Belgian Muslims have strongly condemned the recent suicide bomb blasts that hit their country’s capital on March 22.
The Brussels blasts drew strong criticism from Belgium’s senior Muslim clerics. The League of Imams of Belgium has described them as “criminal doings beyond description.”
“In the face of this tragedy we are calling upon all citizens of our country for solidarity and unity regardless of faith. We are to get through this test together and steer clear of the traps that may be planted in our way by those who wish to trample underfoot the values of tolerance and neighborliness we all together have worked for,” the league of the Muslim clergy said in a message. The head of the Belgian Muslims’ Executive, Salah Echallaoui, elected just before the tragedy, urged all Belgians to unite. He called for a common front against all types of violence and terrorism, adding that the true Muslims of Belgium remained deeply committed to democratic values.
Devout Muslims keep saying their faith and religion have nothing to do with insane cruelty and violence, committed by terrorists who claim that their aim is the triumph of “true faith.”
The latest bombings have proved very painful to them and every coreligionist they know. The media background as it is, the shadow is cast on all European Muslims, they complain.
“I’m Brussels-born. I’ve grown up here. We’ve never felt racism towards ourselves. But now we have some uneasy feelings. True, for now nobody has pointed the finger at us so far, but many of my friends and relatives are complaining that when they go to Morocco, only the Arabs’ luggage undergoes special checks,” says Mbrak, the owner of a fast-food joint in Brussels’s Saint Gilles community.
He is certain it is very wrong to associate the extremists’ ideology of hatred with Islam, because violence and religion have nothing in common.
“Killing people over nothing… I really don’t know what a person should have on one’s mind to do such things. This has absolutely nothing to do with Islam,” Mbrak said with bitterness.
The Muslim community in Belgium took its current shape in the postwar years to incorporate migrants from the Arab world, who arrived in the country back in the 1960s in search of a better fortune.
Sociologists currently estimate it at 620,000, or 5.8% of the Belgian population. An overwhelming majority of Muslims are either Morocco-or Turkey-born migrants or their descendants (first or second generations).
