- Monday, 19 January 2015 00:00
- Written by Patrick Dele Cole
I HAVE read the Koran over seven
times, page by page. As I have been at pains to point out, education is
universal and every culture, religion, group contribute to its gigantic trough.
Islam, the Arabs, Shintos, Confucius have done their bit by contributing their
wisdom into this pot. I do not claim to be an Islamic scholar and my
piece was not about the doctrines of Islam. It was about world politics,
which I know many Islamists are unable to differentiate from Islamic
ideology. This is not about a doctrinaire commitment to one religion or
the other or to the West as I have been condemned to be. The Pope has his
problems and good luck to him.
There are 28 wars in
the world today. 26 are or concern Islam, or Islamists – either the Islamists
are persecuted or there must be another explanation for there to be so many
wars in Islamic areas. In any case the question of persecution cannot
arise as most of these wars are in Islamic countries where one group of Moslems
are trying to wipe out another group.
Some accuse me of not
understanding Islam, having a little knowledge of the religion, of not reading
the commentaries as well as the doctrines as contained in the Koran. I am
the first to accept that I learn every day even from the misguided personal
attacks or apologists for a failure of an otherwise powerful tonic of human and
heavenly endeavour – Islam. I have never praised the West or
Christianity. The failure of Christianity and the West in several
theatres of human endeavour is self-evident. If the conquistadors were blood
thirsty and bestial, that is not an attribute of Christianity, it was a human
failure and tragedy, and strongly condemnable.
If a group of hoodlums, without any
human conscience could seize 276 girls at a school in Chibok in the name of
Islam, all those who profess that religion have one of two options – dissociate
Islam from that action or by their silence acquiesce that the religion actually
supports violence against such soft targets. It is the silence of a majority of
Moslems that leads to the conclusion or to the suspicion that they, deep down,
believe these unwarranted bestial attacks of innocents are justifiable.
The commandment of God, Allah, is “thou shall not kill”. In his
commandment there are no if or buts. If a Moslem in the name of the
religion beheads Sergeant Rigby, even if obviously both perverts are descended
from Nigerian parentage, there is nothing but condemnation for their act.
The reality of what
faces us is clear – the majority of those killed by Moslems are their fellow
Moslems in Syria, Iraq, in Pakistan. If the Taliban in the name of some
perversion of Islam can go to a school and kill 145 Moslem Pakistani school
children, the answer to their evil is an earth shattering “No. you are
evil”. If one Moslem in the name of this same perversion of Islam can in
Sydney, Australia, hold 17 people hostage and display a sign of Islam in his
demented action, I do not need my good Islamic friends’ consent to point out
unadulterated evil where it is so glaring. If Hitler killed six million Jews in
an attempt to wipe out the Jewish race, he committed genocide and war
crimes. No, none would call what he did Christian: he may have been a
Catholic but his religion did not encourage his atrocity. The allies who
fought Hitler were also Christian but they did not go to war in the name of
Christianity. It seems incredibly puerile to even discuss Hitler’s evil
in the name of any religion. So the Atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were
Christian bombs!! Incredible!!!
The Holy Book of Quran
has plenty to attract people of all faiths. What has gone wrong is that people,
radicalized, by commentaries on the Koran, in the name of Islam, are killing
themselves and children. Islamic states are refusing to allow Moslem
women marry non-Muslims; sometimes the parents of such women have killed the
women rather than allow such marriage. If my detractor’s argument is that you
cannot judge Islam by the action of the “extremists”– I have no argument
against that. But when extremists are allowed to rule whole countries, imposing
inhuman treatment on all dissenters, then true Moslems must not only condemn
such actions, they themselves must take action against their own
extremists.
