Powerful Western rhetoric notwithstanding, political Islam is not a stateless entity with mindless hatred for non-Muslim societies. The sub-text of the Saudi monarch’s recent visit to India suggests that the keeper of Islam’s two holiest shrines may be steering his country away from the sterile Wahabi Islam that has given his faith a bad name the world over.
More significantly, King Abdullah may have realized that while Islam is the only major religion standing openly in the international public arena (others having retreated under pressure of a new Christian god called secularism), it is therefore as vulnerable to attack as the pillars of Mina. Among colonized peoples of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Muslims have suffered the worst humiliation, with puppet regimes hoisted upon imposed borders, in service of Western economic and strategic interests. When leaders like Saddam Hussain and the Iranian Ayatollahs tried to challenge this covert imperialism, they fell foul of the old colonial-corporate mullahs.
The quiet dignity with which the King avoided the politically dicey (for him) visit to Rajghat eclipsed many significant acts of omission and commission. No Hurriyat leader camped in Delhi to apprise the Saudi royal of the sufferings of the Kashmiri people (read Muslims). In fact, seditious Kashmiris surface only at the bidding of Pakistani, American and British leaders, and this should make it evident that far from being an Indo-Pak dispute,Kashmiris a legacy of colonialism. Refuse to entertain Britain and America, and the problem will resolve itself. The contrived controversy over Saudi aid to restore Jama Masjid fizzled out, and I think that more than deft handling by the MEA, it was the Saudi embassy that spoke a few quiet words of wisdom to Indian co-religionists. Thus, the richest and most eminent Muslim monarch came, and Indian Muslims had nothing to whine about to him!
More astounding is King Abdullah’s statement that India is his second home. Can Al-Hind be Dar-ul Islam? This was no polite noise, but Indian analysts missed its significance. I think the King has protected Islam’s flanks in the emerging third crusade with political Christianity, and has quietly intervened in the Western strategy of inciting Islamic groups to bleed a predominantly Hindu India (via Pakistan and ISI-controlled Bangladesh), while western military-economic machines trample over Muslim lands. If India is ‘home’ to the guardian of Islam’s holiest shrines, it means India is being invited not to join the crusade against Islam, and Islamic nations are being given the signal to stay focused against political Christianity and its menacing presence in the Muslim world.
I say this because for the first time since the end of the second world war, a major controversy concerning Islam, in the form of insulting cartoons published by Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten in September 2005, has not led to violence in India. Having grown up hearing the excuse that Muslim grievances over Palestine caused this or that violent incident; having witnessed India being made the site of sponsored Muslim rage over the Satanic Verses, which then spread to other parts of the globe, the present situation is unprecedented. The cartoons led several Muslim nations to recall their envoys from Denmark, while a boycott of Danish goods provoked sharp rebuke from the European Union, which is surely a political expression of support for the offensive caricatures of Prophet Mohammad.
The cartoons were an intentional act of religious disrespect by political Christianity, comprising the socio-economic-political elites of Europe and America. The culture editor of Jyllands Posten let the cat out of the bag saying the critical issue was the integration of immigrant Muslims and Islam’s compatibility with modern secular society. This simply means that Muslims living in white Christian lands must discard their Islamic identities and conform to a Christian ethos; Pope Benedict XVI has sought conversion of European Muslims to Christianity.
Secularism is Christianity’s schizophrenic twin; it enables Christian powers to pretend religious indifference while pushing their political agendas in non-Christian societies. Just as the separation of church and state in the past created Western political and intellectual elites who could more successfully execute the Christian quest for world dominion, so the ideology of secularism served to delegitimize the native traditions of non-Christian countries. That is why West-promoted secular elites in politics and academics have been so consistently hostile to India’s Hindu ethos. Secularism does not mean neutrality towards religion, but involves active hatred of traditions that could blockade Christian political, economic and intellectual supremacy.
Conversions are necessary to procure greater subservience of the natives. This is the reason why all so-called secular Christian nations have a budget for overseas evangelism, which is nothing but an offensive intrusion in the internal affairs of non-Christian cultures. In India, secularism ridiculed Hindu anxiety over missionary activity and promoted Muslim separatism through personal laws that gave the most obscurantist elements power over the entire community.
The cartoon controversy was deliberately aggravated by a Norwegian Christian magazine which republished them last month; one showed the Prophet wearing a bomb-shaped turban. When Muslims objected, a united Europe republished the cartoons simultaneously on February 1, 2006, which is a powerful political snub. Moreover, the timing coincides with the Euro-American assault on Iran’s nuclear programme. Interestingly, Salman Rushdie received a staggering advance to demonize Ayatollah Khomeini for deposing the darling of American oil companies. Rushdie went further and distastefully placed women named after the Prophet’s wives in a brothel. I sincerely hope pious Indian Muslims will now understand the Hindu sense of hurt at M.F. Hussain’s hate-filled depictions of Hindu goddesses (secular Muslims are shameless hypocrites). They should also gracefully accept the judicious rules of coexistence that sanatana dharma places upon all social beings.
The genesis of the predominantly American initiative to corner Iran reportedly lies in President Ahmadinejad’s plans to open an oil bourse based on the euro rather than the dollar, and Israeli intelligence’s belief that by March 2006, Iran would reach the “point of no return” in terms of technical expertise to enrich uranium in quantities needed to build a nuclear warhead. Before he fell sick, prime minister Ariel Sharon had asked his forces to prepare for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran.Israel’s eagerness for diplomatic relations with Pakistan, mother lode of nomadic terrorism, is part of a Western strategy to contain proud Islamic nations that seek agency for their people. Yet larger forces may compel President Musharraf to stand by his co-religionists.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s defiance in the face of referral to the Security Council raises suspicions of covert support from powerful Islamic countries and at least one major regional power. The international community must be vigilant against a Euro-American conspiracy to destroy the political dignity, financial viability and military might of oil-rich Islam. Eminent Americans like Mr. Robert M. Bowman, former director of the US Star Wars space defence programme, believe that the manner in which the Twin Towers in New York fell indicates synergy between mercenary jihadis and domestic political terrorists, as the buildings could not have collapsed upon themselves unless explosives had been placed at strategic places and set off simultaneously via remote control. If there is an iota of truth in this assessment, the world has a duty to ask if the Euro-American crusade against Islam should be dignified by international consent.
The Pioneer, 7 February 2006