Even the fans are off but load shedding is still here. Soon, we will have gas shedding and other forms of shedding. That is the way it is. It is also the fifth of November as I write this. I have, for as long as I can remember, remembered the opening lines of the rhyme about Guy Fawkes Day. Could it be that the Guy Fawkes Day song seems to have been stuck in my mind for too many years because I spent the first few years of my education in Lahore in the Convent of Jesus and Mary (CJM)? Before my readers get too perturbed about that, in the remote past, CJM was a co-educational institute till KG 3. The reason why I bring this up is that the Guy Fawkes song, being anti-papist, could not have been sung too often in the convent. My next school, though named after a Catholic saint, was run by non-catholic types so, in all likelihood, that is where I picked it up and that also in my reading of English history. The Guy Fawkes affair was what we in Pakistan today would call an attempted act of sectarian terrorism. Yes, sectarian. It was an attempt by a Catholic to kill in the name of religion a bunch of Protestants, including the king. So, when our friends in the west lecture us about sectarianism in Islam they conveniently seem to forget their own past. Christians and Christianity have gone through sectarian wars and through their own cycle of religious violence that lasted for quite a few centuries. That of course does not excuse our own sectarian conflicts in this day and age. If we in the Muslim world are guilty of anything it is our excessive religiosity. Whether that is by itself a bad thing is debatable. If there is anything that makes religious zeal dangerous it is the addition of ignorance and politics to the mix that makes it quite flammable. Poverty is often blamed for acts of religious violence but we must remember that the poor have no time for religious excess; they are too busy etching out a mere living. The question people go around asking within Pakistan and from people like us abroad is whether Muslims will ever get out of the cycles of religious violence that we are caught up in these days. The obvious answer is that indeed we will but it will take some time. But, first, outsiders will have to leave Muslims alone. Let them fight it out and when they have reached the end point where violence starts to feed upon their own countries, like it is starting to happen in the Middle East, then eventually many of them, out of necessity, will want peace. After all, it was the sectarian Thirty Years’ War fought in Europe between the Catholics and the Protestant ‘powers’ along with other internecine wars that also revolved around religious conflicts, eventually leading to the Peace of Westphalia around 1648. This peace established the concept of national sovereignty and religious freedom, and that sectarian differences were not going to be the basis of international conflicts. I am sort of abbreviating the whole process but after Europe stopped fighting within its boundaries, within a few decades Europeans, including the British after they had settled their own sectarian conflicts, spread out to conquer much of the world. In the 17th century, Europe was primarily facing the Ottoman Empire on its east and south. The siege of Vienna in 1683 was the turning point of the Ottoman’s long fight primarily against the Roman Empire in Europe. Interestingly, around that time, two other major empires in Asia besides the Ottomans included the Safavids in Persia and the Mughals in India. By the middle of the 18th century, the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals were all in a state of decline while European Christian powers were ascendant. These Muslim empires started to wane allowing Europeans to win back much of Ottoman Europe and gain a foothold in India. None of the European conquests could have happened without the Europeans making peace among themselves first. However, the self-perpetuated internal decay in the Muslim Empires facilitated European successes. One way of looking at what is happening in the Middle East at this time is that ‘foreign interests’ are trying to make sure that Muslim countries do not make peace with each other in the westphalian style and then embark upon external domination. But things are different today. Europe, Russia, the US and UK are all major economic and military powers that cannot be overcome by Middle Eastern Muslim nations individually or as a group even if they all make peace with each other. Though 400 years ago it must have been difficult for the Europeans to imagine that they could one day conquer parts or all of the Ottoman, Safavid or the Mughal empires. It is unlikely that there exists a grand conspiracy between all these existing world powers to keep the Muslims in a state of turmoil. What the Bilderberg Group is up to is however worth wondering about. If Muslims can educate their people and remove politics from religion then much of the sectarian conflicts we see both internally as well as among different Muslim countries will start to abate. The first step, however, is to take politics out of religion. Sadly, that is not going to happen over a short period of time. It took Christian Europe close to a century of intermittent wars before it got to that point. From the perspective of time, the Middle East has been in a state of flux and minor proxy wars for close to half a century so perhaps in a couple of decades things might get better. But, as the old saying goes, things will probably get a lot worse before they get any better. The author is a former editor of the Journal of Association of Pakistani descent Physicians of North America (APPNA)