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Gilles Kepel,
an expert on radical Islam, in his book “ The Revenge of God” states that
seen from Vatican, Islam is feared as arch-rival today. There is an obvious
alarm in their perceptions. Christian Arabs are abandoning the Middle East
steadily. The church fears the day when, the Holy Land will be populated almost
entirely by Jews and Muslims. In Sudan, an Islamic republic is fighting a war
against its own Christian citizens.
In the US there
is an extremely important progression of Islam among African- Americans. Many of
us do not know that after the riots in Las Angeles, the truce was signed in the
mosque of Imam Aziz with the
representatives of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. This group is very
puritanical and very militant supplying Muslims with an identity and a
reorganisation of communal links around religious observance.
Most of the
firebrand fundamentalist leaders are not ulemas or traditional Islamic scholars.
There are engineers, doctors, with access to modern support networks and
services who go back to the scared texts and pick a bit here, a bit there and
try to reorganize the meanings of the religious texts to their own needs. The
assassins of Anwar Sadat in 1981 did this. This is an extremely modern way of
dealing with religious texts. There is thus an obvious link between religion and
resurgence leading to powerful and radical functions of Islam today, which
short-circuits the traditional ulemas.
The Islamic
terrorist outfits, with the backing of governments can span several continents.
A U.S. Republican task force has disclosed that American Muslim members of Fugra,
an organization of terrorists involved in the bombing of World Trade Centere in
New York were trained by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)
Surprisingly Pakistan created a terrorist force to carry Jihad to America,
abusing American funds to do it. Yossef Bodansky, Director of the task force in
his report gave detailed evidence of Pakistan’s world-wide involvement in
“religiously inspired violence associated with Islamic radicalism aimed
primarily against Hindu, Ahmedia and other religious cults from South Asia,
particularly India”.
Despite the U.S
being at the receiving end of Islamic terrorism today, it closed its eyes to
ISI’s training Muslims from the US and Canada for terrorist operations in
North America and Canada. The Task Force gave detailed accounts of six training
complexes in Pakistan, which originally were meant for Afghan resistance and
later on turned their heat towards India where Kashmiris, Sikhs and others were
trained. The ISI also recruited radicalised but technically educated American
Muslim youth through highly professional intelligence officers. The truth seems
to have come out when U.S financed programmes supporting Islamic recipients
boomeranged and American cities became their targets of destabilisation.
If we go to the
roots of the conflict engendered across the continents, it is because one faith
has monopolised the truth and became arrogant. Octavio Paz, Nobel Prize winner
for Literature in 1991 in an interview in the New Perspectives Quarterly said
that Islam, standing apart from all world religions, is the most reactionary
force in the world today. “East may be meeting West at the end of history but
Islam, in its confirmed monotheism, seems the odd civilization out,” says the
Nobel Laureate. He further says that Islam today is the most obstinate form of
monotheism. The human civilization owes many things to monotheism but it also
owes to it hatred and oppression. Crusades, colonialism, totalitarianism, even
ecological destruction - can be traced to monotheism. Outside Islam the world,
wedded to modernism, assimilated foreign traditions with western culture.
Indeed, the first third of the 20th Century was the culmination of a
long process of the discovery of other civilisations and their visions of
reality. Islam, however, stands alone. It is the most retrograde force in human
society today.
Octavio Paz
states that the marvellous thing about the Western Civilisation is that we could
criticize religion with the weapon of philosophy and reason; and then we could
criticize philosophy, or rationality, with the weapon of philosophy. But Islam
doesn’t have it. There is no reconciliation of faith with science in Islam.
This is the root cause of a brewing conflict across continents and civilisations.
The fundamentalism as reflected very often through the cries of Jehad is borne
out of a studied reluctance to accept modernism with known notions and concepts
of progress. Having accepted one truth in opposition to plural truths, Islam has
sadly repudiated plurality of civlisations. The outward manifestations of such
thinking, which promotes terrorism should not surprise anyone as it is becoming
a depressing reality of our times.
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