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 here and Part 3 here.
Part 4: Truth
To a Muslim, there is nothing either objective or verifiable about truth, except when truth has no remote bearing on his faith, which is rare, as “Allah knows best.” While truth can be negotiated, mostly, truth is either received, as from scripture or other authority, or seized, with or without violence. At worst, truth is imposed. But today, Islamic truth is unraveling, giving rise to yet another potential string of inner struggles for the contemporary Muslim.
Ordinarily, quite without malice and in complete sincerity, a Muslim’s truth can be a mélange of truths, half-truths, received truths, myths, prejudices, non sequiturs, contradictions, speculations, misinterpretations and arbitrary assertions, to which a fellow Muslim interlocutor will concur without the slightest bit of trouble, the point being to respect the speaker, no matter what, which means agreeing with everything they say. If the parties to the conversation are social equals, each might say any number of impossible things on either side of breakfast and the conviviality will flow without hindrance. Where there is a difference in social weight, the one considered more important will near-monopolise the time with monologues that are punctuated with obsequious noises from the lower one that can be cringe-inducing to witness. Disagreements (always either down the social scale or between social equals) tend to arise in the province of personal responsibility, where all of the above will again be in evidence, with complete and deferential acceptance by the lower one, and in the case of equals, truths will be replaced with outright lies, the volume will be cranked up to yelling, and exchange will collapse into each attempting to out-yell the other. The last one yelling has the truth, obviously. But at the interface between Muslim truth and objective truth, another dynamic is at play that raises interesting questions.
Maren Hunsberger gives a video update on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), in which her guest, astrophysicist Dr Amber Straughn, observes that “Astronomy really gets to the heart of what it means to be human,” barely able to contain her excitement. Her colleague, astrophysicist and engineer Dr Amy Lo, one of the designers of the JWST, enthuses, “I think we’ll answer questions that we hadn’t even thought to ask yet.” Dr Straughn says about humans, “We are creatures of curiosity and of wonder.” The subject of the video is astronomy and the technical intricacies of the most advanced telescope ever built. Apart from the short male voiceover in the introduction, all we see and hear in the entire video are three females, creatures “deficient in intelligence” according to Islam. These days, I find myself unavoidably reflecting on how Muslims perceive objective truth, and how they come to terms with a clash with reality that they can only avoid up to a point. Leaving aside the small matter of the universe, what is the truth here: that these three women are “deficient in intelligence”, or that they are some of the most intelligent people on earth? Most Muslims interested enough to watch such a video will simply not approach that question. Those who do, simply hold both propositions to be true and leave it at that. At the interface between Muslim truth and objective truth, much Muslim creativity and ingenuity is expended on keeping contradictory or mutually exclusive propositions in the same head at the same time. This does not make for happy people*.
In 2017, Dr Straughn gave a public lecture on the James Webb Space Telescope at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. Four people in the audience grabbed my attention: in the second row sat a man of South Asian extraction, with his daughter of about nine. Two rows further back, at the opposite side of the auditorium, sat two young women of South or West Asian appearance, both with their hair covered in Muslim fashion. The rest of the audience was almost exclusively white, from all walks of life and of all ages. I knew that the man and his nine-year-old daughter could not be Muslim. But what about the two “modest” women two rows back? They were Muslim, of that I was confident, and their presence at an event of this kind encapsulates the central concern of this essay: what is truth to the Muslim, who is open to the objective truths of the modern world?
Clearly, these women would not have been in the audience had they not wanted to be there, at least that can be said for the one who paid full attention throughout, and perhaps not for the one who was on her phone a lot of the time. Perhaps the second one didn’t want to be there in the first place. Perhaps her phone was her escape. Whichever way, at least one of them was not “deficient in intelligence,” as their religion would have it. So what does the interested one hold as true for herself: does she hold herself to be deficient in intelligence, or is she intelligent enough to be riveted by a talk on astrophysics, space telescopes and exoplanets? The speaker, also a woman, is a world authority in her field. Is she deficient in intelligence? How do intelligent Muslim women decide on the truth about themselves? It must be impossible for a woman to be intelligent and a Muslim and happy all at the same time. Perhaps she, or even both of them, might challenge the speaker during q and a, or so I hoped, but by then their seats were vacant.
