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 is here.
Part 2: Fear
In the blistering summer of 2016, I was doing research into Shinto, for which I interviewed the representative of the High Priest of Daiganji Temple, on an island off Hiroshima. I learnt a great deal about the fluid syncretism across animism, Shinto and Buddhism, and how social hierarchy and state power plugged into these at different points in Japanese history and social evolution, my particular interest being in the transition from Heian to Kamakura. Right at the end of the interview she summed up everything in one simple observation: Shinto is about fear; it’s all about fear.
I’ve since thought a lot about that observation and about what drives or drove animist and pagan religions. From time to time, I am reminded of the fear that drove us in our infancy to attempt to placate the terrifying and unfathomable forces of nature that could so easily, for reasons known only to those forces themselves, destroy us, and how, right from when we first conceived of gods, we created them in our image. How could we do otherwise; it was the only image we had.
Recently, when I watched a Christian Prince video on YouTube of one of his famous debates with Muslims, I was again reminded of the fear that drove us to contrive religions in the first place. In this video, an Indonesian hajji was his affable, rational and measured guest, familiar with the rules and etiquette of discourse, making a refreshing break from the usual cocksure uncouth Muslim ignoramuses who rush in where angels fear to tread. Christian Prince is an evangelist, and if his guest makes it as far as a conclusion (they frequently don’t), he invites them to convert to Christianity — just one more way in which the Internet has proved a double-edged sword for Islam.
The hajji concedes every point to his host’s impeccable knowledge of the Islamic scriptures and exegeses. The Muslim ends up convinced by all the arguments and is clearly minded to accept the invitation to become a Christian. Something stands in his way, and he expresses this in five terse words, “I fear for my soul,” which he repeats several times throughout. It was the one barrier he could not cross. At the end of the day, when all is said and done, the battle lost and won, firmly astride the path of the Muslim believer stands Fear, and it is not minded to make way.
The hajji tries a bit of the old haggling to get Christian Prince to agree to take the hit for his soul, should it turn out that leaving Islam was the wrong move (insurance of the Pascal’s wager kind, where you believe in God just in case it turns out there is one). But Christian Prince is a believing man, too, and is not about to be generous with his Judgement Day credits — imagine the precedent that would set! But a hajji fearful for his soul is easily manipulated, and the evangelist never actually agrees to what the hajji asks for, yet manages to get the hajji to agree that he has “accepted Jesus Christ as his saviour,” even though he actually never quite got that far. The moral of the story is clear: whether you’re Dr Faustus or an Indonesian hajji, never throw your soul into the bargain unless you have a good lawyer right there beside you! As an aside, going beyond getting people to leave Islam, in this case getting them to embrace Christianity, makes Christian Prince little better than Zakir Naik, who bargained with a young atheist challenger for his soul: “When I have replied to you [taking success for granted, AP], will you come back to the fold of Islam?” Here I would have enlightened Dr Naik that atheists do not sell their souls.
I had left Islam at the age of twenty-two. It took a whole ten years before I bit into my first bacon and egg butty, washed down with hot black coffee on a freezing Glasgow morning. It wasn’t fear that had kept me from the sizzling rasher, but simple lack of opportunity. Nonetheless, I at last had Islam totally cleared out of my system, or so I thought. Ten years after that I came across a live version of that amazing Scottish breakfast: a real pig. I was awestruck. The animal was within arm’s reach. I just had to stretch down over the low stone wall between us. But it might as well have been the Berlin Wall for all my ability to extend my arm, point my finger and touch. I could not do it.
I did not fear the pig at all and had no thought for what I might pick up from being so close to it, let alone touching it. Yet I could not touch it. I don’t know how much time had passed while I simply studied the animal and psyched myself up to reach down and touch the skin on its back. Possibly twenty minutes had gone by. I was afraid, yet I had no idea what I was afraid of. Pigs have been the ultimate taboo since as early as I can remember. Here I was, twenty years an apostate from Islam, only to discover that I was unable to bring myself to touch a pig.
Muslim fears are not phobias; there is nothing irrational about them. They are not mental disorders. The madrassas exploit the malleability of the young child’s mind to embed in it fears that will later be accessible to neither volition nor reason. As such, they become indistinguishable from our innate primaeval fears. One such instilled fear is the fear of doubt. It is not for nothing that the first substantive verse of the Qur’an reads, “This is the book about which there is no doubt” (Qur’an 2:2).
To fear doubt as an animal fears fire, is to be a prisoner who fear keys, even if a key sits in the lock of his cell door and no one is around. To fear Hellfire and thereby be deterred from risking it is one thing, but to be deterred from doubting Hellfire in the first place obviates the need for the threat of Hellfire. When six-year old Muslim children have it drummed into them (by intimidation and corporal punishment, both intended to instil fear) never to question, they have been put into those situations by parents who themselves fear not putting their children into those situations. Any child in whom the fear of doubt does not take hold finds madrassa a traumatising experience. My own loving parents could not bring themselves to remove me from such institutions, even though I begged them to do so. I was never physically abused, although I’ve seen others subjected to falaka, which is the caning of the bare soles of the feet. The teacher put his whole body into swinging the cane. It took a long time before I stopped hearing that boy’s screams.
