I am a mujahid. My operational area is the social media – Facebook and Twitter, to be precise. I have been tagged an e-Talib, a cyber-mujahid, a keyboard-jihadist and what-not. But these terms do not strike anyone with specificity and carry a vagueness which I personally dislike more than India performing an Agni Missile experiment. Rather they undermine the determination that has always driven me and the zeal and vigour that have always characterized my ''operations''. Due to the afore-stated reasons, I simply proclaim to be a social media mujahid.
The Internet has always been a bad place and with the advent of websites like Facebook and Twitter, it became even ''badder''. Not to mention YouTube – a site which I will much rather love to call ''the blasphemy site''. I feel proud simply by stating it for gazillion time that it has been banned in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan because of that one video. And no, I am not listening to you saying it has informative, educational and recreational videos running in hundreds of thousands. No! I said.
But the Internet is a good thing for a couple of reasons. You remember the time when we used to talk to foreigners in the Yahoo chat rooms and lured them into accepting Islam – ah the good old days. That was the dawn of cyber-tableegh. Then came Facebook and DSL connections, which kick-started the era of cyber-jihad parallel to cyber-tableegh.
Going through the valley of stupidity and avoiding all sanity, it was a strange wedlock. No one could believe the soft-hearted cyber-tableegh so willfully entangled with the violent and brutish cyber-Jihad. But the otherwise foolish romanticism provided the necessary adhesive force needed to attach together what doesn't deserve to even exist.
The network, Alhamdolillah, is very strong and the strategy of cyber-jihadists is multi-pronged. Let's talk about the performance of the social-media department of the organization. From uploading pictures of tree branches so designed to reveal Allah's name to directing expletives at those who want to bring centuries-old concepts and their interpretation in consonance with the need of the hour and posting Islamic verses and Ahadith on Mark Zuckerberg's daily status update so to lure him away from sinful life and facilitate his entry into the fold of Islam – we have done it all on a daily basis, without any pause.
With the recent surge in the number of desi Liberals, the organization's focus has shifted from foreigners to local 'miscreants'. For this purpose, pages of Islamic identity with sect-specific inclinations have been entrusted with the task to reproduce, rediscover, invent and create all that hasn't been said but carries illimitable authority. The problem with the desis, however, is that sometimes we have to deal with our daily life friends, relatives, neighbors and even teachers whom we cannot degrade verbally on their face. The game plan in such a situation is to make fake profiles, ostensibly having a female identity and then directing all the verbal (textual) garbage in 360 degrees mode.
In the performance of my holy duties, my favorite part is when I start arguing over the Internet, hiding my hypocrisy and moral depravity in a religious clad; the caps-lock on and the Shift button red-hot for the use of angry emoticons. Such arguments, in every one of the 100 percent of instances, end in my empty head bursting with religious fervor and ejecting a fatwa of apostasy and infidelity.
While writing this khutba, second in importance to Umer media's Facebook posts, I can't help hold back the fatwa that I so want to unleash on you poor souls. The Internet is haram – there I excreted it through my mouth. Unless of course it is used for cyber-tableegh and cyber-jihad. In which case, it the greatest Islamic invention of the 12th century.
Yes, Islamic.