Terrorism is the unconventional use of violence for political gain. In legalese, it is a strategy of using coordinated attacks that fall outside the laws of war commonly understood to represent the bounds of conventional warfare. 

Before the advent of modern democracy and the end of monarchy as system of governance, one could safely say that what we refer to as terrorism today, was the norm. If a group wished to change a dynasty or remove a theocratic order, and sometimes these two were one and the same, the only, and I repeat, THE ONLY means available to effect such change were the tools of terror and violence.  

This applied to whole world, perhaps with the exception of the North American First Nations where the tradition of the long house and matriarchal societies were the norm. Otherwise, Europe, Asia and Africa; Hindu, Muslim or Christian societies lived through violent times filled with terror every time political or religious change was made. 

However, this being a predominantly Muslim audience, please allow me to focus on Muslim societies. Our religious and political history is sprinkled with terrorism as a means of achieving power. The manifestations of terrorist activity to effect change are in fact part of our collective heritage, going back to the assassinations of our earliest Khalifas, the one we refer to as our Khulfa Rashidoon and the era that we idolize as the Golden period of Islam. 

The murder of Ali Ibn Abu Talib by the Islamic fundamentalists of that time, the Kharijites, done outside the realm of regular warfare, is in my opinion one of the most glaring examples of terrorism. 

And the slaughter in Karbala of the Prophet’s progeny was not simply to settle a religious dispute, but to settle once and for all the political claims and counter claims of the bani Umayyad and the bani Hashem. The scars left by that act of terrorism have not yet healed the body politic of Islam to this day, and may stay with us for times immemorial. 

Closer to home, as most of us are South Asians; we sometimes fail to recognize how terrorism shaped our history in the sub continent. Whether it was the terrorism inflicted by Mahmud of Ghazni on the Hindus of Gujarat and Sindh or the reign of terror by Aurangzeb who murdered his elder brother Dara Shikoh to capture power, the lives ordinary people and their religion was shaped dramatically by the power struggles and the terrorism that was used to effect change. 

Elsewhere, in Egypt, a predominantly Shia country in the 11^th century, home to the Fatimide dynasty and the Shia school of learning, Al Azhar, in a matter of one generation shifted to Sunni Islam and today ,not a trace of shiaism can be found there. How did this happen? A Kurdish Sunni gentleman by the name of Salahuddin Ayubi, long before his triumph over the Crusaders, wiped out the Fatimides in an act of terrorism on fellow Muslims that today would create howls of horror. The Fatimides or the fatimaeen, were chased from city to city, ended up in Yemen and guess where they found refuge? India. 

Today, there remnants are the Ismailis and the Dawoodi Bohras; sects of Islam, so traumatized by terror, that they are unique in there lack of ambition to dominate the Muslim narrative. 

If the Sunni terrorism changed Shia Egypt, wait till you hear what the Safavids did to Sunni Persia? Within a hundred years, the people of Iran had gone from a Sunni majority nation to an almost 100% Shia country. 

I give these as examples to show that acts of terrorism not only changed political power, but also the religion of people, en masse. 

Now it was not just Muslims who were involved in these acts of terrorism. Right up to the 18^th century, all power shifts, irrespective of religion, were conducted by warfare, killings, assassinations and the ingredients that make up terrorism today. 

The moment early Christianity wrapped its cloak around The Roman Empire, the religion of the people of the empire changed with it. The pagan religions of Europe only exist in mythology today and nowhere do people talk about Zeus as if he was a real God. 

Because terrorism was the norm, it was what the people accepted as part of their lives. In fact literature of the times does not talk of terrorism at all. The bloodbaths of Baghdad by the Mongols, the slaughter in Jerusalem by the crusaders, the sacking of Muslim Delhi by Nadir Shah from Iran or Abdali from Afghanistan, were accepted as mere spikes in the violence that governed political change and our daily lives. 

Right up to the end of the 18^th century and the dawn of the age of reason and revolution in Europe, terrorism was the accepted instrument of power. Both, political and religious, which were most times, one and the same, rarely different. 

However, by the end of the 18^th century Europe and North America take their first steps towards democracy; a system of governance that bypassed most of Africa and Asia until recently. 

The American Revolution and later the French revolution brought to an end to the concept of royal dynasties. One ended the rule of the British King in the new US while in the other; a bloodier one, the French revolution put an end to the monarchy in Paris. 

What had been the norm for thousands of years came to an end in these two countries. No more could single families’ rule on the basis of lineage; no more did competing families vie for power by hoping to kill the ruler and impose a new order of nobility. The early concept of republican democracy had been born. 

