Roshanara Choudry - a life ruined by religion

Roshonara Choudry was studying to be a teacher. She was the top student in her university class. In a few years' time, who knows what she might have achieved? Maybe teaching in a primary school, educating young people, giving hope to others. Maybe carrying out her own research. The world would have been at her feet.

The achievements that she could have accomplished, the lives she could have changed, the benefits she could have brought to herself and society... all whisked away in the moment when she stabbed her local MP, Stephen Timms.

She's now been jailed for life. Because she watched the videos of homicidal maniacs like Anwar al-Awlaki and Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, from whom she gained the insight that

when a Muslim land is attacked it becomes obligatory on every man, woman and child and even slave to go out and fight and defend the land and the Muslims and if they can't handle like the forces they are facing, then it becomes obligatory on the people who live in ... closest to that country and if those people refuse to fulfil their duty then it, then it becomes to the next closest people and the next closest until it goes all the way round the whole world and it's obligatory on everyone to defend that land.

And so she went out, bought some knives from a hardware shop, and stabbed a man.

If you ever needed proof that religion is a cause of harm, well, here it is. It's just destroyed the life of a young woman who had every reason to live, not to mention the lives of her family, not to mention the man she stabbed and his family.

And where's Anwar al-Awlaki? As well as apparently hiding out in Yemen, he's still on the internet in the form of his videos, inciting others to murder in the name of his barbaric ideology, like

Paul “Bilal” Rockwood and his wife Nadia in Alaska, and on the other side of the world in Singapore, Muhammad Fadil Abdul Hamid.

I can't help but feel sad that Roshanara Choudry is now going to spend the rest of her life in prison, in 21st-century Britain, all because of a few hate-filled words in a book written in the desert over 1,000 years ago.