The longish interregnum came in the 16th and 17th centuries, when Europe was busy in transforming itself – and Muslims remained backward – in Reformation, Renaissance and Industrial Revolution.

The tide once again turned on the Muslims in the 18th and the 19th century colonization of India, Malaysia and Indonesia by the English and occupation of the Muslim of central Asia in the 18th century by the Russians with the eclipse of Turkish power and the final conquest of Turkey by the Europeans in the first world war in early 20th century, resulting in severing and bifurcating the Gulf and Arab countries, until the formal return of sovereignty in the middle of the 20th century to the sub-continent in the South Asia, and to the South East Asian and Middle East Asian Muslim countries by the British and to the central Asian countries by the Russian in the last quarter of the same century.

The high tide of dominance and dispossession still continues in the 21st century by the conquest of Iraq. The Muslim countries of Iran, Libya and Syria are under the threat of unleashing of super fire power of Bush administration with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia warily cautious which could become deviants in the hands of Islamic extremists controlling these countries and might dare to stop towing the Western policy of nuclear containment. This sordid saga of the intennittent clash and conflict between Muslim and Christian civilizations, is now compounded by the West’s need for cheap and uninterrupted supply of oil and consumer markets for its manufactured products and expert services in over-populated, backward and obscurantist Muslim countries the world over. Now, China, India and South East Asia are going to excel in the ranks of rigorous and forward-looking countries but Muslims, who are one-sixth of the world’s population, will remain the only backward-looking people at least until the middle of 21st century, which it is not difficult to foresee.

There were six hundred and fifty Afghani and Pakistani Muslims belonging to the weak and insignificant countries, including nine Muslim Britons in Guantanamo Bay. The weakling countries kowtow before Americans with begging bowls. Their Muslim citizens deserve unequal and brutal treatment, which will not jeopardize the salvation of the President Bush’s born-again

Christian soul; nor can anyone dare to challenge the breach of human rights of fair trial guaranteed by the United Nations’ Charter of Human Rights. There is no international court, where individual violations by the sovereign countries can be challenged. The victims of Guantanamo Bay are confined since seven years, living in hellish conditions. They symbolize shrieking silence of the lambs, so far as the course of procedural justice is concerned.

In Guantanamo Bay, the American doctors, as spiritual and proud descendants of the Hellenic heritage, who also take Hippocratic oath of a patient’s health and welfare, examine the inhumanly
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quarantined and wretched Muslim detainees without fair trial to hypocritically keep them alive to serve as ugly and horrific examples of punishment in the servitude by way of suffering daily tortures, physical abuses, solitary confinements, alienation and restricted movements with the shackles on their feet, like horrific scenes depicted by Dante in the Christian hell.

The entire campaign of Pope Urban was based on the single theme to liberate Jeruselum from the Muslims. everyone of whom he declared was fit to be killed. He used the emotionally charged word ‘”ini del” in condemning the Muslims. The modem substitute for Muslim infidels is “terrorists”. as used by the Western media of propaganda.

Second time, nearly after a thousand years in March 2003, the Christian armies of America and Europe, as coalition occupiers, invaded Iraq, a Middle Eastern Muslim country on the pretext of terrorists occupying Iraq and for liberating Iraqi people by daily degrading and massacring them. The propaganda gloss put by President Bush, the born-again Christian and the third millennium incarnation and incubus of Pope Urban on his invasion and carnage in Iraq is that the forces of light and freedom have come to liberate Iraqi Muslims from the abysses of darkness and ignorance through the elixir of democracy. Bush, Blair and Bremer, the infamous lords of occupations, call their conquering armies, as peacekeepers and liberators and the Iraqi freedom fighters, as filthy terrorists and insurgents. The occupying forces daily incarcerate Iraqis, kill them by bombs thrown from Apache helicopters and destroy their cities, where people have risen against foreign occupation.

It is to be seen how many decades this second conflict and clash of civilizations between the powerful Christians and the weak Muslims will continue. All odds are against the Muslims and the greed of Bush, Blair and Bremer for cheap oil, consumer markets and labour is unquenchable. This is a fight between Western capitalism and Muslim obscurantism in the vicious clash of civilizations.