Islam's Inner Dialogue With It's Deviant Sects
ISLAM’S INNER DIALOGUE WITH ITS DEVIANT SECTS
Islam did not have only solve its problem of co-existence with frankly non-Muslim faiths. It also housed under its roof a range of deviants sects from the mainly politically dissenting mainstream Shia (the Twelver Shia) to the more dubious Sevener Shia and those heretical sects by the dozen which, at their most extreme become hardly recognisable as Muslim. These extremists we will ignore for the purposes of this article and confine ourselves to the Twelvers, the Seveners and the Alawis of which the Bektashis is only a subsect.
All these four defend that they are staunch supporters of the family of the Prophet most importantly represented by the those male offspring of Ali the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet (sws) and his first wife Fatima the youngest daughter of the Prophet. Among these grandsons of the Prophet (sws) one or two in each generation are recognised as ‘imams’ or leaders of Islam, beginning with Hassan and then his younger brother Hussein and according to the Twelver Shia, ending with the twelfth in line who disappeared and went into occultation (hiding) to return at the end of the time as al Mahdi, the saviour of the world. According to the Sevener Shia, imams ended with their seventh in number who similarly went into occultation and is due to return similarly as al Mahdi. These Seveners are the more unorthodox of the two named Shia sects but below them there are quite a few more deviant sects among whom the Alawites are the most populous. What is the quarrel of these sects with the majority Sunni Muslims?
Basically the only bone of contention between the most numerous and moderate sect of the Shia, namely the Twelvers, is the right to succession to the Prophet as the leader of Islam. For the Shia in general this succession is half and partly like in Catholic Christianity and half like dynastic succession as in royal succession. As well known, the Catholics regard the popes as successors to the apostolic office of St. Peter the companion of the Christ, but not as the sons of St. Peter (for all popes were not Jews like Peter but Europeans, mostly Italians but as his spiritual successors. Shia says more than that for their imams: all are Alid-Fatimid descendants of the Prophet and succeed to the Prophet both dynastically and spiritually. The Twelvers insist that Ali should succeed the Prophet straightway and that Abu Bakr and Umar and after them Uthman were usurpers worthy of all blame. Muawia and more so his son Yazid were even more atrocious usurpers as well as all caliphs in both Umayyad and Abbasid and then Ottoman lines, whether just or atrocious, were all usurpers. However the Shia have had no candidates of their own after their twelfth imam (or seventh in the case of the Seveners); instead they had to extemporise, pending the return of al Mahdi at the end of the time, by installing suitably qualified religious scholars, some with claims to descent from the Prophet (sws), as deputy imams, each at a local level.
Among these local imams a priestly if not entirely official hierarchy evolved similar to the Christian pastoralism with local mullahs providing both spiritual and some administrative leadership to his subjects and receiving religious taxes, tariffs and gifts from them- just like in Christianity. Their hierarchy presented pompous titles like ‘hujjat al Islam’ (proof of Islam) and ‘ayatullah’ (sign of Allah) and at the top one or more mujtahid al mutlaqs (absolute jurists) and muqtadas (should-be-followeds), all entitled to public reverence, obedience and tax or alms collection. Even the royals had to defer to them or could be, under certain circumstances, deposed. Overall if not identical, the Twelver social system looked very much like the Catholic Christian and almost equally open to abuse. This combination of great political and spiritual power underpinned by steady and considerable public funding through religious taxes and charitable donations gave the Shia clergy a tenacity and resilience which saw them through many trials and tribulations in the hands of their occasional allies and equally occasional rivals the political potentates from kings to local lords. Because in Shiaism there has been such power and prestige involved the Shia imams have a strong vested interest not to reconcile their sect with the Sunni sect which has neither any significant religious hierarchy or compulsory taxes going to their scholars who are also sometimes are called imams in an unofficial, complimentary sense.
