A contemporary Muslim is an anguished being preoccupied with mediaeval concerns. 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 unbeliever, the kafir, 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, leaving an ummah in meltdown. This short series explores aspects of that complex struggle. Previous parts are at these links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.
Part 6: Ethics
“Did you know Islam allows you to crucify people? Hmm? Did you know that? How many of you know that? Come on, tell me. Put up your hand. How many of you know that Islam says you can crucify a man?”
Sheikh Ahmed Deedat panned across his deadpan congregation and spotted one hand. “Masha-Allah,” Allah willed it, he acknowledged and at the same time exulted. Allah’s will, as we shall see, has a lot to do with the Muslim’s struggle against his own ethical evolution.
Deedat ’s glee failed to bring a twitch to his congregation’s faces, failed to take the vacuousness from their eyes. Undeterred, the sheikh pressed on, arm and hand chopping on every repeated “crucified”, “cut”, “killed”… the obligatory interspersed Arabic both lyrical and hypnotic, these attributes of the uttered Qur’anic language being all the proof that Deedat’s brother-in-faith, Yasir Qadhi, needs that the Qur’an is indeed divine (1). As you might have guessed, dear reader, Sheikh Ahmed Deedat was enthusing about the particularly notorious Qur’an verse 5:33:
“The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and do mischief in the land is only that they shall be killed or crucified or their hands and their feet be cut off on the opposite sides, or be exiled from the land.” (2)
It is a verse carefully avoided by two groups of Muslims: those who are ashamed of it, and those who wish to deceive. The latter are identical to Ahmed Deedat, being proud of Islam’s barbaric ethics, but they hide the fact to deceive the naive infidel. So even that difference is an illusion, for Deedat was speaking to Muslims — no deception required — while Muslims who deceive about Islam do so to non-Muslims. Those Muslims who are ashamed of all the killing and cutting and crucifying have failed to protect themselves against the corrosive effects of civilisation (3).
Most Muslims, unfortunately, are still like Ahmed Deedat, proud of Islam’s barbarism and savagery. Jihad Watch reader Jaladhi, in response to Islamic Republic of Pakistan: 70 honor killings in six months in Sindh, by Robert Spencer, commented:
“You think Pakistan and Muslims will be ashamed of such despicable acts? Don’t bet on it! Nothing shames them – when allah tells them to do it, everything goes. If anything they feel proud of such horrible acts.”
“When allah tells them to do it, everything goes.” This, in a nutshell, is Islamic ethics, and Allah is nothing but the alter-ego of the quintessential pre-mediaeval Arabian barbarian. To let humanity into your heart is to go directly against Allah. To remain true to Islam, a Muslim must remain a monster (4).
*
It was a Saturday night and I had no inkling that my final minutes as a Muslim were counting down. As I approached the front gate of the madrassa, which happened to be the teacher’s house, a boy standing outside was holding hands across the gate with the madrassa teacher’s daughter. I don’t recall whether they let go of each other’s hands when they let me pass, but I don’t think they did. I encountered no one in the house or in the madrassa at the back. I sat down. Suddenly something shattered on something as a girl screamed, a woman cried out and a man bellowed in rage. There was knocking into things and falling about. Blow after blow, the man roared, the girl screamed, the woman cried. I got up, walked out of the madrassa and back through the house. There was no one. Only the sound of a girl howling and the carpet littered with splintered bits of plank. When I left that house that night, Islam and all religion stayed behind inside it. I had apostatised. I had become an atheist. There was no one at the gate.
That girl was lucky. At least when I heard her still howling she was lucky. She might have been dead not so long after, as so many girls trapped in Muslim families end up, for such a girl must be killed, having brought shame to the family by means of the display of love. Killing restores that which love corrupts. Thus is the way of the Muslims, and her father, a teacher of this faith, was one to know.
My parents knew this, too. But I knew my parents, and knew that no such misfortune would befall me were I to inform them that I was no longer a Muslim. They did not harm me in any way, nor did they say an unkind word to me. My parents’ love for their child was stronger than their fear of Allah, or the power of his will over them. My parents were better human beings than Ibrahim, who did not spare his child’s life because he loved him, but only because Allah commanded him to do so. There are still too many Muslims who admire Ibrahim for that. Islam not only blocks any ethical development in the Muslim, it corrupts even the purest and most highly-developed of emotions, love.
The endless pandemic of “honour” murders attests to the depth and tenacity of Islam’s bulwark against civilised ethics, and the Muslim girls who lose their inner struggle lose it also in the most physical sense: their lives are taken from them, and thus is the perfect religion restored to perfection.
Oh mother, a rattle, tears and darkness
Blood gushed out, and the stabbed body trembled.
“Oh mother!” Heard only by the executioner
Tomorrow the dawn will come and roses will wake up
Youth and enchanted hopes will ask for her
The meadows and the flowers will answer:
She left to wash the disgrace.
The brutal executioner returns
And meets people
“Disgrace!” He wipes his knife
“We’ve torn it apart.”
And returned virtuous with a white reputation.
