How Muslims, from Malaysia to Egypt, are disseminating and intensifying the 'exclusivist' and 'divisive' religious views and agendas, leading to conflicts and violence...



‘I've consulted all the sages I could find in the yellow pages, but there aren't many of them. And the Mayan panoramas on my pyramid pajamas haven't helped my little problem’. - Alan Parsons


Malaysia church bombing in 'Allah row'Lately, the News from Cairo and Kuala Lumpur is a clear sign of the intolerant times we live in…? In Egypt, drive-by killers have murdered several Coptic Christians as they were leaving church, sparking riots that have left more people dead. And in Malaysia, about a dozen churches have been torched or attacked by Muslims... Although of a different kind, but nevertheless an indicator of the rising resentment of the ‘Other’ was the Swiss referendum that banned the building of Islamic minarets.

Around the world, friction between various faiths is increasing, especially surrounding Islam, and is being fuelled by Muslim fanatics and the reactionary media at large, that has become a global phenomenon! It wasn’t supposed to be like this... the “Age of Reason” that illuminated the human mind in the late 18th century held out the promise of putting logic and rationality at centr-stage? But conflicting ideologies overwhelmed this appeal to reason -the 20th century was marked by bloody slaughters as Communism, National Socialism and Capitalist Liberalism fought to establish their dominance… If these manmade ideologies can excite such a killing frenzy, then how much more potent is religious faith???

As the previous centuries have shown, no major religion is exempted from the perceived needs to foist it over non-believers…! This is truer of the monotheistic belief systems than of the others... Christianity produced the Crusades and the Hundred Year War in Europe. Its missionaries travelled to the far corners of the globe in the wake of colonial armies to convert the ‘heathen’! In the 7-8th century, the armies of Islamic warriors swept across much of the known worlds, in a bid to spread their Islamic faith. To make Prophet Mohammed proud and to give Allah his Kingdom back!!! The Muslim Ottomans of Turkey continued this westward push, and for centuries, the Christian Europe was locked into battles with the Muslim Turks. The tide turned the other way outside the Gates of Vienna in 1683, with Muslims finding themselves at the receiving end of Christian European domination, occupation and exploitation?

This ‘titanic’ existential struggle still continues to sear their worldview of maligning of Muslims around the world. Their perceptions of the Christian West as being arrogant with rapacious powers, was reinforced by the colonial experience …or was it really??? Now, the Muslims see themselves as the true victims of a rampaging American war machine that is pursuing a millennium-old anti-Muslim agenda! Against this backdrop of ancient enmities and unceasing rancors, millions of Muslims view any attack against the hated West as something to cheer about…! Even, if these Muslim terrorist atrocities are mere pinpricks from them, yet they draw applauses from many fellow Muslims blinded by their religious hatred… United in their anti-West sentiments, and by the concept of the Islamic Ummah, millions of such Muslims overlook their national self-interests, as they applaud and support the nihilistic forces unleashed in the name of Islamic Jihad by a narcissist Prophet…! They also forget that far more Muslims have died at the hands of their fellow Muslim Jihadists than those fallen in battles against the Kafir Western powers…

Moreover, returning to the current manifestations of this conflict, Christians living in many Muslim countries are often viewed as Western agents, even though they are ethnically of the same stock as the majority population is... For instance, the Coptic presence in Egypt predates Islam by over six hundred years. Yet, they are still thought of as outsiders in these Muslim Lands…!

In Pakistan, this anti-Christian sentiment has been growing ever since the (late) General Zia’s self-serving policies that gave rise to Islamic extremism that is devouring Pakistan today!!! Churches and the degraded poor Christian communities have all been repeatedly attacked, jailed, tortured and even killed in the name of Islam’s fight against the Kafir Worlds…! Together with the Hindus, most Pakistani Christians still remain amongst the lowest of the lows and are being pushed into extinctions….

