Making a Friend out of an Enemy

The Advent of the Age of Peace as a single family. Living in harmony is no longer simply an ethical principle. Rather, it is a way of life, the veracity of which has been proved through scientific studies. In the present age, the scientific community has abandoned several ancient theories. For example, the heliocentric theory has replaced the old geocentric theory. The same approach is applicable to war and peace. The demands of a realistic assessment of current affairs and scientific thinking should make people give up violence and adopt the peaceful method as their only possible course of action. The fact of common ancestry has forever done away with the equation of ‘we and they’. Now the only valid equation is one that is based on the concept of ‘we and we’. To initiate war, therefore, is like waging war against one’s own family members rather than against any outside group. War is now the act of a pre-civilized age and not of modern civilization. This universal fact is set forth thus in the Quran: ‘…whoever killed a human being—except as a punishment for murder or for spreading corruption in the land—shall be regarded as having killed all mankind, and that whoever saved a human life shall be regarded as having saved all mankind.’ (5:32) War has only one serious upshot: the killing of others. War is, in effect, an act of mass murder. In this sense war is the worst kind of heinous crime. In other words, war means