In other words Shiaism confers on its leaders great secular, spiritual and financial powers and as such makes them utterly reluctant to consider the merits of the Sunni ways and close the gap between themselves and the Sunnis. Instead, to bolster their claims, the Shia look down on Sunni secondary sources like the Hadith and jurisprudence and hold to their own corpus of Hadith and juridical opinions (fatwas). As such, the general ethos and drive of Shia mentality is one of hating Sunnis and their leaders from Abu Bakr downwards while at the same time extremely romanticisng Ali and his Fatimid descendants and dwelling on the tragedies which they believe have been their lot in the hands of Sunni miscreants and mischief-makers. To bolster this hagiography and theology of victimisation they oversee massive public demonstrations almost certainly modelled on pre-Islamic pagan processions with field theatrical shows of episodes like the very tragic Karbala events (which victimisation of Hussein and his family the Sunnis equally deplore although many Shia are deliberately left in darkness about this) and incredibly bloody and barbaric processions of lamentation and self-mutilations in which even young children may shockingly be made to bleed form various parts of their bodies- all apparently to keep a hatred incandescent hot and prevent a conciliation with the Sunnis- who form the 90% and saner majority of Muslims.
What the Shia do not want their public to know is that all Sunnis other than the small Umayyad dynastic clan who had governed the Muslims for less than a century equally love the family of the Prophet and cursed the Umayyads, especially Yazid as soundly as the Shia. Many Sunni imams, including their greatest Abu Hanifa, dies as martryrs defending the Ahl al Bait (Prophet’s Household) and claims to caliphate of the same Alid imams as the Shia championed. The only difference between the Sunnis and Shia has been that the Sunnis did not over-blow the already tragic issue but saw salvation in a more cautious approach to the re-instatement of the Ahl al Bait. Many members of the Ahl al Bait among the Sunnis have accordingly came to happy rulership over happy Sunni subjects and today’s kingdoms Jordan and of Morocco are the most recent examples. In contrast Shia never installed any members of the Ahl al Bait to rule over them except sporadically for brief periods ending in failure for the same reasons as the ending of great Hussein: Shia inconstancy, unreliability despite sporadic if unwise heroism. There must be something gravely wrong with the Shia menatality; otherwise the Shia history could not be so almost an unbroken story of failure, tragedy and incurable hatred towards all others.
Other than this sad political difference with the Sunni majority the Shia have a lesser degree of legal differences. Some of them are: not washing the feet but just wiping the feet at wudhu, the muta (temporary marriage) which according to Sunnis was banned by the Prophet towards the end of his mission and the reception of khums (one fifth) of the income of wealth of the public by selected mullas as the deputies of the Ahl al Bait. In the view of the Sunnis these are invalid licences and usurpations. To take the already quoted examples, washing feet is definitely better than just wiping them and will do no harm but good; so just wiping may mean laziness and negative piety: No doubt both the Prophet and his companions plainly and regularly washed their feet, otherwise the majority of Muslims could happily skip it as an easier is less healthy option. Muta marriage is simply too irresponsible an arrangement not least because it has no concern or provision for any children who might be born to the temporarily engaging couple while the whole Qur’an takes extraordinary pains to instil in us a maximum sense of responsibility towards our marriage partners and any offspring proceeding from our unions. Muta more looks like the present girl friend-boy friend relationships between basically total strangers which can last as long as one or both sides want with no rights and responsibilities afterwards.
At its worst it can be seen as one-at-a-time form of prostitution in which the male client hires the female subject for a fixed term of exclusive sexual access. This cannot be seen as compatible with human dignity, especially Muslim. Marriage should be based not on sexual need alone but should be an open-ended commitment between a man-servant and woman-servant of Allah surrounded by their respective families and embedded in a matrix of closely related and permanently loving group called an extended family of parents, off-spring, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces and in-laws. Nothing of the sort happens in muta. Read if you wish:
“It is He (All-Gracious) Who created from water the human being and made from it in-laws and blood relations…” (25: 54).
There are effective in-laws, no effective blood relations resulting from a muta marriage but a short-term prostitute-hire type of need-satisfying ethos totally unworthy of a religion like Islam. It is almost like a car hire or hotel room hire, temporarily benefited from, paid, used and returned and never looked back. If a child is born it may be impossible to reunite the temporary couple and their joint offspring since the man may have to move on and his trace may be lost. And how bad any sensible woman will feel for selling herself for money to total strangers even when one such stranger may prove a decent person and keep in contact with his hired temporary wife with a view to shoulder any responsibilities created. How well this pagan arrangement can compare with a marriage transacted under full public glare in the midst of large numbers of loving and celebrating relations, in-laws, friends and neighbours.
