Rafiq Zakaria's Tirade Against Christianity
© Prakash J. Mascarenhas, 29th October, 2002. Recently, an article had appeared in the Mid-Day, a Bombay newspaper. The weblink is here. This article is in response.
In Bombay, we have five major English language newspapers. All of these are owned by non-Christians - Hindus, Jains (who are, today, as good as Hindus), Muslims and Zoroastrians. These five papers are: the Times of India, the Indian Express, the Asian Age, all owned by Hindus and Jains, and the tabloids: the Muslim-owned Midday and the Afternoon Despatch and Courier.Therefore, it is but natural that whenever a question about Christianity come up, the innate anti-Christian bias of these papers, their proprietors and editors shows up.
Each of these papers, periodically, feature some provocative topic of controversy about Christianity. This then draws in responses, both in defense of Christianity and against. Then the paper, after some days of the controversy, declares the question closed.
I have personally noticed that these papers maneuver these controversies in such a manner as to exclude or mutilate the replies in defense and give prominence to those against, before declaring the question closed. For some time, I too attempted, actuated with the desire of defending the faith, to answer these attacks, but I noticed that my letters were never published, while the most stupid nonsensical letters were. That set me to thinking and opened my eyes to the not so overt mischief of these papers.
Recently, in mid-August, the Times carried, without any provocation whatsoever, an article, or rather a 'review' of a book being published by one of its sister entities, that shamelessly misrepresented Christianity. (See here, for that 'review' and my response.) That day, I cut off my subscription. Soon after, another Times article came to my notice - "Indian Spirituality," (see here) reading which, one gets the impression that the only 'Indian' spirituality is Hinduism, and that the other religions that Indians follow do not count.
Recently, Jerry Falwell, the US fundamentalist, had, in a TV interview, stated that he believed Muhammad, the founder of Islam, to have been a terrorist. Predictably, when the news filtered into the Indian bazaar, the Indian Muslims reacted with violence, as if it were the Indian people and or government that was responsible. Rationality was always a stranger to Islam.
In response to these events, the Muslim owned Mid-Day carried, on 16th October, an article by Dr. Rafiq Zakaria, Tirade Against Muhammad: an exercise in sheer mendacious hypocrisy!
Dr. Rafiq Zakaria is reckoned a pillar of Bombay society and is influential. One of his sons, a Fareed Zakaria, is settled in the USA, married to an US citizen, Paula Throckmorton, who has embraced Zakaria's Muslim sect, and has become part of US politics - he was featured by the Time magazine - and is the editor, I believe, of Newsweek. Zakaria is considered a Muslim moderate and he writes frequently in the papers to exhort his co-religionists to moderation, but at the same time, he seeks to placate and coddle them by unwarranted and lying attacks on Christianity. This, I have noticed, is an old habit. Therefore, this tirade, to use his own word, against Christianity, is not something new or unique. That, however, is no reason at all for tolerating this lying and vicious tirade against Christianity and some of its most revered saints and teachers - persons such as St. John of Damascus, etc.
The law of the land, particularly, the Indian Penal Code, has specific provisions against hurting the sentiments of any particular religion. These were applied recently to the chieftain of the Hindu Marathi terrorists, the Army of Shiva, for his speech advocating that Hindus too adopt against Muslims the tactic of suicide bombers. Again, a few days before, the police registered a complaint
against a New Church minister, the principal of the Agnelite institution in New Bombay, Saturnino Almeida. (See news report here). However, it is obvious that these provisions should have been applied to the Times of India for its anti-Christian article (see here) and to the Midday and to Dr. Rafiq Zakaria for his vicious attack on Christianity.
However, India is the land of perpetual double-standards. Spineless and cupiditious central and provincial governments have reacted in the face of Islamic terrorism by seeking to appease it, while acting violently against any other community - Hindu or Christian, etc., when they protest, secure in the knowledge that viciousness is a virtue cultivated only by Muslims.
