As a Muslim, you just grow up hating Jews. As soon as you start understanding things, you are brainwashed with how the Jews of Medina had insulted and fought with our beloved prophet. This starts at an early age when Muslim kids haven't grown old enough to know how to question. So, they never get to know the details. They just grow up with that hatred of the Jews ingrained in their heart and mind.

Although I personally grew up a believing Muslim with engaging myself nominally with the rituals and scriptures (which was the case with more than eighty percent of the young people during that time), I also grew up with that hatred against the Jews without ever meeting one, nor knowing the details of the circumstances that had lead to the conflict between the Jews and our Prophet. For the first time, however, I raised the question of why Muslims have to hate the Jews when I was a third-year undergraduate student, while discussing about some event that took place in Israel/Palestine with a few friends (more religious and knowledgeable in Islam). The answer I got was that the Jews fought and insulted the prophet and Allah says in the Koran that Jews are a cursed people who will never find a abode to live in peace (my recent investigation into Islam finds it absolutely true). That was a good enough a reason - when Allah (the Creator) has said so, it does not require any further questioning and explanation. I didn't question it for another 15 years until the following experience that changed my life significantly.

Before I paid a visit to Bangladesh in early 2002, a few months after the parliamentary election, I was already saddened with what had happened to the Hindu minorities in the post election days. The Jamat-e-Islami aligned nationalist coalition, lead by Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which had trounced the Islamo-secularist incumbent Awamy League Govt., went on a rampage against the people aligned with the defeated party. The ever insecure Hindu community which traditionally votes for the secular parties had to bear brunt of this horrendous campaign most. Rapes (including gang-rapes), torture and humiliation (with incidence of striping and parading the Hindu women around the village) became widespread according to media reports. One investigative report by the most popular English newspaper, Daily Star, had cited they had interviewed nearly 1000 Hindu women and girls being raped and gang-raped in a single district. The age of the victims ranged from an 8 year-old minor to a 72 year-old grandmother.

When I arrived home, I had more to learn about. I learned how activists of the defeated party, even of the Muslim background, spent months in terror. Some of them, who did not have tribal muscle-power and got caught, were paraded around the locality with garland of shoes round their neck. A subsequent media outcry and international condemnations forced the government to crackdown on such violence and violations, after the barrage of defiant denials in the initial weeks.

This left a lasting mark on my mind which probably changed me forever. Instituting a government based on the Islamic ideals is the vision of the Jamat-i-Islami party. BNP is the slightly moderate Islamo-nationalist party, whose founding father changed the constitution of Bangladesh from secular (instituted by the founding father of defeated Awamy League in the 1970s) to an Islamist one in the 1980s. These two parties combined represent the Islamic face of Bangladesh. All these flagrant violations of human dignity and rights happened under their stewardship and patronage. Whether real Islam had anything to do with it or not; what struck me most is that so long as there are divisions between people, like Hindu-Muslim barriers, such things will continue to happen. Nothing is worth this, whatsoever the true Islam may represent.

Earlier, I knew how the Hindus had to move out of East Bengal and later Bangladesh in tens of millions to India because of the treatment they got at the hands of the majority Muslims. I myself had the experience of foiling a bid to kidnap a Hindu classmate (girl) to force her into marry a Muslim thug (who had dropped out of my class a few years earlier). I played a crucial role in foiling the bid by alerting the girl and her family and helping them escape to India. I considered my effort in this incident a great gesture of kindness to my classmate, without realizing for a long time how much distress and pain the whole thing might had have caused to the victim, who had to abandon their ancestral homes of centuries forever.

Although my outlook on life took a humanistic turn after this, never did I leave the fear of being burned by Allah in the fire of hell. I still thought there was probably something very worthwhile in Islam. Else why would so many people believe in it? Why were so many people converting to Islam? Why is it the fastest growing religion? And why are so many Westerners, including some famous ones like Cat Steven, also converting to Islam? But what ensued in the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) meeting in Kuala Lumpur in March 2003 changed my life once and for all.

Mahathir Muhammad was my greatest Islamic leader, whom I used to see as a model for the Muslim world's movement towards moderation, prosperity and development. Never did I realize that there is so much Islamic poison in the mind of this leader who is highly acclaimed in both East and the West. I was so disappointed with his OIC speech that I wrote a critique of it which was eventually picked by a professor from Rutgers University for a book (bookBeyond Jihad - Critical Voices From Inside Islam) she was planning on political Islam. However, that Mahathir speech definitely changed my life and perspective of the world forever. I became much more sympathetic to the people of other religions (including the Jews) than I was before, which they definitely deserve, not less if not more. The terrible treatments doled out to the Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and Jews etc. in any Muslim-dominated country in the world on a daily basis even today would easily justify my sympathetic views of them by any standard of logic.

This also marked the commencement of my journey of finding out what is there in Islam that can fill the mind of 1.4 billion Muslims with such poisonous and cruel thoughts and utter degree of irrationality as reflected in Mahathir's speech. After studying Islam (Koran & prophet's biographies) to a great extent, what I found out now is that it all comes from the Koran and life of the prophet Muhammad and that the prejudices they perpetuate towards the Jews are totally undeserved.