Such divergences from the Sunni (which means ‘Prophetic’) practice give Shiaism a very sad, impromptu and spurious image as totally unnecessary as their other legal differences with the Sunnis. Ninety percent of Muslims cannot be wrong in loving Ahl al Bait at least as much as the Shia love them while at the same time refuse to over-dramatise the tragedies which befell the Ahl al Bait for which, by their own admission, the Shia has a lot to answer; after all, it was they who first invited Hussain with promises of protection and elevation and cowardly abandoned him at his hour of need. It was they who could not protect and support Ali and it was they who through unwise heroics time after time provoked the imams to rise in claim of khilafa and then let them down. What do we want, after the martyrdom of Hussein a sect arose from among the Shia called the ‘Bukaoon’, the weepers who went about announcing their shame and regret for letting Hussen down and weeping and crying bitterly and torturing themselves in public on and on. What are today’s Shia celebrations like at Karbala if not a continuation of that admission of guilt albeit projected quite unjustly to the Sunni Muslims who have had nothing to do with the wrongs of the Umayyads and had in fact been themselves victims of the often cruel Umayyad rule?
Now the Alawis. These share with the mainstream, law-observing (Sharia-following) Shia the emphatic claim that the Alid-Fatimid offspring of the Prophet have had the exclusive dynastic right to represent Islam and rule over Muslims and whether they openly admit it or not refuse to recognise and apply the rules of the Law (Sharia) as the rest of the Muslims do. They basically make do with the confession of the Unity of God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God but haste to add another two claims as inseparably complementary to the first: these are that Ali is the true and mandatory successor to the Prophet and one Fatimid grandson of his in each generation should be both the spiritual and temporal leader of all Muslims. As such Allah, Muhammad and Ali almost make a trinity with Fatima cutting a figure reminiscent of Mary mother of Jesus as the holiest person outside the trinity. This is not an insignificant similarity to Greco-Roman Christianity which is the source of all present sects of Christianity. If this similarity is slight (slight because mainstream Alawis do not deify Muhammad, Ali and Fatima) they, like the Christians, deny that the Law (Torah for the Christians and Qur’anic Law the Sharia for Muslims) is binding any more. As a result and just like the Christians they invented their own rituals which are based on mythical events describing the Prophet initiating the practice of the forty men and women around him sitting in a circle and celebrating Allah and conveniently ignoring that both the Prophet and his Fatimid-Alid offspring have in fact continued to observe the Sharia and its rituals like the five times a day prayers the fast of Ramadan and the Hajj pilgrimage.
This dubious acceptance-cum-rejection of the Prophetic precedent and tradition which both Ali and Fatima and their children so thoroughly observed is an exact duplication of the Pauline (Greco-Roman) Christianity which is described as ‘anti-nomian (from ‘anti’ for against and ‘nomos’ for law) and among the confessors to Muhammad’s prophethood is peculiar to the Alawis. In an apparent effort to compensate for this abandonment they, again like the Pauline Christians, put a too conspicuous emphasis on morality as if there is a causal relationship between law observance and immorality on the one hand and law rejection and morality on the other. Since neither Christians nor Alawis are more morally advanced than mainstream Jews and Christians this antinomianism must amount to a laziness and lack of commonsense among the antinomian sects on top of badly offending their co-religionists who base their morality on the observation of the Law.
In the field of ritual both Alawis and Christians invented their own rituals which are based on musical, chanting, dancing and alcohol-taking ceremonies sprinkled with a spirit of sectarian love and hatred of those who are quite wrongly seen as the enemies of Ali which the Sunnis are not. Ali’s status among Sunnis is realistically high being based on truthful, historical accounts of his merits from his great learning to his truly saintly conduct and also warlike heroism but Sunnis quite reasonably decline deifying Ali which the Alawis almost do. Ascribing infallibility to any human being is not part of scriptural monotheistic faiths like Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Islam and the Qur’an is particularly at great pains to blow up such notions to pieces. All outside Allah, be it angel, demon or man are fallible without exception; the true greatness of a man is not in his assumed mythical infallibility but in his heroism in fighting his ego and conquering the control of his life and conduct from the ego which conquest is always incomplete. The rest of his salvation comes from Divine Grace and in fact his any degree of conquering his ego was again from God’s Grace. This is beautifully stated in the famous Muslim saying “La hawla wa la quwwata illa billah” which translates as “There is no transformation and power except with Allah”. Both Christians and Alawis are experts in reading any scriptures they have extremely selectively in order to satisfy themselves about their justification and also inventing huge masses of myth and legend to the same end.
