Download the Book - Islam and Science Fiction

On the initial part of my journey I was as fascinated as a child,
captive to the wonder and beauty of spaceflight. Earth, viewed from
the trans-orbital shuttle, is so breathtakingly beautiful and its scale is
so grand that no photograph can ever do it justice. The backdrop is
infinity. You can feel the endlessness. The stars are such sharp
pinpoints, and there are so unbelievably many of them that the senses
are overwhelmed.
The fusion transport ride to the Solar Polar Orbit Laboratory,
however, was long and boring. Once Earth faded from sight, and only
that infinite cold blackness surrounded us, I could get as much
stargazing as I needed in about five minutes a day. I had plenty of
time to read.
First, I read about Hitler. It comes as a constant surprise to
westerners that many in the world of Islam admire him. He hated
Jews, you see, and thought highly of those of Aryan stock. My own
ancestors, the Bakhtiari, trace their lineage to the most ancient of
Aryan peoples. It was with some surprise that I learned that Hitler
thought the Nordic races were the true Aryans. Although he would no
more admit this to them than he would admit to the Japanese that he
considered them an inferior race, Persians he considered Arabs, and
therefore Semites. I have always been doubtful that his treatment of
the Jews was nearly as harsh as they claim, but I was shocked to learn
that he persecuted the Gypsies as badly as the Jews claim to have
been. The Gypsies are Aryans too. They lived in Persia from around
the first century, and I probably bear their blood.
And of course, with his defeat, the remaining European Jews felt
drawn together, and drawn toward the Palestine they had long since
forsaken. Clearly, Hitler was, if not the father, certainly the uncle of
Zionism. He quickly lost his former appeal to me.
I read quickly through the passages on Hitler's practice of putting
himself on the defensive, accusing those who opposed him of
outrageous wrongs against him and his cause, justifying a call for
drastic actions in self-defense. These passages were unsettling to me,
but I didn't recognize just why.
I learned about the harnessing of hatred against minorities, of
hardening the population by repeated assertion of the rightness of
persecution. I learned that you could, by stages, condition a people to
accept first the ridicule, then the dispossession, then the banishment,
and finally the extermination of an unpopular minority. By
acquiescing, they become accomplices in the lesser wrongs, and lose
the moral authority to protest. Soon it becomes easier to accept
heinously immoral deeds by others than to accept that you yourselves
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