Nazik al-Malaika, To Wash Disgrace, 1949
*
The Qur’an commands Muslims to love only what Allah loves and to hate all that Allah hates, and Allah loves only himself and those who love him, and hates everything else. Allah, perfection itself, and as such only changeable to become less than perfect, cannot change, at least once he’d stopped changing (5). Ibn Taimiya put it much more tersely:
“The heart will not find complete happiness except by loving Allah and by striving towards what is dear to Him. It is not possible to achieve this love except by rejecting all things that compete with it. This is what the words, ‘There is no god but Allah’ mean; this is the spirit of the deen of Ibrahim and of that of every other prophet,” (6).
All love is for Allah alone in practice means all love is for Muhammad alone. It is clear from Muhammad’s biography, from the Hadith and from the “revelations” in the Qur’an, that Muhammad was a sociopath, pathologically incapable of empathy, who expected nothing less than absolute obedience from his subjects and permanent adulation. No Muslim ever utters Muhammad’s name or otherwise refers to him without appending their words with “peace be upon him,” or something even more ingratiating (5).
“Surely God and His angels bless the Prophet; O you who believe! call for (Divine) blessings on him and salute him with a (becoming) salutation,” (Quran 33:56). The scholar ibn Kathir entitled the section in his Tafsir ibn Kathir regarding this verse, “The Command to say [ṣalawāt] upon the Prophet (Muhammad)”. Muhammad made sure he laid the basis for his cult: “The miser is the one in whose presence I am mentioned, then he does not send the Salam upon me.”
Muhammad is easily compared to Stalin, Mao and Kim Il-sung. However, the Stalin and Mao personality cults ended when they died. The Kim Il-sung and Muhammad personality cults continue past their deaths to this day. Kim Il-sung, despite being dead, remains the Eternal Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and it is still possible to insult him, not his memory, but himself. So does it remain possible to insult Muhammad, who has been dead for almost one and a half millennia. Clearly, the Eternal Leader has nothing on the Perfect Man; yet another dictator with Muhammad-envy?
The cult of personality is sometimes taken to be a form of worship, but it is far worse. Even communal or congregational worship, even if fervent, does not descend into mass psychotic behaviour. Witness 100,000 North Koreans balling their eyes out in adulation of the Eternal Leader (or is that the Dear leader or perhaps the Heavenly Leader?). Witness continental-scale Muslim rioting at the mere rumour of something slightly untoward maybe having been said about Muhammad. There is nothing about this perfect man that isn’t perfect, and never shall anyone say otherwise. Moreover, this man’s example is to be emulated. Doing as he did is good. It is a good thing to go murdering and raping and pillaging. It is a good thing to lie and to deceive. The reward for such behaviour is an eternity of fleshly delight (if you’re male and heterosexual).
Is it then any wonder that the ethics of the modern world, especially after the setting down of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and the wide-scale exposure of Muslims to civilised values, should present Muslims with a clash between Islam and civilisation, and Islam itself with an existential crisis? Muslims who grew up in the West are autonomous individuals and know what it means to be an ethical human being (where they go with this is another matter), while those who grew up under Islam in Islamic lands and have seized control of their own minds know that the kind of human beings they’ve become is not the kind of human being that is compatible with Islam. In both cases, such Muslims claim their rights by virtue of being human, not by virtue of being Muslim.
When Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan whines (he does rather a lot of that) that the “world has a problem when it comes to human rights of Muslims,” he does not mean human rights as enshrined in the UDRH; he means Muslims’ rights as enshrined in the Shari’a — Taqiyya 101. He does not mean equal rights for all; he means all rights for Muslims alone. He does not mean equality between all individuals; he means Muslim overlordship over everyone else and the restitution of the dhimma and slavery. He does not mean equality of women with men; he means men having control over women. He does not mean equality before the law; he means a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man and dhimmis may not testify against Muslims and parents are free to kill their children and grandparents their grandchildren; and more, much more. Every assumption we make when a Muslim speaks of human rights or any aspects of ethics, we would do well to reexamine from every angle, even if it seems silly to do so. The consequences of agreeing with a Muslim on such matters can be catastrophic; how much more so of supporting them.
According to the doctrine of Al-Wala’ wal-Bara’, Muslims are meant to have empathy towards Muslims and all things Muslim, while they have enmity towards non-Muslims and all things non-Muslim. They are meant to be lenient towards Muslims, and harsh towards infidels. The distinction between human and not-quite human, or downright animal, is the presence or absence of the Islamic faith. This is no longer so straightforward.
Muslim clerics have good reason to fear doubt amongst “the believers”, for it is indeed a slippery slope. Once doubt in the correctness of Islam sets in, it opens the door to exposing the monstrous ethics that underpins Muslim pride in the most barbaric conduct. Muslims who find themselves recoiling in revulsion from Muhammad’s behaviour are simply Muslims who have caught up with the ethics of the world and recognise themselves as human before Muslim. Even if they did not then explicitly join the human race, they cannot return to the status quo ante (not even Mufassil Islam can do that).
