Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A Critical Appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity) by BS Murthy (best pdf reader for ebooks .TXT) 📕

But whither gone the umma there; what with the shepherds of the faith thus stymied, the Musalmans of the region have no clue either. These very faithful who fear Islam is in danger whenever a Muslim girl weds a kafir are seemingly cool to the nemeses knocking at their religious doors. The believers who take a cartoon of their prophet with a ‘bomb in the turban’ as an affront to their ‘religion of peace’ don’t feel scandalized at all by the suicide bombers of Islam. The fanatical who take to the streets at the death of a faithful at the hands of an infidel are yet to hit the road when the Musalmans have been killing the Musalmans in the masjids of Islam. The bigots who burn the effigies of Uncle Sam fail to come up with one for the Satans of Islam; why this all-round silence, when the Muslim world is burning in its sectarian hatred? Maybe it’s possible that the Musalmans who have come to jump for joy at the infidels’ death in the martyr missions of the faithful had insensibly lost their sensitivity after all.

What of the Asian contingent of Islam; though numerically superior, it’s forever condemned to play the Islamic second fiddle to the Arab umma, and thus the intellect of these Musalmans is not attuned to apply its mind to the affairs of the people whom Allah had chosen to reveal what all he revealed through their own man. Of course, they do compensate for this handicap by being the first to take up the cudgels for Islam against the kafirs whenever Muhammad was perceived as being slighted. Well it’s all about human psychology for as if to assert his self-worth and show it to the world besides, the inferiority complex of man goads him to adopt aggressive postures! Maybe it is the fate of the Asian umma to remain servile to Allah as well as his Arab servants, so it seems.

True that Islam had dwelt all about the jihad against the kafirs to the last detail, even of splitting the ‘spoils of war’ among the believers; but then, how even the All-Knowing Allah were to know that the Musalmans one day would wage jihad against their coreligionists, and that which ‘the God’ couldn’t foresee, how his mere Messenger would have seen! Besides, Muhammad, gloating over the sycophantic antics of his flock, anyway, would have been too overwhelmed to visualize the impending schism for airing an opinion as otherwise that would have surely found its way into the Islamic folklore through the hadith or sunna. So, bereft of Allah’s ayat and Muhammad’s hadith, the muftis and the Musalmans alike have reached the dead end of the Islamic guidance, or so it seems, for they are unable to find a bend to steer them clear of the Quranic quagmire. After all, the Musalmans had long since ceased to apply their minds, that is, in all matters faith as they allowed themselves to believe there is nothing in the life, which is not governed by Islam that anyway had laid out the ‘straight path’ for them! Sadly, that’s the Catch 22 of the umma now, as ever.

However, it may be interesting to speculate about the pathological separatist urge that bedevils the Muslim mind-set; in Muhammad’s fight against the idolaters, it was his compulsion to co-opt ‘the God’ of the Jews to gain authenticity for Islam, and so he had averred that ‘the God’ revealed to him what he had earlier revealed to Moses and other prophets, Jesus included. But then how the adoption of ‘the God’ of the neighborhood, save the idolaters, would entail an identity of its own to Islam; so for according a separate identity to the new faith, the ensign of its Messenger was made the standard of Islam. While Muhammad had established the Muslim separateness thus, fearing dilution of their faith in interaction with the Jews and ‘the others’, the Quran ordained the umma to insulate itself from the rest of all. Why, the ethos of the Muslim separateness fitted Muhammad’s interests like a glove and served the cause of Islam to the hilt, that was, till the Persians were forced into its fold; seen in the hindsight rather foolishly.

The people of Persia, which became the Iran of Islam, were culturally suave and numerically superior to the tribal Musalmans of Arabia, and it was no wonder that they wished to have a separate identity of their own in the alien religion; the ill-fate of their country had forced them into. But by having to share the prophet and the faith with the Arabs they despised, they were in the same boat as Muhammad was once with Islam having a coparcener God with the Jews and the Christians. However, as the Quran had disowned the Jews and the Christians as if to bestow upon the Musalmans their Islamic identity, the discord of the faithful over Muhammad’s successor could have been the godsend for the Islamic separateness of the Iranians. So they sided with Muhammad’s progeny and began to swear by Ali, of course, besides Muhammad for after all it is the essence of being a Musalman, and thus the unitary path of Islam that Allah envisaged for the believers came to be forked into the Sunni right and the Shia left with a Quran to boot in Persian.

And yet vouching for the Quran, and revering the Messenger of Allah, they both tend to nurse a sectarian animosity generated in the battlefield of Karbala. It is these conflicting precepts of the religious righteousness of these sects that make each ‘the other’ to the other. Needles to say, the zealots amongst the Shias and the Sunnis imbibe the dogma of the doctrinarian differences of their respective sects, and it is the fanaticism nurtured by their exclusionist visions that nurtures the sectarian antagonism amongst them. What about the dream of the Musalmans to make all humanity embrace Islam if ever comes true; would that bring the inter-religious strife to an end in the all-Islamic world; be sure, the Sunni-Shia intra-faith animosity is bound to spoil the grand Islamic party. What if it were in a bad taste, if not for this Sunni-Shia animosity, wouldn’t the Musalmans, unified in their hatred towards ‘the others of the Quran’, have made them the exclusive targets of the unfolding Islamic terror?

