FICTION

Today, the imam of the Albanian mosque in Bern, presbyter Imam Mustafa Mehmeti, visited my hospital room. This imam is an erudite figure, polyglot, and author of about twenty very significant books. His books have caused great resonance among readers. He has very solid relations with all Catholic, Protestant/Evangelical, Orthodox, and Baptist churches. This means he works a lot in the field of dialogue, harmony, tolerance, and interreligious ecumenism. At the same time, he is an extremely tolerant person and opposes radical and fundamentalist Muslim groups and movements. In this regard, he published his book “Islamic Fundamentalism as Fiction and the Anti-Fundamentalist Muslims,” which caused a great stir among public opinion and academic critics. This book was declared a unique work in academic theological circles in Kosovo and Macedonia.

— Welcome, honorable Imam!

— Nice to see you, dear Qëndresa! How are you feeling health-wise now?

— I am still worse now, unfortunately!

— I pray to the Merciful God to help you until full rehabilitation!

— So be it, honorable Imam!

— Qëndresa, you must stay strong and face all illnesses, sufferings, and hardships with dignity! Under no circumstances, at any price, give up in the face of life’s storms and fortunes!

— I am trying, Imam, but in vain; no positive change in me. I am so despairing about my life’s fate…

— Qëndresa, you must stay continuously connected with God and regularly turn to Him with prayers. Pray again for your physical and psycho-mental health and well-being! I will surely pray with all my heart for your health!

— Hoxhë, you know I am a stubborn atheist and have no connection with God. Moreover, I hate all religions. Religions have brought us no benefit except bloodshed, hatred, division, wars, and conflicts between peoples, cultures, and civilizations. Millions of people worldwide died cruelly because of religious hatreds among people and nations.

— Qëndresa, Islam and Christianity preach and promote love and peace among people, nations, cultures, and civilizations. We are all products of divine love, and this love should be conveyed to family, relatives, neighbors, and societies wherever we live and work around the world.

— Imam, happiness, peace, and universal human progress are products of the Renaissance, individualism, humanism, and the rapid and massive progress of science, modern technology, and philosophy. Meanwhile, religions are catalysts of regression, decadence, primitivism, and backwardness. Europe and the West moved forward when they abandoned religions and constitutionally declared secularity and laicism in governance…

— Dear Qëndresa, Islam preaches the universalism of all human values and harshly condemns radical and fundamentalist trends and movements. The vast majority of over a billion Muslims worldwide are tolerant, universal, and constructive and accept and respect the laws of the countries where they live and act. The radical and fundamentalist groups and movements are, fortunately, a minority. The tragedy is that these are very noisy and very present in social networks and media with their infantile, illogical, and paradoxical preachings. Furthermore, they are sponsored by powerful economic circles from the East, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, and Kuwait.

— Honorable Imam, precisely the “fundamentalists” of all origins, all types, and all colors: frustrated religious kamikazes, masked criminals, mafiosi, satanists, religious hedonists, antichrists, cannibals, pedophiles, environmental polluters, modern pharaohs (dictators) with their atomic-nuclear weapons that wipe out entire human lives from the face of the earth, simply all these heinous criminals have united in a common devilish and misanthropic mission (iblisian-satanic or luciferian) to desecrate and destroy the work of God: man and the universe.

For them (the fundamentalists, that is), man, as the most sublime and superior work of God, is just a statistical, mathematical “number,” a “laboratory mouse” or “experimental species.”

The alarm is already sounding. We must be careful and vigilant! The situation is extremely urgent! We have no time to wait: either we stop and eliminate these atrocities, these evils from our universe, or very soon the great catastrophe that has already begun will overwhelm us, leading to the “final moment,” the “day of absolute judgment,” the “resurrection,” the “destruction of the entire universe,” namely the “day of judgment,” or the “apocalypse.”

— Qëndresa, all absurd and inhuman acts of a fundamentalist are unacceptable and intolerable to all those Muslims who are wise and base their faith and complete theory and practice of their religion exclusively on the authentic foundations of their holy book—the Quran—and the prophetic tradition—the Sunnah of Muhammad, peace be upon him. This is just like a true and wise Christian who does not accept all those devilish acts committed in the name of Christianity, in the name of Jesus and the Bible. For example, a true Catholic or Christian, who bases his faith exclusively on the authentic foundations of the teachings of Jesus and their holy book—the Bible—does not agree at all with the distorted phenomena, so to speak, of the Christian world: “the Crusades,” “Saint Bartholomew,” the Inquisition, the Holocaust-Auschwitz, anti-Semitism, Nazism, the First and Second World Wars, in which hundreds of thousands were killed and equally many were exiled in all corners of the globe, etc.; or with those terrorist organizations that emerged in the 1970s and 80s in some democratic countries such as, for example: the Red Brigades in Italy, the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Ireland, the Japanese Red Army in Japan, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in West Germany, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) in Spain, etc.

Yes, yes! The more I deepen myself in reading and meditating on the Qur’an, on God, the more powerfully I understand and love God, the prophets, myself, people, and the entire world; this means I am more anti-fundamentalist.

Therefore, several times in this essay of mine, I have loudly and proudly (without “pardon”) emphasized my religious affiliation as a Muslim, simply because I refuse to be put “in the same basket” or even “in the same grave” with the crazy fundamentalists of the jihadist Bin Laden type, and, finally (in the epilogue), I do not share their pathological religious spirit, nor their identification card (ID), nor their blood group, nor the identifying lines of their fingerprints, nor even the same genetic DNA code that God has determined for me.

And these characteristics are not shared by over a billion other Muslims worldwide either.

Therefore, a snobbish Muslim should not suffer from this complex in front of European citizens, because Abraham (Ibrahim), Jesus (Isa), Moses (Musa), and Muhammad were neither of the Aryan race nor Nordic or Celtic; they did not have blue eyes, nor could they be European-American. Ultimately, it theologically does not matter what racial, ethnic, or geographical affiliation they had. In fact, they were prominent universal and planetary figures whose divine messages today radiate to all four corners of the globe, to all human communities and cultures.”

— Imam, now we are entering a new era, the 21st century, and it is our responsibility to respect each other and work together for the good of all.

Let us read once again the German poet, writer, and philosopher of world renown Wolfgang Goethe from his West-Eastern Divan:

“He who knows himself and others,

Still here will also recognize:

The Orient and the Occident

Are no longer to be separated.

The Orient belongs to God!

The Occident belongs to God!

The space of the North and the South

Rest in peace in His hands!”

….

(Translation from ALBANIAN by Valentina Korçari Muka)

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