Religion, Today's Terrorism and Tomorrow's Leaders

Now a days, it is so hard to read and understand certain things. With the global events unfolding and the way they do – people belonging to some region, caste, community or religion start feeling - somewhat targeted, self-decimating; critical, submissive, violent, so on and so forth.

Different emotions surface in people’s minds - depending on the type of upbringing, contact, circles, education and opportunity within which this people get to express their views. This makes things so complex for the truth to come out.

Let us take the recent case of terrorism, Islam and Muslims in the context of early 21st century.

It is like an eternal truth with which certain religious and political commentators proclaim: “We Muslims are as responsible as Islam’s enemies…”

Now study this statement in context of the beliefs the person who says this carries. First, s/he strongly thinks and believes that – they are Muslims. The subtle truth is just taken for granted – that we are humans first before we are Muslims. If we are humans and we trace logic on the previous statement, it might read: “We humans are as responsible as Islam’s enemies….”

But that statement does not make much sense, because if all of us are human – and considered human – who will remain to identify oneself with Islam? For identifying with Islam one has to give oneself another identity over and above human. So if the new identity is called Muslim – then only the statement would make sense. Without giving oneself an identity of Muslim, there won’t be any existence of something called Islam.

Why and how humans have got entangled and puzzled into this religious game? From progression of Jewish religion to Christianity and to Islam; the steps were taken to complicate the matters more rather than solve. Each so called progressive step in religious growth, was something that is defined as EVOLVED and improved. That is why Islam is called the most contemporary and progressive religion with high significance in today’s world.

There could be two possibilities:

First, how nice it would be if all Jews were converted to Christianity and all Christians would have converted to Islam. There won’t be any residue to fight over. But we all know that it did not happen that way. There are residue (those who did not like the new faith) of Jews did not become Christian and there were Christians who did not become Muslims.

Second, the people were and are not smart enough to understand that what they call EVOLUTION of religious thought is nothing but a short-sightedness of creating complexities rather than simplification. Just for a second assume that people had that fore-sight and humanness to stop and say – let us go back one step and remove the very first complexity. Then they would have evolved as a better human race without differentiating among themselves.

But we all know that did not happen. The short-sightedness of human mind did not stop with Jews, Christians or Muslims. Within Muslims too, they divided Sunni and Shia. Now these two segments fight.

Similar is the case with Christianity too – the protestant and Catholics fight. In Hindus – the acceptance of many gods and goddesses is tolerated – but the caste wars takes place.

Every generation have their defined terrorist – Nelson Mandela was a terrorist under Margaret Thacher’s Britain; Mahatma Gandhi and Bhagat Singh were also terrorist – with decades bygone – they are all considered great personalities and leaders who fought oppressive regimes and whose life are role modeled by younger generations.

With such ease we define terrorist today. Who knows with 2-3 decades gone, won’t they be called great leaders fighting oppressive regimes?

An innocent civilian house bombarded in a remote village by Northern, Western and UN Peace troops has potential of giving birth to the most deadly suicide bombers the world could see. These suicide bombers are fighting a moral, religious and ethical battle against oppressive regimes.

Most terrorist do fight moral battle for holding their nations, religious, family and self dignity. Most terrorist are persuaded through pamphlets and lectures to choose their path of becoming a terrorist. The western propaganda and media may project terrorist with more zeal and passion as mis-guided people; but I have not seen a single western media channel out and out presenting what oppression terrorist are fighting. May be western and northern media does not have that much interest and aptitude to understand the core issues – because they are so blinded by them being part of the oppressive group. One which they themselves are not aware of!

Will any common civilian American or British or European agree that they are integral part and parcel of an oppressive and exploitative system? Never, because they won’t be able to understand this view point!

Sadly, if the oppression is done through backing of international and national legal laws – it would always be justified. The environmental and resource exploitation resulting in national poverty that has happened since last couple of centuries by greedy people who dominate regions and races has leaded this world to give birth to what is call terrorists.

So I do not think that any community or region or religion should feel self-deprecating or belittling themselves about standing up to fight terrorist within their country or their religion. Instead one needs to stand up and understand the broader issue encompassing the problems of the world that lead to terrorism.

It is convenient for short-sighted visionaries to label people fighting oppression as terrorist, but it takes a whole decade, generation or a century to realize that those terrorist were actual leaders for the new world.

Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Bhagat Singh, Michael Collins and many others were called terrorists.

If history is written by humanistic and environmental perspectives – any terrorist would emerge as a leader in history books!