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DONALD Trump’s expletives-laced threats to Iran landed on Easter Sunday showcasing the abysmal vulgarity that his brand of politics increasingly wraps itself in, aided and abetted by religious and racial violence. It was Pakistani scholar Ahmad Javaid who drew a distinction recently between religious zealots and liberals of his country. It’s difficult to find a bigot who doesn’t take recourse to violence or abuse to assert their point. It was equally improbable to find open-minded agnostics to be abusive with their opponents, he said. Violence and abuse is the feature of groups such as Hindutva and Zionism, which binds them in an unequal relationship of mutually exclusive bigotry. Zionists are ardent opponents of idolatry, to which Hindu nationalists can do little more than to pocket the insults.
Open-mindedness has little to do with being religious or irreligious. The day Trump hissed his curse words at Iran, the Pope counselled him and his followers against waging wars in the name of Christianity. The Pope’s criticism was a clear response to Pete Hegseth’s hissing invocation of his Christian faith to rally the military in the unprovoked war on Iran he is supervising. It was in a similar vein that Marco Rubio urged European leaders at the Munich security conference, two weeks before deceptively attacking Iran, to discard their democratic pretence and return to the colonial-style conquest of the Global South in which Trump’s United States saw itself in the lead role. “Godless communist revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings” were the killjoys of the West.
Europe should look to the future of the “Christian West”, Rubio hectored. President Trump’s project to Make America Great Again (MAGA) was in fact a strategy to ‘Make the West Great Again’. The exhortations notwithstanding, the Christian West of Rubio’s dream comprises avatars that range from the late Charlie Kirk to the Ku Klux Klan.
Trump’s MAGA movement is bursting at the seams with mutual hostilities within the group. The three men lynched in the KKK-run county in the classic movie Mississippi Burning were two “Jew boys” from the Kennedy era. They were driving a frightened “Black boy” to safety when they were stopped and executed in their car. The KKK-inspired hatred of Jews and Blacks exudes little patience with MAGA worshippers of Christopher Columbus who see him as a Christian hero. The KKK represents white supremacist Protestants, while Columbus as a Catholic predator plundered gold from the “new world” to reignite the Crusades.
Open-mindedness has little to do with being religious or irreligious.
Trump installed a marble statue of Columbus on the grounds of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House the other day and signed a proclamation officially recognising Columbus Day as a federal holiday, calling Columbus “the original American hero”.
The statue and the holiday proclamation have a context. They are part of a broader effort by the president to restore what he considers traditional American symbols. This directly counters recent moves to remove or contextualise monuments to Columbus due to his controversial legacy regarding the colonisation and treatment of indigenous peoples. The new statue is a replica of one that was toppled in Baltimore by protesters in July 2020 during the racial justice protests that followed the murder of George Floyd.
As his ratings erode over the Iran war, Trump’s leaning on Columbus for help casts the electoral net wider. Rescuing the legacy of Columbus from “left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name”, the move has been celebrated by many Italian-American groups as a symbol of their heritage. Trump acknowledged this directly, saying after signing the proclamation: “We’re back, Italians!”
Remember that Columbus lived in a Spain that had just completed the Reconquista — the centuries-long Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula — with the fall of Granada in 1492. The same year, the Alhambra Decree expelled or forced the conversion of Jews to Christianity. In his Book of Prophecies, Columbus argued that his discoveries would provide gold to finance a new crusade to liberate the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. He wrote to the rulers: “I have already petitioned Your Highnesses to use the profits from this my enterprise for a crusade against Jerusalem.” Consider reading this out aloud today to America’s Christian Zionists working overtime to overrun an entire world on Israel’s behalf.
As for Iran, there could be a hundred things wrong with the way the clergy has stoked a controversially patriarchal society in which well-educated and progressive women have struggled to claim their agency. Yet Iran is not a religiously sectarian society. If anything, it has borrowed considerably from the liberation theologians of yore. What riles the likes of Hegseth is the fact that Iran’s revolution was shaped by an “unholy alliance of the Red and the Black” (as the Shah called it) — a fusion of Marxist revolutionary thought and Shia Islamic theology, largely forged by the intellectual Ali Shariati.
Scholars widely refer to Shariati as the “ideologue” or “intellectual forefather” of the Iranian Revolution. Though he died in 1977, nearly two years before the revolution’s triumph, his ideas provided the revolutionary framework that mobilised millions.
Shariati’s ‘Red Shia-ism’ has been likened to the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian priest who founded the Latin American movement. Prof Dustin Byrd has taught philosophy and religious studies at the University of Olivet in Michigan. He says that Shariati “developed an Islamic form of liberation theology” that “closely follows the theological orientation” of Gutiérrez.
Iran’s open embrace of its historical invaders offers a contrast with the air-brushing of Mughal rule from Indian history under the current Hindutva rule. Iran easily co-opted foreign invaders led, for example, by the forces of Changez Khan and Alexander the Great among others. After conquering Iran’s Achaemenid Empire, Alexander adopted Persian customs to legitimise his rule, as did the Mughals in India. Nehru extolled the multicultural synthesis Mughal rule bequeathed even as Hindutva ideologues revile him as anti-Hindu for doing that.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, April 7th, 2026
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