Daily Inspiration Quote by Feisal Abdul Rauf

The line is engineered to do two jobs at once: draw a hard moral boundary around violence, while threading a political needle so narrow it’s basically rhetorical surgery. Feisal Abdul Rauf, a theologian who’s often been forced into the role of “acceptable Muslim spokesperson” in American media cycles, opens with an all-inclusive condemnation: “everyone and anyone.” That redundancy isn’t accidental. It’s prophylactic language, built to pre-empt the suspicion that his ethics come with tribal asterisks.

Then comes the pivot: “And Hamas has committed acts of terrorism.” It’s not a flourish; it’s an evidentiary receipt. The “and” matters, because it frames the Hamas clause as a logical extension of principle, not a concession to pressure. He’s signaling that the moral framework is primary; the named actor is simply an application of it. That matters in a climate where public discourse often treats Muslim leaders as guilty until they perform denunciation on cue.

The subtext is defensive and strategic: I will not be boxed into collective blame, but I also won’t evade specificity. At the same time, the sentence is carefully limited. He condemns “acts,” not an entire people; he does not broaden to state violence, occupation, or retaliation. That omission is likely deliberate, because expanding the moral net would trigger immediate accusations of “whataboutism” and drown out the core claim: terrorism is unequivocally wrong, even when it’s politically legible to some.

In effect, Rauf is trying to reclaim moral agency in a conversation that routinely demands it as a performance.