Wednesday 14 September 2011

Opinion piece: 'Time to break free?'

Ahmad Ali Khalid, Dawn.com, Blog, Time to break free?, 11 Sep 2011 "“No, Jihad does not mean holy war, it means struggle in Arabic,” this was a phrase that my Muslim friends and I repeated all too often in the aftermath of 9/11 in Britain. My generation who grew up in the shadow of 9/11 have had our religious experiences shaped not by moving Sufi poetry, reading philosophy, speaking about theology or researching about our religious traditions. Our religious experience has been shaped by an act of symbolic political violence; it has been shaped by questions of war, accusations of terror and interrogations about our loyalty which brought up the question of identy."