There have been many killings
in the U.S. by obviously mad people in schools, in cinemas, etc. No one
of good conscience has ever had anything to say but to condemn the action of
these mad men. If those who killed Sergeant Rigby by butchering him to
death in the streets of London are condemned as despicable unhinged Moslems, I
have no problem with that. But to accuse me of lack of sympathy or
understanding of Islam because I bemoan actions perpetrated in the name of
Islam by radicalized Islamists is to be blinded by the proverbial beam in one’s
eyes. (Remove the beam from your eyes before you can see clearly to
remove the mucus in your neighbour’s eye).
Radical Islamists in
their misguided mission seized seven planes; deliberately crashed them in the
Pentagon, World Trade Centre, etc. The killing of thousands of people remains
an act of unmatched human cruelty exceeded only by Hitler and Rwandan
genocide. In Iraq, the ISIS were asking people to quote verses in the
Koran and failure to do so meant death.
Someone has whispered
to me that the bombings in the U.S. and in Europe – rail stations, underground
transports – were strategic or tactical manoeuvres – in a war not dissimilar to
the ones used against the British by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in its war
of independence, or indeed by sympathizers of the Allies in the underground
movements attempting to tumble the German forces in France and elsewhere during
the Second World War. But what demented radicalized Moslems have done far
outstrips consideration of strategy or tactics. What strategy do you have to
kill children and women? Is it to strengthen the resolve of the rest of Islam?
The children in Pakistan were killed by seven suicide bombers who went into the
school to unleash mayhem.
When people talk about
tactics and strategy – they in fact mean that whatever they have done could be
justified by claiming that they engage the attention of the enemy. Islam now
fully has the attention of the world. What does Islam want???
In the context of
Nigeria the Boko Haram has declared its objectives to be nothing less than the
annihilation of the nation, Nigeria, to be replaced by an Islamic Caliphate
State. It is still hazy about what it means as a state because we have
many Islamic states in the world – Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia,
etc. What will happen to non-Moslems in such a Nigerian Boko Haram
state? Will they follow the Chibok experience – convert our women and
marry them to Moslems? In India it was religion that divided India and
Pakistan – where we had the unworkable agreement of East Pakistan and West
Pakistan – leading to the eventual creation of Bangladesh. In an Islamic
Nigerian nation under Boko Haram, what would happen to large chunks of the
Middle Belt, and most of the South? Is the recipe of Boko Haram the
creation of parts of the North into an Islamic State? Would they yield in
negotiations to breaking up Nigeria or do they still need the oil of the Niger
Delta? If the proposition is a Northern Islamic State, there may be
several takers, although I will oppose it. It is like a child who sees
chocolate and gauges itself on it until it is sick. The South needs the North
as much as the North needs the South. But as at today Mr. President’s
writ does not run in 33% of Nigeria. That is a serious problem, which the
elections will not solve. But rather exacerbate.
But Moslems must
seriously ask themselves what they want? There is, whether they like it
or not, a world order, to which nations fit. That order cannot allow the
discriminate killing of people who happen not to agree with your way of
thinking. I am told that the critics who have inundated the press on my views
are doctrinaire and therefore illogical, beyond reasoning. I have no intention
to call anybody names. We started from the simple premise of looking at
realities. There are wars all over the world; nearly all of them are
Islamic. If the boundaries put in place by Europeans in 1919 are the
problems then we are dealing with nationalistic issues. If that is the
case, how many nations, given the ethnic diversity of Iraq, Syria, Iran, and
Libya are you going to create? They may all be Moslems but their record in
killing one another does not show brotherly goodwill. So are we dealing
with the problem of ethnic diversity masquerading as religion? Libya has
been broken up to ethnic warlords, an outcome the Western world have been well
advised to leave alone in its stupidity in attacking and killing
Ghadaffi. Iraq had both ethnic and religions divisions which the wars
have made more truculent. Saudi Arabia, Syria etc, is a polyglot of
ethnic diversity; so is Pakistan. Indeed the only glue keeping these
countries together was Islam but even that has come unstock because of the
Sunni/Shia dissent.
• To be continued tomorrow
• Dr. Patrick Dele Cole (OFR), a
former Nigeria’s Ambassador, wrote from Lagos.
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