I did not choose silence. Underneath Muslim protest of “innocence until proven guilty”, the “bias of the Zionist media” etc., lie a realistic assessment, for some also a dreaded thought, that in all likelihood it did come from “one of us”. Furthermore, choosing silence would have meant acquiescing to an insidious form of terrorism sweeping the Western Cape; intellectual terrorism whereby people are being pipe-bombed for speaking their minds. (A senior Pagad figure recently spoke about, “ordinary gangsters, religious gangsters and intellectual gangsters”. Thus when “the people” are against gangsterism then those religious figures or intellectuals who do not toe the line of “the people” had better watch out.).

What then is my response to the wave of bombings that has been experienced in the Cape?

“The people” or “the community” were useful and legitimate concepts to invoke at a time when our leaders were being killed, banned or jailed. “The people”, however, spoke four years ago and will speak again in a few months time. “The people” also spoke in the form of long and protracted constitutional dealings that are universally acceptable. In a democracy there is absolutely no justification for any kind of vigilantism – religiously premised or in the name of “the community”. The state, however fragile its judicial and security infra-structure, is the only entity that prevents us from sliding into barbarism. The notion of taking the law into your own hand is thus a contradiction in terms; any attempt to “take the law into your own hand” – be it the withholding of taxes by farmers or the lynching of alleged rapist or witches, or the torching of alleged drug lords – is, in fact, a contribution to lawlessness.

In the terrain of extra-juridical retribution there is thus no question of “innocent victims” – all victims who have not been judged guilty after due process of the law are innocent. (In the wake of the bombing of his house, some individuals who came to commiserate with Dr Ebrahim Moosa, said: “It’s awful, what if your wife and children got killed?” The implication was that it would have been sort of OK if you with your loud mouth got killed”.)

This is equally valid for the USA bombing of a “pharmaceutical plant” in the Sudan and alleged terrorist bases in Afghanistan. When any entity sets itself up as accuser, investigator, prosecutor, judge and executor then it has entered the realm of barbarism. The USA refusal to subject its bombing in the Sudan to any kind of legal scrutiny by the International Court of Justice and any impartial investigation on what was really going on at the “pharmaceutical plant”, effectively places the USA in the same category as the killers of “witches” in the Northern Province or the bombers of Planet Hollywood. For the victims there is no distinction between being burnt alive by a bloodthirsty visible mob, being bombed by a loner whose face may or may not be captured by surveillance equipment in a restaurant or being bomb from the sky by sophisticated hi-tech planes. Such distinction is only located in how these cowardly acts are being portrayed in the media.

I do not relish the image of the global terrorists that Muslims have acquired throughout the world. I am also loath to attribute this to the media. The truth is that a disproportionate amount of both state and non-state terrorism can correctly be attributed to Muslims. Furthermore, our theology and earliest history lend itself far easier to the option of violence as means of redressing of grievances that that of most other religions.

What remains reprehensible, however, is the blanket demonization of Muslims. Referring to the bombing of Planet Hollywood, allegedly in retaliation against the USA bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan, a caller to a radio station asked why did Muslims do this here. “After all, when the IRA detonated bombs in London, the English or Protestants did not bomb Irish pubs in Cape Town”. The caller missed his own complicity in this kind of sweeping generalization. Why should all Muslims be tarred with the same brush when a single Muslim, or a marginal Muslim group engage in terrorism?

This kind of blanket demonization, besides being the stuff that racism, sexism and ultimately holocausts are made of, is the subterfuge for those who are either too lazy, unwilling or incompetent (or all of these) to look at every particular incident or movement in an objective way and locate them within their specific socio-historical and political context. Pagad, for example, rather than being located with a mythical universal Muslim discourse, should be looked at within the context of South Africa and more specifically, its Western Cape matrix. While such movements may be sustained and inspired by their counterparts of co-religionists in other parts of the world, their origins, nature and programme are homegrown. Confessional religious thinking may want to attribute the actions of its adherents to an ahistorical faith explicated through revelation embodied in a divine canon. While attributing social movements to a faith may be soothing for religionists this kind of thinking has no place in objective journalism or scholarship. Doing so is buying precisely into the essentialist rhetoric of religious fundamentalism. Thus when they argue that they are fighting a universal battle informed entirely by an ahistorical faith then we sustain the idea of essentialist faith unconnected to history and society by responding to them in exactly the same way.

Muslims are also serving as the Chief Justice of our country, as Truth and Reconcilliation Commissioners, as Commissioners for Gender Equality, as MP’s, Ministers and Land Claims judges. Noisily they resisted racism and quietly they go about the business of reconstruction and reconciliation. They also laid wreaths to honour the victims of Planet Hollywood. Numerous pray five times a day to a God that loves peace as much as justice. They derive enormous satisfaction and strength from their faith in a profoundly spiritual manner. They return from their prayers to shared lives of prosperity or poverty with their Christian, Hindu, Jewish or atheist neighbours. They, like other fellow citizens, bleed when they are pricked – or bombed.

Alas, when one makes a black dot on white sheet and asks observers what they see, they invariably miss the white sheer.