Fatalism

Some things may just be meant to happen. Do you believe in fate? If you do, the Middle East is a great place to pursue your religious beliefs. In Chapter 5 in Baghdad without a Map, “CAIRO DAYS: Ozymandias Slept Here,” Tony Horwitz, on his journey in Cairo, Egypt, describes the Islamic dedication to fatalism. He describes his taxi driver as a dedicated believer in Islamic ideology.

“The only insight I ever gained into this suicidal abandon came from a speeding Kurdish driver, after he’d recklessly run over a bird.
“Allah wanted it dead,” he said. The same fatalism applies to all passengers.”(p. 83)

If Allah wants something, it happens. Who is this Allah? According to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, Allah is the ‘one and only’ God in Islam. All of his believers are to believe that everything happens as Allah says, even when it involves a life-and-death situation, such as the road kill described in the text. In a bigger picture, unfortunately, this idea of fatalism applies to some active, hostile terrorists among who were the fiends who forced the planes to be flown into the buildings on September 11th. If they were alive, when one interrogates the criminals about their motivation, it is very possible that they would say something like “Allah wanted us to save our country.” Although this assumption may look criticizing of the religion itself, I am not saying in any way that Islamic religion is to be seen as unreasonable inspiration for savages, as it is sometimes portrayed in this way on the media. The point is that the religion should never be abused to justify destruction and killing of many including themselves. Now it is really time to stop the forever-lasting violence between America and some of Middle East. If one side stimulates the other, the chaos will never stop because the other side would want revenge, which can vary from militarily oppressing them to flying planes into civilian-packed buildings.

SL