With such similarities I tend to think that Alawism is born of a conversion to Christianity of some Central Asian peoples we normally call Turkic in the hands of those ever-spreading and daring Christian missionaries before the advent of Islam followed by another unwilling conversion into Islam in the hands of the Muslim conquests of the same region. Habituated to the antinomian comforts and trinitarian obsessions of their Christianity and with a sincere effort to make Islam palatable they must have evolved Alawism which afforded them the same liberties and comforts of their Christian past. Allah knows best.
The conclusion from all above must be that all are free to choose and the doctrine of no compulsion in religion is part of Islam’s whole doctrinal set (Qur’an 2: 256) and I believe the Alawis should be accorded the rights accorded to all Ahl al Kitab and let preach and practice their faith freely without molestation. They may call themselves Muslims and Allah is too Gracious not to care for them as He cares for Sunnis and in fact the members of all faiths but if truth and maximum benefit is required a more wholesome and realistic following of the Qur’an and the real historical Sunna of the Messenger (sws) of Allah are essential. Amen.
REALISM vs. IDEALISM
Islam is about ‘al Haqq’ which means both reality and truth. Reality of something is proven when we test that something and find it effective in influencing other things within a defined context. For example, we may have in front of us a real water melon and a real-looking plastic or porcelain made copy of a water melon. When we break both we find out which is real. The real one can be eaten, the false copy cannot. This does not mean that from an aesthetic point of view a copy, a false representation of an object cannot look more beautiful than the real object. A paper rose can be much bigger and gorgeous than a real but imperfect rose growing on its bush. Yet, it is this less beautiful rose which insects visit and suck juices from.
Did you know that we have this dilemma also as regards religious matters? Almost all religions outside Islam suffer from a terrible illness called idealism. By idealism I mean taking a reality and by distortions and exaggerations converting it into something which has rather little relation to the real thing taken as the starting point. The more backward a nation the more they tend to idealise things; the more backward a nation the more the leaders of that nation cause the idealisation of themselves. Tyrants and dictators especially seek and enjoy idealisation; it gives them and their cronies more leverage on their victims. In religions it is often the believers who idealise the founder. A true man of God will not do that for himself but will desperately insist that he is no god or sub-god or god substitute.
For example, a prince named Gautama who lived in the 6th century BCE was a spiritually very talented and inspired man. Leaving his princely life aside he launched himself as a spiritual seeker and came up with a number of beautiful moral and spiritual discoveries.
All along he insisted that he was an ordinary man, another mortal soul among others and his instructions to his disciples revolved entirely around practicable moral and behavioural advice which he himself practiced quite consistently. As such we may regard him a true prophet, a real guide of men. But look what happened. Once he died the proportion of his disciples and their followers who kept in mind that their master (then called ‘the Buddha’, i.e., the Enlightened One) was a very well inspired and motivated wise teacher of morality and spirituality with an almost entirely practical bent of mind began to decrease while those who idealised him into a god and as such forgot about most of his moral teachings and practical example began to shoot up at the speed of light. Within a generation or two the man was made into a god, represented in stone and even gold sculpture which were then housed in equally gold-clad, palatial temples each served by hundreds of incense burning and hymns-humming monks. The whole practical and realistic wisdom and morality edifice prince Gautama had built up during his life receded to a dark and neglected corner and almost disappeared. The sad fact was that it was this disappearing element which was the real thing the Buddha had given to people, real because it could improve people’s wisdom and morality and thereby create more humane, civilised societies who would also live real, productive, charitable, peaceful lives within the context of a normal social and political system- not isolated communities of terribly superstitious monks pandering to even more terribly superstitious laymen.
For this superstitious people of monks and laymen the real Buddha was irrelevant. What they loved and adored was an idealised, manufactured Buddha totally devoid of the practicalities of life and instead dwelling in people’s minds as an inexhaustible source of superstition and as an instrument of magic and an equally inexhaustible instrument of exploitation in the hands of the higher priests. True faith and practical morality of the Buddha was out, idolatrous superstition, magic and exploitation was in.
