Osama is dead

Osama is dead (inna lilla hai wa inna alai hai raj’un)

“O you who believe, keep your duty to Allah, and let every soul consider that which it sends forth for the morrow, and keep your duty to Allah. Surely Allah is Aware of what you do.” (The Holy Quran 59:18)

“Every soul will know what it has sent before and what it has held back.” (The Holy Quran 82:5)

“And every soul is paid back fully for what it did, and He knows best what they do.” (The Holy Quran 39:70)

These verses are aimed at the whole humanity, not just Muslims. They remind every one that what a person does today will have repercussions for tomorrow. If Osama was responsible for planning and execution of the attack on the Twin Towers, among others, then he has to be denounced for the killing of innocent men and women, not only in the Towers but also in the planes, which were used as bombs and at other places. We agree that mere verbal denunciation is not enough but he needed to be apprehended and brought to justice by being given a chance to fully defend himself. What the US has done is applied the law of the jungle and lost its moral authority. If the US can be the prosecutor, the jury and the judge in this matter why would it be wrong for someone to decide that Tony Blair who lied to the British Parliament to justify an attack on Iraq is a criminal and shoot him dead?

This is what these verses warn us against is that what you are doing today is going to come back to haunt you tomorrow so think about what you are doing. In their hatred of the USSR the Americans raised the Mujahideen, financed them, trained them and praised them for killing of every Russian whether a soldier or a civilian. It is these much praised Mujahideen who have now come back to haunt them. In response the Americans have not taken any principled stand but continued in the same way. This will come back to haunt them. Osama will now become a great hero and martyr. It will become a heinous crime to criticize him or to oppose anything that he did. If he had been put on open trial then the weakness of Osama’s arguments and his position would have become apparent to the whole world.

It is a sad reflection on the Muslims’ moral and temporal condition as well that the only Muslim country, which is a nuclear power was powerless to stop the US from invading its territory. People will use the earlier denials of the Pakistan government regarding the presence of Osama on its soil to question whether Muslims are a trust-worthy people.

This will not change until Muslims learn the lesson that Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad tried to teach them, which was that Muslims should give priority to improving their moral and spiritual condition rather than gaining temporal power.