EPILOGUE
Change is the keyword in the context of
existence: We come into being through a process of change; keep changing all our
lives, and when we lose the ability to change, we die.
Jehad was an effective tool for the Arabs because it
helped them build a vast Secular Arab Empire, which eventually laid the
foundation of a Spiritual Arab Empire. The former does not exist any longer, and
the latter is more burdensome than beneficial to the Arab race in terms of
scientific, technical and cultural progress. Civilisation of the Arabs owes a
good deal to their House of Wisdom (Bait-Ul-Hikmat), which they set up in the
reign of al-Mamun to translate the masterpieces of literature and science from
India and Greece. This is how they built a tradition of gathering, increasing
and disseminating knowledge during their heyday. In fact, the advent of the
Arabian Prophet and the phenomenon of learning, experimentation and teaching
were processes of change, which honoured the Arabs with grace, governance and
greatness. But now they have fettered the forward movement of time. Thus to all
those nations that draw inspiration from the Prophet as Model Flu
Behaviour, which it 1,400 years old, time has become regressive. This is the
reason that the Muslims have lost the dynamism, which inspires nations to live
vigilantly, vigorously and vivaciously.
Jehad is a double edged sword because it can also be
used by a Muslim against Muslim brethren for personal ambitions in the name of
Islam. Take for example, Timur Lang (Tamerlane), who was born in 1336 in
Transoxiana. He raided Baghdad and various cities of Mesopotamia on the pretext
that the Arab rulers of the area were not doing enough to protect the pilgrims
to Mecca and other holy places of Islam. With the purpose of striking terror
into the Arabian hearts, he erected a huge pyramid in Takrit with the skulls of
his Arab victims. In 1400, he repeated the same orgy of loot and murder in
Aleppo. First, he gave over the city to plunder as a mark of Jehad; then he
beheaded over 20,000 Muslims and built a tower with their heads. This champion
of Islam even destroyed the splendid mosques of Nurid and Ayyubid times and
allowed his troops to rape the Muslim damsels, who had taken refuge there to
save their honour. As he heard that some of his soldiers had been killed in
Baghdad, he returned like a hurricane to inflict the most dreadful punishment on
the Arabs. He carried out such a vast massacre that he built no fewer than 120
towers with the decapitated Arab heads in different parts of the city. This
practice of Timur was declared as fully Islamic by the Muslim divines for having
all the elements of Jehad!
The abuse of Jehad is not restricted to individuals
like Timur. It is equally rife among the Muslim nations. The recent Gulf War
between Iraq and Iran, the two Islamic states, explains the point. They had
declared Jehad against each other, though they both were pursuing national
interests!
Jehad or the pretended holy war in the name of God, has
no relevance to the modern world, equipped with the most lethal weapons that
have the ability to kill entire mankind within a few hours. Elimination of
religious war is the most urgent need of our times. Islamic belief in Jehad,
shows primitiveness of the Muslim thinking, which has become a stark challenge
to sanity. The philosophy of Momin-Kafir has stripped the Muslims of their
humanistic feelings and they think in terms of Muslims only, believing in
annihilation and enslavement of the non-Muslims.
As international affairs stand, it is the Muslim
nations of the world that need protection, yet it is they, who are accustomed to
satire-rattling. The recent NATO military action in Kosovo is an example of the
high morality that has come to be associated with modern civilization. The way
the Americans, the British, the Germans, the French and several other Christian
nations got together to bomb day and night for eleven weeks a fellow Christian
country to save the Muslims' rights, clearly shows that God lives in the West
where people are inclined to think and act like humans and not as religious
robots.
It is interesting to note that while the Christians
were heavily bombing fellow Christians in Kosovo, the Islamic nations of the
world did sweet nothing to help the Kosovan Muslims except making dulcet noises
of brotherhood and questioning the noble motives of the West. This episode
demonstrates that the Muslims have failed to keep up with the changing times. It
is because Islam demands total adherence to the 1400 year old Prophetic Model of
Behaviour.
