Why let terrorists hold your tongue?

The photograph of an X-Ray showing the bullet in Baby Satrin’s head landed on my desk with a thud.

My own tear glands and those of my colleagues went through the severest test. Some won and others lost the battle to hold back tears.

It was just too cruel and surreal; even with the bullet lodged in his head, Satrin kept asking for his mum, killed as she tried to shield him.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Kenya, the gunmen must have been relishing TV footages showing how they had ‘hit’ the Kaffirs where it hurt most-women and children and right inside a church!

Yes, the clear spot on the greyish-black image got me thinking what kind of worm wriggles in the minds of terrorists.

This is an analogy from my mother tongue but given the mood I am in, I give you the liberty to take it in the literal sense if you feel like.

I have no other way of trying to conceptualise how terrorists can be so different from the rest of the society-Muslims, Christians and Hindus alike-to the extent that they give a fellow human’s life the same premium as that doled to pigs and chickens.

I know we are not accustomed to talking openly how bad terrorists are for fear that this would put us in their crosshairs.

We also talk in general terms, even if it is on specifics like Sheikh Shariff Abubakar Makaburi who openly supported the Westgate Mall attack as if those inside were sheep.

There are several sides to what is happening in Kenya. On the one hand, it seems to me that State security is behind the execution of some fiery and Jihadists-leaning clerics like Sheikh Aboud Rogo. Extra-judicial killings belong to the Banana Republics and should not be tolerated for, once police are given licences to kill, you may never be able to stop them.

This clearly is an unjust crime by the state against a section of the Kenyans. It aggravates the feeling they have been marginalised and bypassed in the sharing of national cake.

But then there is the flipside, discernible in the grenade and gun attacks we have witnessed in churches and other public places, including Uhuru Park. Muslims argue Islam does not condone mindless killing of the innocent to punish or bruise the ego of the bigger enemy called the State.

However, again that is what Rogo and Makaburi insisted is justified, especially in a state of war, which they kept saying we are in.

But no matter how far apart Islam is to terrorism, and however close fundamentalists are to it, there are several issues we must start confronting as a country because if we don’t have a meeting with ourselves and invite our consciences to attend, we shall regret in future.

The first is that Muslims on their own need to have their own dialogue. We may deny this but I have never heard a terrorist bomb attack in Nairobi or that Kikambala Hotel four years later, who did not profess the faith.

Also, in one of the interviews we had on the gun attack that sank a bullet into Baby Satrin’s head last Sunday, one of the witnesses told our reporter the gunmen shouted Allahu Akbar. I wouldn’t even ask the meaning because it is so obvious.

Yes, we may argue about the delicate nature of balancing relations between Muslims and Christians, and so we mute our collective anger as citizens against terrorists and their heinous crimes.

We may also argue that in expressing our anger, we would be playing into the terrorist hands, first by showing them they have scored in our pain and inter-religious suspicions or even hostilities.

So we are hit, we stumble and cry, but keep trying to get to our feet. However, each time we rise, we find a few of us have been killed in the process, but we shut our ears, zip our mouths and dry our tears until the next attack.

The other issue is that terrorist attacks are indiscriminate, and Muslims too are hurt as are the rest of the faiths. There are thousands-and one reasons to believe this is true, and all you need is to go through the casualty lists from all past cases.

But this is often quickly eclipsed by the fact that in some cases, the terrorists, like in the case of the Westgate Mall, sought to identify Muslims and spare their lives, then spray bullets at kindergarten-going children.

This argument is also glossed over by the sentiments of fiery clerics, who use some mosques to openly and defiantly make such statements as the one I heard last week: “Dawa ya kaffir ni bunduki!”

I need not argue this out; that some of the radical youths have taken over mosques, and the more tolerant Sheikhs have either been cowed or run out of town.

True, in the same breath, we concede there are also Christian clerics who are equally fundamentalist, albeit overtly, but are also spewing the same vitriol against Muslims.

Amidst all this discomforting groundswell is the sad reality that if we do not quickly stamp out terror, we risk tumbling into the abyss of inter-religious war. Mercifully, there are generally more level-headed, kind, pious and well-intentioned Christians and Muslims(and even atheists) than the handful terrorists among us.

As we stare at the poster of terrorism in Kenya today, symbolised Baby Satrin’s fight with a bullet in the head, Christians and Muslims need to dialogue openly and deeply about their own muted suspicions-staring with intra-faith level first. As Martin Luther King Jnr said, we must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or perish like fools.

Baby Satrin, you are in our prayers as is your mom’s soul and all the others who are affected by the Sunday attack.

The writer is Group Managing Editor (Print) at The Standard

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