The fact that the death of monarchist rule and the development of early capitalism go hand in hand, but would require a separate talk on its own. 

In fact, the term Terrorism dates from the Reign of Terror (1793-94) in the French Revolution but has taken on additional meaning in the 20th century.  

Contemporary Terrorism involves activities such as assassinations, bombings, random killings, and hijackings. Used for political, not military, purposes, and most typically by groups too weak to mount open assaults, it is a modern tool of the alienated, and its psychological impact on the public has increased because of extensive coverage by the media. 

Of course, state terrorism inflicted by democratic countries on occupied nations, be it in Palsetine, Kashmir, Chechnya or the Western Sahara and Kurdistan, is the other manifestations of unbridled power where the victims cannot effect democratic change in the occupying country’s leadership. They, then respond with their own form of terrorism. The point being that both forms of terrorism do not find acceptance as the normative. 

According to definition of terrorism typically used by states, academics, counter-terrorism experts, and non-governmental organizations, "terrorists" are actors who don't belong to any recognized armed forces, or who don't adhere to their rules, and who are therefore regarded as "rogue actors". 

This has now involved the use of private armies employed by states to inflict terror without having to account for it. 

Because of the above pejorative connotations, those accused of being "terrorists" rarely identify themselves as such, and instead typically use terms that reference their ideological or ethnic struggle, such as: separatist, freedom fighter, liberator, militant, paramilitary, guerrilla, rebel, Jihadi and Mujahideen or fedayeen . 

Despite the democratic changes of the later 18^th century in Europe, terrorism continued to be the tool for political change or the demand for political change right up to the early 20^th century.  

Whether it was Lenin’s brother trying to blow up the Czar’s train in 1905 or the numerous insurrection throughout Europe following or preceding the publishing of the Communist manifesto 150 years ago, terrorism became a tool of the working class and their political parties who witnessed the life of Oliver Twist not through the pages of a Dickens novel, but as reality where capitalism destroyed lives while democracy failed to deliver the correction. 

Chairman Mao had not yet uttered the words, “power flows through the barrel of a gun,” but the working poor, anarchists and other revolutionaries in cities across Europe, had started localized revolts. These cities, while flourishing with profits from the colonized Asia and Africa, had become breeding grounds for revolutions with the millions of deprived citizens, living amidst the massive wealth being generated by the ruling classes from their control of Asia and Africa. The most famous of these revolts was the failed Paris Commune. 

Then came the event that the American journalist John Reed would label as "10 Days that shook the World." It was the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the ultimate triumph of a people rebelling against an established order and channeling the use of terrorism towards a single-minded goal of destroying the ruling monarchy. Today, the Bolshevik revolution, its causes and its effects, are being erased from our collective consciousness and history, as if it never happened. 

However, I suggest we are on the threshold of another convulsion; this time Albert Rhy Williams may have to write, 10 minutes that destroyed the world. 

Today, terrorism is again rising to challenge the established order, except this time it is not a terrorism that aims at power or has an agenda to improve, or at least pretend to improve the lives of people on earth. This new terror is a monster that was created by the CIA to fight communism, but has turned on it very creator; the USA. 

This terrorism and its political wing, more like the IRA and Sinn Fein, are not in this for their own power, but to supposedly bring God’s law on earth and to prepare for the Armageddon. 

Be it the Christian Right in the US or the Islamic Right in the form of Al-Qaeda, the Saudi funded salafis or the Iranian ayatollahs, both are racing towards each other headlong in what Tariq Ali refers to as the Clash of Fundamentalisms. 

In this clash, religion itself is the primary weapon of choice and consequences for all of us quite frightening. 

Sam Harris is an author who has written a book, The End of Faith, a deeply critical analysis of the role of religion in contemporary society. In the book Sam Harris pleads for an age of reason that will render religious faith as archaic as the worship of Odin or Zeus. He says religious myths must die if we are to survive as a species 

Now this may alarm many of us but Harris argues that without the taking out of religion from the public domain, we are headed of a catastrophe.  

While Marx, the 19th-century political philosopher derided religion as the "opium of the people," Sam Harris, says organized faith is more like crack cocaine, and its fruits every bit as ruinous. And we must quit the pipe, cold turkey, before it's too late. 

Sam Harris may have taken an extreme view, but what he articulates fiercely and fearlessly is what more and more people are thinking, but few are willing to say in polite company, which, in the words of a respected writer on the Toronto Star’s Religion page, is that “religious faith is not only blind, but deaf, mute, absurd, irrational, and threatens our very existence.” 