If the governments of the provinces and at the centre were courageous and free of vote-bank cupidity, they would have banned, not just the SIMI, but also the Tabligh-e-Islam and the Dar-ul-Uloom of Deoband, the mother of Wahhabism, Pakistan and the Taliban, etc. And, most, if not all, Muslim clerics, including Bukhari, the Imam of Delhi, would have been rotting behind bars.
Now I will attempt to address the issues raised by Zakaria in his hateful diatribe. First, that Christians have not accepted the claim of Muhammad to prophethood; Secondly, that Christians reacted with violence to the spread of Islam; Thirdly that Hindu sentiment against Islam is the creation of the English, etc.
Shortly after the 11th September 2001 attacks by Islam on the USA, its chief patron and guardian, there was a rash of articles, in various forums, that sought to whitewash Islam: They sought to justify Islamic anger on the basis of lingering anger against the violence of the several Crusades against Islam, etc. One of these articles was by Zakaria.
The arguments are the same today as then: It seems that Islam has a divine right to launch unprovoked attacks upon others, seize their lands, rape their women, enslave their peoples, etc., etc., but that the victims have no right to resist, and in resisting Islam they have sinned and wronged Muslims!
Let us get these facts straight: It was Islam that attacked first, and it was centuries between these attacks first began and the first of the Crusades. At the time Islam was founded, all of Arabia, with the exception of the tiny pocket of Mekka of the polytheistic Quraishites, was Christian, specifically, three Nestorian Christian kingdoms. After Muhammad conquered Mekka from the Medina al Yathrib, he sent out armies to terrorize, conquer, enslave and forcibly convert these Christian peoples. But he did not stop at Arabia - he sent out his terrorists into Syria, Mesopotamia (the ancient Christian lands of Chaldea and Assyria), into Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, etc., etc. Nor is it that his victims were only Christians, but also the Zoroastrians of the Persian Empire, the Buddhists and Hindus peoples of Central Asia - Turks, etc., upon whom all the most unspeakable atrocities were perpetrated and who were as a result forced - at sword point - to embrace Islam. Even though the Iranians have embraced Islam, to become equally fanatical followers, they still nevertheless justly denounce the original Muhammadan Conquest and Campaign of terrorism as barbarous - truly a Nakba, if ever there was one!
Not one of these attacks had even the pretence of a provocation - on the contrary, they were driven by the purely internal logic of Islam, which inculcates viciousness in its adherents and commands them to go forth and conquer all the earth, making all its peoples subject to Islam.
Within a century from Muhammad's death, Muslim Arab invaders were fighting in France to conquer that country, having conquered and enslaved Spain and Portugal. At the battle of Tours, they were soundly defeated, the first in the long process of the Reconquest, that culminated centuries later in the liberation of Spain and Portugal, and which moved the Portuguese and Spanish to circumnavigate the world to short-circuit the Islamic stranglehold on the Spice trade.
The first formal Crusade, proclaimed by the Pope and pushed by him, was declared some six centuries after the first acts of Islamic terrorism had commenced under and by the express command of Muhammad, the Islamic heresiarch.
Zakaria is pained that Christians do not accept the Muhammadan claims to prophethood, contrasting that to the Islamic honour and respect accorded to Jesus Christ and his mother Mary.
Christianity is a religion that is established on certain claims and beliefs, which are contradicted by Islam. Therefore, by its own internal logic, Christianity could not acknowledge Muhammad as a prophet.
If Muhammad was truly a prophet, then Christianity is necessarily false. If Christianity is true, then Islam is necessarily false and Muhammad could not be a true prophet, but either an impostor or a dupe of Satan.
It is illogical and absolutely the most stupid idea that Christians should unthinkingly accept Muhammad's pretensions, and it is the most stupid of Zakaria that he should reproach Christians for acting according to the internal logic of their faith and rejecting Muhammad's pretensions.
What of Islam's honouring Christ and Mary? This is not honour that Christians can understand and appreciate, it is rather a distortion - a malicious distortion of the true Christ and Mary, besides being the most silly and absurd, confusing Mary with her namesake of some two millenia previous, the sister of Moses. Islam is very clear in putting in the mouth of their pseudo-Christ, even Antichrist, a fierce and lying denunciation of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity - one that is, moreover the most absurd, which no Christian have ever claimed or believed.
