Islam Under Scrutiny by Ex-Muslims

Articles, Comments


Homo Sapiens:
Searching for Rationality and Moral Consistency

Part One: Boycotting the Fruit of the Infidel Mind

Just as the right to free speech in Europe was the fruit of fierce political struggles during the 18th Century, so the liberation of human reason from superstitious thinking, arose from challenges to the power of the Church. These challenges which questioned dogma central to Catholicism such as the virgin birth, the concept of transubstantiation, and the existence of free-floating angels, demons and the devil, culminated in a plethora of books and pamphlets, published by brave, freethinking individuals, throughout Europe during the 17th Century.

Thus, in the West, human reason, freed from the shackles of blind superstition and autocratic authority, was at last able to begin the adventure of exploring the social, moral and material Universe and its laws: the Dark Age of Medieval Europe was brought to an end. It was out of the vortex of social, political and philosophical challenge and protest, that both free speech and science emerged for both, are the fruit of the same basic impulse: to inquire into the nature of reality, without fear or favour.

To the Muslims of the world, who have participated in, or endorse by their silence, the protests concerning the cartoons depicting Muhammed bin Abdullah, and who are engaging in the boycott of Danish goods, this is an appeal from the heart: please, please demonstrate your rationality and capacity for logical consistency. After all, it is this capacity for rationality, together with the refusal to fall into the inconsistency of a double standard of morality, which separates us humans both from animals, and your average bully, despot, tyrant and psychopath.

For those Muslims outraged about the cartoons of Mohammed bin Abdullah, who are engaging in violent protest, calling for the murder of the Danish artists, and the boycotting Danish goods, we wish to suggest - your boycott is incomplete! Rejection of western secular and aesthetic sensibilities is not enough. For moral and intellectual consistency, secular scientific achievements must also be avoided if not completely rejected.

So Muslims of the world, unite. After all, it does seem that what you venerate and pay homage to, is not the beauty of human reason discovering its reflection and its resonance in the vast multiplicity of forms and forces interplaying in our Universe, but an individual! Mohammed bin Abdullah you say, as the founder of Islam, who you Muslims wish to venerate as the perfect role model for all human beings, for all time. Instead of each human soul, wrestling with the moral and practical issues of the day, you Muslims believe your path to the good life can be achieved by merely emulating Muhammad's example in all matters. So please, boycott the cartoons, sick product of the infidel mind, but don't forget to also, boycott western goods invented and developed by the same, irreverent, freely speculating, infidel mind.

So, for example, no more flying in airplanes - try instead to locate that horse with the face of a woman, which you believe, Muhammad bin Abdullah used to visit his 7th layer of heaven. No more microwaves and gas cookers and air conditioners - use the heat of firewood, and hand held fans - they were good enough for your Prophet, and his Allah in His infinite Wisdom, did not think otherwise. You don't like images of the human form? No more TV, DVD's and whatnots. No more phones and cameras too. Cars, motorbikes, bicycles - why do you use them when your Allah's Prophet got by on camels? Even in emergency situations, when he was raiding the caravans of the infidels of that time, he did not call for a Ferrari car to get him out of trouble, or machine guns to see to the Kaffirs. Newspapers and the internet for the dissemination of facts, ideas, and information and opinion? Well, your Prophet and his God found writing on dried bones, leaves and bits of parchment good enough. To the rich Muslim intellectuals and other such elites, don't come to the West for medical treatments using the latest infra scan and pharmaceutical developments - instead, stick to black mustard seeds 9and prayer) as recommended for all maladies by your esteemed Prophet.

But perhaps the most significant sacrifice that moral and intellectual consistency demands from Islam and Muslims is that they stop taking the benefits of Western secular education. If the Muslim viewpoint is that the entire God-less /Allah-less West is a heaving mass of vile kaffir corruption, why, then do Muslim elites send their offspring to Western universities? Universities comprise the cornerstone of secular learning and freedom of expression; to accept their benefits is to accept these core values. As the protests about the Danish cartoons have culminated in calls by Muslims that free speech is something to be ring-fenced or derided in its totality well then, the entire edifice of Western education must also be rejected.

So dear Muslims, in the name not of beneficence or mercy but in the name of the defining characteristic of Homo sapiens, demonstrate your rationality and capacity for logical consistency.

