DEFINING ISLAM WITH LOVE OR HATE

In a post-Bin Laden world, there are no illusions with the demise of Osama about the end of terrorism at the hands of extremist so-called Muslims. What can be considered a “win” is that, for Bin Laden’s Jihadist followers, he can no longer be seen as having been “protected” by God from the pursuers of American justice. The man once hailed across the militant Muslim world as the leader of Islamic Jihad against the “Great Satan” of the West met his death at the hands of American Navy SEALs. It’s a clear message to radical Islamists that God is most definitely not on the side of Bin Laden and his camp.

But instead of wringing our collective hands at the inevitability of future acts of terrorism by Jihadists, we need to be truly courageous and address the underlying causes of radicalism in Islam that foment so much hatred and violence and result in the deaths of thousands of innocent lives, more often Muslim than non-Muslim.

And no, the “problem” is not the religion of Islam. The problem is the Wahhabi and Salafi interpretations of it being spread with Saudi oil money across the largely un-educated and impoverished Muslim world. The seeds of this cancer were not sown exclusively by Muslims, but it is their soil in which they were planted and grew, and the farmer is ultimately responsible for his crop.

And for the West to deal the death blow to Islamic radicalism, it must look honestly and unflinchingly at U.S. and Western foreign policy agendas (going back to the Cold War and even earlier to the post-Colonial period of the 19th and early 20th centuries) that have done much to shape the current state of relations between the Christian West and the Muslim East.

Things like the fight against Communism since the 1950s employing the destabilization of democratic political movements in the Muslim world, while simultaneously instigating, aiding and abetting violent, radical Jihadist Islam in countries bordering former Soviet states. Like Afghanistan, for instance. Everyone knows that story and how it’s been played out in the past and how it’s playing out today.

The saddest irony is that Pakistan's series of corrupt, military regimes dating back to the early 1950s all the way to the present illustrate in the glaring light of history the ease with which these regimes and their dictators get into bed with terrorist groups and thereby legitimize and facilitate these extremists' violence and ideologies.

The victims of these failed laws and spineless politicians are all the various religious communities throughout Pakistan -- be they the mainstream Sunnis or the minority communities of Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Shias or Ahmadis.

The obviousness of the human rights abuses against the minority religious groups can blind us to the fact that a mainstream religion that tolerates and even encourages the wholesale slaughter of its citizens who may hold different beliefs only promotes the cancer of spiritual and moral decay that, like the fall of Rome, becomes irreversible after a certain point.

This cancer of religious intolerance and fanaticism that is now deeply entrenched in the cultural and religious fabric of Pakistan (and many other Muslim nations) can only be excised by the spiritual reformation of its people.

This is not impossible. What will seem impossible for most Pakistanis and other Muslims around the world to accept is that the singular cure for all of their socio-political and religious ailments is available (and freely offered) only by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community -- the very same Muslims they so ruthlessly and ignorantly persecute and allow to be massacred. That cure was delivered to the world by the Promised Messiah and Imam Mahdi, Hadhrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad more than 120 years ago, and that cure continues to be dispensed through his rightly-guided Khilafat (Caliphate) which began after the demise of Hadhrat Ahmad in 1908.

The salvation of the Muslim world and its truly peaceful and beautiful Faith will only see fruition within the sphere and protection of Ahmadiyyat Islam, whose motto is "Love for All - Hatred for None."

This is not just a prophecy or simple sloganeering. It is an objective assessment of the survivability of a religion given two fundamental paths it can now take given the cancer of evil-mindedness that has been slowly poisoning it for centuries.

One the one hand, you have the path of the terrorist's Islam -- a religion of hatred, oppression, ignorance and ultimate self-destruction leading nowhere fast.

And on the other hand, you have the enlightened, peaceful, educated, non-politicized, rational, moral and spiritually-rejuvenating Islam of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community as brought into the world by the Imam Mahdi & Promised Messiah of Muhammad (saw), Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian (1835-1908).

Between these two choices you have the 1.2-billion Muslims who are aligned with neither group -- the middle-of-the-road average Muslims who make up the silent majority of Islam. It is these who must now decide which path they wish to tread.

By doing nothing, they will empower the terrorist's version of Islam simply because of the 1% rule that was so frighteningly demonstrated by the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany. It doesn't take that many people to turn a peaceful, cultured and educated society into a totalitarian regime that rules by force, dogma and terror, and which can so quickly consign millions to their deaths.

Unless the silent Muslim majority wakes up to address and defeat the evil that is extremist Islam, that Islam will eat them alive like the cancer that it is.

But if Muslims open their minds and their hearts to the truth and peace embodied in the words "Love for All - Hatred for None" which are exemplified by the Ahmadi Muslims currently numbering tens of millions in 200 countries, then within a few generations, the Taliban / Al Qaida / Wahhabi versions of Islam will be dead.

Right now, the Mullahs may hurl abuse at them and call for their destruction, and some Muslims may heed such calls and kill Ahmadis individually by targeted assassination, or en masse by orchestrated attacks on Ahmadi homes, businesses and places of worship, but they will never be able to extinguish the Light of Allah, either by the breath of their mouths or by the violence of their hands.

Ahmadiyya Islam started with 40 people in 1889 and from that time until today that number has seen at least a million-fold increase. Time, history, reason, truth and love demonstrate that some Higher Power is on their side. Which side will you be on? Now is not the time for fences.

[ Original post appeared on http://www.ahmadiyyatimes.com/ at this link:

http://ahmadiyyatimes.blogspot.com/2012/04/faith-and-practice-defining-islam-with.html ]