We look forward to Christ returning triumphantly from the right hand of God the Father to destroy the Antichrist and commence the restoration, while Islam teaches that he is only temporarily residing in a lower paradise, from which he will return to set up his own harem, breed his own brood of fanatic Muhammadans, and then die, in preparation for which, they have prepared a grave for him! It is impossible for Christians to recognize their Messiah in this alter of Muhammad!
Therefore for Muslims to innocently take umbrage at Christian wrath at lies and falsehoods of Islam and its heresiarch is utter falsehood and hypocrisy.
Century before the advent of Islam in India, Christianity was brought by the Apostle Thomas. Since then, the East, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Persia and India, was severed from the rest of Christianity by the Nestorian Schism. Following the onslaught and pogroms perpetrated by Islam, the Christians of India nearly vanished, the remnant eagerly latching on to the Portuguese for survival.
Islam came to India during this time, between the Nestorian Schism and the arrival of the Portuguese. During this time, then, the Indian Christians were in no intellectual position to take on Islam. However, Islam committed, as everywhere, enormities and monstrosities upon the peoples of India, principally Hindu and Buddhists. (In matter of fact, the onslaught of Islam eliminated Buddhism from Central Asia and from Peninsular India.) The Hindu-Buddhist Turks of Central Asia being bludgeoned into embracing Islam, then adopted the same viciousness that is the hallmark of Islam against Indian Heartland. Raids after raids were launched against India, captives in the hundreds of thousands and in the millions were dragged inhumanely, with the trademark Islamic bestiality towards the non-Muslim, whom they consider as less than human, over the inhospitable Uparisena mountains, so much so that they became red with the blood of the Indians. Thus this mountain range has received its modern, Islamic name, the Hindukush: the Death of the Hindus. Is it Zakaria's contention that this name was the invention of the English? Were Timurlane, Muhammad of Gazni and Muhammad the Ghorite, Englishmen?
Was it Englishmen who rode in and sacked the temple of Somnath again and again? Was it Englishmen who demolished the Ramjamnabhoomi Temple and built the Babri Masjid in its place?
Were the Arabs who invaded Sindh and murdered its King Dahir and kidnapped his daughters for the Caliph's harem, Englishmen? Were the innumerable murderous Arab and Turk invaders, the founders of the Slave, Tughlak, Lodhi, Mughal, Nizam dynasties also Englishmen? Were the Arabs of the Sultanate of Cambay and the Turks of the Sultanate of Bijapur whom the Portuguese fought also Englishmen? Were Allaudin Khilji, Aurungzeb and Tipu Sultan, etc., also Englishmen? Were the Marathas, the Chandellas and Sikh states established by fighting and securing the evacuation of those territories by the English?
If we are to understand Zakaria, the Hindus in India, and in addition, the Buddhists and Jains, were just overwhelmed with delirious joy and taken up in in raptures when the Muslims came in and began to perpetrate their atrocities, to kidnap and rape their women, enslave the Indian peoples and sell them into captivity, etc., etc., a happy paradise that was only disrupted by the monstrous Englishman who seduced the Hindu and corrupted his soul, inducting into him evil thoughts and resentments against his generous and benevolent Muslim 'patrons' !
All this is the most utter shameless mendacious hypocrisy! It is something that Dr. Zakaria, as most Muslim apologists, have cultivated into a fine art!
Muhammadans object to the discription of their heresiarch as a sex-maniac and a terrorist: I challenge one and all to prove to me if there was any other founder of a religion who, like him, set out and sent out armies to conquer and force peoples to embrace his creed. There have been many who, in the history of man, have founded or are reputed founders or re-founders of religions: Kong Fuci, Buddha, Mahavir Jain, Shankaracharya, Moses, etc., not excluding Jesus Christ. Did any one of them, with the sole exception of Muhammad, do this?
America the apostate seeks to appease Muslim sentiments, particularly of the oil-rich Arabs, and divert their attention from its support for Israel. For this end, they have even shamelessly indulged in the most unspeakable acts of terrorism against the Serbs of Yugoslavia in order to assist the traitorous Serb Muslims in their program of carving out an artificial Muslim nation - Bosnia - the Serb Pakistan.
