[Assam] Is the ?Clash of Civilizations? a Myth? -only Islam is bad?

[umesh sharma]

Why single out Islam for condemnation?
   
  closer home (to Assam)  - in Nagaland, Tripura  and Meghalaya also there are miltants killing innocents. They are Christians - and they are as rabid against other faiths -see their ban on Durga Puja in Tripura, destruction of temple in Kohima-as Islamic terrorists are in Middle East etc.  Similarly we see Nigerian riots - where both muslims and Christians destroyed each others mosques and churches and killed and burned about 100 people of the other faith. Same in Sebia , Kosovo etc. Where thousands of muslims were butchered by Christain mobs.
   
  How about Christian Nazis --killing millions of Jews? And earlier killing of native  Peruvians by invading (Christain)  Spanish hordes who converted them by force.
   
  Hinduis and Sikhs are not far behind either - terrorists from each killing the other over the past few decades in Punjab , Delhi and elsewhere. Gujarat incident is a shining example.
   
  It is true that the disease is more rampant among Muslims though - nowadays. Just like bird flu is more in South East Asia these days.
   
  Umesh
  

Dilip/Dil Deka <dilipdeka at yahoo.com> wrote:
    I'd like to share the following article published in the Sentinel editorial section. I don't know if the author is on the editorial board. The author is well focused.
  Dilip
  =========================================================
  Is the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ a Myth?
Bikash Sarmah
W ith the march of civilization and the concomitant 
socio-political, economic and religious fallouts, 
the world seems to be debating as to whether it 
is religion that acts as the most potent political force. There may be atheists and agnostics rubbishing the claims of religion, as a force in the political sense, and other non-religious factors contributing to those very claims. But, practically speaking, religion does matter in the politics of the new world order. This should not have been the case. Given new scientific insights and technological strides, and where scientists are questioning the role of God as a creator, religion should not have been a factor to reckon with. Unfortunately, it is very much so. And that seems to have sustained the “clash of civilizations” as theorized by Huntington.
Any debate on the East-West conflict is essentially a debate on the struggle between the Islamic and the Christian world. Let us accept it, though it sounds bitter. Why the struggle? There are at least two clear answers. One, it is the quest for dominance over the other that fuels the struggle. The bitter truth is that the votaries of the “clash” are driven by absolutist tendencies often verging on sheer fanaticism. The Christian world finds itself more liberal and liberating, drawing its strength from the tradition of democracy. The Islamic world, on the other hand, finds itself more cohesive, drawing its strength from the tradition of Islam, and giving the impression of its tentative tryst with democracy. The Christian world finds a labyrinth of antiquated ideas and beliefs in the Islamic world, seeing in the latter an element of aggressiveness. As for the Islamic world, the Christian West seems to be corrupting Islamic values and influencing Islam to serve western interests.
 However, the fact remains that both the worlds are embroiled in the vortex of fears; for both, it is the fear of the other that sets in motion the vicious cycle of the “clash”.
Two, conservatives in both the worlds have betrayed the very cause of religion. What is cause then? Obviously spirituality. And spirituality does not require one to be religiously devout. Its dimension is different: higher and transcendental. Its concerns are different: humanism and hence some sort of a refined or redefined internationalism. Clearly, it is this failure on the part of the champions of both Islamic and Christian world to project the philosophy of religion, that has been the most effective contributory factor to the “clash”. I call it effective because when the two worlds fight each other, it is the essence of religious philosophy — spirituality — that suffers the worst blow, and any suffering of that sort — of the very essence— fosters the fight. Durable disorder? Or is it any inevitable, perpetual neo-order?
Of all the interpreters of the “clash of civilizations”, I have found Dr Wafa Sultan not only radical but also highly pragmatic. Until yesterday, she was an unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living in Los Angeles. Today, she is an international sensation, earning the wrath of the Islamic world engaged in the “clash”. It was a radical, provocative interview she gave on the hugely popular Arab channel Al-Jazeera on February 21 that led to her becoming a sensational Muslim voice. According to New York Times, the interview was viewed on the Internet more than a million times and “has reached the e-mail in-boxes of hundreds of thousands of people”. Wafa Sultan, 47, believes that “our people”— meaning Islamists — “are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings”. It was “knowledge” that “released” her “from this backward thinking”, and “somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs”.
Sultan’s interview on Al-Jazeera had conservative Islamic clerics condemning her as a heretic and an infidel who deserved to die. Muslim liberals and reformers, on the other hand, hailed her for her courage to bluntly say the truth. She said: “Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any result. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them... The Jews have come from the tragedy (the Holocaust) and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling... We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people.” Now one must understand that she is not speaking on behalf of the Jews or, for that matter, supporting the Jewish agenda on
 Palestine. She does not tend to overlook the aberrations of the Jewish discourse. The fact of the matter is that she is simply — and honestly — projecting her views on the jihadi attributes of the Islamic world that does seem to believe in democratic protests; the Prophet Mohammad cartoon controversy and the subsequent violence being one indicator of growing intolerance.
Clerics in Syria have already denounced Sultan as an infidel. Some Islamists believe that she did Islam “more damage than the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammad’’, to quote New York Times. This sort of a reaction is natural given that Sultan is a woman voicing her ire against aggressive Islamic tendencies, and a woman roaring so quite logically, despite being a Muslim, goes counter to the ways of the Islamists. But one needs to understand the genesis of the rebellious Sultan. While pursuing her medical studies at the University of Aleppo in northern Syria, she saw gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood — a radical Ezyptian Islamic group — storming into her classroom and killing her professor. That was in 1979. Since then, her life has changed; her perspectives redefined; and she has searched for a meaningful dialogue into the role of Islam in the “clash of civilizations”.
Sultan asserts: “The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century.” Very powerful words, very provocative. Sultan definitely runs the risk of being misinterpreted as she discerns the “clash” as one between two mentalities. However, since we must live up to the cause of a progressive world order where debates ought to hinge on rationale, it is important and necessary that we interpret Sultan the rebel correctly and read her mind. By the “21st century” mentality, she does not mean the Christian world as such, nor by the “Middle Ages” mentality does she mean Islam as a religion. Sultan’s assertion is against primitive minds who refuse to change and who are conditioned by the past. Her struggle is against the barbarism of the day — in the name of religion. She is
 all for modernity, the one that shapes human minds with the power of reason.
The political concept of religion is a poisonous one, be it political Islam or Christian West or Hindutva. Religion is a private affair, and must be so, so that we do not regress to psychologically primitive times. As a matter of fact, no one has seen God! What is worrisome is that progressive minds do not tend to be outspoken critics of the rubbish that goes in the name of religion. What is lacking is courage — to see the truth, to say the truth and cling on to it, come what may. The “clash of civilizations” is a misnomer then, in the sense that civilizations, if they are really so, do not fight each other. Only barbaric forces are aggressive and absolutist. Liberals from both the Islamic world and the Christian West must assert so. And Hinduism, as a Vedantic way of life, can be of immense help, but not Hindutva as an aggressive political concept. This is so because Vedanta propounds the theory of internationalism, though as an ideal. Even its practice is possible, but only when
 one understands, like Wafa Sultan, the “clash” as between primitive minds who are determined not to progress. A clash against the ‘‘clash’’ is what we perhaps need. 
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Umesh Sharma
5121 Lackawanna ST
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 1-202-215-4328 [Cell Phone]

Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005
		
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