If the complete boycott of the fruits of the infidel mind, proves impossible, then Muslims must cease their pious, self-righteous protests and threats directed at the rest of the world's moral, spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities. The energy thus wasted should be used more wisely to thoroughly untangle how we have come to arrive at the present lamentable lack of moral and intellectual consistency in the Muslim nations and cultures. In this exploration, the West's crucial role in forging the present-day reality - the growing popularity of suicidal bombing, along with the impending spectre of civil war in countries with large Muslim minorities, must also be acknowledged.

-------------------------------------------


Part Two: The Importance of Avoiding Essentialist Arguments Concerning Muslim Mind and Culture.

It is being argued in some circles that it is impossible to engage with Muslims - as if there were something permanent, unalterable and eternal about this creed and its hold on the human mind. This is a most dangerous fallacy. At this juncture in human history, the only hope we have against falling into the tyranny of competing autocracies (even if some of these autocracies, maintain a veneer of democracy) is to live, work and communicate in the faith and the hope that all human beings have the faculty for reason as well as a moral conscience. To say, as Mark does (librabunda.blogspot.com) that one cannot reason with Muslims is a very dangerous statement. None of us choose the circumstances of our birth - I myself was born into a Muslim family, and if, from childhood, I could question this faith, so can and do, others.

To those falling into essentialist conceptions about Muslims, I must ask, which Muslims exactly, are we to deem, impossible to reason with? What of those individuals from Muslim families, communities and lands, whose reason and moral conscience, persuades them to risk life and limb questioning Islamic dogma? Are they still not to be trusted? What of those Muslims who for reasons of love and affection, cannot sever links with the relationships that form the very ground of their being? Are we to say they are beyond the pale? What about the silent majority, too busy just trying to survive, and lacking the most basic amenities of life, - are they to be condemned because they found no time to think and to challenge those mullahs and other elites whose feet are on their necks?

It is surely vital that we do not fall into essentialist pronouncements - most of us are indeed formed by our circumstances - and also, the breadth of our experiences... this is cause for hope, becoming as it must, the basis for dialogue and the consequent opening up of our mental horizons.

Even as we acknowledge the growing confidence of Muslim fascism and the urgent need to expose and oppose it, we must at the same time, not lose sight of the fact that, both in Muhammad's day and after his death, there were individuals, groups of people and huge military offensives, that opposed and protested Islamic ideology in the Muslim-controlled regions of the Middle-East.

In the process of this exploration of present-day Muslim sensibilities and how they have been formed, a worthwhile starting point for collaboration between both Western/Secular and Muslim/Middle-Eastern thinkers and concerned citizens, would be to ponder on the discoveries and inventions which might have been made in the Muslim-controlled lands, had grassroot social movements for gender equality and social justice, been allowed to permeate the sensibilities of the androcentric Muslim elites who inherited Muhammad's mantle.

It is a deeply buried fact of history, that the human capacity for reason and love of justice burned brightly, not only in Europe during the latter centuries of the second millenium of Christianity, the 17th and 18th centuries, but equally brightly, during the centuries immediately after the death of Muhammad. Middle-Eastern peoples risked their all in opposing Muslim tyranny, arbitrary, unjust rulings and oppressive social norms by organising numerous uprisings and protests that led to battles and extensive periods of outright war. For example, the bravery in battle of peoples such as the Babakis, the Isma'ilis, and the Mu'tazilis who all dared to face up to the unprovoked violence of the land-grabbing, empire-building Arabs was noted, if obliquely by Muslim historians of the time. The tragedy for humanity is that the core of such resistance movements was decimated and the remnants of protestors, enslaved or otherwise assimilated into the Muslim social/political empire. Virtually no other records exist but the biased references by Muslim scholars of those times.