On 11th September 2001, it received from Islam its Guru-Dakshina, the harlot's wages for playing mid-wife to Bosnia!
After the 9/11 attacks, I read the extra-ordinary news that a Scandinavian organization awarded the Israelite pacifist organization, Gush Shalom. The citation said that it was impoverishment and illtreatment at the hands of their enemies that made Muslims take to terrorism as an instrument of protest.
In truth, this contention is nothing more than a tissue of lies, that any reasonable man ought to know. Bin Ladin's father emigrated from British Yemen to Saudi Arabia so that he could live in a purely Muslim environment. His son carries that same, unprovoked Islamic fanaticism forward. Indeed, as many unbiased people have recognized, Bin Ladin is typical of the Saudi attitude.
None of the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11 were from impoverished or 'illtreated' families. On the contrary, they gravitated towards Bin Ladin out of purely ideological reasons.
The attitude of appeasement and whitewashing that this Scandinavian organization and Gush Shalom represents is the same attitude that Zakaria seeks to cultivate. Zakaria is portrayed as a moderate Muslim. However, from the moral viewpoint, it is impossible to accept that he is, indeed, a voice for moderation. On the contrary, Zakaria is one of those very many who make it their avocation to mollycoddle Islamic recalcitrance and to whitewash its crimes. It is people like Zakaria who encourage and support the murders of 9/11. They see, not murderous terrorists, but innocent, naive little kids out for a romp in the kindergarten. This is a course that can only encourage these criminals, secure in the knowledge that while the orthodox Muslims believe that they shall be carried forth into their 'heavenly' whorehouse, the Jannat al Firdaus, apologists like Zakaria will endeavour to divert the wrath of non-Muslims and delude them.
Certainly, Islam cultivates in its adherents the feeling that non-Muslims are less than human. Muslims have always treated those of their enemies that have had the misfortune to fall into their hands as being less than human. Witness the treatment of those kidnapped in Lebanon, etc., the victims of the Kandahar hijacking, Daniel Pearl and the passengers and officegoers in the planes and buildings on 9/11. One common thread runs through all of them.
Zakaria seeks to push the blame for crimes committed by Muslims onto the English. Our Lord, the Messiah and the Incarnation of God, Jesus Christ had occasion to decry the Pharisees, describing them as swallowing the camel and straining at the gnat. This is exactly what Dr. Zakaria does. He swallows whole and entire, and with nary a scruple, the entire history of Muslim atrocities after atrocities in India and the world, swallowing whole the Hindukush, the rampages of Ghazni and Ghori, etc., etc., and strains at the gnat of English perfidy in India.
The worst thing that the English ever did in India was the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and in scale it pales into insignificance against the numerous crimes committed against Indians by Islam; not the least, that which is witnessed to by the Hindukush.
To paraphrase Gandhi, then, this hypocrisy of Dr. Zakaria is of a Himalayan scale!
Many Indian Christians think that we are victims of Hindu Revanchism along with Islam. It is true that Hindu Revanchism is our enemy. However, Hinduism, for all its evils, was and is not as systematically viciously violent as Islam is, and Islam is our enemy on a universal scale. Hinduism is our enemy only in India, and in a few other places, too minor to bother about. However, Islam is a threat world-wide. Nor is Islam an innocent victim. It has committed great crimes, not only against Christians, but also against Hindus. The Hindu Reaction, then, to Islam, is a natural one. There is no good reason why we should ally ourselves with treacherous Islam, or allow ourselves to be lumped together with them. Our interests are different and opposites. We do not travel the same paths. We have nothing in common. The persecution that Indian Christianity is enduring is a matter between itself and the God of Abraham, Jesus Christ, and we do not have any reason to turn to His enemies, who shamelessly blaspheme Him day in and day out, for succour and fellowship. Rather let us turn back to Him, and examine how and why we have gone wrong and incurred His wrath, so that He has abandoned us to the forces of evil.