Clash of civilizations should be avoided

LAHORE: We are living in dangerous times. This is the age of intolerance, extremism and violence. ´Unsecularization of the world´ has become one of the dominant social factors of life. Extremist ideologies are on the rise. Societies are more polarized. Anti-Semitism remains a scourge. Islamophobia has emerged as a new term for an old and terrible form of prejudice. The revival of religion has provided a basis for identity and commitment to fundamentalist movements. These groups want to competitively promote their particular political and religious values. Minorities are being attacked in all the so-called secular nations.

The unjust (post-9/11) international order in which the Muslims feel they suffer at the hands of the West. Muslims hear hate speeches across countries and regions in which Islam as a religion is attacked. Hate speech against Islam also leads to injustices against Muslims. It has also become a common misperception that friendship between Muslims and non-Muslims is prohibited in Islam.

Interaction between Islam and the West is seen as a ´clash of civilizations´. But it is also a fact of history that Islamic civilization eventually nurtured Europe out of the Dark Ages, laying the foundation for the Renaissance.

Christians and Jews living under Muslim rule were allowed to practice their religion. Jews rarely faced martyrdom or exile, or forced compulsion to change their religion, and they were mostly free in their choice of residence and profession. The Quran addresses the believers among the Jews and Christians with great respect, calling them "the people of the book". But forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland has destroyed good Muslim-Jewish relations.

The clash among different religions intensifies religious strife between increasingly militant Hindu groups and Muslim and Christian minorities in India.

The latest Mumbai massacre, killing 143 people and injuring 327 by Deccan Mujahideen, once again widens the Muslim-Hindu divide in India. Four major terrorist attacks have already occurred in India's financial capital Mumbai in the last 15 years killing hundreds of innocent people.

Some believe these attacks were the revenge of atrocities by Hindu fundamentalist groups against the Muslim minority in India. Recently, more than 100 Christians have been killed in weeks of violence in eastern India by Hindu fundamentalist groups. Earlier, Muslims had faced the similar kind of brutality. Gujarat has experienced India's worst Hindu-Muslim clashes in a decade, with more than 4,000 people, mostly Muslims, losing their lives in 2002.

Some analysts believe India is a secular country and will not become a Hindu state. Will the inheritance of Indian secularism hold? Maybe it will, but certainly the overwhelming trend is away from Nehru's vision of a secular, socialist, Western, parliamentary democracy to a society shaped by Hindu fundamentalism.

The roots of Muslim rage run deep in India, nourished by a long-held sense of injustice over what many Indian Muslims believe is institutionalized discrimination against the Muslim minority. The disparities between Muslims, which make up 13.4% of the population, and India´s Hindu population, which hovers around 80%, are striking. There are exceptions, of course, but generally speaking Muslim Indians have shorter life spans, worse health, lower literacy levels, and lower-paying jobs.

Kashmir, a Muslim-dominated state whose fate had been left undecided in the chaos, also remains a suppurating wound in India´s Muslim psyche.

To revitalize the relations among different religions, Saudi king´s initiative "for interfaith and inter-cultural dialogue to promote peace, understanding and tolerance" among people and respect for their diverse religious, cultural and linguistic identities may prove to be a hallmark. But the Bush administration has embarked on a war that has no boundaries or time horizons. It is seething with as much anger and rage as its adversaries, and it is difficult to see any end in sight to this conflict that threatens to kill and mutilate Muslims in large numbers, in addition to curbing their civil rights in many countries. Viewed against the backdrop of the wars that the US had waged against Afghanistan and Iraq, avoiding a clash among civilizations seems awfully Utopian.