God and I had prayed together about the situation months
ago. We had prayed that there would come a time when the young British Muslim
men and women who had left UK to join IS in Syrian would have had enough of
blood and executions and want to come home.
They had purchased a one-way ticket to what they believed to be a
meaningful life standing up for a righteous cause, but it turned out not to be
so. The grass turned out to be less than
green on the other side of the fence.
Wanting to come home and actually being allowed to come
home are two very different things. It’s
not just the UK government who don’t want them to come home and are threatening
prison sentences, but the IS don’t want them going home either. Mehdi Hassan, just 19-years-old was killed this
week because he 'wanted to come home'.
These young people are truly stuck between a rock and a
hard place.
The less sympathetic among us will want to say, “You made
your bed and now you must lie on it,” I think of some parents of these Muslim
children who have talked about betrayal and how they cannot forgive their child’s
actions.
When did any of us make the sensible decisions when we
were nineteen years old? Didn’t we, even
at nineteen, sometimes feel our lives to be on a meaningless path? Didn’t we
long for something a little more exciting?
The older generation had lost its way, got side-tracked by mortgages and
bills and keeping up with the Joneses.
God snared me at 18 years old. He nudged me onto a very different path to
the one I had planned. His path wasn't bad for me in any way. Following God does not automatically mean something
negative, destructive or divisive.
Christians are required by God to serve the community and to love people
unconditionally.
I believe the disillusioned jihadis should be allowed to
come home. Who better to talk to the
next wave of radicalised Muslims? These people had swallowed the same
propaganda and let the fire be ignited in their hearts. They have been out there and they know how
the story ends. Who better to talk sense
to the next wave?
They are still young.
Their ways are not set in stone.
They are malleable. They represent the child who stuck his hand in the
fire and got burnt and won’t do it again. Wisdom has come quickly to them.
One day they will not be so young and they will become
hard. Right now they have hearts soft
enough to hurt when they see acts of horror meted out on innocent communities. Leave them there and those hearts will harden
and they will hurt less and less as time goes on and horror falls upon horror.
If other countries like Denmark, Sweden and Germany have set
up programmes aimed at bringing them home we should be able to follow their
example.
The times when we find ourselves between a rock and a
hard place it doesn’t help to be told that we have made our bed and must lie on
it. It’s not about being soft on the
offender and letting anyone off. Very
often the way out of our rock and hard place requires effort to change our thinking
about things. We have no “Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free”
card that we can slap on the table when times are tough. We can’t snap our fingers, like Mary Poppins,
and the mess of the floor tidies itself up.
No one expects it to be easy. A lot of hurt has been caused by the actions
of radicalised young people to families and communities but now is not the time
for writing them off.
When one prayer is answered it often leads to another
connected prayer. I pray for a Spirit of
repentance and forgiveness and for people to be given a new start. It is everything the Christian faith is about.
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