Never before in the history of Islam has it faced a danger such as this. For the first time, Muslims en masse are reclaiming their place in humanity and rejoining history. Islam has always relied on Muslims being unequivocally Muslim in clear contradistinction to the kafir, the unbeliever, treating the values and mores of the infidel with utter disgust and contempt. But history has played a trick on Islam and increasing numbers of Muslims find the values and mores of the infidels growing within their own hearts, gradually forcing out the Qur’an so firmly lodged there during their early childhood. This drama plays out as Islam struggling against Muslims and Muslims struggling against themselves. This short series explores aspects of that complex struggle.
Part 1: The Future
Insha-Allah, masha-Allah, alhamdulillah — if Allah wills it, Allah willed it, praise be to Allah (or more loosely, thanks be to Allah) — invocations that punctuate so many Muslim quotidian utterances, each an acknowledgement of the supremacy of the will of Allah over all things: nothing happens or fails to happen, save by the will of Allah. Failure to acknowledge this is to display arrogance, if not commit outright blasphemy. Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, that great scourge of philosophers and rational thought, father of the Muslim mindset, will have us understand that the sun rises in the East each day because each day Allah wills it to rise in the East. The sun has never risen in the West because Allah has not yet willed it to rise in the West. That does not mean that Allah will not make the sun rise in the West tomorrow. Al-Ghazali, in effect, abolished cause and effect, without which no scientific investigation is possible.
Scientific investigation is not only dabbling in the unknown, it is also dabbling in the future. To know things differently to the way we knew them before is to change our condition from the status quo ante to the status quo post. We have, by sneaky subterfuge, trespassed on the prerogative of Allah. Muslims have good reason to be suspicious of science: a blasphemous endeavour par excellence. This does not mean that there are no Muslim scientists, but it does go some way to explaining the striking dearth of them.
More debilitating for Muslim ventures into science is Allah’s perfect and immutable holy book, the Qur’an, in some senses actually equated with Allah. To suggest fault with the Qur’an is inconceivable for a Muslim. Yet there are at the very least sixty scientific mistakes in the Qur’an. This is possibly a far greater deterrent to Muslims approaching science, since doing so puts the Muslim on a direct collision course with the Qur’an and the inevitable choice at the end of it: Allah or reality. Moreover, the very act of investigation that is the very definition of science already implies a rejection of the Qur’an, Allah’s perfect book replete with all the answers to every possible question. The abolition of cause and effect is reinforced in Shari’a, although, as we shall see later, also exploited by it:
“Allah Most High says, ‘One of My servants reaches daybreak a believer, another an unbeliever. He who says, “We have received rain by Allah’s grace,” is a believer in Me and a disbeliever in the planets. But he who says, “We have received rain by the effects of such and such a mansion of the moon,” is an unbeliever in Me and a believer in planets’ (A: if he thinks they have a causal influence independent of the will of Allah (dis: 08.7 (17)),” (Reliance of the Traveler, Book P:41.2.2)
Should the Muslim plough right ahead nonetheless, then whatever he might accomplish, he dares not claim credit for lest he blasphemes. It is not just that so few Muslims have won Nobel Prizes, it is also that to win such a prize puts the Muslim winner in a very awkward position, not only vis-à-vis the ulema and the ummah, but also vis-à-vis themselves. Success after years of hard solitary work in a laboratory will still extract an alhamdulillah (even if it’s only felt, rather than thought or uttered) from the Muslim scientist, crediting everything to Allah, despite what might be his real disdain for the Qur’an and the mentality of his fellow Muslims.
The only unequivocally halal science, unsurprisingly, is science pursued “in the way of Allah,” which is why Muslims have no problem learning nuclear physics. Jihad is so much more holy if you can throw in a nuclear bomb or two. The same single-minded motivation that lies behind a science intern stealing discarded centrifuges from a Western installation lies behind a group of eager trainees learning to fly passenger jets, learning how water purification works, and learning to hack the Internet. It is all aimed at the same objective of going directly from the present to the Afterlife, without any need to trespass on the future, the domain of Allah.
The future can be nothing more than the exclusive prerogative of Allah, and to ensure that this prerogative is not encroached upon, predictions tend to detach from feasibility, probability, possibility and even reality, as these place conditions on the will of Allah and on one’s acknowledgement of that will. To declare with certainty that a bridge will stay up just because an engineer has designed it to stay up, is to presume the engineer more powerful than Allah, in whose power it is to will the bridge to collapse regardless of everything.
