A world without extremes

Some days ago, an old friend of mine reached out to me asking if I was doing alright because of, as he said, “that stuff that happened in Texas”. I thought another hurricane had happened. At that time, I did not know about the hostage situation at the Texas synagogue. When he broke the news, I felt concerned for the Jewish hostages as much as I did for the Muslims outside that synagogue. It is such lunatics who make is hard for us Muslims and tarnish the image of this beautiful religion called Islam. He chose that Jewish synagogue because it was the closest congregation of the Jewish people near the prison where Aafia Siddiqui has been serving an 86-year prison sentence for trying to kill American soldiers. Perhaps he should have thought more about his own children who needed a father more than Aafia Siddiqui needed a lunatic to create a standoff to secure her release.

Osama bin Laden believed that non-Muslim infidels must be killed in the name of Islam and Jihad. The extremist western lunatics, driven by sheer propaganda, also believe that that is what Islam stands for. In that, the two extremists, otherwise at loggerheads with each other, share a common lunacy driven belief. The majority of the Muslims in the world do not believe at all that the meaning of Jihad is to grab arms and kill non-Muslims. That is a teaching of the western imperialism to the shock troops it had employed against the communist regimes around the world. That has nothing to do with the true Islam.

Growing up in Pakistan, many Imams blaring through the Masjid speakers, condemned the Jews and went to horrible lengths to inculcate hatred in the minds of the listeners against the Jewish people. Even TV ads in Pakistan trying to sell kids’ noodles or cookies showing Einstein hinting at the intelligence the kids would gain by eating the food would be dismissed as Jewish propaganda. Almost everyone who has heard about Einstein in Pakistan has also heard that he was a Jew. Almost no one who has heard about Einstein in Pakistan can claim to understand his Special and General Theories of Relativity. So much for Einstein’s famous speed of light thought experiment, it turns out, sound may travel faster than light on Earth since there are more indoctrinated and less enlightened people.

Einstein’s faith never escaped the ludicrous mindset of his peers during his time. Many scientists dismissed his seminal work outright calling it “Jewish science” and “Jewish physics”. This is what happens when minds are shaped and driven by political filth and cultural gibberish instead of the truth.

While people painted Einstein’s work with his faith, the world today paints the faith (Islam) of the Texas synagogue shooter with his action. Terrorism as usual would tarnish a faith (Islam) just as a faith (Judaism) tarnished the impeccable and mind-numbing theories of the great Albert Einstein. The world tends to live in extremes. Action and faith in these two cases show that they are no different than chicken and egg. It becomes hard to decipher which came first.

But whatever the order, the propaganda reaches before any light. The indoctrinated mind takes over the truth based world. That is what I meant by sound traveling faster than light. Neil deGrasse Tyson rightly says that one of the major reasons we have science is for the purpose of avoiding our own senses to determine the truth. Because our senses come with bias resulting from culture and politics. We make tools that see and find the truth for us. Sadly, there is no tool yet that can do the truth based, unbiased, and unvarnished judgment for us. Human imagination is what got us into this abyss in the first place. Perhaps the world needs less imagination and more truth.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 20^th, 2022.

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