By Shahid Fayaz
There are sentences that rise from the ashes of our collective tragedies and declare truths that should have been evident from the beginning. “Terrorist has no religion and war has no language” is one such declaration, a phrase that breaks like thunder across the fragile sky of our present world. It carries the weight of centuries of human folly, the grief of civilizations brought to ruin, and the plea of millions who are caught in the crossfire of battles they never wished for. To speak it is not only an act of resistance but also a moral duty, for it shatters the illusions carefully built by propaganda, power, and prejudice.
Terrorism has always thrived on the illusion of belonging to some sacred order. Its architects seek to wrap violence in the cloak of faith, nationalism, or ideology. But strip the act of its justifications and what remains is simply cruelty blood spilled in marketplaces, children buried under rubble, civilians reduced to statistics. To name a terrorist by religion is to offer legitimacy to their claim of divine sanction, when in reality their violence is an exile from the very spiritual roots they pretend to uphold. No faith in the history of humankind was founded on the worship of destruction. Every thing scripture, however interpreted, speaks first of peace, of dignity, of reverence for life. When a boy man plants a bomb or holds a gun to an innocent head, he is no longer a believer of any creed; he is merely an enemy of humanity itself.
Similarly, war has no language. Language was the first miracle of civilization, the bridge that allowed us to rise above mere survival and enter the realm of imagination, memory, and dialogue. In language, we built poetry, philosophy, and the laws of justice. To drag language into war is to mutilate it, to turn it into the stammer of violence where meaning dissolves into screams. The moment bullets fly, every tongue becomes the same cry of agony, every dialect turns into the silence of death. War is a devourer of languages, swallowing stories, songs, and archives of memory in its hunger. Think of how entire libraries in Baghdad were reduced to ashes in 2003, how the voices of Aleppo’s poets were silenced under rubble, how Ukrainian lullabies now echo in underground shelters rather than in open fields. War annihilates not only the living but also the cultural and linguistic memory of peoples.
The twenty-first century promised a different world. After two world wars, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had shown the atomic face of human arrogance, after the United Nations rose as a fragile monument of hope, one would have expected humanity to choose dialogue over destruction. Instead, we are witnessing a return of old demons in new disguises. Terrorist cells lurk in shadows across continents, claiming allegiance to distorted visions of Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, or nationalism. Each time they act, media headlines rush to attach them to a religion or culture, forgetting that such labeling only strengthens the poison. A terrorist is not a Muslim, Hindu, Jew, Christian, or Sikh. He is simply a terrorist. To add faith to his identity is to betray the millions of true believers who worship in sincerity and peace.
War today also masquerades as language. Political leaders deliver eloquent speeches to justify invasions, economic sanctions, and occupations. They speak of liberation, sovereignty, or self-defense, but their words are mere veils for power struggles. The war in Ukraine, for instance, is described alternately as a defense of democracy or as resistance against Western expansionism, depending on which narrative one consumes. In Gaza, bombs rain down while leaders call it “security.” In Kashmir, in Yemen, in Sudan, in Ethiopia, language is weaponized to cloak violence, yet on the ground, the truth is simple: war leaves only widows, orphans, and ruins.
Let us not deceive ourselves: the true terror of our age is not merely in the guns of militants or the tanks of armies, but in the silent presence of the atomic bomb. The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima in 1945 was supposed to be the last warning to humanity, the apocalyptic image that would end wars forever. Yet today, nine nations hold nuclear weapons, each capable of wiping out millions in a matter of minutes. The world lives under the permanent shadow of annihilation. The nuclear threat is not bound by language, faith, or borders. If one is launched in anger, accident, or miscalculation, the chain of destruction will not stop at one religion or one nation. It will be global, blind, and merciless.
And here lies the deeper truth: terrorism and war are not external monsters. They are born from within us, from our collective failure to see humanity as one. Terrorism feeds on alienation, on poverty, on injustice, and on the indoctrination of young minds into hatred. War feeds on greed, on the arrogance of power, on the myth that violence can secure peace. To call terrorism religious or to give war a patriotic language is to betray ourselves. It is to allow division to define what should be universal.
History provides us with countless reminders. During the Crusades, both Christians and Muslims claimed God was on their side, yet rivers of blood flowed through Jerusalem. In Europe, Catholic and Protestant armies once slaughtered each other in the name of truth, though both prayed to the same Christ. Colonial wars were justified by the language of “civilization,” though they left continents scarred with famine and subjugation. In the twentieth century, the Nazis wrapped genocide in the language of nationalism and purity, leaving behind the silence of six million murdered Jews. In each case, religion, language, and ideology were manipulated to disguise what was essentially human cruelty and ambition.
In our times, we cannot afford to repeat such blindness. When an extremist plants a bomb in a mosque, when a drone strike kills children in a village, when an army demolishes homes in occupied territories, these acts are not the voices of religion or the tongues of justice. They are eruptions of our collective failure to protect life. The victims do not cry in Arabic or Hebrew, in Russian or Ukrainian, in Kashmiri or Sudanese. Their cries transcend language. A mother clutching her dead child speaks a language older than civilization itself: the language of the grief.
It is therefore the task of our generation to build a new vocabulary, one that refuses to attach faith to terror and refuses to cloak war in the garments of language. This vocabulary must rise from a deep recognition of our shared fragility. The world is too interconnected, too interdependent to allow the old divisions to dictate our survival. Climate change, pandemics, economic collapses, these are challenges that demand cooperation across borders. How absurd it is, then, that we still pour billions into weapons while millions starve.
The scholar in me cannot ignore the irony that while literature, philosophy, and science have reached unimaginable heights, our politics remains trapped in primitive instincts. Dan Brown, in his fictional worlds, often shows how secret societies manipulate fear for power. Arundhati Roy, in her searing essays, reminds us that democracy without justice becomes another form of tyranny. Between the imagination of Brown and the fierce clarity of Roy lies the truth of our world today: power thrives by dividing us, by attaching violence to faith, by giving war a language. It is up to us to strip away these illusions.
We must remember: religion at its heart is an attempt to touch the infinite, to connect with the sacred. To equate it with terrorism is to slander it. Language at its heart is an attempt to connect human to human. To equate it with war is to murder it. Terrorism and war are aberrations, not identities. They are interruptions in the human story, not its essence. The essence of humanity is creation, not destruction.
The nuclear age has made this truth urgent. One misstep, one reckless leader, one miscalculation could erase centuries of progress. Einstein once warned that World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones. The haunting possibility is that he may be right.
And so, to say “terrorist has no religion and war has no language” is not merely to utter a poetic phrase. It is to reclaim the integrity of words, to defend the dignity of faith, to protect the sacredness of language, and to remind ourselves of the abyss we stand upon. It is to assert that the identity of the terrorist is only terror, that the identity of war is only silence. Beyond that, there is nothing.
The choice before us is stark. Either we continue to label terrorism with religion, continue to cloak war in rhetoric, and march blindly toward nuclear catastrophe or we learn, at last, to see humanity as one. History will not forgive us if we choose the former. Future generations will inherit only ruins, poisoned waters, and the ghost of languages once spoken. But if we choose the latter, if we strip terror of its false cloaks and silence the rhetoric of war, perhaps we can still build a future where religion returns to its essence of peace, and language returns to its essence of connection.
This is the call of our age: to speak the truth without distortion, to resist the manipulation of faith and words, and to protect humanity from its own destructive genius. Terrorists have no religion. Wars have no language. The sooner we accept this, the sooner we may find a path not only to survival but to a future worthy of our highest dreams.
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