Modern man has achieved tremendous progress.
He conquered the nature and developed most sophisticated technologies to satisfy his needs and living in this world with utmost comfort and ease.
However together with this progress, he has used his skills and technological innovations to destroy humanity. He has become the most dangerous enemy of his own survival.
Man is failing to live in peace with the great physical and social environments that he has created working hard using his high level of intelligence. He has not succeeded in living with fellow human beings in peace with justice and does not hesitate to exploit his own brethren, particularly the weak, helpless and downtrodden.
He has no peace of mind and heart because he is only concerned in the accumulation of wealth and power for himself.
The contemporary world is full of violence, brutality and conflict between individuals, groups and nations.
A major source of violence as a wild reaction of the people who felt suppressed, subjugated, denied of their basic right of existence and forced to leave their lands, properties, privileges, the way of life and to adopt the culture and views of dominant groups.
They adopt a suicidal approach where they find it better to fight and damage the establishment that they feel does not give them a fair go.
In their mind, they are fighting an informal war without any rules for the restoration of their right and privileges.
They are weak, powerless and without adequate resources to wage conventional resistance against a much superior enemy and therefore they sacrifice themselves to cause damage and destruction of lives and properties indiscriminately without any ethical considerations.
The most perilous situation is that they justify their violent and brutal acts by taking refuge under religion and posing their violent acts as a religious duty.
They give the impression that they want to establish a religious order and replace the present system based on injustice, cruelty, suppression of weak and poor, deprivation of genuine right of existence to oppressed and repressed people.
They project that they are fighting a war against evil and vices and sacrificing themselves for a noble cause. Thus they attract recruits amongst young people with limited knowledge and practice of their religion and with poor social skills.
The misfits, the unemployed and even the criminals are hoodwinked into joining these violent groups and are made to commit atrocities against the establishment as well as innocent people who in their minds are considered as enemies.
They destroy infrastructure, kill innocent people indiscriminately, kidnap anybody and indulge in all kinds of criminal activities thinking that these wrong means justify their noble cause.
Violence against these violent people and groups breeds further violence. The result is a tsunami of violence that we call terrorism that has increased exponentially during the last 15 years.
To come out the situation it is necessary to put a stop to this violence by initiating dialogues, understand the problems of each side, safeguard human rights of all individuals, bring about justice and equity for all irrespective of religion, sect, and ethnic affiliations.
Dr Jamil Farooqui is the professor of Sociology at the International Islamic University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
We are living in very paradoxical age. Human rights, animal rights and environmental rights are becoming mainstream issues. Back in time our predecessor had no inkling of such noble rights. But in tandem with these New Age rights our world is no less violent. The violence at the mini or macro level can be pretty devastating. Today when one or more country attack another the human toll is blanketed with the euphemism – collateral damage. It is the mother of all justifications when the innocents are decimated. An unbalanced individual carrying the latest automatic firearm can mow down plenty in a moment of frenzy. Are we living the Golden Age of comparative tender care for our fellow-beings and animals or mired in the killing fields that has no parallel in our human history. Violence then was contained in particular area of military action and death was usually the result of paticipation. A deranged guy then with a knife would cause limited damage. With science and sophisticated technology moving forward we are making dramatic progress in many fields of endeavour. But along with the surge of overcoming ignorance we appear to carry the seed of violence. This act of violence has resulted in more devastating outcome in sync with our technology. Can the violence be overcome or reduced with the passage of time ? With increasing knowledge can we humans learn to live with one another, appreciate our differences and resolve our issues short of murder and mayhem? I suppose this is one of the 6 million dollars question yet to be answered.