I might be wrong but I believe I can almost imagine her. I can imagine her thoughts, her anguish, her pain and emotions; I can imagine her feeling of helplessness. I can imagine her heart nagging at her as she would watch those numbers, those scenes of brutality, of destruction on television, on newspapers, on social media; feeding on the truth and on Western propaganda against Assad.
I can imagine as she would read Quran may be without exegesis or may be with one written by some extremist mullah. As she would study extremist Islamic content, waking up everyday feeling that everything she has done, everything she is doing, this whole world, is so pointless. She should do something for her other life, her real life, the afterlife. She should do something for her brothers and sisters being killed, raped and wounded in Syria; how it would have made her blood boil.
So Aqsa Mahmood, a 20 year old British woman of Pakistani origin left her home to go to Syria last year where she joined Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), married an ISIS fighter and moved on to Iraq.
I am not apologizing for her, I am not justifying her actions, I am not showing sympathy for her. She does not deserve it. I am just trying to understand her and it is painful; it is unfortunate. It is painful because there she was, someone who, apparently, had the opportunity to achieve so many other things, who had the emotional depth, the will and the strength of character to feel the pain of others and to work for them and she has been wasted, destroyed just because she went off in the wrong direction.
If her parents are to be believed, and I admit they are not the best source since they must be scared for themselves and her siblings, there was no other fundamentalist involved, no one egging her on to the path she took. She was an integrated member of the society, attending college as a successful student. She just studied Islam on her own and turned to this path; to use the phrase media has been using for her, she was a 'bedroom radical'.
This puts a lot of question marks on a lot of thing. While it is true that we see what we want to see but no one is born knowing what he/she wants to see. It is the society and our experiences which teaches us that, of course our disposition plays a part as well. So before anything else her radicalisation puts a question mark on the British society, in the larger context it also puts a question mark on actions of several governments, USA, Saudi Arabia, Britain itself among others but more than anything else it puts a question mark on Muslims and on Islam.
I know the popular argument, this isn't real Islam. My question is, what is? Let me answer, its nothing. Islam is, apart from some basic injunctions and boundaries, to each just exactly what he/she wants to see, what suits each of us, at least for those of us who bother to think, those who present the abovementioned argument. For others, for the majority, the real Islam is the Islam that mullahs present, the radical Islam. The Islam that drives ISIS, Taliban and Al-Qaeda and their cohorts, the Islam that is based on the literal interpretation of some of the Quranic text and the Islam that Muhammad (P.B.U.H.)--in the last few years of his life--and his companions and later Muslim empires practised. The Islam that is outdated for the contemporary world.
What we need today is the Islam of earlier part of Prophet Muhammad's life in Madina, his political sagacity and his pragmatism, his kindness and his perseverance. Moreover, we need the rationalism of Mutazzilites, and the open-mindedness of sufis, we need to learn to care about this world and its people, we need to understand that the way forward for any religion in the contemporary world is through its ability to instill compassion and humility in humans and that the way forward for Muslims right now is working for the economic wellbeing and scientific progress of the Muslims not killing non-Muslims or conquering other countries. May be learn a bit from the people who according to us control thr world through economic means and whom we claim to understand and know.
Above all what we need is a close look at the spirit of Quran and life of Muhammad (P.B.U.H.) and mould our views, our ideology to suit that. We need to live in 21st century otherwise we would remain in the 7 century as we have been living for the past 1400 years. We need all this and more because while I can only try to imagine the wasted life and imminent death of Aqsa Mahmood and many others like her, even that imagination is so heartrending that I don't want to imagine anyone else like that again, ever.
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