In Malaysia, the trigger for these recent bouts of anti-Christian frenzy; was a High Court’s decision that allowed the Kafirs (non-Muslims) to use the word ‘Allah’ to denote their God? It struck me as odd that this matter was the subject of pure judicial reviews... Hmmmm….! After all, every religion claims that ‘its god is the creator of this whole world’ and Islam is no exception! That being so, then why should anybody object, if the same term is used for the Maker by others???

I still can’t get it!!!!!!!!!!!

People are increasingly becoming exclusivist in their approach to religion. A Muslim website advises believers not to socialize with non-Muslims unless it’s strictly necessary...?

Rehman Malik, the Pakistani Interior Minister, said in the wake of the recent deadly Muharrum Ashura bombings in Karachi that the perpetrators were ‘worse than the non-believers’. The obvious implication here is that non-Muslims are such terrible peoples, but those responsible for the recent atrocities are even worse…! This he claimed despite the naked truth that non-Muslim societies are generally more peaceful and free of corruption and crimes than the Muslim ones...

Everyone knows how MUSLIM countries do not allow other religious groups/followers to immigrate to and integrate within Muslim countries. But, Muslims can easily migrate to any western Christian nation and avail all goodies of rich countries, because of they offer tremendous freedom and equality to all...

Moreover, Muslims are accepted and are integrated with all other faiths. This has created a big divide in this one world…. Until the Muslim countries don’t open up their borders to all religious groups to immigrate, integrate, get citizenship, buy property, allow to build churches, Temples, and synagogues, or to preach and practice their religious beliefs freely, they will remain segregated from the modern world and will always lag behind in economic developments.

After all, there is no Christian world or a Hindu world or even a Buddhist world...! No other faith-believers, except Muslims, divide the world based on religion (I have intentionally left out Israel and the Jewish world for being too small in comparison)...

Ever since 9/11, the ongoing conflict is being defined as a Christian war on Islam… Opinion polls across much of the Muslim world indicate that the United States is viewed as the main villain. Even when the US has rallied to a Muslim cause, as it did in Bosnia and Kosovo, its motives have been suspect in the eyes of many Muslims. Much of this irrational attitude is due to this impotent rage of conspiracy theories, the beating of drums of innocence fuelled by the American policies of ‘truth and justice’. Chief among these is the blank cheques handed over to Israel. In a sense, the plight of the Palestinians has come to symbolize the weakness of the Muslim world. While, on the other side of the coin, Muslims view Israel as Washington’s agent in humiliating both the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors... In this black-and-white take on the conflict, the Jewish narratives of persecutions and genocides by Muslims is long but forgotten, as is the criminal Arab culpabilities in losing war after war to the tiny Zionist state….!

For mankind’s slow rise has been marked by suspicions and warfare between tribes and nations… as a whole, after the great bloodletting of the first and second World Wars, there was some hope that humanity would learn lessons and would avoid warfare as a means of settling their dreadful differences! The founding of the League of Nations, and, later on, the United Nations, were the concrete expressions of these idealistic aspirations…

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, there was renewed hope that, the end of the Cold War would finally usher in the dawn of a peaceful era. Alas! The last two decades have been bloodier than the previous twenty years in our history…!

As the United States has emerged as the only superpower after the end of the Soviet Union, Muslim extremists saw suicide attacks as their only weapons and means of resisting the American firepower. And, although terrorism is a weapon of the weak, Islam has used it since its inception by Prophet Mohammed, and it still remains a deadly one!

No one can take away the rights of a population, which is in majority. However, to stay in harmony with other religions, the Muslim world must give up their segregations and distortions in belief. The time has come to think about integration for its own benefits... The Muslims of today, instead of building bridges, are all busy erecting barriers... Until and unless, they can tear them down, the world will become an even dreaded place to live in!!!

But how can we build such bridges of peace and harmony when, in reality, ‘religion plays such vital roles in disseminating the exclusivist “Your God and My God” theory…!!!

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