Better Study Islam

In the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7 the West has invented the myth of radical Islam, thereby implying that there must be a benign version of Islam too. Luminaries like George Bush and Tony Blair love to surprise Muslims by telling them ?Islam means Peace,? regardless of the fact that Quran [3:17, 3:85] itself explicitly states that ?Islam means Submission.? Their excellences hope that their subterfuges will help Muslims discover a variety of Islam that neither Quran nor history reveals. These innovative revelations, too clever by half, by the neo-prophets could actually offend Muslims because Quran [33:40] is emphatic that Muhammad is the last prophet!

Many na?vely believe that once Osama bin Laden is killed terrorism will end. Some wistfully complain that America?s meddling in the Middle East has created Osama. Make no mistake, Bush?s attack on Iraq is unscrupulous but Bush or no Bush, Islamic terrorism has plagued the world. Osama is neither the first Islamic terrorist nor shall he be the last. Islamic terrorism is traceable to Muhammad himself, when he attacked the Jewish settlement of Khaybar, looted its wealth, massacred most of its men and took as ?wife? [read booty] the beautiful 17-year old Safiyyah b. Huyayy, who had been wed for merely a month when Muhammad massacred her husband and father [1]. You cannot avoid studying and confronting Islam and its prophet if you are serious about stopping terrorism.

Apologists of Islamic terrorism come from all walks of life. Psychology professor Staats concludes that the underlying motive of terrorism comes from the social condition of a people [2]. Implicit here is the assumption that the poverty and deprivations in some Islamic societies, and not Islamic ideology per se, motivates terrorism elsewhere. One needn?t tell our professional psychologist that numerous peoples in this world live in abject poverty and deprivation, yet when was it last that we heard of a Bhutanese Buddhist who bombed WTC because his Tibetan counterparts have been brutally oppressed and exiled by the Chinese? Cardinal Ratzinger, before his ascension as Pope Benedict, played amateur psychologist at Subiaco, Italy, where he declared that Muslims feel threatened by the cynicism of secular culture [3]. Our amateur psychologist surely knows that the orthodox among the Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Jewish or his own Catholic faiths might be very suspicious of the secular lifestyle, yet do we ever hear of them bombing the London tube? Does one have to remind the Pope that while secularism is a relatively new concept, Islamic terrorism is 1300 years old?

The West is making the same mistake that Hindus made for a thousand years: Appealing to Muslims in the name of Islam. Muslim invaders pillaged Hindu temples, beheaded scores of Hindu men and raped their women. As material evidences and contemporary Islamic chronicles testify, thousands of Hindu temples were razed and mosques erected in their places [4]. Instead of inquiring into what motivates Muslims, some ignorant Hindus wrote hymns equating Islam and Hinduism. In a land that had earlier produced the lofty philosophies of the Upanishads, some unthinking Hindu even manufactured a spurious text called Allah Upanishad. While Hindus were busying themselves with such misguided endeavors, Muslims gagged Hindus by imposing jizya [poll tax or ?protection money,? which humiliated infidels must pay ? Quran 9:29] and plundered their land. Historian Lal shows that the impoverished subjects often castrated their sons and offered them as slaves to Muslim rulers in the place of tax revenue [5].

In the fourteenth century, a Hindu spiritual leader called Madhava Vidyaranya inspired the founding of the Hindu empire of Vijayanagara, which repulsed Muslims from South India and ushered in a golden rule for the next 250 years. Yet, its rulers failed to see beyond imminent danger to understand that Islamic threat is ideologically inspired. After repulsing one set of Muslims, Vijayanagara employed another set of Muslims in its army. Hindus would come to rue this decision during the fateful battle of Talikota, where Muslims in the Vijayanagara army deserted to join hands with the invading Muslims.