Similar but less drastic distortion contorted also Christianity. By all evidence in the first three Gospels of the New Testament Jesus (pbuh) was just another charismatic prophet of Israel with hardly any mystical bent. He was a travelling preacher of eminently simple faith and equally eminently practical morality on top of being an occasional miracle-worker. What we call miracles are real events albeit exaggerated on transmission and over time, which real events are designed as signs from Allah that He is not bound by what is usual but can always produce unusual, incredible-looking events. No doubt such miracles are also within the bounds of what we call the laws of nature but appear as miracles simply because there always are more to natural laws than we can ever know. What is more all events no matter how ordinary or extraordinary they look are creations of Allah and Allah alone and it is only us who are mystified by some events we call miracles and not Allah for Whom all are equally explicit exercises of His Will. All in all Jesus sws was a man of simple faith, the faith that God alone knows and can do and are doing everything and therefore our faith in and praying to God make up the only way to our salvation- exactly as Islam says. He Jesus sws, like Muhammad sws, was only a transmitter of Allah’s messages to people and the exemplar of their application in practice. It was only in that sense of an exemplar that we could only go to God through Jesus alone and we can only go to God through Muhammad (sws) alone now.
This was the real Jesus, real as we defined at the beginning: Effective, like the real water melon and the real rose to meet our needs. Only by believing in and emulating Jesus sws in all our moral doings could we achieve salvation which means nothing more and nothing less than our becoming a man or woman every reasonable person could call “a truly and extraordinarily good and noble person”. It is this event and only this that is the greatest miracle Allah creates among all events Allah creates! Allah created no greater masterpiece than a true prophet or saint (friend) of His- all universe, all creation is programmed to produce that perfect human-being, that perfect servant of Allah. This blessed human-being joins Allah, enjoys His greatest Divine favours and never comes back or falls down afterwards. He cannot be re-bestialised but remains a soul higher than the holiest angels, despite remaining a human being both before and after death. Amen to that perfection.
But what happened? Why, the same illness was contracted by people thanks to the superstition as well as less than honourable machinations of some too ambitious souls.
The first known infecting agent was the young and very vehement, zealous young Pharisee (Jewish cleric) Saul who renamed himself Paul and is known to the Christians of today as St. Paul. For this man the real, historical flesh and blood Jesus sws (whom he never met or heard or could quote anything from him) was not good enough; it was not a workable starting point for him. He, like all too zealous persons who are inevitably unstable and extremist needed a hero capable of firing his overactive imagination and feeding his extremist penchant for mystery and magic. The mystery he called faith and the magic he called miracle. The mystery conjured up by Saul/Paul was that Jesus was the Son of God in a literal sense and also that he had died on the cross for the remission of the sins of mankind which remission, strangely enough, only applied to those who believed this dogma of vicarious (by proxy) redemption. So it was not as generous as applying to all humanity. And this dogma of a son god who was killed and whose death was meant to be the redemption of mankind was not new at all- it already had a long pedigree among many pagan religious traditions like the Isis- (an Egyptian god) and Adonis- (a Greek god)worshipping cults spread all over the Roman Empire. As such Paul was founding another cult at the expense of Jesus the real person, the Jewish prophet Jesus who was after reviving Jewish piety on Mosaic/Torah lines with slight modifications but moral emphasis enhanced.
Soon in the hands of Pauline Christians the real historical Jesus went though a gradual process of growing into a true god and then THE GOD, albeit with a Trinitarian mystery. The law Jesus and his immediate and real followers practiced, which law as already said, was the Law of Moses with slight modifications, as well as the practical example of the Christ as God’s exemplar were pushed back into irrelevance and in their place an idealised (read ‘too gloriously falsified’) Jesus an almost totally impractical morality and spirituality was innovated. Buddhist-like temples and priestly hierarchies followed and the old exploitation of laymen by a powerful and entrenched priesthood re-emerged.
Then Allah sent Muhammad (sws) to put the record straight for the last and final time.
As the first measure Allah ensured that neither the Qur’an He revealed to Muhammad sws nor his basic life history and memory of His final prophet sws could be lost. As such he is the only, repeat only man called a prophet by a great section of humanity who is a historical person in the fullest sense of the term. But this exemption from loss did not go as far as preventing some misguided or malicious people attempting to betray Muhammad sws as others before them had betrayed prince Gautama or prophet Jesus sws. The tiny seed of the great error of falsification by exaggeration had in fact crept in as from the early second century of Islam. Some people who were either spiritually too ambitious and imagaantive (whom we may call Muslim Pauls) or plain hypocrites out to corrupt Islam begin to proclaim that Muhammad sws was not just another mortal man except that he was the true messenger of Allah meant to tranmit Allah’s Message and exemplify its practice. He was a pre-existent spiritual personality from whose essence all creation was made and who had been and would always be in charge of everything in the Name of Allah. He knew everything, was a witness to everything and given power on everything. His death was only apparent. From his grave he still was the ruler of the world etc. This was how far the falsifiers through exaggeration could go; the Qur’an was too strong to allow them to go all the way to the deification of the Prophet sws.
