The Gulf communities were shaken a few days ago by the news of the "massacre" in the Sultanate of Oman, carried out by a small group of criminals against unarmed individuals practicing their rituals. I have used the term criminals to avoid using the words extremists or radicals, as those terms no longer suffice to describe the event. There are many reasons that can explain this criminal phenomenon, and we have heard and read many interpretations, some fantastical and some hypothetical, without some of us ringing the bell.
In the opinion of the author of these lines, the bell rings in two places: first, the school, especially the curricula and teachers, and second, the media, where there is a "taboo" around our education and media that prevents them from touching or criticizing aspects of religious misinformation. The education system is hesitant to take necessary actions, such as a thorough review of religious programs and training for teachers.
For a long time, we have told our young students, whose intellectual resilience is fragile, that there was a "golden age" in the past that we should return to, imagining that era as one of goodness, prosperity, and peace, and we must do what needs to be done to return to that golden age! In truth, there is no golden age; there were conflicts driven by interests and many superstitions adopted by some, taken from books that interpreted religion with bias against the different other. We have not seriously reviewed those ancient references and critiqued them objectively, as they often reflected the problems of their time.
Many of us have ignored the "temporal dimension" in comparisons and thinking, to the point of distributing and entrenching superstitions. If you find a respectable television station hosting someone who says something like "God created us as Muslims bearing a message, and created all others for toil, labor, and scientific inquiry just to serve us," you can understand the calamity that has entered the Arab mind.
There are examples we broadcast in our textbooks and television programs, and we have also been afflicted by the curse of the spread of social media, which reinforces these superstitions for our youth every hour. A superficial understanding has dominated our comprehension of our Islamic religion, contrary to the values brought forth by our Prophet Muhammad, and we have become prisoners of scholars whose scientific and religious knowledge is shallow. These scholars, in the negligence or even shortcomings of educational leadership, have taken on the task of education, leading to a vast amount of distortion that could fill large volumes, many of which pave the way for political recruitment, teaching our children not noble principles, but how to eat and drink, standing or sitting, and where the devils reside in the house, which is only in the bathroom and near the fire (because devils love fire), without a moment’s thought that people of the past did not have bathrooms as they do today, and any reader of history knows that!
Demonization and crime do not begin with firing bullets; they begin with seizing minds, charging them with a vast amount of demonization of the other and hostility toward them, bringing historical stories and events, which have their own specific contexts, into today's rapidly changing and intertwined world of interests, which is a grievous methodological error.
We now have a large number of "sedition tools" and "guardians of intentions" who instill in our youth intolerance, hatred, and disdain for others, under the sedative of a false moral superiority, which in some cases results in firing bullets in the end. The perpetrators are victims of that ideology, and the true criminals are the authors of nonsense in educational curricula, media institutions, and those who affirm these superstitions every day.
From personal experience in the world of education and media, I have witnessed live examples of those irrational interpretations in aspects of life from the social to the political, and even, surprisingly, in economic matters! We are in a "great valley" of culture, not an area of crime that occurred in Oman. While extending condolences to the Omani people, known for their tolerance and solidarity, we must not kill the mosquitoes, but rather drain the swamps so that the mosquitoes die and malaria is eliminated.