Bandali Jawzi in his book, 'Islamic Intellectual History' (translated by Tamara Sonn, OUP, 1996) has done an admirable job piecing together and interpreting a variety of accounts by writers of the day. The movement Babak inspired, (whose social code, we would define in modern day terms as 'socialist') declared war on the Abbasid social order. This movement to overthrow the Islamists of the day, was joined by 300, 000 Khurramis from Azerbaijan and Daylam, as well as sheaves of landless peasants from Iran and Iraq. Together, they fought valiantly over two decades, beginning in the year 816 AD. A central tenet of the Babakis was their belief that , '-all the prophets, regardless of their religion and codes, are inspired by one spirit and that revelation never stops.' (Sonn, 96:115)

Concerning the Isma 'ilis, Jawzi concludes from the evidence, ' the Isma'ilis spurned literal interpretation. They sought to interpret the law according to its internal sense, based on reason alone. Thus they were the first sect (bid'a) in Islam to which we can apply the name, 'rationalists' in the contemporary meaning of the word '. (Sonn, 1996:130). Jawzi's research further established that while the Isma' ilis interpreted religion and its rulings in a way that led to its denial, the Mut'azilis tried to reconcile religion and reason in order to avoid abandoning one for the other.

What is the significance of these long-suppressed facts for us today? Where are the researchers to guide us? Should we be surprised that present-day inheritors of the past orthodoxy of Islam, such as Saudi-funded higher Education institutions and departments in both West and East, are not racing to unearth such buried realities of Islam's history/heritage of rationalist/socialist/feminist/animal rights' dissidents?

We who do not wish to repeat history, must on the one hand, draw a parallel with Arabic empire-building activities, which include the enslaving of others, and on the other hand, the recent history of Europeans escaping disease and want in Europe, for the New World of the Americas, Australasia etc. They too, for subsequent centuries taught a distorted version of historical reality, denying the inhumanity of their empire-building activities. These activities included, enslaving other humans (whose defining difference eg skin colour, conveniently rendered them less than human) and, the massive and greedy exploitation of nature.

In the face of the current threat from a revived Islam, it is absolutely vital that we rational humanists of whatever political creed, or spiritual belief, avoid falling into an essentialist posturing regarding Muslims. At this juncture of world history, it must be acknowledged that the male fixation with the moral-military modus operandus that, 'Might makes Right' and its subsequent 'history according to the conquerors', is the shameful history of Western and Eastern patriarchal societies alike.

Furthermore, it is vital to recognise that despite the West's Renaissance, despite the framing of human rights legislation and international laws, the Western nations' oppressive, exploitative activities in Third World countries, have continued largely unabated. The way this has been achieved is no longer by Western armies themselves overrunning a nation whose resources they are thirsting for. Instead, the Western elites have struck Faustian deals - for example, elevating to positions of power any obscure, self-seeking, amoral Sheikhs of the Arabic world, in return for the draining of that people's resources. This must be understood to have contributed hugely to suppressing the democratic impulses of those peoples and pushing them back into the medieval mindset of Islamic fatalism and the mania for control over 'their women', if they can have no control over anything else in the Universe.

It is the West's (well-hidden) disgrace and a tragedy of international proportions, that such principled leaders as Mehdi Ben Burka of Morrocco and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, were assassinated under the direction of US, UK, Belgium and French governments. Why? Why did our apparently democracy-loving leaders eg, President Dwight Eisenhower of the USA and Lord Home, the UK's Foreign Secretary order the killing of these secular, principled leaders and install puppet leaders who cared nothing for the progress of their people? Because Lumumba, Barka and other Third World leaders of their stature were seen to be interested in the welfare of their own peoples and not easily persuaded to sell out in return for the West's access to mining, mineral and oil rights. So, when we call for moral and intellectual consistency of Muslims, we call for these qualities to be equally manifest in the foreign policies of the West. To date, this has not occurred.

The current Islamic lands can only be transformed in the direction of developing political cultures based on equality, freedom and rights for all, without regard to religion, if the West acknowledges its centuries of 'speaking with forked tongue', its many inhumanities, which extend to its present-day moral vacuity and political opportunism. If the Muslim world's dehumanisation of 'Unbelievers' is wrong, the West's support of military dictators in those countries, against all its much-vaunted philosophies of democracy and human rights, is equally reprehensible.

Tyranny must be challenged wherever it occurs, not just when it suits our interests to do so. Meanwhile, the humanity of people, treated as pawns and playthings and indoctrinated by powerful elites, must never be doubted. Instead, we who happen to be born into circumstances of greater freedom, we who are blessed with resources of time, energy and education must... enter into dialogue, engage with, and educate those less endowed with such advantages whether - in the West or the East.

RY Alam is an ex-Muslim and can be contacted at Yaz103@hotmail.com
 

Please start a new comments thread here