A strong belief in fatalism Islam can become a very convenient means of escaping personal responsibility for one’s own actions. It cleverly attributes the ultimate blame for evil to some-one who is beyond the grasp of the law.
Bernie Power, Quadrant
Every human action, positive or negative, can ultimately be attributed to Allah, with the faithful believing a person’s eternal destiny is decreed forty days before that person is born. When a jihadi rampages, he sees himself having no more agency nor free will than the bloody knife in his hand

A FEW days before Christmas in 2017, Saeed Noori, an Afghani refugee who came to Australia on a humanitarian visa in 2004, ploughed his mother’s car into a crowd on Flinders Street in Melbourne. As a result, sixteen pedestrians were injured and 83-year-old grandfather Antonio Crocaris later died in hospital. As he drove, Noori was shouting “Allah akbar” (Allah is great), according to the off-duty policeman who arrested him. In an interview with the police, he explained his action by saying “Allah made me do it.”
This same exclamation was used by Adel Amastaibou, a French-Moroccan, who stabbed Jewish disc jockey Sebastien Selam to death in Paris in 2003.[1] It was also the justification given by Gulchekhra Bobokulova, an Uzbek nanny, who decapitated a four-year-old girl left in her care in Moscow in 2016.[2]
As Quadrant reported in its December, 2018, edition, foreign student Momena Shoma also invoked Allah’s alleged greatness as she repeatedly plunged a carving knife into the man who had taken her into his family home. As he recalled the incident,
All she [kept] saying was “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,” while my daughter was screaming here, and I told my daughter, “Run, Shayla, run.”
Why do some Muslim people blame their criminal actions on Allah? Such a conclusion can arise out of the Islamic doctrine of qadr or predestination. It is one of the six key doctrines of Islam: the others are belief in Allah, his books, his angels, his prophets, and the day of judgement.
Continue reading ‘Allah Made Me Do It’: Divinely Inspired Murder