Of course there can be any number of reasons for one of them being on the phone, just as there can be any number of reasons for them walking out before the event was over, but their presence and then early absence leads one’s thoughts to the conflicting truths that the Muslim in the modern world must negotiate at every turn. These two women seem to have found some kind of manageable cognitive dissonance. Others solve the problem by ditching one side of the contradiction for the other: they either apostatise from Islam, or become seriously devout. Either action helps truth to become clear, one way or the other. The determination is then to keep it that way: the apostate reinforces his apostasy; the Muslim reinforces his piety.
Dealing with Muslims’ idea of truth can be entertaining, frustrating or tedious, but occasionally, it can be interesting, such as in the case of five-degreed Yasir Qadhi. Four of Qadhi’s five degrees are in what Muslims quaintly refer to as “the Islamic sciences” (yes, envy of the infidel’s intellectual accomplishments slips out when least expected), while his only real degree is in chemical engineering. Nonetheless, Qadhi is a cut above your Mehdi Hasan or your Maajid Nawaz. Of the YouTube Muslim evangelists who preach in English, if Zakir Naik were at one extreme and Bilal Phillips in the middle, then Yasir Qadhi is at the opposite extreme. This makes him interesting, for he exemplifies how far it is possible for a Muslim to go in rationalising the claims of seventh and eighth century, fundamentally irrational peoples, ossified into a religion that has persisted as a relic into a rational world. Qadhi’s problem is no different to that of any “Islamic reformer”: how to shoe-horn the factually untrue into the factually true, the irrational into the rational, the inhuman into the human and the unethical into the ethical when getting rid of any of them is not an option.
In his video The Reality of Jinn in the Qur’an and Sunnah, when Qadhi first introduces the djinn**, he presents them not within the cosmos of the Qur’an and the Sunnah, but, straight off the bat, offers a catalogue of the infidel world’s supernatural beings, from trolls and demons to fairies, ghosts and spirits. Even Hollywood and The Exorcist are invoked. Qadhi makes two claims here: one, “The reason why each and every civilisation believes in spiritual entities …is because they are real,” and two, the djinn are just another of those “spiritual entities” and so they, too, are real. Here Qadhi attempts to establishes the credentials of Islamic supernatural beings not from the perfect word of Allah himself, viz., the Qur’an, but by associating the djinn with infidel supernatural beings. The supernatural beings of “each and every civilisation” that Qadhi does not care to mention include those of pre-Islamic Arabia, such as Hubal, al-Lat, al-‘Uzza and al-Manat, whose reality Sheikh Yasir Qadhi has just established. Whoever would have imagined?
But Qadhi’s dishonesty is plain to see. None of the infidel cultures he lists claim their supernatural beings to actually exist. Santa Claus, trolls and ghosts are real for little children and cranks. Healthy children realise before they reach ten years of age that such stories are not true. The tooth fairy, the bogey-man and demons persist in the world’s cultures because they enrich imagination and speech, and give us safe and enjoyable access to emotions that we no longer experience very often in the relative safety of our modern world, like being scared out of our wits. We hold onto our supernatural beings not because they are real, but because we enjoy having them around. Lumping Islam’s djinn together with our fantasy beings, Qadhi “proves” that the djinn are real. To a Muslim, such logic is faultless. “From our [Muslim] perspective,” affirms Qadhi, “we look at all of this [SciFi fantasy channel, etc.], we read all of this, and it fits in perfectly with our world view. …In reality, this [claims of haunting, etc.] is a sign of our religion being true. …It explains in complete logic and rationality [emph. orig.]…everything is explained.”
Having just resorted to infidel sources as evidence, Qadhi has no problem asserting “We have to take what we can from the Qur’an and the Sunnah; …take it as a fact. …If Allah says it—end of story. We take it as fact.” So the sun does set in a muddy spring! Well, I never. “However, if there is something we discover upon ourselves, seems to be a reality, we say this is a theory, this is a possibility, and Allah (swt) knows best.” Thankfully, we now know the claim that humans have orbited the entire earth without going anywhere near the sun to be false. Alhamdulilah! The sheikh has shown us an elegant refutation of the claim that there are more than sixty scientific errors in the Qur’an, not to mention the historical inaccuracies and other assorted claims that doubters introduce. There would’ve been no need for any of this had Muslim truth not found itself in a crisis of credibility brought upon it by modern times, that Qadhi elsewhere describes as, “confusing times”, “an era of trials and tribulations”, “challenging times”, “testing” times, and “difficult times”. But when a Muslim knows the answer, all else is weird and bizarre:
You have djinn that speak human languages. This is well-documented. The famous case of …Emily Rose …from which we have tape-recordings to this day …where a village girl, illiterate and uneducated, is speaking fluent Latin. …This is a phenomenon that psychiatrists actually know about: where a person just learns a language out of nowhere and begins speaking it fluently. Now psychiatrists have their own weird and bizarre ways of explaining it. We don’t need that weird and bizarre. It’s very clear how a seven-year-old girl …can speak fluent Latin. …You come across djinns that will be speaking in languages that the person who is speaking has never been exposed to, but these are human languages. And therefore, this shows us that the djinn, intellectually, are not as high as us, because they have to learn our languages. We don’t learn their languages. They have their languages.
