First of all, first kindly rectify your concept of history. I don’t know where you picked up this idea that according to the history of man as such, religion has been the most important factor in perpetration of cruelties. This is not correct. Most of the wars in the history of man have never been fought in the name of religion. They have been fought for secular reasons, for political reasons, or for any other reasons. That is overtly. And sometimes they are fought covertly. That is, the true reason is not revealed, but a reason is attributed to those wars. The wars have always been secular, and most of the wars I am talking about.
And sometimes they say, like the British used to say, they are fighting for the sake of peace. While the other party is fighting for the sake of war, but some party is fighting for the sake of peace. In the name of peace a war is fought. So in a good name sometimes a war can be fought justifiably or unjustifiably. Maybe it is just the purported intent and not the real intent. So people have been attributing the reason for fighting wrongly and unjustifiably to religion, as they have been attributing it to peace. So those people who fight in the name of religion, they should not be given the license that whatever they claim, that should be accepted. Why should that claim be accepted? Unless they justify the war with religious argument. This is exactly what the Holy Quran tells us.
The Holy Quran tells us that even those wars, I mean they are much limited in number than the rest of the wars. As I have told you, the order of preference would be, the order of, I mean, if you look at it from the point of view of numbers, in that order, the largest, biggest, widest wars were not fought in the name of religion. The wars of Hannibal, for example, the war of Alexander the Great, the war between the Latins and the Greeks, all these big wars, plus the wars inflicted upon the civilized part of that time by the Mongolians at various times, they are the most heinous, most cruel wars that we know in history. None of them was fought in the name of religion. So to say that always the cruelty has been perpetrated upon another in the name of religion, it is wrong in the first place.
Secondly comes those wars which were political in nature, but were fought in the name of religion erroneously. It was claimed that they are fighting for the sake of religion, but it was not for the sake of religion at all. It was for some other reasons. And there the initiators of those wars were not religious people. They were irreligious. And the wars were waged against the religious people who were in minority and who were totally innocent. So the religion was not the cause of the war. The religion was made the object of war. The religion was made an object of cruelty. It was not perpetrator of cruelty. It is quite the other way round. So go to the sources of religion, anywhere in the world, this exactly is the situation.
Whenever a prophet comes, he does not preach war. The war is preached against him. And that war is not justified by any religion or even that time. That war has political reasons. They begin to see that a new order is going to overtake us. The old order is going to be destroyed because they see that inherent power and potential in that prophet who is going to destroy the old order and a new revolution is going to take place. So for fear of that revolution, for fear of demolishing of their own edifices of superstitions and other things through which they rule the common man, that fear is responsible. Out of that fear they wage a war in the name of religion. While their own religion does not permit them to wage a war.
So that is also out of question. When a religion is persecuted and after a certain limit and transgression, the followers of that religion are permitted to defend themselves, who can say that this is a way of committing cruelty against mankind? It is those against whom atrocities were committed, who were permitted after a very long time of patience and perseverance to fend for themselves. And when they do, when the worldly people begin to point out, look here, this is the war in the name of religion. So religion should be condemned. So if you analyze the history correctly in its true perspective, this question falls on its own. It has no strength in it.
