NEW DELHI

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

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There are nine bodies � all of them young men � that have been lying in a Mumbai hospital morgue since Nov. 29. They may be stranded there for a while because no local Muslim charity is willing to bury them in its cemetery. This is good news.

The nine are the Pakistani Muslim terrorists who went on an utterly senseless killing rampage in Mumbai on 26/11 � India�s 9/11 � gunning down more than 170 people, including 33 Muslims, scores of Hindus, as well as Christians and Jews. It was killing for killing�s sake. They didn�t even bother to leave a note.

All nine are still in the morgue because the leadership of India�s Muslim community has called them by their real name � �murderers� not �martyrs� � and is refusing to allow them to be buried in the main Muslim cemetery of Mumbai, the 7.5-acre Bada Kabrastan graveyard, run by the Muslim Jama Masjid Trust.

�People who committed this heinous crime cannot be called Muslim,� Hanif Nalkhande, a spokesman for the trust, told The Times of London. Eventually, one assumes, they will have to be buried, but the Mumbai Muslims remain defiant.

�Indian Muslims are proud of being both Indian and Muslim, and the Mumbai terrorism was a war against both India and Islam,� explained M.J. Akbar, the Indian-Muslim editor of Covert, an Indian investigative journal. �Terrorism has no place in Islamic doctrine. The Koranic term for the killing of innocents is �fasad.� Terrorists are fasadis, not jihadis. In a beautiful verse, the Koran says that the killing of an innocent is akin to slaying the whole community. Since the ... terrorists were neither Indian nor true Muslims, they had no right to an Islamic burial in an Indian Muslim cemetery.�

To be sure, Mumbai�s Muslims are a vulnerable minority in a predominantly Hindu country. Nevertheless, their in-your-face defiance of the Islamist terrorists stands out. It stands out against a dismal landscape of predominantly Sunni Muslim suicide murderers who have attacked civilians in mosques and markets � from Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan � but who have been treated by mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera, or by extremist Islamist spiritual leaders and Web sites, as �martyrs� whose actions deserve praise.

Extolling or excusing suicide militants as �martyrs� has only led to this awful phenomenon � where young Muslim men and women are recruited to kill themselves and others � spreading wider and wider. What began in a targeted way in Lebanon and Israel has now proliferated to become an almost weekly occurrence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It is a threat to any open society because when people turn themselves into bombs, they can�t be deterred, and the measures needed to interdict them require suspecting and searching everyone at any public event. And they are a particular threat to Muslim communities. You can�t build a healthy society on the back of suicide-bombers, whose sole objective is to wreak havoc by exclusively and indiscriminately killing as many civilians as possible.

If suicide-murder is deemed legitimate by a community when attacking its �enemies� abroad, it will eventually be used as a tactic against �enemies� at home, and that is exactly what has happened in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The only effective way to stop this trend is for �the village� � the Muslim community itself � to say �no more.� When a culture and a faith community delegitimizes this kind of behavior, openly, loudly and consistently, it is more important than metal detectors or extra police. Religion and culture are the most important sources of restraint in a society.