A ‘Religion’ is born

We have been blind to how Terror has turned into a religion in itself

I’m utterly ashamed, thoroughly disgusted, very embarrassed. I’m utterly revolted and thoroughly angry. Until now I was thoroughly at a loss for words too – utterly. The silver lining: people united in their revulsion of the heinous act of bombing a church in Peshawar that killed over 80 Christians, injured over 130 and destroyed many more lives. Our people are good, so there is hope yet. But why are our leaders so bad? This is not a conundrum. It is our unworkable, decrepit, alien political system that causes bad leadership to be thrown up.

After the church bombing and the utterly lily-livered response of our politicians cloaking their self-serving hypocrisy in the usual stereotyped statements, it’s time to call a spade a shovel. Much has been said already, but there’s more. As calm returned and thoughts unscrambled, I realised something so obvious that I’m surprised it didn’t come before. Words returned.

Right under our noses and before our eyes a new ‘religion’ has been born. Its deity is Satan. Satan is the anti-thesis of God. So this new ‘religion’ is anti-God. It stalks our land and lands afar. The name of this new religion is ‘Terror’ – ‘Dehshat’ in Urdu. Its devotees are called ‘Terrorists’. Terrorists are Satan’s demons. It cannot belong to the Supreme Creator because all His names in whatever language mean love, balance, tolerance, equity, egalitarianism and brotherhood. His followers’ obligation is to be good to all His Creations of which humanity is the greatest. Satan’s followers would prevent this by doing the opposite: being bad to human beings. By mindlessly killing innocent people in His name they cannot be God’s people or followers of any of God’s Messengers and ‘Nabiyah’ (those who shake up society and upturn the status quo for the better), 124,000 of them in all.

We know the recent history of Terror: it started in Europe with gangs like Bader Mienhoff and in Japan with the Red Army. They indulged in mindless terrorism using Marx’s communist philosophy as a cloak after convoluting and mutating it. Fast-forward and the freedom fighting Mujahidin morph into Afghan Taliban while abandoned Al-Qaeda become homeless ‘dogs of war’ as mercenaries are called. They become purposeless and go looking for another war. The purpose of existence Al-Qaeda then found was to impose its own version of Sharia on the world that is at great variance to God’s Islam in the Quran, its principles and His objectives. They and the Taliban forget what God says, that there is no compulsion in religion, to you your religion and to me mine. A person who understands this is a real believer. Those who would impose their own version of God’s intent are not.

The Taliban occupied Afghanistan and imposed their severe primitive ideology on it, calling it God’s. Untold cruelty followed. The Taliban are mired in an imaginary past while their western ‘enemies’ move forward in a dynamic philosophy. Their stupidity caused their land to be occupied again, this time by the US. Another war of liberation followed. It goes on.

Meantime, in a copycat action the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan was born out of the lapsed Pakistani Mujahidin of the Soviet-Afghan war and out of the many seminaries Pakistan, America and Saudi Arabia created as a Mujahidin nursery to propagate an interpretation of Islam that only a small minority here follows. They network with other Pakistani militant groups (to call them ‘Jihadi’ is pejorative) and are called the Pakistani Taliban. Unlike the Afghan Taliban who have a purpose right now – to liberate their homeland – the Pakistani Taliban’s purpose is mindless, the same as Al-Qaeda’s but limited in space: while Al-Qaeda wants to impose its ideology on the world the Pakistani Taliban want to impose their ideology on Pakistan – for now.

When the adherents of ‘Terror’ kill innocent people in Islam’s name they plant false flags against Allah and the Muslims. What could suit Satan more? Those who acquiesce to or sympathise with them and confuse them as “our people” and call them “stakeholders” misunderstand the universal Word of God that is for all humanity in the multiverse. People who kill to impose their anti-religion on others cannot be “our people” or “stakeholders” because by their actions they have lost their stake in Pakistan and are expunged from the State. They can neither be Muslim nor belong to any of God’s Faiths. They don’t even belong to humanity. They twist God’s Word like black magicians read His scriptures backwards. They are beyond the pale.