Fear of doubt is the ultimate insurance against rational and ethical intrusion into the Muslim mind. The infallibility of the blood-soaked Qur’an and Muhammad cannot be doubted. In this Abdullah Sameer video, Yasir Qadhi Doubts in Islam, he discusses Dr Yasir Qadhi’s encounters with doubt when he exposed himself to the environment of Western universities. And Qadhi, in turn, highlights the perils facing Western Muslim young people, exposed as they are to a world that Islam is wholly unprepared for. In another, Sheikh Omar Suleiman offers Muhammad’s simple advice. If all else fails, know that you did not doubt, but that Shaitan put those thoughts in your mind, so that the moment such a thought arises in your mind, quash it straightaway by saying to yourself, “I believe in Allah.” That pushes Satan away — note, it pushes Satan away, not your doubts. We don’t want to remind you that you had doubts.
One way that rational and ethical Muslims deal with their doubts is by cognitive dissonance. Those less schooled in the finer points of reason and ethically more primitive dress up their fear as faith. Both groups are dishonest, but the former, being more self-aware, is also more delusional. To be steadfast in the face of clear evidence of the cruelty and irrationality of Islam has, in the conception of the latter group, nothing to do with fear, but with “having strong faith,” a dubious virtue peddled by both ulema.
The poor ulema, what Muslims grandly refer to as “scholars”, such as sheikh Suleiman, above, have their hands full dealing with Shaitan using the Internet to place doubts in the minds of so many young Muslims, as exemplified in this video (if you can put up with the irritating pomposity of saying everything in Arabic before saying it in English). Search for “Doubt in Islam” on YouTube to see just how busy Shaitan has been over the last five years alone. He has even infiltrated the Islamic Studies departments of Western dhimmi universities. Nowhere is safe. Doubt lurks around every corner, ready to pounce on the unsuspecting Muslim. The irony of seeking protection from evil supernatural entities while availing oneself of an education at an Ivy League institution of higher learning is lost on such Muslims.
The anecdote to doubt is simple and obvious: to remain a Muslim of strong faith, remain primitive and simplistic in thought. The ulema themselves, many centuries down the line, are providing strong evidence that the great philosophers of the so-called “Islamic Golden Age” could only have been either infidels or apostates, as has long been known.
The thought that gives rise to supernatural beings controlling natural phenomena like sunrise, sunset, the seasons, thunder, lightning, etc., and the underlying fear that conjures up such beings, is the mainstay of Islam. The word “fear” and its derivatives appear no fewer than 200 times in the Qur’an (Pickthall translation). Of these, eighty-eight references encompass fear of Allah and what Allah will do to the one who does not fear Allah, e.g., fear Allah; fear the Lord; fear a terrible Day; fear a terrible punishment; etc., including “Allah loves those who fear him,” (Qur’an 5:82), thereby making the most highly-evolved emotion conditional upon the most primitive.
The Qur’an instructs, “The Prophet is closer to the believers than they are to themselves,” (33:6). The believer has less love, less regard, less humanity for himself, than he has for Muhammad. What chance anyone else? Ahmed Deedat puts it this way, “My black brother is nothing. I can sacrifice him for Allah and his Rasool. …The Prophet is closer to us than our own flesh and blood, than we to ourselves.” Allah claims the deepest, most heartfelt love for himself: “Yet there are some who take others as equals to Allah and love them as Allah alone should be loved; but those who (truly) believe, they love Allah more than all else,” (Qur’an 2:165). Allah spares not even a child’s love for its parents.
“And your Lord has decreed that you worship none but Him. And that you be dutiful to your parents. If one of them or both of them attain old age in your life, say not to them a word of disrespect, nor shout at them but address them in terms of honour. And, out of kindness, lower to them the wing of humility, and say: “My Lord! bestow on them thy Mercy even as they cherished me in childhood’,” (Qur’an 17:23-24), except when they transgress against Allah, in which case the child is commanded to throw his own parents to the wolves: “O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for Allah, even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives,” (Qur’an 4:135).
Allah’s love is nothing but an instrument of merciless control, like the love demanded of Winston Smith for Big Brother, an instrument of fear. Ninety-three times the word love appears in the Qur’an, only twice by Allah’s name The Most Loving. Twelve times he demands of believers to love him (in exchange for mercy, forgiveness, etc.). Sixteen times he says he loves those who obey his various commands. But the most mentions of Allah’s love is in the negative. Twenty-four times the Qur’an specifies those whom Allah does not love. 200 times the Qur’an mentions fear.
In Islam, fear stands out far more prominently than love, the latter in all instances clearly subordinate to the former. Is it then any wonder that Muslims have no problem with public caning, public beheadings, and other demonstrations of violence and hatred? But let two people show affection in public, even by touching hands, and rioting mobs will ransack the city and do worse to the couple. Everyone fears not showing enthusiasm for public hatred and cruelty; everyone fears not showing disgust at public affection.