Muslim threats or predictions are often characterised by bombast or absurd exaggeration, especially when needing to assuage an indignity, an insecurity, a fear, or a humiliation. Within the Muslim fatalistic thought system, there is a logic to such unrealistic threats and predictions. For Allah, everything is possible, and what to a non-Muslim appears like a Muslim’s taking leave of reality is to the Muslim a sincere invocation of the very real power of Allah to will absolutely anything at any time. The more absurd the prediction, the more flattering of Allah the predictor.
The arbitrariness of what lies between the present and the Afterlife is strongest amongst Arab Muslims and weakest amongst Muslims geographically and culturally furthest from them, with varying degrees of acknowledging the future as something not subject to physical laws and human agency, and at it’s furthest, insha-Allah being little more than an utterance of habit, akin to “bless you!” after someone sneezes. The closer to the Muslim heartlands, the more imbued with real petition insha-Allah becomes, so much so that one risks giving offence by planning or predicting without acknowledging that Allah might have other ideas. But of course, Muslims have human passions and urges like everyone else (much as they might deny it) and insha-Allah is also the fail-safe get-out clause from any undertaking, no matter how solemnly made. In fact, the solemnity itself is not indicated in the earnestness with which the undertaking is acquiesced in, but with which “insha-Allah” is uttered and repeated, hand-on-heart, pained expression, bobbing head and all the rest of it. If the future is whimsical, arbitrary and unpredictable, Muslims will ensure that it stays that way, regardless of whether they’re dealing with Muslims or infidels.
An American contractor, after having operated in Iraq for some time, observed:
“I never had cause to think about what a powerful concept “Agreement” is until I came to Iraq. Whether some friends agree to meet at a restaurant for lunch, or a supplier agrees to provide ten truckloads of materials to a job-site on a specific day, or lease papers are signed on a house, an Agreement gives all parties the incredible power to predict the future,” (emph. orig.)
And that is where the problem lies. An agreement directly contradicts the will of Allah. It is an arrogance and a presumption that taunts the Almighty. It not only implies collusion against Allah, it also arrogantly and blasphemously assumes that the will of Allah can be the subject of agreement between mortals. Avoiding such arrogance and such presumption is paramount to the Muslim, who will scupper an “agreement” so as not to fall foul of such trespass. Lying, understating or exaggerating, whether to avoid losing face, to avoid being cheated, or, indeed, to cheat, serves only to compound the problem of trespassing on Allah’s prerogative. But the matter is only this clear-cut and straightforward between Muslim and Muslim.
Lying, understating and exaggerating assume a whole new scale and significance in “collaboration” between Muslim and non-Muslim. There can be no win-win, as the non-Muslim might expect on a firm handshake, because it would mean an outcome that delivers equal benefit to Muslim and infidel. This is not only offensive to the Muslim, but militates against a central tenet of Shari’a that a Muslim must always benefit at the expense of a non-Muslim. So even as you’re signing that fantastic deal with all pomp and ceremony, the Muslim will already be working on how he wins and you, the infidel, lose, and here “insha-Allah” plays the added role of duping the naive infidel into believing he’s dealing with someone of godly ethics (well, he might be, but it’s a god that prides itself on its ability to deceive, besides, “The life of this world is only the enjoyment of deception,” (Qur’an 3:185)). The outcome of a “deal” with a Muslim is usually catastrophic and costly for the non-Muslim, whether an individual or a country. When dealing with infidels, not encroaching on Allah’s room for manoeuvre acquires a special attribute unique to the interaction between Muslims and infidels, in which Jihad never ceases.
The Muslim’s ambivalent relationship with the future makes even him vulnerable to Shari’a manipulation:
“There is no disagreement among scholars that it is permissible for a single Muslim to attack battle lines of unbelievers headlong and fight them even if he knows he will be killed. But if one knows it will not hurt them at all, such as if a blind man were to hurl himself against them, then it is unlawful. [In other words, it is haram for a Muslim to act towards non-Muslims in a ways that do not harm the non-Muslims, AP] Likewise, if someone who is alone sees a corrupt person with a bottle of wine beside him and a sword in his hand, and he knows that the person will chop his neck if he censures him for drinking, it is not permissible for him to do so, as it would not entail any religious advantage worth giving one’s life for. Such censure is only praiseworthy when one is able to eliminate the wrong and one’s action will produce some benefit [for Islam, AP],” (Reliance of the Traveller, Book Q:2.4.4).
Not every Muslim is in a rush to take up Allah on his fantastic offer of getting directly from the present to the Afterlife, bypassing the future. The Qur’an has many passages of bribing, threatening, and cajoling Muslims to act in the cause of Allah, i.e., commit jihad. Muslims learn of a bargain that Allah has already struck with them, a ‘deal of the aeon,’ one might say.
“Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs (in return) is the garden (of Paradise): they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain: a promise binding on Him in truth, through the Law, the Gospel, and the Quran: and who is more faithful to his covenant than Allah?” (Qur’an, 9:111).
So thoroughly is the future abolished that to the jihad fighter who fails to get slain in the act of slaying, Allah promises to bring the Afterlife into the present.
“Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, ‘The person who participates in (jihad) in Allah’s cause and nothing compels him to do so except belief in Allah and His Apostles, will be recompensed by Allah either with a reward, or booty (if he survives) or will be admitted to Paradise (if he is killed in the battle as a martyr),’” (Sahih Bukhari, Volume 1, Book 2:35).
The fine print of this “reward, or booty”, in short, is: rob all you can, rape all you can. Such are the divine rewards for upholding Islam’s highest virtue: getting killed while killing for Allah. Plunder is a pre-feudal form of economy that parasitised on agriculture and trading. This is the divine ideal projected straight from the past into the Afterlife and, should the jihadi survive, from the Afterlife back into the present. The Paradise of Qur’an 9:111 is amply detailed in Qur’an 78:31-34 and elsewhere. “Verily for the Righteous there will be a fulfilment of (the heart´s) desires; Gardens enclosed and vineyards, and voluptuous women of equal age; and a full cup (of wine).” The Qur’an expends no fewer than fifteen verses, scattered throughout, to assure the jihadi that these “voluptuous women” meet his exacting barbarian standards, as does the rest of the package:
“Beautified for men is the love of things they covet; women, children, much of gold and silver (wealth), branded beautiful horses, cattle and well-tilled land. This is the pleasure of the present world’s life; but Allah has the excellent return (Paradise with flowing rivers, etc.) with Him” (3:14).
To the unfortunate slayer who doesn’t quite manage to get slain, Allah offers the consolation prize of all the wealth he can plunder plus as many sex slaves as he can seize. A barbarian’s kind of god offers a barbarian’s kind of Paradise. Nothing that might have arisen between the time of Muhammad’s Paradise on earth and Muhammad’s Paradise in the Afterlife is of any consequence. In other words, between Muhammad’s life and the Afterlife, there is no life. These are the Muslim’s only relevant points of reference, his only standards of value. While the Afterlife is patiently awaited, the present can at best but attain to the past, in which lived the perfect human being with his generation of the best of Muslims.
Muslims have the Qur’an, infidels have the future, and the rest, as they say, is history. At time of writing, we are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Moon Landing. When President John F. Kennedy made the audacious undertaking of “landing a man on the Moon by the end of this decade and returning him safely to the Earth” on 25 May 1961, without once assuming success to depend on the will of some god, it was one of the most brazen and spectacular attempts to control the future, and it paid off. It paid off as did agriculture pay off, our ancestors’ precedent for all the Kennedys to come. Agriculture is no less audacious a confidence that the future can be controlled, than was the Apollo Program, and arguably more so.
The Qur’an mentions the Afterlife no fewer than 116 times. In consequence, according to one summary:
“The faith of a Muslim is tested by belief in the hereafter. One cannot be genuinely Muslim until one believes in the unseen and still to be experienced next life. …It is the true life that every soul should try to reach safely. …This earthly life is too short and worthless, and it is no more than a passage to real life in the hereafter,” (Rafik Berjak in The Qur’an: An Encyclopedia, edited by Oliver Leaman).
To a greater of lesser degree, Muslims have an ambiguous relationship with the future and difficulty with concepts involving the future, such as hypothesising. At one end are those who would do nothing to change their condition on the grounds that the future is entirely in the hands of Allah, while at the other end, Muslims plan their careers, invest money, raise children, go on trips and even speculate, all in full expectation of influencing the future. A Muslim, Farouk El-Baz, even worked on the Apollo Program (and offered, presumably in jest, to send a copy of the Qur’an along to the Moon). Yet “insha-Allah” is always there, even if only inwardly as a faint echo of a distant impulse. Increasingly, especially outside of Islamic communities and societies, Muslims have little choice but to engage with the future, but it is an engagement often lacking any clear distinction between wish and reality. The Islamic Republic of Iran, for example, boasts a sixty-year old, cobbled-together scrapyard airforce of forty jets, yet is unshakably convinced of certain victory against the US and Israeli air forces combined. A Muslim’s relationship with the future is just one of several battles he still has to fight with himself.