Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (An appraisal of Islam 'n India)

The Wages of God

The WE-THEY obsession of the Islamic ethos debilitates the Musalmans with troubled minds. While the ayats of Quran spell out who THEY are - the Jews, the Christians and the idolaters (read Hindus, in later centuries) – the Islamic theology defines who THEY are, the Sunnis, the Shias and the Sufis et al. And the political divide too is clear as to who THEY are - the Iranians and the Iraqis, the Pakistanis and the Bangladeshis, Saudis and Yemenis all Musalmans though.

Well, for those perceived as WE, Islam is all green but it turns blood-red when it comes to those who are seen as THEY. This is the moral code of Islam, which in Arabic means peace, and also surrender. While Muhammad taught his medieval flocks to surrender to Allah to serve his cause, insensibly the umma got stuck in the obsolete Islamic era of servitude, not only to 'the God' but also to His messenger. Well Allah's covenant for the 'hereafter' might be eternal for the Musalmans but sadly for them, or so it seems, the way of life 'here' is forever altering for them to comprehend it. What with Muhammad having convinced them, once and for all, that the succor of 'the hereafter' is the solace of the Musalmans, they tend to disregard life 'here', which makes them oblivious to the realities of the ever-changing world.

This as was seen is owing to the Decommissioned Adult, the Parent-contaminated Adult and the Child-contaminated Adult, prevalent, by and large, amongst the Musalmans, in some degree or the other. While the Muhammadan Decommissioned Adult is incapable of analyzing the current realities, his Parent-contaminated Adult harps on the past glories of the Musalmans, and the Child- contaminated Adult lives in delusions of a rosy future for Islam. Moreso, when it comes to the Jews, their estranged religious cousins, it is as if the Musalmans have got stuck in the time zone when their life and limb, not to speak of their faith, depended on the whims and fancies of Muhammad.

However, before Muhammad came up with the Quran, the progeny of Isaac, having been driven out from their Promised Land, lived in peace and prosperity amidst the posterity of Ishmael by the oases of Arabia. But as the Straight Path of Islam came to be laid by Muhammad, the Jews got a bumpy ride on it even though the Quran endorsed their Moses as a Prophet of yore. The enduring hatred of the Jews that Muhammad had inculcated in the followers of his cult would forever stymie the psyche of the Arabs towards their cousins in Israel, and understandably the umma at large, so it seems.

It was thus, the boasts of Gamal Abdel Nasser that he would push the Israelis into the Red Sea sounded like music to the ears the Musalmans the world over for Allah's faithful then, and Nasser seemed like the Pharaoh of Islam, about to enslave the hateful Jews all again. But the unmitigated Arab disaster that was the Six-Day War left the shell-shocked umma clueless about the Islamic calamity, and though the Yom Kippur war that followed, which had initially raised the tempo of the Musalmans, yet left them sullen in the end, well, owing to the brilliance of the Jewish military prowess.

But the Muhammadan Decommissioned Adult of the hadith vintage wouldn't realize that the world had changed beyond recognition since the time of Muhammad and his Caliphs, who conquered much of their neighboring lands and forced their peoples into the Islamic fold. If only the Musalmans could deviate a little from their believing course of the 'Angles of War' that Muhammad had charted for them, they would realize that those were the days of mortal combat, when the Islamic creed of huris for the shahid and a fair share of the 'spoils of war' for the survivors that gave the cutting edge to the Muslim swords.

Well in those battles of yore, the jihadis vied with each other to die for the joys of the 'Hereafter' that Muhammad had promised them, which earned laurels for the Muslim coat of arms, but sadly for the coats of Muslim mail, the modern warfare is as much about machines as men behind them that THEY have come to master on both counts. So, in battle after battle, and war after war, in the modern era, whenever the Musalmans itched for a fight, the patriotic sense of THEY, alien to the Muslim ethos, had been proving to be much more potent than the religious zeal of the faithful to die for Islam.