Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s latest exposition of his ideas was very successful and honest. We were delighted that Mr. Blair supports an idea we have been advocating for years.
Sincerity and religious moral values free from fanaticism are a blessing for all. A devout person will never ignore the voice of his conscience. The presence of genuinely devout people of good conscience in a sphere such as politics, a tool for shaping society, is a great blessing for that society. Tony Blair is a sufficiently honest politician to explicitly state that he is religious. The “need to respond to radicalism with education” in his latest piece is a very important one I have been reiterating for years.
The problem of lack of education, among women in particular, in many Arab countries in the Middle East represents the basis of radicalism. For example, more than half the female population in Egypt is illiterate. While these women are being raised as Muslims, they have no opportunity of reading the Qur’an; they can only learn their faith from certain people around them. Most of them know only what their families teach them and may imagine that various fanatical ideas represent the “true Islam.” Since they cannot read and write, they have no means of learning whether or not the information they obtain is compatible with the Qur’an. This is not their fault, of course. In this way, many women accept the status as “second class citizens” their religion supposedly bestows on them. This is by no means the end of this false perspective, of course: The children raised by these women grow up under the influence of a similar ideology, and when they attain positions in society, they strive to maintain this ideology they have adopted.
Yet it is easy for these Muslims under the influence of radicalism to escape their situation and see the truth through an accurate religious education based on the moral values of the Qur’an. If you look, most of these people sincerely believe in God and live the lives they think their faith demands. They can therefore escape this situation through being rightly directed.
This is one aspect of deficient education, of course. Another is Darwinist-materialist philosophies that have had an even more profound impact. Although Europe and America are working hard to bestir organizations, individuals and aid foundations into action, we see that these efforts elicit almost no response among much of society. It is unreasonable to expect people who have been educated from a Darwinist-materialist perspective throughout their lives, and with a philosophy that excludes people from races other than their own, to harbor feelings of compassion when they look at the pictures of refugees in difficulty. According to the Darwinist world-view, wars and conflict are a golden opportunity for the strong to survive and the weak to be eliminated; the fact, which will surprise many people, is that this ideology of exclusion affects the subconscious and the worldviews of radical groups and leads them to think that those who do not entirely go along with them have any right to live. It is the same mindset for some groups who allegedly claim to act in the name of Islam and fight against Assad in Syria to kill those who do not have the same ideology as theirs in the most brutal methods. In Syria, where those who use Socialist Ba’athist ideology are torturing, massacring their own people and destroying their own cities, there is no way to discern them from those who allegedly act in the name of Islam and also use ruthless methods. Furthermore, when we inspect closely their war methods, we don’t see much difference from those groups fighting for communism in Sierra Leone, Cambodia and Laos.
Throughout history, the Middle East has been a central location for religions. The Abrahamic faiths were born here and spread out from here. That is perhaps the most important of the region’s beauties; the Middle East draws its energy from religion. Therefore, politicians and opinion makers who fail to grasp religion will not be able to produce the desired results when it comes to resolving the Middle East’s current problems. I think that Tony Blair does grasp this important point, and like him, that all devout politicians need to be encouraged.
However, we must not ignore the fact that the Fact of Creation, the basis of all true faiths, must be added to education against the myth of evolution. We cannot expect virtues such as compassion, love, affection, reason and forgiveness from people brought up learning the fallacy that they are just slightly more evolved versions of apes. Therefore it is vitally important for people to be taught that ‘all human beings are valuable beings who have souls.’
Adnan Oktar's piece on Daily Mail: