Towards clash of civilizations

Few years ago when a sooth- sayer predicted that the Third World War will be triggered by a turban clad man with a beard, few people took him seriously.

Then Osama Bin Laden was just begging to be felt in the international scene but it was difficult to imagine how the man and his dogma would be a catalyst for an event as destructive as a World War.

However, over the years he has been able to keep the insane flames of religious fanaticism ticking marshalling the power necessary to cause concern among Western countries which are mainly Catholic or Christian.

Most countries in Middle East have been having autocratic regimes but they also enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the West mainly due to the clout Western nations had in developing the Middle Eastern oil industry. Thus the West was able to control and influence the affairs in the entire Middle Eastern region through these nations that were dependent on them as their ‘friends’.

Civil movements

Iran was the first country to throw the Western leaning Shah Pahlavi and establish itself with its own values and outlook signifying a departure from this political establishment.

However, it was the advent of Osama Bin Laden and his fanatic suicide cult in the recent history that posed the real threat to Western domination in the Middle East.

The partisan support the West traditionally extended to Israel helped Osama in no uncertain measure to project the West as the enemy of Islam thus polarizing radical thinking among Muslim fundamentalists during the past decade.

Today the situation has certainly become unmanageable to the West with the fall of its friendly autocrat Mubarak in Egypt. The trend is now becoming more discernible with civil movements in Yemen and Algeria showing signs of asserting themselves against their own autocratic rulers. And if this trend continues even the most Western friendly regimes in countries like Saudi Arabia would find themselves at the mercy of Islamic fundamentalism which they call as ‘true Islamisation’.

Religious centered battles

Medieval history in Europe and the Middle East is replete with religious centered battles between the Muslims and Christians for religious supremacy in the region. No love has been lost between the followers of these two religions when thousands died in the Christian quests to capture Nazareth, the birthplace of Jesus.

Judging by the lurid details of these battles some historian of European medieval history have commented those to be the worst battles humanity has ever witnessed in terms of human misery and brutality. Thus the vendetta between Christianity and Islam has an extremely unpleasant history.

The common belief about religion is that it is made up of followers of a doctrine preached by a particular religious icon. But in practice what we generally take to be a religion is a civilization of an era and the values of a particular group of people.

Thus the Christian religion has been adapted into the Western values giving it an identity and Islam has been adapted by the Arab culture and values giving it an identity that is different.

This adaptation by a civilization is so strong that it could even be that the original doctrine of that most benevolent religious leader could often be either lost or altered in the process. Therefore the religions practised by people in the world today have been over shadowed by their culture and values.

Western values

Today Christian prosetylisation is taking place all over the world backed by Western riches and influence. Even the world dominating position English language earned after colonialism is being used to convert people in poor countries.

Although church attendance in the West has dropped to abysmal levels they donate lavishly to poor countries as a way of propagating Western values and culture so as to keep those countries within their fold.

On the other hand if you talk to most Muslims they will tell you that the whole world will soon be Isalamised in keeping with the wishes of Allah. They believe that ‘Jihad’ or the holy war is justified as long as it is to propagate the message of Allah.

They believe that even though Jesus was a prophet he was not able to deliver the message of God as he was crucified by the Jews. Thus the Christian religion, in its present form has adopted God’s message in the obverse.

Though rooted in the history these dogmas and beliefs have found a new mew meaning in the modern world with the emergence of Israel in 1945.

And what has been happening in Palestine since Israel came into being has been interpreted as a bad omen requiring fortification and Jihad by the Muslims. Now with the West losing its friendly autocrats one by one in the Middle East and with liberation movements forming Governments that are more Islamist, the signs are that polarization of religious sentiments is now taking place in the most volatile area of the world.

Thus this era we live in happens to be an era of competitiveness between the two religions in the world for global domination with their attendant antipathy towards each other.

The irony however is that this is not a situation that neither Jesus Christ nor Prophet Mohamed would have wished that their compassionate and benevolent preaching would usher. This is not religion but plain human politics and avarice, the very failings in humans that the religious leaders preached against.

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