Good news from Rwanda
<a href="An”>http://www.muhajabah.com/islamicblog/archives/veiled4allah/008701.php”>An entry in al-Muhajabah’s blog gives some news from Rwanda, where the number of Muslims has doubled since the genocide, in large part because Muslims stayed out of that atrocity and gave shelter to Tutsis while the churches turned them over to the murderers. (Then again, were Muslims murdered during the Rwanda genocide? If not, that could partly account for this increase, but the fact remains that thousands have converted in the ten years since.) BBC News report (1st April)
This report notes that “the Church hierarchy in Rwanda supported the previous regime of President Juvenal Habyarimana. And they failed to denounce ethnic hatred then being disseminated. Some survivors like Zafran have since left the Catholic Church, unable to reconcile the Church’s teaching with the actions of its most senior members during the genocide”. One notes yet again the lack of fellow feeling among Christians – they were willing to abandon their co-religionists in East Timor to the Indonesians (yes they were Muslims, but there was no pretence of jihad and they wiped out a third of the population), and terrorise Afro-Americans for a century because of a post-Civil War vendetta in which the churches were complicit.
There are two important lessons in this for Muslims. The first is the obvious value of being a good neighbour and helping them out in times of distress; the other is staying above nationalism and tribalism. The Muslims in Rwanda risked their lives to save people from being murdered by militias and mobs. Muslims today are divided along various lines of race, tribe and biraderi, sects with minute differences as well as other matters which should not divide us. This causes problems in the mosques, which in many places are the preserve of one ethnic or tribal group (you might like to read this blog entry by Izzy Mo in New Orleans), and ultimately gives our community a bad name when such matters as biraderi politics gets tangled up with local politics in the UK and becomes news. There is no room for this in Islam! Let us rise above it!
