"I Want 'Allahu Akbar' Back"
Op-ed contributor Wajahat Ali , in his opinion article "I Want 'Allahu Akbar' Back" (2017), mourns the fact that the claimed benign, religious phrase "Allahu Akbar" has been unfairly twisted into a terrorism-related reference and asserts that these two words are actually innocent. Ali supports this claim by delivering a catalog using parallel structure in which he gives real-life examples of when he uses this phrase throughout his daily life in order to show the innocence and casual usage of the phrase, gives examples of the phrase being tagged onto three recent terror attacks around the world, showing how a few radicals are giving these words a bad reputation, and compares "Allahu Akbar" to shouts of "white pride" by supremacists, showing another example of how language can be perverted and weaponized by extremists and how therefore this is not exclusively a Muslim problem. Ali's purpose was to shed light on the true meaning behind t...