What’s A Muslim Parent To Do? They Know What’s In The Qur’an And Hadith

They can try to “keep their kids out of trouble” by fiat — as the Mahmood family, where the parents tell the children never to discuss ISIS, not even — or perhaps especially — to denounce it. There’s the optometrist Mr. Khudairi, who wants to keep Muslim children from joining ISIS which, one would have thought, given its widely-publicized gruesome displays of mass or individual killings (by beheading, by shooting, by burning alive), would have no appeal at all for young Muslims, but for some reason does.

But you will not learn anything from this article about what is contained in Qur’an and Hadith, what it is about the figure or example of Muhammad, the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil), the Model of Conduct (uswa hasana), that makes the appeal of ISIS so strong, and what makes the Muslim parents quoted so unwilling, apparently, to discuss what is actually in the Qur’an and Sunnah that should immediately cause any well-brought-up Muslim to shun the Islamic State, without more. Yet apparently a great deal more efforrt, on the part of parents, is needed. Why is that? 

Perhaps the author of this article is hoping, in a following piece, to be allowed to quote chapter and verse from the Qur’an, to discuss what Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Ifshan Ellian, Mona Walter, Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan, and so many other defectors from Islam know about its contents and its message — or perhaps the editors of The Globe will never permit that, and readers will be left, as they are with this article that appeared in today’s Sunday Globe, to wonder what it is that makes so many young Muslims all over the world, from every conceivable land and circumstance, to want to sacrifice themselves for this incipient caliphate and its murderous ways.