The Muslims may claim that Islam is a perfect code of
life for all times but this is just a presence. For example, owing to the
divisive attitude of Islam, the Muslim nations must not form a part of the
United Nations Organisation, but things have changed so completely that they
have no choice but to join this organization or perish.
Similarly, Islam is fully opposed to the modern
economic system which is founded on interest. The Koran forbids both receiving
and paying interest but the Muslim nations have no alternative to this practice.
All their financial institutions are based on interest, and they continue this
practice under fictituous descriptions such as profit. What hypocrisy it is! The
same remarks equally apply to their legal system, which is directly or
indirectly borrowed from other nations. Take for example "Khula" i.e.
woman's right to divorce her husband. There is no authority for this law in the
Koran, which bestows this right on man alone. Even the hadith condemns it:
"Those women who break matrimonial ties and
divorce (Khula) their husbands are hypocrites."
(Mishkat, Vol. 2: 3148)
However, owing to the pressure of Feminism, "Khula"
is becoming fashionable in Muslim countries. Again, the Koranic behests about
purdah (veil) have become impracticable in almost all Muslim nations, and the
same is true about sex-segregation because men and women have found it
economically impossible not to work together in offices, factories, hospitals,
etc. For the same reason, even polygamy is legally discouraged in many Islamic
countries.
There is a long list of Islamic practices, which has
become outdated in modern times. Educated Muslims ignore them, yet verbally
justify them to the fellow Muslims. This is a psychological malaise, which has
become the major source of mental conflict for the followers of Islam.
The whole charade is in fact, a clerical manipulation.
It is a conspiracy of the Muslim priest against ordinary Muslims. Most of them
are power-hungry men, without any moral or intellectual virtue. Therefore, they
wield the might of superstition to fool and snool the faithful irrespective of
its consequences to the nation.
Religion is the weapon of superstition which has the
same relationship with reason as darkness has with light, stupidity with wisdom
and perversion with piety. This is why more superstitious a people, the easier
it is for the priest to push, pervert and persecute them for his own gain in the
name of the Supernatural, who seems to remain on cordial terms with him, no
matter how antihuman his behaviour.
A look at the Papal office reveals this truth. Having
raised Jesus to the status of Son of God through tales of miracles and
mind-boggling stories of his spiritual greatness, Pope first thoroughly
brainwashed the Christian mind with his own infallibility that Christ was
supposed to have bestowed upon him as his vicar on earth, and then acquired the
power of excommunication, which enabled him (Pope) to declare a Christian as a
renegade and inflict upon him the punishment of apostasy. In the case of a
monarch, it meant that he was disqualified to rule his Christian subjects, who
must rebel against him. Thus, a Christian monarch reigned subject to the
pleasures of the Pope.
History has noted that Henry IV of Germany incurred
excommunication, and as a price of papal mercy, he had to strip off all his
regalia, wear ordinary woollen clothes and stand bare-footed for three days in
chilling cold weather before the gates of the castle at Canossa in 1077. It was
only this act of self-humiliation that persuaded the Holy Father to pardon him.
Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, suffered
an even worse fate: he had to kiss publicly the feet of Pope Alexander III for
the sin of not acknowledging him as Christ's Vicar!
As the world of Islam is receiving rays of
enlightenment from the modern scientific progress, the Muslim masses are trying
to rise from a long torpor of superstition. This is proving an alarming
challenge to the pomp, power and prestige of the Muslim clergy, and they are all
out to quell this awakening with an accelerated zeal of suppression through
their proverbially effective weapons of religious bigotry, holy gossip and
fatwas.
Tragedy of the Muslim world is that it has not been
allowed to develop a culture of dissent. Like Christendom, it has not been able
to separate politics from religion. This has exacerbated the Muslim social
misery beyond description, and even the politicians, who are anti-Islamic at
heart, find it convenient to fool, school and snool the masses in the name of
the Prophet for being highly conditioned to his name. This technique works well
because the Muslims sincerely believe that the Prophet shall compensate them for
all their worldly sorrows by getting them into paradise!