The ethical struggle going on inside the contemporary Muslim, that Zakat is for Muslims only, and worse, that it must fund jihad, that males exercise arbitrary control over females, that Muslims wilfully kill way, way, way more people than everyone else put together, that most Muslims around them are ethically stunted and proud to be so stunted, that most Muslims still feel nothing for the innocents slain in every jihad attack, that Muslims are phenomenally bigoted towards non-Muslims, that Muslims lie without flinching at their supposed non-Muslim friends, that their imams in mosques encourage all of the above and more, weigh increasingly heavily on the ethical Muslim, until he or she can bear this weight no more.
(1) Admittedly, this is not quite as lame as Irshad Manji’s claim that the Qur’an is not divine, but divinely inspired.
(2) If the number 5:33 sounds familiar, it might be because it sounds so similar to 5:32. But that’s where the similarity ends, for their contents could not be more different. 5:32 is the go-to verse for all those who, unlike the honest and unapologetic Ahmed Deedat, will have you believe that Islam is not only peaceful, but cutesy-cuddly peaceful. They’ll quote: “whoever killed a human being, shall be looked upon as though he had killed all mankind; and that whoever saved a human life shall be regarded as though he had saved all mankind.”
Except, of course, that they are being dishonest, as one would have to be if one wished to defend Islam against ethical challenge. Qur’an verse 5:32 reads: “That was why We laid it down for the Israelites that whoever killed a human being, except as a punishment for murder or other villainy in the land, shall be looked upon as though he had killed all mankind; and that whoever saved a human life shall be regarded as though he had saved all mankind. Our apostles brought them veritable proofs: yet it was not long before many of them committed great evils in the land.”
After which verse 5:33 continues: “Those that make war against God and His apostle and spread disorder shall be put to death or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides, or be banished from the country.”
5:32 and 5:33 are two parts of the same message, with the latter even referred to inside the former. Not every Muslim is proud of the way these verses are lied about, and how they are used to mislead non-Muslims.
(3) “Civilisation and Islam are two different things,” said Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Not a Friday goes by without khutbahs across the world decrying the effects of civilised ethics on Muslims, not least the flaunting of apostasy and atheism. It’s OK for Muslims to scream their faith from towers at all ungodly hours, but if you leave their faith, they expect you to do them the courtesy of keeping quiet about it.
(4) To avoid misunderstanding, ethical behaviour is not unique to the modern world. Ethics have formed a core part of philosophical enquiry from the earliest times. It is possible to detect some origins of modern ethics in the Code of Hammurabi. Greek philosophers wrote hefty tomes on that subject alone. The position taken here is that only now that the particular social being that is the autonomous individual is becoming generalised across the Islamic world is it possible for Muslims in general to embrace evolved ethics. Others have reached that point much earlier, even long before the autonomous individual became the dominant social form. Tabari recounts how a group of Christians who had embraced Islam were so appalled by what they found that they returned to Christianity. He quotes them as saying, “By God, our religion from which we have departed is better and more correct than that which these people follow. Their religion does not stop them from shedding blood, terrifying the roads, and seizing properties,” (Tabari 17:187) whereupon they returned to Christianity. For this rejection of the great favour that Allah had bestowed on them, caliph Ali beheaded all the men and sold the woman and children into slavery.
(5) Although he does change his mind sometimes, apparently. “We do not abrogate a verse or cause it to be forgotten except that We bring forth [one] better than it or similar to it. Do you not know that Allah is over all things competent?” (Qur’an 2:106) For someone who is almighty, this is not what I’d call “in all things competent,” but be that as it may. Bring forth “one better than it”? Even if we assume, for sake of argument, that the later verse is perfect, you know, as Allah is (the Qur’an being uncreated and so the same thing as Allah, and all that), the verse so replaced certainly could not have been perfect. And since Allah is all-powerful, he can certainly “abrogate a[ny] verse or cause it to be forgotten” at any time (perhaps like the stoning verse that ‘Aisha’s sheep sensibly gobbled up). So “the book about which there can be no doubt” (2:2) contains any number of imperfect verses, to wit, all the nice fluffy stuff Allah came up with in Mecca bettered by the hardcore stuff he later “revealed” in Medina, and all of these can be abrogated or caused it to be forgotten again when Allah is next in the mood. So, while we are told that Mecca was the Jahiliyyah to be conquered and bettered, we are also expected to believe that the verses abrogated there prove Islam to be a religion of peace.
(6) Ibn Taimiya, Majmu’ al-Fatawa, vol 28, p.32, Riyadh, quoted in Al Wala’ wal Bara’, According to the Aqeedah of the Salaf, Muhammad Saeed al-Qahtani, Transl. Omar Johnstone (emphasis added).
(7) The parallels between Adolf Hitler’s life and deeds and the life and deeds of Muhammad are striking. Hitler’s father was distant and largely absent. Muhammad had no father. Hitler was fanatically devoted to his mother. Muhammad married the mother-figure that, as an orphan, he always craved. Hitler was rejected by Academy of Fine Art Vienna, twice. Muhammad was rejected first by the Jews and then by the Quraish (apparently his life was littered with rejections). Then both men went forth into the world to court notoriety and became monsters.