II.
Religion as Contender for World Order:
Mutual dependence for economic and political survival has led to a
renewed search for commonalties among nations. The Trialogue of the
Abrahamic Faiths is an auspicious beginning which must be extended so as
to include the faith-communities of the whole world. Over fifty percent of
our planet's people do not believers in Abrahamic Faiths yet their
destinies are intertwined with those of the future wars will utilize
arsenals that will hardly distinguish the fate of believers from
non-believers. Nuclear technology and war planning executed in outer space
cannot possibly guarantee one group's survival to the exclusion or at the
expense of the other.
Thus the motivation for peace and justice in the modern world has
to be on truly global scale. There is no place here for any particularism;
and any ethnocentric claim must be ruled out ex
hypothesi. The criterion to judge the effectiveness and
legitimacy of all claims is the universal benefit any claim promises to
all the peoples. Such criterion may seem commonplace, but history is
replete with examples in which religion had military conflicts, and/or
blessed economic exploitation, political oppression, and persecution of
the masses of dimension in the context of the political dimensions of the
Christian theology:
"No King but was in the end divinely established: no ruler but sought and received the blessing of communal religion. The eighteenth century saw clearly this essential relation of religion, privilege and monarchy and the nineteenth the relation of religion and society's oppressive superstructure. But both thought that it had been a conspiracy of organized religion, especially of Christianity, that had imported this religious dimension into a potentially secular and so innocent politics. The twentieth century has shown on the contrary that ideology, a religious interpretation of and allegiance to a community's social mythos, spring up inexorably in all politics; that the divine legitimation of rule and the sacral character of a way of life-whether it be a Marxist or a liberal, capitalist ideology-is a much a character of advanced contemporary societies as was the union of religion, myth and kingship in a traditional society…. The social myths of ethos that make our common life possible have a religious dimension. This is the source of the community's creativity, courage and confidence; it is also the ground of the demonic in historical life-of blind fanaticism, of infinite arrogance, of imperial ambition, of unlimited cruelty and of ultimate violence."
The history of Islam present us with no phenomena as those of
Judaism and Christianity. There is nothing comparable to the history of
Judaism. Where a diametrical reversal has taken place: namely, from being
the most persecuted and tyrannized-over minority in Europe, to becoming
the perpetrators of genocide against the Palestinians. To this, history
adds the irony that Jewish fury and resentment are directed not against
their former persecutors-the Nazis, Fascists and communists of Europe- but
against the innocent Palestinians whose crime in Jewish eyes is that of
having lived in Palestine for millennia before and after the Hebrews had
established themselves in the territory for a comparatively brief period
of its long history. The irony is double when we consider that religiously
and culturally. The Palestinians are an integral part of the ummah which alone in the whole of human history.
Acknowledged Judaism as divine religion. Its Torah as the law of God, and
welcomed and protected the Jews wherever Islam was dominant. The cries of
Palestinian victims massacred in cold blood by Jewish hands claming to
actualize the promise of the ethnocentric god, must have caused the
Prophets of ethical monotheism to turn in their graves, as well as the
geniuses of Islamic-Jewish cooperation across the last fourteen centuries
(samuel ibn Nagdala and Hasdai ibn Shaprut. Moses Maimonides and Solomon
ben Gabirol. Saadia Gaon Fayyumi and Hayyuy ibn Zakariyya.etc.etc).