The prominence of our primaeval emotion of survival, fear, in the Qur’an leads me to question one particular axiom about Islam: its association with Judaism and Christianity as an “Abrahamic faith” (with to without pagan trappings such as djinn or the hajj). Certainly, Islam has the story of Abraham and others of Judaeo-Christian tradition, but these are plagiarised and poorly so, as many have shown, and the Bible has its floods, swarm of locusts, plagues and other assorted natural calamities, but they are of cosmic, global concern, rather the minutiae of the tribesman’s everyday fears and ignorance:
“…like a rainstorm from the sky, wherein is darkness, thunder and the flash of lightning. They thrust their fingers in their ears by reason of the thunder-claps, for fear of death…,” (Qur’an 2:19) or “And surely We shall try you with something of fear and hunger, and loss of wealth and lives and crops; but give glad tidings to the steadfast,” (2:155).
These are the quotidian preoccupations of primitive peoples who propitiate their gods for mercy, compassion, peace, security and all things craved but so rare in their precarious world, things that only gods can provide and that they can just as easily withhold. It is my contention that Islam is one of these religions, of a kind with Shinto, rather than a monotheism, of a kind with Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, faiths of more advanced, and hence less insecure, societies. Islam is a pagan religion overseen by ninety-nine gods (Ar-Rahman, ar-Rahim, al-Malik, al-Quddus and all the rest) unified into one godhead, Allah, and embellished with a prophet and all the other trappings of monotheism. Its taboos have the same grip on its believers as have the djinn, and inspire the same fears. While Islam’s ostensible declaration of faith is There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger, Muhammad overshot his own monotheistic aspirations with Allah providing revelations-on-demand, ready-to-use, thereby rendering its declaration of faith effectively There is no god but Muhammad and Allah is his messenger — a faith befitting only the very best of warlords.
It is no accident that Islam was freely taken up by wild, marauding tribes that lived by plunder, but bitterly opposed by all who practised religion in settled communities, whether polytheistic or monotheistic. Muhammad was not offering an alternative god, but a mode of life and an ethical system more primitive than their own. It is also no accident that the most violent verses are the later ones. There was no other way of spreading Islam once he proselytised (strictly-speaking, recruited) beyond his tribal universe and Allah, ever-sensitive to Muhammad’s ideological (and other) needs, obliged with appropriately-violent verses.
Because Islam provided a pre-mediaeval tribal plunder economy interacting with settled monotheisms with new, hastily-contrived ideological underpinnings, it lacks both the organic internal cohesion of, for example, Shinto (also a religion based on fear), and has none of the internal consistency, not to mention conceptual elegance, of the real Middle Eastern monotheisms it claims to share lineage with. Islam cannot function as a monotheism because at its heart is fear, rather than law or love or enlightenment. Monotheisms evolve and fear is an ossifier. Islam’s adherents cannot evolve within the faith without destroying that faith. Those with a vested interest in the preservation of Islam ultimately have no option but to kill all who would apostatise from it, as exemplified by the very first action of the very first caliph, Abu Baker, when he launched the Ridda Wars against those who dared to walk off when Muhammad died, and contemporary Islamic governments declaring apostasy a capital offence, whether by statute or mob rule.
Finally, there is the fear of raising suspicion. Sheikh Omar Suleiman can blithely advise doubters to simply say to themselves, “I believe in Allah.” How qualified is he to know the efficacy of his own advice? Has he ever known doubt himself? Yasir Qadhi has, and he knows from personal experience that once you doubt, even five university degrees are not enough to help you fool yourself. Doubt will eat you and while it does, you must conceal all sign of its presence. People mention apostates who pray, fast, go to mosque and even teach Qur’an, as if they’ve pulled a neat trick and it’s all hunky-dory. When your entire universe has been Muslims, Muslims and nothing but Muslims for all of your life since childhood, and everything in your family is the business of everyone in your family, and shame is the one thing that must never ever be brought on your family no matter what, the prospect of losing all you’ve ever had, being shunned by everyone you’ve every known, rebuilding your whole self and identity and getting to know an entire new world, all while going through a massive multiple grieving process and possibly being in physical danger… Dissenting, even in the most banal way, is not worth the risk of just one cousin or aunt just once looking at you askance. It takes just one question… you suffer for another day, for fear of raising suspicion.
I did, after an internal struggle that took me completely by surprise, touch the pig, that didn’t move from the spot. I was disappointed to find it was not squishy and marshmellowy as I had imagined, but coarse and hard and didn’t even twitch. It could at least have recognised how tough it had been for me to get up close and personal with it; shown some appreciation for what I’ve had to overcome to accomplish that momentary physical contact. But I bear no grudges. I’m sure it could smell that last bit of Muslim fear still lurking deep inside me. Expecting a pig to forgive 1400 years of extreme badmouthing just so some jumped-up atheist could feel better about herself was a bit much to ask. I get that.