Of course, this means that the djinn are capable of learning our languages while we are incapable of learning theirs, which makes it unclear exactly how, “intellectually, they are not as high as us.” I repeat that Yasir Qadhi holds five university degrees, albeit four of them are in “the Islamic sciences”. Even if his congregation were to notice this bizarrely inverted non-sequitur, what hope is there of the average Muslim joining the modern world if a sheikh can so demonstrably hoodwink them? By that I mean really joining the modern world, as opposed to finding a way to live with it, i.e., “remaining true to themselves,” viz., Muslim.
This is a near-accurate account the final part of a conversation I had with some former friends in Marrakesh, written up directly afterwards. The conversation had reached their claim that Islam is the final religion. What followed went something like this, with different people interjecting:
“In that case, how do you explain Sikhism?”
“What?”
“Sikhism, the religion of the Sikhs. How do you explain it?”
“If it is a religion, then it must be older than Islam.”
“It comes almost a thousand years later than Islam.”
“Then it is not a religion.”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course! Islam is the final religion. If it came later than Islam, then it is not a religion.”
“Would you like to inform forty million Sikhs that their religion is not a religion?”
“They are ignorant. They should follow Islam. It is the final religion.”
“I’m interested to know what you consider a religion and what not.”
“A religion comes from God. There can be a right religion and a wrong religion, but all religions come from God. Islam is the right religion.”
“All religions come from God? Even Buddhism?”
“Of course!”
“You do know that Buddhism has no God, right? It’s an atheist religion.”
“I can see what you are doing. You are trying to use clever words on me. I am not stupid. [Expletive]!”
“And if all religion came from God, then what was so wrong about the Quraish? They had their religion before Islam, so it came from God, and they had all their idols in the Kaaba. What can be more blessed than that?”
“[EXPLETIVE]!”
“Ok. Ok. I’m trying to figure out how you can tell, just by looking at a religion, but knowing nothing at all about it, whether it came before Islam or after Islam.”
“If it is not Islam, then it came before Islam.”
“And if it came after Islam, then it is not a religion, right?”
“That is right.”
“So you will simply deny that Sikhism, a religion practised by millions of people for the last more than 500 years, is even a religion at all.”
“Islam is the final religion—Basta!”
There ended my final conversation with this particular group of Muslim friends. We haven’t spoken since.
Generally, the only way to sustain a conversation with a Muslim is by politely ignoring all the nonsense they speak, but it can be wearing. Mostly, the Muslim is oblivious to the discomfort of his or her interlocutor. But at other times, the Muslim is very much aware of that discomfort and exploits it, such as in “interfaith dialogue”, which is neither interfaith nor dialogue. When one side of the “dialogue” is Islam, then it doesn’t matter what the other side is, the Muslim will impose Islam on it. Christians involved in interfaith dialogue with Muslims feel very pleased, or even smug, with themselves for doing so, even though they take great care never to say anything that might offend their hyper-touchy Muslim interlocutors, who exercise no such restraint at all. They know not what they do, as the Muslim is merely humouring and exploiting them for an ulterior motive, jihad, and, if they were so minded, would humour Hinduism, Buddhism, even atheism, in exactly the same way. Sam Harris’ pathetic capitulation to Maajid Nawaz in Islam and the Future of Tolerance is a case in point.
Western people, autonomous individuals, tend to guard against stereotyping. The implications range from not prejudging anyone to eschewing collective punishment. Not so Muslims. Not prejudging is profoundly un-Islamic, as Islam has already prejudged both all who are not Muslim and all who are Muslim. All Jews this, all Christians that, all polytheists the next thing. These are stereotypes because they are based on prejudice. Careful observation of Muslims reveals that accurate statements can be made about Muslims as a whole that do not require prejudice. Such statements do not, therefore, amount to stereotyping. So, for example, it is not stereotyping Muslims to say that Muslims can only stereotype and nothing else. The truth about infidels they have already received. It comes from Allah, it is accurate, and it is ingrained. While Western non-Muslims beat themselves up to avoid anti-Muslim bigotry, bigotry against non-Muslims runs freely in the veins of every Muslim. A Muslim, by definition, is a bigot and an incurable one at that.
