The noted American scholar Samuel P. Huntington is dead but his idea of 'the clash of civilizations' is raging in the world with full fury. Just before the disintegration of the 'evil' Soviet Empire with whom the capitalist Western world fought with all its might for half a century during the Cold War, Huntington created a new enemy for the West - the Muslim civilization - to fight and subjugate, for God knows how many years in the twenty-first century. While the Soviet empire comprised Russia and her few surrogates, the Muslim civilization consists of over a billion people living in forty countries with Muslim majorities and in dozens of other countries stretching from Singapore to Nigeria and from America to the Central Asian Republics that have considerable Muslim populations between 100,000 to 140 million. The West led by the United States alleges that the radical Islamists under the umbrella of al-Qaeda have hatched a conspiracy to undermine the Western governments by waging a worldwide jehad to establish a global caliphate. The underlying objective is to deal the Muslims as a whole with an iron hand so that they are not able to raise their heads with dignity and honour in future. The caricaturing of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Denmark and the remarks of Pope Benedict XVI about Islam at Regensburg in Germany on 12 September 2006 from behind the shoulders of a 14th century Byzantine Emperor, Manuel Paleologus were base attempts to humiliate the Muslims. Moreover, if the toilet-flushing of the holy Quran in Guantanamo, the abusive treatment of the Iraqi prisoners by the US army in Abu Ghraib and the firing of a missile from a US ship during the first Gulf War in 1991 with the inscription 'Saddam here comes Jesus. Call on your Allah' are not meant to shame and ridicule the Muslims then what grand purpose did all these actions serve. Do civilize nations behave in this manner? And how the West will continue to treat the Muslims is clearly manifested by their so-called 'war on terror' strategy. When a US Presidential aspirant John McCain emphasized that America needed a leadership 'to confront the transcendent challenge of our time: the threat of radical Islamic terrorism', it reflected that the Western mind is fearful of the Muslims - past and present. The crusading spirit behind the war on terror indicates that the Western world is still held hostage to the fall of Jerusalem to Muslims in 638 A.D., the hostility of the Crusades between 1095 and 1291, the conquest of the Muslim armies across the Byzantine Empire, Spain, the Eastern Europe and the crucial battles waged at the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683 by the Christian armies to repel the Muslim marchers. Who says history is past? We are witnessing its re-enactment in present. Mind you, this is not the first re-enactment. If the stick is in the hands of the Americans in the twenty-first century to beat the Muslims, the British used the same stick with equal ferocity against the Muslims of India in the nineteenth century during and after the Indian war of independence. When the feeble octogenarian Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar raised the battle cry against the usurpers of the British East India Company in the summer of 1857, more or less, all sections of the Indian society readily responded to his call. This can be well-understood from the last address of a Maratha rebel from the state of Satara in south India, when he was sent to the gallows on 19 June 1857: "Listen all As the English people hurled the Raja (of Satara) from his throne, in like manner do you drive them out of the country? This is murder. I am illegally condemned .... This example is made to frighten you, be not be alarmed. Sons of Brahmins, Marathas, and Musalmans, revolt Sons of Christians, look to yourselves." This was a testimony to the fact that all the Indian communities fought the war of independence. However, the East India Company, the British government and the English Press branded it as an exclusive Indian Muslim conspiracy to launch a global jehad against Christianity. If, today, the West alleges that militant Muslims are planning for a universal Caliphate, in the mid-nineteenth century it were the British Evangelicals and the Anglican Church which propagated that the Muslims had started a 'global jehad' against the Christians. This was far from true because the Ottoman Caliph in Turkey instead of supporting or sympathizing with the Indian Muslims at that time, contributed 1000 to the relief fund set up by Britain to help the British sufferers in India which was equal to the amount donated by Napoleon III, who was the leader of a big Christian country of Europe. Even if one buys the