Going back into the Islamic history, bereft though they were of the Ariel support from Allah’s War Birds, the Muhammedan infantry of yore with the sword in one hand and the Quran in the other conquered much of the old world. Needless to say, while the inspiration to fight came from the Quran, much of the military tactics were but the products of Muhammad’s campaigns against the Quraysh and the others. But soon, the spiritual zeal to impose Islam on the infidels gave way to the temporal zest of the Musalmans to indulge in the vices of life. Thus, the eventual eclipse of the Islamic power was on account of the socio-intellectual downslide of the Musalmans and if anything, during the colonial period, the Muslim world was pushed more onto its back foot than ever.

Given the associated pride of their dominance of yore, the umma’s hurt at the Islamic decline is understandable, and at the end of the colonialism, the idea of reviving the glory of the Muslim arms first dawned on the Punjabi Generals of the newborn nation of Pakistan. Going by the past history of Muslim conquests in Hindustan that were to portend an easy victory, the Islamic army of Pakistan waged a full-fledged war over Kashmir with gusto. However, as against the hoped for Muslim military cakewalk over the hated Hindu enemy, perceived as non-martial, soon enough, the Pakistanis woke up to find the Indian army at the gates of Lahore, the pride of Punjab, in their land of the pure, which sent the Pakistani fauzis running for cover and that forced Field Marshal Ayub Khan, their despot, to send SOS to the U.N for a cease-fire.

Even before the umma could recover from the Hindu shock, the Nasser misadventure that followed in the Middle East, instead of resuscitating the power of the Arab Sword ended in the fiasco of a Six Day War with the hated Jews. Well, after a prolonged Christian humiliation that was the colonization of the Muslim world, what these two military defeats might have done to the Islamic psyche is not hard to imagine. Then the Bangladeshi war in which Pakistan irrevocably lost the eastern wing of its country should have signaled to the Musalmans that the Sword of Allah had lost its cutting edge after all. And later, as if the Great Satan’s capture of Saddam Hussein from a hole was not the final nail in the coffin of the Muslim valor, the Navy Seals gunned down Osama bin Laden in his Pakistani hideout.

However, nowhere else the umma places its Islamic military honour at stake than in the Promised Land of the Jews that it hopes the Palestinians, ousted from there, would somehow recapture for the eternal glory of the umma. So fathered by their hatred for the Jews and mothered by the delusions of ‘the hereafter’, both brought up by the Quran, the child of the Islamic terror was born in the womb of Palestine to the joy of the Musalmans. It was as if it appeared to the desperate umma that, at last, it could get hold of the stick with which they could beat their hateful infidels, who came to dominate them; why at the apparent success of the terrorist acts, as the Musalmans watched in awe, the Jews began collecting their body bags. So the umma came invest in Arafat’s Al-Fatah in right earnest as Leila Khalid, the female face of the Palestine terror then, famously commented to the world media that there were no innocent people as such, for everyone either supports a cause or opposes it, ideologically or otherwise. And the rest is the continuing history of the Islamic terror taken over by Hamas after Arafat’s death with each chapter unveiling a new facet of it that was till Israel seemingly brought it to an end with its tough political stand backed by its hard military first.

But, the hypocrisy of the Musalmans and the naivety of Islamapologists tend to link the phenomenon of the Islamic terrorism to the vexations of a hurt pride. Granting that the hurt was good enough for the faithful to hurt the infidels, how can one explain their intra-sect slaughters? Given the propensity of the umma to blame ‘the others’ for the debilities of their faith, the Musalmans seem to show no intellectual inclination to redress this self-destructive phenomenon that was plaguing Pakistan, to begin with, but spread far and wide into its dar al-Islams. Even though the Sunni-Shia- killings, clearly rooted in the sectarian dogma of the Islamic divide, were to be shrouded by some ethnic animosity attached to them, the Sunni slaughter of the sub-continental Shias in Iraq begs for answers. And in them lie the need for the alleviation of the inherent dangers of the separatist dogma that bedevils the mind-set of the Musalman.

It is true that either by intellect or by inclination, the tendency of the umma is to fashion its faith in the pre-Hijra Quranic stream of love and compassion for fellow Musalmans. True, the silent majority of their simple living mullahs, sailing in the benign boats of Islam, help these Musalmans seek succor in their faith, but their grievance that ‘the others’ dub their ‘religion of peace’ as the ‘doctrine of death’ is sham for they too believe in the martyrdom of the fidayēn that blow up the kafirs. If anything, it is this dual mind-set shaped by the Quran that underscore the dilemma of the Musalmans and the dichotomy of Islam. However, when the fidayēn began to target ‘the other Musalmans’,