A virus inside the body does not become part of the body. It is the body’s enemy within, a Trojan horse. You cannot say it is “part of me” and a “stakeholder” I must therefore negotiate with it. It has to be destroyed. So too Terrorists because they are a virus in the body politic. There can be no dialogue with them, no quarter given, nor can they be allowed to open offices anywhere in the realm.

‘Terrorists’ are not to be confused with freedom fighters that wage a just struggle to free their homeland from foreign occupation. Poorly armed, they use tactics that can fall in the category of terror, but only against armed combatants as far as possible. The American freedom fighters were called terrorists by the British, as was Nelson Mandela by South Africa’s apartheid regime. ‘Terror’ to impose one’s convoluted ideology on people pretends to be jihad but is not. Armed jihad is a just struggle to win freedom for one’s homeland from foreign occupation. Terrorism spreads discord and disharmony – fitna and fasad – and creates chasms through which Satan enters. ‘Jihad’ means struggle, any kind of struggle.

The Afghan Taliban are freedom fighters right now but when they ruled Afghanistan they became terrorists. If they return to power they will be worse. Terrorists’ ‘jihad’ is a Satanic jihad because they kill innocent people wantonly to impose their misinterpretation of Faith on them and that too in the name of God, knowing or not that they are actually doing Satan’s work.

Recent terrorism in Pakistan is the fruit of the All Parties Conference, a conclave of defeated opportunists trying to pull themselves out of a hole. Instead, they are digging the hole we have all fallen into deeper and getting us stuck even more. The APC sent a message of appeasement and surrender to the TTP that raised their morale: why would they talk to the vanquished? The APC resolution was born in stupidity and conceived in spinelessness. If they are not careful they could pay for it very soon as we are paying for it now – thousands of officers and soldiers killed, countless more innocents murdered, minorities slaughtered. The anti-God ‘religion’ moves on while we recede.

After the Nairobi terrorist attack on a shopping mall, our government should be wary of similar copycat attacks on malls in Pakistan. Mr Nawaz Sharif should look over his shoulder at Mohammed Morsi of Egypt. If Sharif takes America’s avowal of ‘democracy’ in the Third World seriously, he has had it.

After the Cold War the US wondered why it was so disliked when it had given more money to the world than any in history? Books like ‘The Ugly American’ told why. Wondering where it had gone wrong, it decided that it was because it had backed Third World dictatorships during the Cold War. Decision: now that the Cold War was over, back the people. Right. But how? Answer: parachute western-style electoral democracy on them. Wrong. What the wretched of the earth want first and foremost is liberation from poverty, degradation and hunger. They want to be upwardly mobile. They cannot eat ‘democracy’.

Was the US was being disingenuous? Alien electoral systems would more often than not throw up pliable leaders that they could manipulate for their own purposes. So is support of democracy a sham, to fool people? I’m afraid it seems so. Proof: when elections throw up the ‘wrong’ leader who is not pliable and works against its objectives America comes down on him like a sledgehammer. Democracy and the ‘will of the people’ are forgotten. This is just what happened to Morsi, who was turning the Brotherhood’s “creeping fundamentalism” into “galloping fundamentalism”. A US-backed military coup ensued. Goodbye democracy, hello dictatorship.

The APC has created the impression that the Dons in that latest Conclave are Taliban sympathisers under whom creeping fundamentalism could start galloping and Sharif may not be able to provide the required stability the US needs to allow an orderly withdrawal of men, machinery and arms from Afghanistan. Then what? It could be worse than Egypt. It could be the US itself providing the stability. Never forget the military industrial complex, that engine of the US economy. Our nuclear arsenal will come to naught. And by the way, so fed up are our people that they might welcome it. We have a history of bending to every invader and kowtowing to him to be recognised with awards, lands and fiefs. Many of our liberation parties and their leaders were catalysed by the British to allow them an orderly withdrawal. They got it. We slaughtered and displaced one another. We still love the coloniser. We still ape him.

The writer is a political analyst. He can be contacted at: [email protected]