Don't bury terrorists here, they aren't part of us: Indian Muslims

New Delhi, Dec 3 (IANS) Indian Muslim clerics and commoners alike feel a prominent organisation's decision not to bury the slain Mumbai militants will send a strong message that the community wants to distance itself from those involved in terrorist activity in the name of Islam.

'Denying the burial of the terrorists on Indian soil is a strong enough message to show they are not a part of us,' Shamim Ali, 30, said, referring to the Muslim Council's decision.

'This is a valid enough decision. This stand shows that whatever these people did in the name of community and religion cannot be justified at all,' Ali, who works as a journalist here, told IANS.

Prominent Muslim clerics also feel that the terrorists met the end they deserved and hope the decision of the Muslim Council in Mumbai would help disassociate Indian Muslims from acts of terror.

'The terrorists deserved this end; no religion or philosophy can justify such acts. This is to show they will never get any support from Indian Muslims even in the slightest possible terms. As for their burial or last rites, their bodies should be sent back to the place from where they came,' Mufti M. Muqarram Ahmad, the imam of Fatehpuri Masjid in Delhi, told IANS.

The Muslim Council had Monday decided not to perform the last rites of the nine slain terrorists or bury them in its graveyards. The terrorists - along with another who was caught alive - had attacked prominent locations in that city last week, killing 183 people.

'These terrorists have killed so many innocents and shed streams of blood. They cannot be Muslims or followers of Islam. So they cannot have a final resting place anywhere in sacred Mother India,' Muslim Council president Ibrahim Tai said.

'We have decided not to perform namaz for the terrorists killed in the Mumbai terror attack. We will not bury them in our graveyards either.'

Qari Usman, a top cleric at Dar-ul-Uloom, Deoband, Uttar Pradesh, echoed the same view.

'The terrorists cannot belong to any religion,' Usman said. 'Their last rites should be performed in a place they belonged to,' Usman told IANS on phone.

Seething with anger after seeing horrifying images of the Mumbai attacks for three days, Shabana Parveen, 28, a housewife, said: 'The Muslim Council's decision will show what Muslims think of such gruesome acts. How can anyone pray for such people to go to heaven in the namaz offered during the last rites.'

Naved Mehtab, a faculty member in the National Institute of Fashion Technology, Mumbai, said on phone: 'I am in favour of such decisions; such decisions will help in repairing the image of the community which gets damaged after such attacks.

'Also, it will help in reducing the feeling of 'the other' in civil society, which seems to get intensified after every such attack,' Mehtab said.