June 02, 2005
[Schwartz] ﷲ - The faith of Allah
Islam is ill.
As someone who once very seriously considered converting to the religion—I privately practiced the rituals and debated with myself for five years, nearly making the declaration of faith [shahada] on at least three separate occasions—believe me when I say there is a cancer in the heart of the Muslim creed.
"Yeah, so?" you (who may or may not be Muslim yourself) say, "We know this already. The symptoms are everywhere: mysogynism, theocracy, not a little bit of fascism, and terrorism."
But you don’t really know. The tumor is not the pillars of Islamic belief, nor the Qur`an or the Prophet Muhammad. It is the Muslims.
They refuse to accept the essential human reality of tragedy. They deny our species’ all-too-innate shortcomings—and our infinite potential for redemption.
Click on "continue reading" [The opinion expressed herein does not necessarily represent the views of Thinking-East, its editorial staff or contributors.]
A prophet dies
Fifteen centuries ago, the Prophet Muhammad was dying, but for a while, only he knew that he was. In a cemetery in Mecca late one night, the old man was taking a stroll with a former servant and confidant.
“Allah has offered me a choice...” he said, pausing to gaze across the gravestones.
Tides of sand and dust had washed over the cemetery for generations, burying epitaphs, silencing the echoes of prayers. Perhaps the old man, as he looked upon the ruined headstones, traversed the caravan route of his memories:
the night of his first revelation, when the angel Gabriel embraced him in a cave...
his terror afterwards, running back home, wrapping himself in a blanket, the whispers pursuing him, and Khadijah, his first wife, most beloved of all his lovers, holding him close...
his first sermons, the hopeful eyes of youth and widows, the wrathful glares of the Meccan merchants and elders...
the persecutions, the deaths—his beloved among the lost—the revelations growing angrier and more apocalyptic...
his incredible dream, in which he soared to Jerusalem and then up into the Kingdom of God...
the flight to the city of Medina, his joyous welcome there...
and the wars—so many wars, so many friends murdered, so many foes slain, so many innocents massacred, so much fire, so much blood...
and finally, the triumphant return to Mecca, the cleansing of the sacred site of the Kaabah, the knitting together of torn Arabia under the banner of the One God.
Perhaps as he looked out across those gravestones, the old man was musing to himself, How far we’ve come.
“I can stay here for many more years,” he explained, “or I can soon leave for Paradise.”
His shocked friend sputtered, “H-have you d-decided?”
“Yes,” he replied softly, then turned and walked away into the evening mists.
A few days later, the elderly Muhammad became sick. The illness was bizarre and mysterious, like the slow withering of a flower. The diagnosis eluded even the best doctors of the day. The old man just smiled.
His friends and family took him away from Mecca, the bourgeois city of his birth and early adulthood, the illustrious holy city around which all the spiritual activity of Arabia revolved. They took him back to dirty and wretched Medina, the shit-hole which, though he publicly denied it, he could never deny in his heart had become the true fixture of his affection, his real home.
His ailment worsened until he was bed stricken. He spent most of his days inside his hut beside the city’s mosque, the simple temple he and his followers had built with their bare hands when they first arrived in Medina.
All of Arabia feigned unconcern, but even the sand-devils stopped spinning as the desert held its breath.
On the day he died, Muhammad pulled himself out of his cot and quietly made his way to the mosque door. He leaned upon the doorpost and watched the congregation pray. He always enjoyed watching his followers pray. When they had finished their rituals, the assembly noticed his presence.
The historical record does not tell us anything more about the assembly. According to his chronicler Ibn Ishaq, these were the old prophet’s words: “Don’t look at me like that. I only ever allowed what our Lord Allah allowed, and I only ever forbade what our Lord Allah forbade. You have the Law now.” And then Muhammad turned on his heels and stormed back into his hut.
A few hours later, with his friends gathered around him, his head resting in the lap of Aisha, a devoted lover and one of the many women he had married during the war with Mecca, the apostle slipped away. His final words were a whispered conversation: “O God! ... pardon my sins ... Yes, ... I come, ... among my fellow citizens on high ...”
