Dzhokhar (Jahar) Tsarnaev

Jahar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, scrawled a note at the wall of the boat while hiding at WaterTown, MA before he was captured by the authorities.

His message was

"When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims." He also penned that he was not mourning the death of his brother because he (Tamerlan) was a "martyr in paradise."

His message is pretty standard; something you would expect from someone who has been radicalized with Jihadism.

There also seems to be a new entry about Islamic terrorism on Wikipedia.

A few days ago, I was reading this interesting blog entry about Tsarnaev brothers global Jihad against what they perceive as Islam's enemy.

Tsarnaev's quote seems to be based on the idea of a global Muslim community, called the ummah, that has always been aspirational. The Tsarnaev brothers clearly felt that they were being marginalized, and the fact that they did not belong to an American Muslim community further reinforced that belief. So the brothers turned to the idea of the ummah, a historical fiction that has not existed in practice in all of Muslim history. Muslims are too varied to connect to one way of being a community.

What we are witnessing in Syria, what we saw in Egypt or in Iran during the Green Revolution, is that Muslims kill other Muslims for political gain, and the idea of the ummah is broken. There is no sense from the brothers that they would have been able to understand or choose sides in these conflicts.

Not only does the Muslim Ummah not exist in the current time, but it also has never existed in the past/historical. And then, it gets really interesting.

There is no universal, binding legal command for all Muslims to support each other at all times. Even if there were, throughout Islamic history, it has been observed in its breach rather than in practice. Prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law, Ali, was assassinated while praying, and Mohammed’s favorite grandson, Husayn, was murdered after being denied food and water for days. Both of these acts were committed by people who considered themselves Muslim.

The above are just some examples. Of course you can view all the wars that Muslim fought against each other in the past and also at the establishment of unjust governments (kings or sultans via dynastic rulers/monarchy). This just goes to show how corrupt the Muslim society have been throughout the ages. Not much different than what you have now.