By David Simmons
The Ismaili Muslim community in Kenya is reeling from eight deaths at the hands of Islamic terrorists. Among the dead are Sikhs, Hindus, Christians and Jews. Multiple nationalities. Multiple religions. Now it is true that Islamic terrorists are killing more Muslims than anyone. But this stunt – the sparing of Muslims for PR – is just that. They shed the blood of humanity. The majority of the Muslim world is against these people and they think they can turn the tide. They can’t. We will not let them.
This heartfelt declaration was posted
on Facebook by a former newspaper colleague, a man I have always
admired for his sound investigative journalism and his integrity,
after the terrorist attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi.
A Muslim immigrant from East Africa living in Vancouver, he claims to
speak for the majority of the followers of Islam when he condemns the
kind of violence we saw in the Kenyan capital, and have seen in the
Sunni-Shiite bloodbaths of Syria and Iraq, and during the attacks in
London in July 2005, in Bali that same year and in 2002, in New York,
Pennsylvania and near Washington in September 2011, in ...
Indeed, the Holy Koran says (25:63):
“The worshippers of the All-Merciful are they who tread gently upon
the earth, and when the ignorant address them, they reply, ‘Peace!’”
But many other verses call for violent jihad against infidels, such
as this passage in Chapter 2:
And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. And al-Fitnah [disbelief] is worse than killing ... but if they desist, then lo! Allah is forgiving and merciful. And fight them until there is no more Fitnah and worship is for Allah alone.
According to TheReligionofPeace.com, “The Koran
contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with
non-believers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic,
with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels
wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who do not join the fight are
called ‘hypocrites’ and warned that Allah will send them to hell
if they do not join the slaughter.”
So, is Islam going through a bad patch,
as Christianity did in the Crusades, during the Inquisition, and the
Troubles in Northern Ireland? Both Christianity and Islam are
developments of Judaism, whose own holy book is full of violence up
to and including genocide. Yet like the Koran, the Old and New
Testaments also vehemently call for justice, love and forgiveness.
No wonder so many religionists are
confused.
There is no point denying that all
three of the great monotheisms are at their core intolerant; how
could it be otherwise, when all three condemn to everlasting torment
anyone who worships any god but Yahweh/Allah? Jews, Christians and
Muslims who plead for peace are forced either to reject the
fundamentalist traditions of all three, or cherry-pick those passages
in their holy guidebooks that support their point of view. For their
part, the jihadis/crusaders/Zionists rely on the ample support in the
Bible, Koran and Hadith for condemnation of, and even violence
against, the infidel.
Fundamentally, the other major
religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism appear to make it easier to
find spiritual support for tolerance of “alternative paths” to
enlightenment, and throughout history the followers of those faiths
have, in terms of sheer numbers of victims, tended to be less
destructive. Yet they are not immune to the base instincts that
infest militant Islam and its Judaeo-Christian counterparts, as seen
in the recent anti-Muslim atrocities in Buddhist Myanmar, or the
occasional extremism of India’s and Bali’s Hindu right wings.
Looking at this situation more broadly,
it is possible to see that the contradictions in the great religions
that call for peace and violence simultaneously are nothing more than
a reflection of the human condition. The most damaging conflicts in
history, the First and Second World Wars, though they (especially the
Second) had some religious elements, were primarily secular.
The most violent of the current
nation-states, the US, makes war on much of the planet not to convert
infidels to any traditional religion, but to maintain its own wealth
and power at the expense of everyone else. By so doing, the United
States is merely following in the footsteps of the secular empires
that went before it – the British most recently, but in a
continuation of the historic course laid out most successfully by the
Romans.
And so we see that for believers and
unbelievers alike, the choice between forgiveness and intolerance,
between war and peace, love and hate, good and evil is a personal or,
by extension, a social or national one. It is not dictated by a verse
in a holy book that might be contradicted on the very next page. We
have seen this tendency very recently as ordinary Britons and even
Americans have turned sharply, and in significant numbers, against
their warmongering politicians who favour aggravating or even
participating in the Syrian civil conflict.
To pursue my own brand of tolerance and
pacifism, I found it helpful many years ago to abandon the
spiritual/superstitious elements of my religion (Protestantism) and
retain only its benign moral guidelines. My Muslim friend quoted at
the top of this essay has followed a different path to the same
destination, as have many more like him. And so I support his prayer
(for that is what it is, not a statement of fact), “The majority of
the Muslim world is against these people and they think they can turn
the tide. They can’t. We will not let them.”
