Men die for other men, not for God

These jihadist apostles have dominated the thinking of the Muslim world for much of the 20th century. Their jihadist messages have echoed in the Islamic world and impressionable imams have emulated them by inciting hatred from mosque pulpits.

Immersed in such self-destructive and jihadist rhetoric, it was difficult to find a voice higher than that of the revisionist apostles of martyrdom stoked by the communist invasion of Afghanistan, the never-ending Middle East conflict and the oppressive Western-supported states of the region.

However, it didn’t take an insightful new convert to be alarmed by the dangerous turn that the Islamic message had been taking, judged by the sermons heard in mosques.

“… My own impression is that those sermons, too, rarely applied to the rational side of man and much often to his emotions. At times, I feel as if the imam is calling the faithful to an imminent battle for life or death rather than expounding a point of ethics or doctrine …” wrote Murad Hoffman, a German scholar converted to Isalm, in his book Islam 2000.

It is not, therefore, the holy Koran or the Hadith or religion per se that turns people into human bombs, but it is men possessed by certain demons who take advantage of the naivety and ignorance of the masses to immortalise their names.

“… What gives birth to religious extremism and religious wars is not dogma, but men who transform dogmas into specific cultures and national identities. For if all the faithful limited themselves to the effort to seek God and adhere Him, the search of God and his adoration could not be the causes of wars, hatreds or discrimination …” wrote the French philosopher Mohammad Arkoun.

At the end, it is the power that men have over other men below them, men who claim to speak to God, which sends their loyal disciples to their death either by blowing themselves up or dying on the battlefield.

It was man and not God who killed millions in the Spanish Inquisition; man and not God who burned others at the stake for denying that wine is converted into blood by prayers; man and not God who launched the merciless Crusades; man and not God that laid the Byzantine and Persian civilisations to waste to raise the flag of Islam; man and not Allah that led tens of young men, women and children to burn in hell in the Lal Mosque; and al-Qaida and not Allah that brainwashes Muslim youth to cause death and destruction.

No wonder former US army interrogator Tony Lagouranis said in a BBC interview recently that he went to Iraq as a good Christian and returned as an atheist because he couldn’t stomach the hypocrisy of people portraying themselves as fulfilling God’s commands, committing gruesome crimes.

It is unfortunate that God cannot speak for himself to expose those conmen who slaughter innocent creatures in his name. I wish he could.