With the benefit that comes from once having been a Muslim, I look at conversations, discussions or negotiations between Muslims and non-Muslims, and despair. The latter, dripping-wet behind the ears, always approach the former in good faith, without the foggiest idea of how their interlocutors regard them. To see the hapless John Kerry, or the dhimmier-than-thou Federica Mogherini in action is cringe-worthy. But former Muslims are not the only ones who see this.
As might be expected, intellectually honest infidel analysts will not balk at the implications of their investigations, nor veer from where their investigations lead. But this is not an essay about them; it is about Muslims. No longer protected within the hermetically sealed world of Muslims, those whose intellects and inner strengths survived their childhood madrassa ordeals remain alive to any spark of humanity, any whiff of doubt nearby. That way lies the sating of a great hunger, the slaking of a great thirst for something more fulfilling than the great living death that is being Muslim. And they sense it. They tremble with anticipation for what lies beyond the door that has opened but a crack. They are the ones who, even if only in baby steps at first, immerse themselves into the reality beyond the suffocating confines of the Muslim mind.
“Offending Muslim sensibilities” has become one of those memes of modern life. But what, exactly, is a Muslim sensibility? On closer inspection, a Muslim sensibility turns out to be nothing more than a “truth” held by a Muslim. A truth held by a Muslim is a truth in which his very existence is invested. It is a truth that a Muslim cannot allow to have challenged, a truth susceptible to the slightest chink of doubt. This truth goes, the Muslim goes and Islam itself comes under threat. When a Muslim kills someone for laughing at the idea of Muhammad going to Heaven on a flying horse, it is quite literally in self-defence. The Muslim might no longer be oblivious to the absurdity of his “truth”, but his actions to defend it are just, and he has no problem going before the entire world to complain. A Muslim must cling to every barbaric commandment of the Qur’an as just, for justice and truth are here interchangeable. Even a candyfloss Western Muslim cannot reject a man’s right to beat his wife without risking apostasy. One wonders whether non-Muslims who consider such Muslims “good people” and “on our side” would extend the same generosity to non-Muslims who hold wife-beating to be a good thing, leaving aside whether they do it themselves.
A Muslim does not care about the objectivity or otherwise of what he holds to be true. Evidence or the lack thereof is entirely irrelevant. Muslims are driven to worldwide rioting not by the objective truth about Islam, about which they do not care, but by violation of the sanctity of the truths they hold. Saying that Muhammad had sex with a nine-year old child is just fine, but saying that doing so is somehow questionable is a lie. It is a lie because it hurts Muslims’ feelings to imply that Muhammad’s actions were questionable. Truth is all about and only about what the Muslim identity can bear. And the Muslim identity is a contraption of seventh-century barbaric wisdom and barbaric truths that is perfect and good for all time, in other words, well out of step with reality.
Unfortunately, both for Islam and for the rest of us, Islam has survived through to an age in which those invested in its preservation can no longer be certain that all Muslims are or will remain Muslim. When the likes of Imran Khan or the OIC or the Arab League or Mahatir Muhammad seek to manipulate international bodies so as to curtail free speech, of course they do so to advance jihad, but they also do so to stop at source the influence that is undermining their own societies from within. Satellite television and the Internet challenge the “truth” as Muslims see it, and as such it introduces into Muslim societies that mortal threat that it must do everything to avoid: doubt. The OIC’s campaign to undermine the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and degrade it to something Shari’a-compliant, is also an attempt to alter the message before it reaches the masses. Since satellite TV and the Internet cannot be blocked, then what comes in through it must be controlled. But the genie, to use another meme, is out of the bottle (I can’t believe I just said that).
* “I left religions, and abandoned all [religious] beliefs, and put my faith in science and scientific logic alone. To my great surprise and amazement, I found myself happier and more confident than I had been when I had struggled with myself in the attempt to maintain my religious belief,” Ismail Adham, quoted in Whitaker, B. (2014), Arabs Without God, p41.
** The singular of djinn is djinni (male) or djinniyah (female). Djinni is corrupted in English to genie. In the video, Qadhi uses the Anglicised plural djinns (jinns), rather than djinn.