islamic-jihad-legacy-of-forced-conversion-imperialism-slavery

Islamic JihadMuslims, by converting to Islam, profess to live by the Quran and prophetic examples in all aspectsof life; they become Arabo-Islamic cultural slaves. It becomes incumbent upon them not only to ape theArabo-Islamic way of life, but also to destroy their pre-Islamic culture, tradition and achievements, repudiatedby the Arabo-Islamic civilization. For them, their motherland remains a Dar al-Harb—a land of war, until ithas been purified religiously, politically and culturally: ‘These non-Arab Muslims develop a special sense ofcontempt for their own cultures and motherlands under the pretence of believing in the Muslimnationhood.’ 374Pious Muslims in the subcontinent, therefore, entertain a strong desire to see their countriescompletely cleansed of the idolatrous Hindu religion, tradition and culture. Muslims created Pakistan at thecost of millions of lives for founding a pure land for them. A similar movement has continued in MuslimdominatedKashmir since 1947. Similarly, the devout Muslims in Iran want to see all vestiges of pre-Islamicreligious and cultural traditions expunged from their country as soon as possible. Following the Iranianrevolution, the Ayatollahs, who aimed to re-create the social, political and religious society founded by theProphet, banned teaching of ancient Iranian history in schools and universities and the teachers in thesedisciplines had to resign. The pious Egyptian Muslims, likewise, have an eager desire to see the remnants ofthe pre-Islamic Coptic Christians and their culture and tradition, blotted out forever from Egypt.In travelling to Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Iran in the late 1970s and early 1990s, Naipaulnoticed a pervasive desire amongst well-educated Muslims for obliterating the so-called un-Islamic ways andtraits of their societies and to destroy the remnant of their pre-Islamic cultural heritage. Observing anuncompromising Arab imperialistic affliction imparted by Islam amongst pious Indonesian Muslims, Naipaulwrote: ‘The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism is that it allows only to one people—the Arabs, the originalpeople of the Prophet—a past, and sacred places, pilgrimages, and earth reverences. These sacred Arabplaces have to be the sacred places of all the converted peoples. Converted peoples have to strip themselvesof their past; of the converted peoples nothing is required but the purest faith (if such as thing can be arrivedat), Islam, submission. It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism.’ 375Based on his observation of Islam’s pernicious impact on the conquered and converted non-Arabpeoples and their culture and civilization, notes Naipaul, ‘To the convert his land is of no religious orhistorical importance; its relics were of no account; only the sands of Arabia are sacred.’ 376 Observing thepervasive Arab cultural hegemony amongst Muslims in Sindh—obsession for the Arab faith, Arab language,Arab dress, Arab names etc.—twelve centuries after its conquest, wrote Naipaul: 377…there probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs. The Gauls, after fivehundreds years of Roman rule, could recover their old gods and reverences; those beliefs hadn’tdied; they lay just below the Roman surface. But Islam seeks as an article of faith to erase thepast; the believers in the end honour Arabia alone; they have nothing to return to.This urge for obliterating their pre-Islamic past is not just an idle desire amongst Muslims. In their respectivehomelands, they have been actively and violently working on destroying the vestiges of non-Islamic religious,cultural and traditional traits—the residues of their pre-Islamic jahiliyah heritage. For example, the TalibanIslamists demolished eighteen centuries-old Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan in 2001; Islamistsbombed a first-century rock carving of Buddha in the Swat valley in northwest Pakistan in September 2007;they bombed the wondrous ninth-century Borobudur Buddhist temple in Central Java (Indonesia) in January1985; Islamists in Egypt attacked world’s oldest monastery at Deir Abu Fana in June 2008. In April 2006, Ali374. Shaikh, Chapter 7375. Naipaul (1998), p. 64376. Ibid, p. 256377. Ibid, p. 331127