…idhinas siratal mustaqim
No Muslim has ever dared explicate the meaning of that moment between Muhammad and the congregants. Like anyone else, they want to be told that their blessed prophet was successful and perfect in every way. Because they want to believe that they, as Muslims, are infallible and wonderful.
But they dare not consider that Muhammad may have died wondering if he was a failure.
In what manner were those Muslims in the Medina mosque looking upon him? Could it have been that their eyes were imploring him, demanding of him: You cannot go. You are the leader. Could it have been that Muhammad realized that, despite all the sacrifice and enormous struggle, in the end his precious “believers” remained, in their secret hearts, pagans?
And did he feel that the guilt for this… rested squarely upon his shoulders? The historical records tell us that Muhammad decided every facet of his followers’ lives: how they were to wage their battles, how they were to pray and give alms, even how they were to marry, sleep together, raise their children—decisions and edicts that were later gathered and codified into the laws of the Shariah.
The early Muslims’ poverty of autonomy and sincerity became explosively obvious after the prophet’s death. Muhammad hadn’t decided who among his cadre would become the next governor of the new Arabian polity. Almost immediately after his demise, the “believers” began to worship his tomb, so frightful was the prospect of having to decide for themselves what to believe, how to live.
Barely a decade passed before Muslims split between those who wanted an elite leadership, and those who desired a monarchy derived from Muhammad’s bloodline—a split which erupted into bloody civil war and assassinations, tearing open the vast chasm between Sunni (the oligarchic school) and Shia (the monarchial school) which has torn apart Islam ever since.
The Muslims’ deep deficiency has persisted in many other ways, especially in religious belief. Islam experienced a few brief centuries of “independent reasoning” [ijtihad], but statism, capitalism, corrupt taxation and foreign invasion led to a series of homegrown military coup-de-tats in the Middle Ages. These regimes rapidly feudalized Islamic domains, purged academia and seminaries of “subversives,” and enforced an ideology of "blind belief" [taqlid]. So started the long slide into spiritual darkness which culminated in the bloody rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the exploitative Saudi regime in Arabia, and the atrocities of September 11th.
History shows that the Muslim masses have been all too happy to be brutalized into serfs, paupers, fellaheen. They easily jab the finger for their decrepitude elsewhere: at the Christians, the Jews, “weak Muslims” among them, even God (masha’allah, the expression goes, It is as God wills...) Yet, a millennium of spilt tears does not just evaporate; it becomes an ocean of sorrow flooding the most hidden caverns of everyone’s souls, mingling with the burning magma of shame and self-hatred, until the pressure builds and the mountain erupts into a firestorm of suicide-bombs.
But salvation does not lie in self-annihilation. There is no escaping the face in the mirror.
As the centuries have eked by, the more despicable the Muslims’ condition, the more primary the colors their clergy have painted the image of Muhammad. Today, after generations of careful and cynical effort, they have managed to excise every tiny blemish from the prophetic character. Conceptually, Muhammad has become an automaton rather than a man of passion who strove to reconcile the great symphony of divine revelation that burst in his mind with the dirge of earthbound sin and ignorance that gnawed at his and his loved ones’ flesh and souls day after day after day. Muhammad was no longer allowed to be a man who made some good choices and some bad choices.
And so Muhammad has stopped being an inspiring symbol and has become an idol to be worshipped.
The great historian Edward Gibbon put it so well: “If he retained any vestige of his native innocence, the sins of Muhammad may be allowed as an evidence of his sincerity.” The Muslims’ persistent denial of this most essential truth has ruined Islam.
The Qur`an says of Muhammad, “He is a perfect example unto you,” and, “No other prophet shall come after him.” The time has come for Muslims to truly embrace Muhammad: to confess their wrongs and idiocies, to accept and forgive themselves, to trust themselves and to trust Providence, to open themselves to the whispers of divine Truth. They must be guided, and they must let themselves be guided, and they must be bold in their steps.
