As much of the Muslim world celebrated the culmination of Ramadan on Friday, a suicide bomber drove into a small town in Iraq. While much of the Muslim world prayed for Eid Al Fitr or feasted with their friends and families, an ISIL bomber detonated a small tanker in the middle of a market in Khan Bani Saad, killing at least 130 people.
Eid Al Fitr is not a Sunni Muslim celebration. It is not a Shia Muslim celebration. It is a Muslim celebration. The Iraqis who were killed in Iraq were preparing to celebrate one of the holiest days of the calendar. That they were Shia rather than Sunni should make no difference – but, of course, such trivial differences do matter to the barbaric militants of ISIL, who targeted them simply for their beliefs.
There is no religious text that sanctions such murder. There is no religious tradition that considers the killing of other Muslims a religious duty. That ISIL thinks there is, merely highlights how irreligious they are. For them, nothing is sacred. Over the year since they exploded into the consciousness of the Middle East, the group has shown that it does not respect the traditional prohibitions on murdering civilians, nor the religious traditions forbidding killing women and children.
Indeed, ISIL’s main tactic is the shock of brutality – including the reported use of chemical weapons – seeking to overturn not merely recent conventions on, for example, the treatment of prisoners of war, but also long-standing Islamic rules on war.
Such rules have existed for centuries – indeed, they have existed longer than the Sunni-Shia debate. ISIL likes to reach back into history to find justifications for their barbarism – if there were truly scholars among their ragtag army, they would also find clear declarations over the centuries on how to wage war. But then ISIL merely appropriates religious texts and ideas, it does not understand them.
This will be small comfort to the men and women, most of them Muslims, who must mourn their relatives during what should be a festive time. For them, there will be no celebration this year and perhaps for many years to come. The best that the rest of the Middle East and the civilised world as a whole can do for them is to ensure that there will not be another Eid when the scourge of ISIL still exists.
