Download the Book - Islam and Science Fiction

contents of Jamil's office. Most of the bulky books were being
discarded, replaced with more efficient crystals, but certain key books
were being taken, and I was not surprised to see which ones. I was
able to set aside the leather-bound book that had caught my attention
years earlier, so that I could read through it before it was noticed
missing.
The book turned out to be several in one. The first was a guide to
psychology, which I simply skimmed through. It outlined training
tactics, with which I was intimately familiar, and the reasoning behind
them. The study I had read earlier was correct: the primary focus of
our training was to instill in us the feeling that our victims were
subhuman.
Easy enough to instill. They were subhuman.
Rip.
The second was a treatise on the political strategy of our
organization. The tactics were complex, but an underlying theme ran
consistently through it: the radical nature of the organization tended
to make it small and weak. By instilling hatred against the Muslim
community as a whole, they would be driven into our folds by our
enemies.
Rip. Pop.
The third section, at first glance, looked like the Koran. It was a
copy of a handwritten text, in the fine script of a religious scholar.
The author claimed to be the Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam, returned from
centuries of occultation to show us a new Path. The work was in
Arabic, and the idiomatic verses had a vague similarity to the Koran.
But the Koran, in the original Arabic, has a transcendental beauty
beyond man's power to mimic. The verses of this new text were dark
and chilling, all about Gehenna and eternal damnation, of Satan and
the fate of unbelievers. It said that against such overwhelming evil as
existed in the world today, all tactics were valid. The message was
simple and straightforward: all but the true believers must die.
And every sura began "In the name of God, the Vengeful and
All-Powerful."
For just an instant, I realized that I was among monsters, and that
I had become one of them.
The dam burst. The collection of vile poisons festering beneath
that bulging carpet poured out, mingling with the new. I could not
think, quite literally. What sort of mind can look upon well over three
hundred innocent victims, a lifetime of denial of plain facts, a set of
values so totally at odds with what noble goals that mind claims to
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