We have a serious problem at our hands.
We are in the middle of a war. We can see that we have an enemy, even though we are not willing to fully confront them.
How can the Taliban be our enemies?
We have always known them to fight for the righteous cause and how can they be evil if all they want is to enforce the will of God?
Such questions perplex the entire nation.
We are even not willing to call our enemy ourenemy, because everything we know, everything we understood about the world, tells us it’s not true.
We simply cannot accept the fact that we can be at war with an entity that is not our enemy.
It can’t be their fault. It must be someone else behind all this mess.
How can our enemy be of the same faith as ours?
So in order to escape this confusion, we have two parallel explanations.
- Our enemy cannot be Muslims, because Muslims are not capable of acts as heinous as the Peshawar massacre, so they must be funded by the RAW, MOSSAD and the CIA
- Our enemy is cruel, so we need to excommunicate them from our religion.
Why do we have to excommunicate someone to condemn them as our enemies?
Where does this insane idea that we can only be at war with non-Muslims come from? Well, even if you believe that, apparently our faithful enemy, which is far more self-righteous than we are, does not believe in it.
Oh, wait, I forgot. The faithful army of the enemy also believes that we are infidels.
So no matter what we do, no matter how much we suck up to them, we are going to be infidels in their eyes.
Our lifestyle is going to be the lifestyle of an infidel.
Unless we succumb to their Shariah, give up our way of life, and give up every freedom that we enjoy, it is not going to make us people of the faith in their eyes.
What we think about it is pointless.
And pretending that they could not believe in whatever in the world is the true faith does not matter too.
They don’t give a damn about our excommunication. But apparently, the faith of our enemy matters to us a lot.
We make our national decisions, declarations of war and truce, on the basis of whether our enemy belongs to our faith or not.
And that they must be excommunicated before any action against them is taken.
We come to realize that the people killing our children and the loved ones should be declared our enemies because they actually don’t follow true Islam.
We might claim that we, in Pakistan, are not a medieval culture. But apparently,our behavior tells us otherwise.
Haroon Riaz is a Rawalpindi-based independent blogger and believes in promoting free speech and secularism. Follow him on Twitter .