The 24-year-old Kuwaiti man who murdered four Marines in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Thursday recently published two posts about Islam on his blog.
Mohammad Yussuf Abdulazeez’s website is titled, simply, “MYABDULAZEEZ” and has just two articles dated from Monday. On Thursday, the 2012 University of Tennessee at Chattanooga graduate murdered the Marines outside of a recruiting center. He died while fleeing from the scene, either after shooting himself or after being shot by police.
The first post of Abdulazeez’s blog is entitled “A Prison Called Dunya.”
In it, Abdulazeez decried existence on earth, or “dunya,” and said he longed for paradise.
He wrote:
Subhnallah, this life we are living is nothing more than a test of our faith and patience. It was designed to separate the inhabitants of Paradise from the inhabitants of Hellfire, and to rank amongst them the best of the best and worst of the worst. Don’t let the society we live in deviate you from the task at hand. Take your study guide, the Quran and Sunnah, with strength and faith, and be firm as you live your short life in this prison called Dunya.
Passages from Abdulazeez’s ascetic — but not overly extremist — blog perhaps highlight the significance of the day he chose to murder American servicemen. Thursday was the last day of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month.
“We ask Allah to be pleased with us, reward us with Janna [paradise], and we seek refuge from his anger and the punishment of the Fire,” Abdulazeez wrote on the blog.
The second post is entitled, “Understanding Islam: The Story of the Three Blind Men.”
In it, Abdulazeez related a popular eastern parable about three blind men who encounter an elephant. After each inspected a different part of the elephant, they described the animal differently.
This, Abdulazeez related, describes how Muslims from different backgrounds approach their religion.
As Muslims, we often do this. We have a certain understanding of Islam and keep a tunnel vision of what we think Islam is. What we know is Islam and everything else is not. And we don’t have appreciation for other points of view and accept the fact that we may be missing some important parts of the religion.
Because Islam is a comprehensive religion we need to know everything from its message. The more comprehensive our knowledge of it is, the better our understanding of it will be and of what goes on around us.
Abdulazeez wrote that the companions of Muhammad “fought Jihad for the sake of Allah. Every one of them had to make sacrifices in their lives and some even left all their wealth to make hijrah [the journey] to Medina.”
He also wrote that Muhammad’s companions “were very involved in establishing Islam in the world. Their mission was to establish Islam and live it.”
The Daily Beast and the intelligence group SITE, which tracks jihadist activity, first referenced the blog. The Beast did not initially link to it. It is unclear if SITE linked to the blog. The group’s website is subscription-only.