“What happened on Thursday has nothing at all to do with Islam because the person who did it, even according to his outward acts, wasn’t a Muslim,” the 46-year-old Abdulmonam says in Arabic, speaking through a translator. He declined to give his last name. “He smoked, he didn’t pray, he didn’t fast, he didn’t do all these things that Muslims should do. It was a horrible crime.”
Nice’s Muslims, like Abdulmonam, are adamant that Bouhlel does not represent the community in any way; he was a deviant who should never be termed a Muslim, they say…
“They just represent themselves. Islam is salam , it’s peace,” he says. “This man apparently wasn’t even doing Ramadan or the prayer. He just thinks, ‘Oh let’s kill people.’ Is that what is Islam? No, it is not.”
Lhouasaine Khalfaoui, a 41-year-old French-Moroccan butcher at the Boucherie Atlas, a minute’s walk from al-Wahda, was a neighbor of the first person killed in the attack, a 60-year-old Muslim mother-of-six Fatima Charrihi. Khalfaoui points to a fly on the counter in the shop and says that a true Muslim wouldn’t hurt it.
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