Mawlawi Mujeeb al-Rahman Ansari was killed painfully while he was praying in a mosque where he was promoting violence. Dozens of other worshipers were also killed and wounded along with him.
The people of Afghanistan have suffered mass killings and suicide attacks in recent years, and they know that no one, even the enemy of the people’s freedom and peace, deserves such a death. Apart from that, in the ominous terrorist attacks, the seeds of more violence are planted, in the minds of the survivors and relatives of the victims, not only sadness but also a sense of revenge are aroused. The mosque should be used for worship, creating peace of mind and promoting harmony. It is not right to preach violence there, nor to kill the promoters of violence.
It is unfortunate that the last words of the famous Mawlawi Mujeeb al-Rahman Ansari, which will remain in people’s memory for years, were a story of his open hostility to peace and coexistence. In the Taliban meeting this year, he said that if anyone makes the slightest move against the Taliban, “he/she should be killed and beheaded.” Such a scary and brutal fatwa does not seem normal even in the authoritarian regime of the Taliban. Even the leaders of the Taliban and the leaders of the Haqqani network have tried to speak at least verbally about amnesty and prohibition of violence in the past year. Even though the Taliban’s terror machine is constantly rotating and every day we witness field executions, assassinations and beheadings in the Emirate of that group, despite this, they do not respond to every opposition movement with beheading and destruction.
Mawlawi Mujeeb al-Rahman Ansari had most of the characteristics of a radical and religious fanatic. He prevented artists’ concerts, said that most women are from hell, called the Nowruz celebration haram, and was against the interaction of Shias and Sunnis. He was a product of a war-torn society, infected with all kinds of violence, a victim of intelligence games and drowned in illiteracy and ignorance. Mr. Ansari said the words that radical mullahs said in private and the beliefs that have been embedded in the minds of a large number of our compatriots during decades of promoting war and violence, without consideration and with a provocative preachy-jihadi tone from a very famous mosque near the Sufi shrine of the same name.
Mullah Mujeeb Ansari declared enmity with those who want freedom, democracy, people’s participation in power and non-discriminatory access to knowledge for women and men. But the progressive and conscious libertarians do not consider even their blood enemies to deserve such a death. A society in which fundamental freedom and democratic civil laws rule condemn terrorism in any form and anywhere. In the society that Afghanistan’s non-fundamentalists want to build, it is expected that the law will remove the means of promoting terror from the hands of evildoers, prohibit the presence of the propagandists of terrorism in public forums, and punish them justly by depriving them of access to the community. I wish Mawlawi Mujeeb al-Rahman Ansari would live and see the defeat of terrorism in the future. I wish he would stay alive and get a chance to apologize for his terrorist sermons and speak for a few days from the Grand Mosque of Gazargah, Herat, condemning war and terror and praising peace and coexistence.