British theory of global jehad in the 1857 war then the two Muslim countries that could have possibly helped the Indian Muslims were Afghanistan and Persia. In order to avoid the second front in the north-west, Sir John Lawrence, the Chief Commissioner of Punjab withdrew his forces from Peshawar to capture Delhi but Dost Muhammad, the ruler of Afghanistan disappointed both the Muslims and the British: neither did he make any effort to help the embattled Muslims nor did he try to capture Peshawar which was formerly an Afghan city. An Afghan attack on Punjab could have jeopardized the empire. Similarly, no assistance or an official word of sympathy came for the Indian Muslims from Persia. In other words, the British theory of global jehad versus global Christianity was nothing but a fantasy of the lunatic British mind. How true are the ongoing alarm bells, about global jehad, sounded by the West in general and the US in particular will be exposed sooner than later. It is a fact that Molvi Ahmed Ali at Faizabad and Molvi Sikandar Shah at Awadh did issue calls of jehad against the Europeans in the1857 war but it was more of a reaction against the British 'Crusade to Christianize India' as has been well-documented by Dr Ian W. Brown in his doctoral dissertation 'English Evangelicals in British politics, 1780 - 1833'. Several examples can be quoted in this regard. Reverend Harvey Brooks' work, 'God's displeasure as provoked by Indian heathenism and Anglo-Saxon policy' shows that the British 'were convinced that India, the second largest country in the world, was given to them by God as a gift to spread Anglican Christianity among the heathens of India.' Another Rev., John Hampdon Gurney of St. Paul, London stated that it was 'the will of God that Indians should be a subject race to the British, unless the latter had given the former their faith.' Yet another Reverend, R.C. Mather asserted that in order to Christianize India, the hold of 'the three surviving systems of errors, Hinduism, Buddhism and Muhammadanism' upon Indians must be broken. In a similar vein, Edward Hoare declared that the Almighty gave India to the Englishmen so that 'England's light might shine in India's darkness.' If this were not offensive to the Hindus, who were the descendants of the great Ashoka Empire and the Indus valley civilization as well as to the Muslims, who were the inheritors of the great Muslim civilization across three continents, then what was it? Wasn't all this stuff the making of a clash between the civilizations? Worse, the British targeted the Muslims because immediately after the outbreak of the War of 1857, almost all sections of the British society depicted it as a clash between Cross and Crescent. A writer in the "London's Quarterly Review' of 1858 was quick to point out that no 'Moslem people, before our conquest of India, were ever long subject to the Christian yoke, while their whole history is full of their triumphs over the sons of Nazareth.' Many missionaries had realized that their efforts to Christianize the Muslims had resulted in naught in the Muslim majority areas, forcing a British commentator to disappointingly admit about the Muslim exclusiveness in these words: "Like a relentless and stubborn foe he shuts himself up in the fortress of his faith, refuses every overture and stands ready to repel every advance.' In a somewhat similar despairing tone, the 'London Journal and Weekly Record of Literature, Science and Arts' concluded that the subcontinent could not be Christianized unless the 'Muhammadan passion for rule in India was tamed and broken.' How the Muslims were hunted and terrorized by the British in the aftermath of 1857 is history. In one day, twenty-four Muslim princes were hanged in Delhi. Moreover, Fredrick Henry Cooper, the Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar let loose the Jacobian 'Reign of Terror', when he publicly executed 283 'rebels' in batches of ten each on 1 August 1857 (the Muslim holy day of the Festival of Pilgrimage and Sacrifice). John Lawrence, whom many British believed God had specifically sent to save India for them, praised Cooper: 'you have had slaughter enough. We want a few here (Lahore)'. Cooper sent 41 'rebels' that were all blown from the cannon by John Lawrence. For his cold-blooded genocidal acts, the British House of Commons honoured him with a vote of gratitude, raised his salary from 7,500 to 10,000 a year and awarded him the Grand Cross of Bath. After a century, the Muslims are again at the receiving end, but this time under the watch of American imperial hubris. Civility demands humility, not humiliation; accommodation not intolerance; and, dialogue, not clash among the civilizations of the world. Email: qizilbash2000@yahoo.com