Lal Masjid’s guardian announced in press that there are weapons present on the premises of the Lal Masjid and these weapons will be used. The point is not the audacity of the statement, but the admission of the fact that madrassas are dens of armed terrorism and nodes of fermenting sectarianism in Pakistan. This statement should rubbish the government’s claims that madrassas only teach and do not engage in extra-curricular political activities.

The presence of the weapons on the compound of the madrassa should indicate to the gvoernment, if it has the common sense to realize, that these weapons constitute a violation of an agreement. When madrassas became militant strongholds, then respect for them as sancturies of learning ends and if military action is undertaken against them and the students die in the process, then the blame squarely rests with the madrassa and its heirarchy.

The pious guardians of these so called centers of Islamic enlightenment should consider what their actions in the name of Islam are telling the world and more importantly, how their actions are undermining their own arguments. These actions and claims to such actions and intentions openly discredit the notion that Islam is a religion of peace and preaches tolerance. To the rest of the world, observing these events, Islam is identified with a way of life that espouses violence and intolerance and they are then, generally speaking, quite disdainful towards all the words coming out of the Muslim quarters pleading the innocence of Islam and its beneign values.

Cries of victimization and of being blamed wrongly, by the Muslims, do not suffice anymore because of the latent hypocrisy present within Muslim actions and their deeds in the name of their religion. If the Muslims have any shred of decency left, they would admit the faults within themselves and stop pretending to claim that which they not and accept what they have become and in the process, made their religion into; an expression of international loathing.