Harris lists about two dozen violent conflicts around the world, which pit one religion against another. On the Indian subcontinent, for example, more than 1 million Muslims and Hindus have died in three official wars and continuous bloodletting between India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers. 

While religious pluralists - in these cases as in other hot spots - may cite failed diplomacy, "in truth," writes Harris, "the entire conflict is born of an irrational embrace of myth." These are just two countries poised to exterminate each other "because they disagree about the `facts' that are every bit as fanciful as the names of Santa's reindeer." 

In the last year, because of the defeat of the Hindu nationalists in New Delhi and because of the desire of General Musharraf to live longer than Islamists would want him to, the temperature between the two countries has cooled. However, the myths of Muslims and Hindus persist about each other. The classic example of such myths are the denial of by many South Asian Muslims of their Indian origin, claiming instead to be of Arab, Persian or Turkic origin, and the denial by Hindu fundamentalists of the Indianness of Islam. Both myths feed on each other the way Bush and Bin Laden do so well. 

While talking of religion and terrorism, one should not forget the million who died in Rwanda in 1994, in less than a month of bloodletting, goaded on by Catholic Nuns while other religious groups looked the other way. Not to speak of the Jewish Holocaust when six million were killed while the Catholic Church stood silent. 

Myths die hard, Harris realizes, but he says die they must if we are to survive as a species. If not, and as long as it is acceptable for someone to believe that he knows how God wants everyone on Earth to live, "we will continue to murder one another on account of our myths," he adds. 

He calls his book "an argument for intellectual honesty. It's only on matters of religion that we allow people to pretend to be certain of things they are not certain about." 

The book delivers a hammer blow to fundamentalists of all stripes, but also to moderates. Religious moderation, Harris argues, betrays both faith and reason equally. Moderates are, in large part, responsible for religious strife "because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed" - all thanks to the sacredness in which we hold tolerance. 

"We need to be more intolerant across the board," he offers. "One of the taboos I'm breaking in my book - and it's more of a taboo among moderates than fundamentalists - is noticing the differences among religions. We have this multicultural, politically correct notion that there's no place to stand where you can rigorously criticize another person's faith." 

While Harris doesn't deny that religions carry a large moral component, he believes one does not have to be religious in order to be moral. "I don't think everyday morality requires any irrationality. The morality of societies that are far more atheistic than my own attest to this." 

So, in the words of Lenin, who remarkably put into practice the Karl Marx’s call to arms, “What is to be Done” 

In my opinion, if we don’t guarantee social justice, if we can’t ensure individual liberties, if are incapable of instituting liberalism and democracy, if we cannot accept universal human rights as fundamental to any laws, we are in for unending terrorism, both at the state level as well as at hands of religious extremists. 

The fight to combat terrorism cannot take place without the separation of religion and state. As long as people demand that citizenship be based on inherited religion or inherited race, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and yes, even Buddhists, will glorify violence in the name of the creator and subjugate religious and racial minorities at will. 

The end of terrorism is possible, but it will take a lot of people a long time to convince a lot of other people that there are no chosen people on earth; that racial and religious superiority is an insult to human intellect and reason. 

This requires just not good intentions or one-to-one education and such seminars, but direct involvement in political parties and groups involved in extra-parliamentary opposition. Without political organizing and getting down and dirty to campaign against US led imperialism on one hand, and Islamofascism emanating from Saudi Arabia and Iran, on the other, efforts to combat terrorism will not succeed. 

Any effort to address only one aspect of the equation must and should be viewed with suspicion. Those attacking US imperialism, while staying silent on the threat posed to civil society by the followers of Khomeini and Bin Laden, need to be confronted and exposed. 

Similarly, people who blindly follow the counterparts of the Islamofascists, the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfields of this world who claim to be waging the so-called “War on Terrorism”, should be exposed. They are not fighting a “War on Terrorism”, they ARE the instruments through which terrorism is being inflicted on the rest of the world. It is they who gave us Bin Laden and his bunch of goons.  

In Tariq Ali’s words, this is a clash of fundamentalisms, and without a double critique of the two sides inflicting terrorism, we are bound to fail in our fight to combat terrorism. 

But, before the first step is taken, we will have to answer the painfully tough questions Sam Harris asks. Among them, why have we given up on Zeus and Odin if we continue to believe in God or Allah? And whoever we believe in, why does this creator, the almighty and all-powerful, allows us through his divine texts to kill in his name? 

In conclusion, I urge you ladies and gentlemen to organize politically, not in NGOs, but with community groups and inside political parties and raise your voice against the rhetoric coming from Bush and Bin Laden. To do otherwise, would be inexcusable.