Dear Najib,

True to your opening verse, you seem not to have read what I wrote and as usual, get intensely personal. Please learn how to use quotation marks when replying to someone. You have included phrases in quotation marks which I did not use, nor are they special phrases as part of this discourse. Please re-write something relevant and forgive me for not understanding what you wrote. I promise I will reply promptly once I understand what you are saying. Thanks.
 

Dear Farzana,

As usual, you do make sense and your approach is balanced. However, your 'communal responsibility' reeks of the same doctrine under which Israel blocks of Gaza – 'communal responsibility'.

I have a daughter in high school – in Mississauga (not Applewood). So I guess I am an expert. Among my daughter's closest friends are a couple of girls who wear hijab, and it is something never discussed among them. Similary, the little 'knob' of Sikh boys is not discussed and Mississauga schools know conservative dress codes very well. If there is any place in Canada where a girl can go to school with hijab without anyone giving a second look, it is Mississauga, with its large Muslim, Arab and Sikh population!

There were problems in this family, problems that could have been resolved. If you claim that the community should take blame for the actions of a madman, then there is nothing different about your statement and that of Nazis or apartheid enforcers (Israeli or South African). By the same token, you place yourself outside that community.

Last but not the least, an intellectual should lead the susceptible members of the community with words of wisdom 'bil hikmati wal mau-i-zatil hasanah' and wise techniques. Blaming and shaming them publicly drives them into their shell, and fostering misunderstanding in the general community about them further alienates them and they find solace in the extremist preachers and in their ancestral cultures.

Also, for the first time, the mainstream media has come out against this unjustified broad-brushed maligning of Muslims – basically saying enough is enough! Muslim and Pakistani communities in Canada are vibrant ones, and they have now made their mark on all levels of society, with personal friends of Muslims almost everywhere. In Aqsa's horrible death, perhaps we may have found something by which we can remember this incident: a sympathy for the deceased and the community, and the isolation of the National Post as the only extremist howler.

As I said, the Muslim community is firmly entrenched in Canada, and very few will believe any between-the-lines implication that maligns all Muslims. Muslims continue to be integrated, perhaps in the best way in all Western countries (barring France perhaps). It is up to our intellectuals to determine how they will be judged 10 years from now.
 

Dear Doctor Sahib

What can I say sir, my dear friend of 27 years. You supported communism when it was dying, and now you are embracing hippie all-humanity-is-one identity. I guess you are a couple of decades late again.
 

If you don't mind, I will share a couple of private arguments we had, which I thought we had agreed, but you again present your non-rational viewpoint. Let me try again:
 

1. Wherever there is more than one individual in a group, there will be politics. There is politics between the two genders in a marriage, and between the young and the old. Farmers and urban dwellers have different needs, different agendas and thus belong to different groups and classes. So do business owners and their workers, and the rulers and the ruled. Your utopia of peace-loving smiling God-denying universal-identity peaceful robots on earth will never come to pass. All your effort towards this end is noble, but ultimately in vain for it is not for humans and their society – which by their very nature and wiring, are programmed to coalesce into groups, and you are a member of many such groups. In Toronto we have over scores of interest groups with their own marginally-different identities, and as we grow outwards, it is pure illogical to assume that the Inuit and the pygmies will have a single identity.

2. Religion, like tribalism and nationalism is used by rulers to send men to war. No ruler can convince thousands of young men to give up their lives for his wealth – he has to invoke something – some superior cause. Regardless of whether that superior cause is true or not, it will be something for which young men can lay down their lives. Were men not ready to sacrifice in this way, the world would be different, and probably much more barbaric. Had the Greeks not had their Pyrrhic victory, and had Tariq not burnt his ships and had the English not fed their sons to cannon on to the beaches of Normandy, history would definitely be very very different. Even the Sunni-Shia divide is more of a historical political power struggle rather than a theological schism. All wars are for power and wealth, and what is needed is a cause – a casus belli – to motivate others to die. This casus belli used to be religion, nation, country, and recently 'freedom' and 'democracy'.

I hope I will get an answer, or at least not having to hear about 'universal-identity' and the dogmatic (:)) mantra of 'religion causing wars' again.