The world has read about yet another massacre of the innocents by a
foot soldier of the self-styled Islamic State — this time again in the
United States in an Orlando club. In Bangladesh, jihadists have
murdered yet another Hindu priest and also several leading Muslim
liberals. Reports are that the IS is preparing many such killings across
several countries.
Every such event is followed by condemnation
of the event-makers, assertions that it has nothing to do with religion,
that Islam is a religion of peace, it does not mandate killing of
innocents and so on — as if they are reading from a textbook of
response. These textbook-like reactions make no dent or deter more such
killings.
What inspires the unending flow of recruits to the
massacring factories of the IS from Muslim families in non-Muslim
countries including Europe, USA, India? Why is it that many of these
recruits, well-educated, belonging often to affluent families, are so
willing to lose life while themselves engaged in killing others, often
as soon as they get converted into Islam or touched by the calls of the
IS over the social media?
Several Muslim majority nations of West
Asia, including the most influential, most wealthy of them all, Saudi
Arabia, have combined with America and Europe to eradicate the IS. With
America using its air power to take out the IS leaders one by one and
the West Asian Islamic nations lending ground troops and intelligence
inputs in the battle against the IS, a certain confidence is being
created that the so-called Islamic State would be pulled out and
eliminated sooner rather than later.
The much-publicised success
of the US in tracking down and exterminating leaders of the Islamic
State movement — the latest is the unconfirmed report that the Caliph of
the IS, Mr Baghdadi himself has been killed in a US air strike, — seems
to be dwarfed by the widening of the appeal of the organisation itself
to the common Muslims.
There is a basic contradiction in the
official US stand against jihadi terrorism and the political alignment
Washington has with countries like Saudi Arabia against the Islamists.
Riyadh is the largest financier of madrasas — the Muslim religious
educational institutions. Innumerable treatises have exposed the type of
religious education that these institutions provide.
These are
funded by Saudi money among the poor Muslim communities across the
world. What is taught in these institutions, staffed largely by a
priesthood that takes it as a command from God through their holy book,
is that their religion is what God wants and that God has instructed
their founder on how the society should be shaped and run to reflect His
will. So, they believe that any change in the rules and practices that
constitute a society is defiance of God and cannot be allowed. Attempts
to make these changes will have to be fought and such a war is a holy
war, the ‘jihad.’ To fight such a war is a Muslim’s duty.
When
this is inculcated from the age of five in these madrasas as the
unchanging, unchangeable truth, the common Muslim begins to see any
deviation from the set of prescribed practices and rules as an evil to
be fought against and those who do take up this task constitute God’s
army.
What is happening in Pakistan is an object lesson. The
constitution drafted by the military dictator Zia-ul-Haq had conceded to
the clerics the right to veto government steps and had reintroduced
capital penalty for deviation from a strict adherence to Islamic laws
and whatever was defined as objectionable to God.
The conceding
of civil power to the clerics enabled them to build a huge power base.
The military and the state power nurtured the clerics to be used against
perceived enemies among whom India stood at the top. The lesson for
the world is that Pakistan as a state will not cooperate with its
neighbours to eliminate terror though it might pretend it wants to
eliminate terror from its soil. The message from the Orlando massacre
is loud and clear: terror as a creed has the support of ‘faithfuls’
cutting across nationalities and geographical boundaries through a
mindset largely shaped by the system of exclusivity interpretation of
everything from religion to all other aspects of human existence .
Madrasas
play a pivotal role in creating this exclusive mindset which in turn
transforms several ordinary persons into suicide bombers. Even without
formal ties, structure, communication and organisational networking ,
the ‘faithfuls’ are wired together and programmed by their shared
theological mindset, to carry their ‘holy war ‘ i.e. jihad, against
Kafirs to its logical end.
The international campaign led by
America to eliminate terror will not succeed unless the mindset of the
people in the Islamic world is sought to be changed. All other
approaches would only give a limited and partial result. Meanwhile,
several analysts of the terror scene fear that the well-funded and
well-armed terror outfits in Pakistan like JeM, LeT etc are planning to
link up with the IS and truly create a worldwide “army of God.”
Pakistan, it must be remembered, had always wanted to be at the head of
an Islamic conquest of the world.
By Balbir Punj, a former BJP MP and a Delhi-based commentator on social and political issues
Courtesy: The New Indian Express
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