Post
by Mesob » 31 Oct 2020, 19:29
The "religion of peace" strikes back in Europe. How does one who lives in Eritrea and some part of Ethiopia expect to live with the "religion of peace" in peace and stability to create a worthy nation. Add to these Arab and Islamic nations such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia around you all the time.
The best decision Issaias ever made was getting rid off the Arabist and Jihadist Jebha/ ELF that was killing the Agazian Christians who joined her foolishly. See how he dealt with the Islamo Fascists since 1994.
The Arabist slaves who burned Tigre Tigrinya books will not be allowed to return back, though Meles Zenawi was courting them in Awassa and Mekele under a slavish certain Beshir Ishaaq who was his classmate in Wingate school.
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French President Emmanuel Macron merely dared to say Islam is in crisis, and got himself into big trouble.
Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked him to get his head examined. Pakistan’s Imran Khan wrote a two-page sermon to fellow Muslim nations calling for a re-education of the West about Islam.
No such restraint for Malaysia’s 95-year-old Mahathir Mohamad. He got so furious as to nearly justify mass killings of the French for what they might have done to Muslims in the past, besides indeed condemning the decadent, ‘Christian only in name’ West where women often walk around with no more than a “little string (that) covers the most secret place”. Protests broke out in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.
But, did Macron speak the truth or not? The reaction of these prominent leaders from powerful and populous Muslim countries points to a crisis. If tens of crores of Muslims across the world feel that they are victims of mass Islamophobia, it is a sense of siege and crisis. Unlike a sacred scripture, however, there can be many versions of what this truth is. Here is this humble editorialist’s effort.
Let me break it down in five broad points:
1) All religions are political. At this point, though, Islam is the most politicised. You can surely hark back to the centuries of the Christian Crusades, but that was some time back. Doesn’t matter if that imagery is often invoked by leaders of al-Qaeda, ISIS and sometimes also the odd angry Islamic nation.
Islam is also the second largest faith in the world, with nearly 200 crore adherents, just behind Christians by about 20 per cent. Like Christians, Muslims also live across the world. But unlike Christians, in the countries where they have a majority, very few have democracy. That’s a checkable fact. Important to note, about 60 per cent of all Muslims are in Asia and four of their largest populations in the world live under different degrees of democracy, between India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Stretching this argument further, in countries where Muslims have a majority, secularism is generally a bad word, or a Western concept. But in democratic nations where Muslims are a minority, they persistently put the republic’s secular commitment to test. France, Britain, the US, Belgium, Germany are all good examples. There is a reason I do not include India here. Because, unlike Europe to which they migrated lately, in India Muslims were equal and voluntary partners in forming this new republic.
2) There is an unresolved tension among Muslim populations and nations between nationalism and pan-nationalism. This arises from the concept of Ummah — that all Muslims of the world are one supra-national entity. Check this out from Imran Khan’s two-page discourse to his fellow Ummah leaders. We have seen this expressed in the subcontinent sometimes. In the Khilafat Movement of 1919-24, protesting against Kemal Ataturk’s winding up of the Ottoman Caliphate and founding of the Turkish Republic, to Salman Rushdie to the now-fading support for Palestine. And now France.
There are some interesting consequences here. While the notion is pan-Islamism, many more wars are fought between Muslims and Muslim states than with others. The Iran-Iraq war was the longest, a large number of Islamic states joined the coalition against Saddam under the US, and, closer home, in the Af-Pak region, Muslims only kill Muslims and not all of them in Friday bombings at Shia mosques.