There is a strong all round desire to learn about what is going on and why has the Islamic world become so restive that many Muslims are now turning to suicidal missions? Blaming the Muslim radicals goes without saying, but it is also frightening that the overwhelming influence of the neo cons in the American political culture is writing the script for the so-called 'war on terrorism', the euphemism for war against Islam. Few, however, appreciate that the strings of the neo cons are in the hands of a greatly resurgent community of the Evangelicals. These religious fundamentalists, numbering more than 55 million in the U.S. population of 285 millions, are increasingly becoming a force to content with. Their faith-based agenda has stirred international peace.
The Tension Between the West and Islam sets the power of Evagelicals in the U.S. and unravels the role of the United States in historical context and religious and economic perspective.
The earliest, seventeenth century, settlers who came to the New World from Europe called themselves the pilgrims. Those Puritans wished to put down their roots in the new land to build a new religious centre in order to propagate their new Protestant faith from a new commonwealth. It was, for all intents and purposes, a religious migration; democracy, of American type, grew only as an incidental by-product.
The Puritan faith soon took an esoteric complexion, different from the Christian beliefs practiced over the centuries. A cardinal belief of this new trinity propagated the return of Christ only if the Israelites controlled the Holy Land of Palestine, the land Prophet Abraham had migrated to in order to preach his gospel of a Unitarian God.
The neo cons charting and driving the Bush policy of neo imperialism are helping the Evangelicals to realize their centuries-old dream of the 'Second Coming of Christ' by allowing Israel a free hand to overpower or terrorise the hapless Palestinians.
Perhaps the greatest irony in the history of Prophets is the irony of Jesus of Nazareth. He was a messemger of peace, pacifism and an embodiment of compassion, mercy and love but his medieval followers made his cause a reason for waging wars and perpetrating violence because they mistakenly believed that wars in Jesus' cause were a holy duty of Christians. Such mistaken followers of Jesus have since been pursuing deadly and destructive wars without realizing that war and violence either in retaliation for Jesus' cause or for the sake of his Second Coming is against the very grain of his message or the spirit of his doctrine.
Islamic fundamentalism has become a grave concern for the world, but the Tension Between the West and Islam presents a gripping account of how Evangelical fundamentalism is rising from the American horizon and unleashing a new Crusade of war and violence for the sake of Jesus' Second Coming. It is now crucial for Christians to inquire how the notion of war infiltrated into the religion of peace-loving Jesus. Has the interpretation of Jesus' Second Coming any scriptural foundation or was it a political move designed to change the course of history by making it contingent upon the return of the Jews to Palestine? The Tension Between the West and Islam delves deeper into a wide arraye of questions to comprehend the background of the current wars and violence.