The incessant Islamic propaganda has incredibly
increased the social prestige of the Muslim clergy: Ayat Ullah Khomeini was able
to oust the Shah of Iran and reverse the progressive march of Iran. As a result,
this country has become a prison for woman, reduced to the status of a sexual
toy for man. Afghanistan, once a green and happy land, has been turned into
ruins through civil war, prompted by the zeal of Jehad. Not only the plight of
women is no better than that of concubines, men also have been made to forget
the meaning of civil liberties.
In the Indian subcontinent, however, Islamic propaganda
has bestowed more power on the politician and less on the priest. This is the
reason that Muhammad All Jinnah, whose character was the exact antithesis of the
Islamic pattern of behaviour, succeeded in persuading the Muslims of India to
partition their own motherland to please Allah, who is keen to create national
disunity among the non--Arab Muslims to turn them against their own country and
brethren for imposing Spiritual and Cultural Arab Imperialism on them in the
guise of "Momin and Kafir." One wonders what kind of God uses the
device of "Divide and Rule" to gain followers. God being
universal, cannot stoop to such contrivances. Since Arabia is the chief
beneficiary of this stratagem, it is the brainchild of Prophet Muhammad, who
aspired to achieve immorality through Arab nationalism, which he termed
"Islam" as the only religion allowed by Allah !
Since every vice is perpetrated by the priest and
politician as a virtue in the name of Islam, it is high time that the Muslims
seek guidance from reason and the universally established moral values. Owing to
the immense destructive power of the modern weapons, nothing is more evil than
war. It demonstrates the nature of Jehad in the context of our times. The
Islamic philosophy seeks to establish a world-order founded on permanent
annihilation of the human species, unless, like Allah and His angels, it adores
Muhammad day and night. One can see clearly that the dream of paradise i.e.,
sex--after-death, is morally below the dignity of man because it involves him
into a pattern of violence, which is the dictinction of lower animals.
Compared to Islam, Christianity has kept with the
spirit of changing times. Pope John Paul II should be congratulated for
declaring that he wishes to make a millennium pilgrimage to Ur (in Iraq),
the birth place of Abraham, in the company of Muslims and Jews. This is an
extraordinary statement for the Christian Pontiff, who ought to oppose Muslims
and Jews in accordance with the established traditions of his predecessors.
The ever-increasing orthodoxy of the Islamic world,
which emanates from its regressive attitudes and social frustration, is becoming
a real danger to the stability of peace and survival of humankind. A faith which
is just make--believe to avoid the realities of life, is a recipe for
self--destruction.
Search for paradise, the most luxurious mileu for
enjoying the choicest sex after-death, is a self-deception, and the God that
offers this type of immoral temptation for securing worshippers, is neither
Divine nor worthy of worship.
Islam is an ideology based on irrelevance because it
seeks God's glory at the expense of human welfare. It is a doctrine of hatred
ardently desiring to found human culture on the permanent strife of Momin
(Muslim) versus Kafir (non--Muslim). This is the reason that Muslims cannot live
with non-Muslims even if they are their own kith and kin. Look at India: the
Muslims forced partition of their own Motherland to create Pakistan, which has
become a living symbol of contempt for everything that is not Islamic.
An even worse aspect of Islam is its dictatorial
nature, which does not allow culture of dissent under any circumstances. This is
what creates cut-throat sects within Islam, which indulge in internecine
squabbles and internal wars. The recent history of Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan
explains this fact.
Women's rights are the special prey of Allah, who uses
them to establish patriarchal societies for spreading male chauvinism to
perpetuate His rule through man's lust, ferocity and barbarity.
Surely, God is neither so power-hungry that He will
resort to such inglorious devices to glorify Himself nor is He a weakling, who
is dependent on male power to enforce His greatness.
It is blasphemous even to think about God in such
terms. A selfish Being cannot be God. To deserve this honour, He has to believe
in the unity and dignity of people, and respect human rights. This is high time
that the hidden motives of religion are examined in the light of reason.
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