When a religious movement begins in violence, it continues in violence as well and eventually ends in violence. Unfortunately for non-observers of such a religion, this violence by 'divine decree' also extends to them and hundreds of millions lose their lives while the dance of death continues through the ages in the name of holy war and conversion of the infidel. Add to it geopolitics and you have the complete picture of violence and counter-violence which remains the despair of civilisations. Man ought no more to subscribe to these archaic manifestations of religiosity and must move on with a scientific temper to progress towards a higher living. Assimilation of the best of all cultures and eschewing of all that is worst in them, surely, is the way ahead and will usher in a new age of peace and enlightenment on earth. It is for progressive and liberal-minded sincere people, and not merely apologists for retrograde and regressive thinking, to take the step towards future advancement of human culture, and they must be devoid of selfish nationalistic or ideological motivations and must be inspired only by the thought of the general good of humanity.
Man is not merely the carrier of tradition, however regressive be such baggage and its vile hold on him, but is also the path-breaker, the innovator, the liberator from the captivity of tradition. Age-old senseless tribal bindings on a vast multitude that has retarded reason and circumscribed civilisation must now be sundered and a new-age ethical system evolved based on all that is sublime in human history and all that appeals to the aesthetics and sense of natural justice of the modern man. Gone are the days of segmented politics when disconnectedness owing to lack of geographical integration of the world caused localisation of culture and its concomitant exclusiveness in the realm of ideas. Such barriers in the path of the free flow of knowledge led to exclusive cultural developments in one part of the world and total ignorance about like developments in other parts. This led to supremacist tendencies and the impulse to imposition of one's own cultural variant on all other races having a different idea of truth and culture. Fanaticism, thus, was engendered in geographical isolation of races as much as by insufficient evolution of the universal idea. This was the seed of forcible conversion to one's own fold, a primitive tribal idea where the wider vision had not yet opened up and ancient barbarism coupled with fanatical attachment to a narrow ideal to set the stage for political perfidy in the name of a God as vicious as His villainous worshippers.
But their day is gone. The Enlightenment has snatched Europe away from theocratic absolutism and ushered in the epoch of reason and liberalism. Where the Middle East and its siblings across the globe still hold on to theocracies, man suffers from medieval monstrosities. A resurgence is likely, for disgruntled humanity cannot be suppressed for long, especially, in modern times when access to information about the free world will inevitably weaken the hold of tyrannical regimes on subjugated masses. Moreover, in a globalised world to stay cocooned in one's own corner, harbouring horrendous historical heresies as humanity's imperatives, for they carry the burden of archaic articulations of faith, is to invoke self-inflicted 'martyrdom' in one's noxious cause of outright obliteration of others' rights. Such an agenda will never succeed given the level of literacy and intellectual enlightenment the major part of the world has already attained. It is a lost cause for a religion that seeks political domination by perfidious means and the sooner reformation alters its moribund ways, the better its chances of a reformed survival. Else, death which it decrees on infidels will be its own lot for stagnation inevitably leads to annihilation.
All cultures have their redeeming elements whereby they gain a footing into the changing contours of a dynamic world and so must Muslims worldwide seek to do with their own inheritance. There is much that is abhorrent in the legacy of loot and conquest that they have to account for to bring about a semblance of sanity into their present predicament but there is equally a lot to cheer about in their heritage of science and technology which had built the edifice of their famed civilisation stretching from the Sahara to Spain. It is misplaced emphasis on dogma and denunciation that has ruined Islamic culture and only a reaffirmation of the vital points that had led to its erstwhile rise as a civilisation that can resurrect it once more. So long as man remains the centrepiece of the human drama, nothing can permanently prevent the progress of civilisation. It moves on with its own momentum forged out of the circumstances that engineer it.
Impetus and impediment both work out their respective roles in advancing or retarding human evolution. Accordingly, civilisation proceeds along an undulated terrain, going up and down in phases. Materialism and spiritualism in inverse relation work on the collective mind of man. Thus, the rise of materialism lowers the spiritual consciousness of man and the rise of spiritualism reduces his materialistic tendencies. An optimal proportion of the twain is conducive for human welfare and the various forces at work in the world resolve out karma to leave the residuum of their action as imprints on human civilisation fashioning and refashioning it. Movements arise out of historical necessities and the demands of evolution and movements wane likewise. There is an energy to it all that determines the course of things and when the last ounce of input work has been spent, death seizes the movement despite desperate attempts to resuscitate it. Such is the state of fanatical ideologies in this age of science and reason. Despite frenetic fanning up of fratricidal violence --- for all of humanity in enlightened vision is but a single family (vasudhaiva kutumbakam) ---, fanatical faiths are in their death throes which they mistake to be martyrdom but which in essence is their obliteration from the face of this beautiful earth they have marred for far too long a period, sinking in civilisation and the possibilities of man to rise beyond what prophecy decrees.
We stand on the crossroads of a new beginning with infinite possibilities opening up before the enlightened vision. No God, no prophet this time will come in the way of the awakened future man, no faith thrust upon the human soul shall retard its progress to freedom. We stand on the edge of a boundless sea of inquiry and investigation, both external and internal, and we remain free to accept or reject our findings in the light of reason and realisation but never again on the basis of arbitrary assumptions or autocratic assertions which stunt the soul of man. If faith there must be, let faith be in the spirit of man to challenge the delusion that is Nature. Let man arise at last from his bondage to God, prophet, messiah and brother man, and let him take his fate finally into his own hands and, so, fashion his destiny as he will, no more governed by a malevolent God, no more subject to divine decree of dubious origin, but a free man with the freedom to choose and to reject what his conscience decrees, what his consciousness ordains.
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