Note to a Young Western Jihadi:
You are struggling. I know. The path you are on, I have been on. And I know that this path is a downward spiral. You will probably not listen to me, just as I would not have listened. But I know that you know you are becoming something other than yourself; you tell yourself that you are becoming what you are supposed to be; what you must be.
But I know that on some level, you know you are actually damaging yourself. On some level it does not feel right; you defy those feelings because they conflict with what the ideology tells you is right. But Islam does not require you to dehumanize others or yourself.
Depending on how far you have gone on this path, you may be beginning to feel the trauma of the internal conflict you are inflicting on yourself; you may want to find a way out, but do not know how, and any time you start to feel like escaping the spiral, you see Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and the suffering of our people, and it propels you again into what seems to be the undeniable necessity of violence. And you have probably surrounded yourself with peers who reinforce this, so you determine that your hesitation is weakness of faith. And you have disciplined yourself to crush all such manifestations of weakness.
But it is not weakness, believe me, these are manifestations of the faith itself, not flaws in it. Do not crush your humanity; do not crush your reason. No righteous cause will require you to suspend rationality or patience or your own psychological balance. The Ummah needs you to be you. We need you to think for yourself, we do not need you to abandon yourself, to suppress yourself, to become a machine. The fact that you care so much about injustice is a treasure for us; don’t let predatory ideologues loot that treasure…
(to be continued…)