Christianity, a beautiful religion spread by the labor of love and kindness by Jesus PBUH had been a source of identity for over a billion people around the world. His life was filled with sacrifice, compassion, and healing for the downtrodden. After his demise, avarice crept into his teachings and what was meant to be the veil for the bodies of unkempt, draped the lowliest of the clergy with finest of the silk.

One of the greatest books on psychological and dehumanising effects of colonization on colonial people is Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth”. Book published in 1961 in french with the title Les Damnés de la Terre.

Jean Paul-Sartre himself took the pains to write an excruciating and self-immolating preface for the it. Amidst his critique of colonization and French brutality in Algeria he notes the symbiotic relationship of the Church and the Armies. While the white man encroached the lands of what Fanon calls “lumpenproletariat” of Marx, the Church ratified not only its actions but convinced the natives of a divine legitimacy for all this. Jesus PBUH would bless their souls if they died working for the ‘intelligent race’. Franz speaks of it in these words:

“I speak of the Christian religion, and no one need be astonished. The Church in the colonies is the white people’s Church, the foreigner’s Church. She does not call the native to God’s ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor. And as we know, in this matter many are called but few chosen.”

Ironically, about the same time Spanish Armada was on its way to bring triumph and plata back to the country, Christianity was at the crossroads of a reformation not very far from it. Martin Luther having witnessed the corruption of clergy in Rome had reneged as the priests of his time proclaimed.

The largest denomination of monolithic Christian faith would become a story of past and from it unstoppable branches would sprout forth. It would burn the Europe in centuries to come through protestant and catholic wars.

It is no wonder today that there is a clear bifurcation between the Christian world. After the irrelevance of Jewish faith and its restrictive admission criterion excluded the aspirants of salvation, Christianity was the only dominant religion throughout the world. Post-Lutheran downfall has reduced it into people alienated from religion altogether and the other lot struggling with finding the right sect. Science-based delusion carried many towards atheism and rest of them embroiled themselves in complicated discourses on variant readings of the Bible.

What Christian world has perceived to be its arch enemy, Islam despite its religious tolerance, magnanimous treatment of its Christian and Jewish subjects, has always been a source of discontent for it. A big portion of it comes from the early apocryphal writings of ecclesiastical writers and their misinformation and fiction about state of Christian subjects in Ottoman Empire, distortion of history about it in Prophet PBUH’s times and ISIS in modern times.

This ‘civilization’ project of Muslim world, whose cumbersome responsibility lies on the ‘civilized’ white Christian world, has been going on for quite some time and surprisingly not in a very different way than the early colonial churches.

Hoya Paxa: A Blog about Interfaith Service and Peacebuilding (inspired by Georgetown’s spirited campus cheer “Hoya Saxa!” to emphasize pax, Latin for “peace” published an article by Harshita Nadimpalli on intefaith dialogue in Pakistan. Semitic religions apart from Islam see each other with deep distrust if not aversion for having stolen their authority.

Christian-Jewish enmity has lasted for centuries which needs no proves. Islam on the other hand not only acknowledges both of them but also makes it a part of faith to revere them.

Now what type of inter-faith harmony can there be between people who call each other charlatans? If the idea comes out of secular humanism, then we don’t need a religious nomenclature for this pantomime because world doesn’t seem to fair well with the enlightenment ideas if not worst. Can it be the usual suspect that Christian missionaries in its quest of civilization this time wants Islam to follow its sorrow trajectory of apologetic inversion as Foreign Policy magazine recently suggested?

Hoya Paxa, published another post by another Hindu writer, on persecution of Ahmaddiya Muslims around the world. Article is filled with false facts, distortions, lack of knowledge and sincerity. Now if this is peace building and promotion, could it be construed that interfaith dialogues are promoting Islamic sectarianism?

Apart from the technicalities, how hilarious does it sound, when a Jewish writer speaks to Muslim audiences on deep issues of Islamic faith and holds a Ph.D in Islamic studies from notorious schools like SOAS? Why doesn’t that knowledge bring him over to the true faith?

Islam has no sects. Allah has decreed his injunctions upon the people and given them two paths to choose from. The option of believing and not believing. Islam or Kufr. There is no compulsion in it. Quran Says

“ وَهَدَيْنَاهُ النَّجْدَيْنِفَلَا اقْتَحَمَ الْعَقَبَةَ”

“We showed him two paths. But he has not attempted to pass on the path that is steep”

Sects emerge when people follow their whims instead of the Sunnah. Intolerance is the result of avarice, not religion itself. There is hardly anything that has not been made clear in Quran, as it states in it. Let us go back to Prophet PBUH’s life and his words as for the enemies Allah has promised to take care of that for us.

يمكرون و يمكر الله و الله خير الماكرين