No Malala, Islam is not a religion of peace. Or war

This is an unwritten rule for Muslims when addressing non-Muslims or the wider world. The Muslim must declare Islam is a religion of peace even before he/she is asked about it. Since 9/11, it has become a dead habit, a token statement. I don't blame Malala Yousafzai for repeating that statement. I must disclose my unbridled admiration for the schoolgirl for having the balls to tell the guns to leave the girls alone.

She is now the face of every girl's right to education, especially in Muslim countries. She took on the Taliban, took a couple of bullets in the head and lived to fight. Well, does that make her eligible for the Nobel Peace Prize? I do not know but when she got the prize, I celebrated it. She deserves all the recognition that the world can give her, because the spotlight on her means a spotlight on millions of girls like her. "We strongly believe in Islam. Islam is a religion of peace, but unfortunately there are people who don't know about this religion," the 17-year-old girl said in Oslo, where she was to receive this year's Peace Prize she shared with Indian child rights activist Kailash Satyarthi.

There was a need to bring in Islam, because Islam is essential to what she is. She grew up in Islam. She represents one side, the humanist side, of Islam. She struggles with the other narrower vision of Islam. They tried to silence her. That she speaks, in itself, is an act of defiance against that stream of extremism. But did she need to pay lip-service to the tokenism: Islam is a religion of peace?

Islam is a religion of peace, said Barack Obama, too many times to remember. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on the promise of steering America away from ongoing wars. He bombed eight countries. His predecessor George W. Bush had bombed just six. In one of his first statements after the 9/11 attacks, Bush had famously said, you guessed it right, Islam is a religion of peace. Some Muslims hate Malala. More Muslims hate Obama. And most Muslims hate George W. Bush. I have watched about 50 TV debates with the subject line: Is Islam a religion of peace? And at the end of each of these, everyone agreed: Islam is a religion of peace.

That you have to debate whether a particular religion is a religion of peace makes the statement open to debate. A large part of Islam's history is written in blood. The wars started right after the revelation and haven't stopped since. Islam has not been only about faith but since the religion took form in centuries of political turmoil, it became inherently political in nature. The periods of peace Muslims have enjoyed were when a strict version of Islam was implemented by ruthlessly strong leaders in large swathes of the area under Islam's influence. When political Islam was its strongest and accepted as state policy.

Islam as a state policy or political Islam is not a threat to non-Islamic countries as much as it is to the countries where Muslims live. Look at Pakistan, for example. Political Islam is a tool that all main political parties and its Army use frequently. The Middle-East has not seen peace in a long time, Islam and governance clash at every stage. The oases of peace like the UAE are so because they have actively sought to limit the reach of Islam.

When left to become the very essence of state, Islam begets the Islamic State. Formerly known as ISIS, IS seeks to establish a state in the name of Islam because it has seen political Islam giving birth to new states. The Taliban implemented that puritanical version of political Islam in Afghanistan and threaten to repeat it once Obama pulls out his forces. The efforts, external and internal, to establish democratic states have failed in most of the MENA region.

Democracy is the will of the people. Islam is the will of God. They are not compatible and that is what lies at the root of democracy not taking roots. When some offer the example of Indonesia and Malaysia, they comfortably ignore that the Southeast Asian countries are not culturally Islamic. Not yet. People have converted to Islam but retained the rules governing the society. Extremism is becoming a problem even in these Southeast Asian countries as well, as demands for implementing the Sharia, the Islamic governance method, grow in strength on the back of Saudi money.

Where is the religion of peace that Malala talks about? Why should one believe a 17-year-old girl's version of Islam when scholars seem to have different points of view? Just Youtube it. Some of them openly call for war while the moderate once are content with Islamic supremacy. The enemies change from Jews, to Christians, to Hindus, to Muslims like Shias, Ahmadis, Kurds and so on. Deobandis do not like Barelvis and vice-versa and both aren't shy about using violence. There are loonies like Zaid Hamid who want Ghazwa-e-Hind. There are hyenas like Hafiz Saeed who try. And there are monsters like al-Baghdadi, who want everyone else to die.

So, if Islam is not a religion of peace, then is it a religion of war? No. Islam is a religion. It is not about peace or war. It is a belief system that finds other belief systems illogical and stupid. The admiration is mutual. Malala, Obama and Bush offer tokenism without sincerity. A meaningless sentence that people have come to believe is useful in moderating the fringe. It is not.

Religions are about war. Two of the greatest religious books in India are about two great wars. The victors of those wars are Hindu gods. The Prophet of Islam himself waged fierce war against people who did not believe in him. He beheaded people with his own hands not knowing that a vile Army in Iraq will justify beheadings by citing the Hadith.

While Malalas of the world often share the Quranic verse that declares "murder of an innocent is murder of entire humanity" they do not explain 'innocence' in this case. The same holy book calls for terror to strike the neck of the non-believer. In the Bhagavad Gita, in the name of his warrior duties, Krishna exhorts Arjuna to pick up the bow and arrows to strike at his own family. The book itself became an addendum to the Mahabharata, itself named after the great war. The New Testament is a tad better than the Old Testament on the violence-meter but reveals itself by the time one comes to the Revelations.

The diya flickers the brightest before it dies slowly. Religion is at that stage. It's burning the brightest now as we see a lot of young people attracted to it. What goes unnoticed is the number of young people who can see through the dogma. The world is not done with religion as yet. But it desperately needs a little less religion and a little more governance and common sense. It needs to go easy on god-made laws and make laws for itself. It needs to see religion for what religion is, not what it wishes religion to be.

Enough with tokenism like all religions spread the message of love or Islam is a religion of peace. This one benign sentence has vilified the religion followed by 1.6 billion people more than any other spewed by anti-Islam nuts. Because repeatedly asserting its peaceful credentials assumes, unwittingly or unintentionally, that it is not.