One fact exaggerated was that the Prophet sws was distinguished from the rest of men not by physical immortality but the spiritual. The knowing or unknowing falsifiers made the Prophet sws physically immortal and aware of everything at al times as if he was God. They in fact defended that one could pray to Muhammad sws and it would be as good if not better than praying to Allah- a notion which was gradually extended to Sufi masters by their falsifying admirers.
The most innocent reason for such a move can only be some sensitive Muslims being impressed by the boastings of Christians with their invented divine Christ whom they claimed to be co-eternal with God ‘the Father’, to be instrumental in the creation of the universe and still being in charge of it and authorised to hear and accept every prayer and grant the things requested. Sensitive Muslims with an idealistic bent unwisely envied this mythical excellence of the Christ and not to be outdone gradually reformed their idea of Muhammad sws to match that of the Christ short of explicit divinty; the Qur’an would not allow it even one millimetre; this last problem our idealisers solved by describing the Prophet in such close and intimate relation to Allah on eternal terms that the Prophet’s divinity became superfluous to declare. Still there has been some rasher souls who did not stop at this halfway station but variously deified Muhammad sws, Ali RA or their imams or themselves- the Fatimid caliph Hakim declared himself God and his sect still survives.
The fact is that the Prophet’s sws relative immortality is spiritual in the sense that his glorious memory and superlative attitude and conduct survive and shall survive, thanks to Allah, as an example for all who wanted to emulate him. This unprecedented realistic (undistorted) spiritual survival must be the greatest miracle ever in human history. Only this miracle is enough proof that Muhammad sws has been the ultimate messenger of God for all mankind for all time to come; there is no second best, no runner up.
True Sufism has always been based on the realistic model of the Prophet sws which true Sufis studied at great depth and tried to emulate. Their inclination has not been praising the Prophet sws in idealised, impracticable terms which could only breed madness, fanaticism and sin but praising him as he really was because only real models of good people are effective in helping us to become really good people. This is non-negotiable.
Yet, some ill- as well as well-meaning distorters through that silly idealisation did not lack. Almost exclusively through fringe Sufism these misfits idealised the Prophet sws to various extents from just under the Christ’s idealised version to all the way to the Buddha’s. Just like the false Christ, Muhammad was also pre-eternal, always with God and had not only witnessed the Creation but was also the very substance of it! The Muslim idealisers could not dare to call him God, at best they could only subtly imply. To this eternal and universal Muhammad sws they gradually added their own heroes equally physical survivors and ‘prayables-to’ thereby moderately well reproducing the old pagan hagiographic pantheon. Among Christians this pantheon was called pan-hagia (pronounced ‘panayiya’) and in English ‘all-saints’. One particularly notorious holy exaggerater interprets the following part of a verse “Wallahu huwal waliyyu” (Allah is the waly himself) as “a perfect man is Allah”. The totality of the verse however says just the opposite:
“Or have they adopted awliya other than Allah? It is Allah Who is the Only Waly because it is He Who revives the dead and it is only He Who is Able to do all things” (43: 9)
This myth of a ‘perfect man’ goes back not to any Books of Allah, particularly nowhere in the Qur’an it is ever implied and in fact it is always and categorically rejected. It comes from the so-called Hermetic Tradition spuriously traced to the pagan Egyptian God Troth called Hermes Trimegistus (Hermes the Thrice Great) by the Greeks and identified with enough silliness with prophet Idris by Muslim falsifier-imitators. According to this mythical tradition this god or god-man transmitted his secret doctrines down the generations through a chain of masters and disciples which chain has been called the golden chain. Sufis took this idea of a golden chain up, this first element in the Hermetic philosophy, which taking up was not only innocent enough but also positively useful. After all, all culture is transmitted over generations through a chain of teacher-and-disciple; what has been bad in the case of some extremist Sufis has been their also adopting the second part of the Hermetic Tradition as well- the part that a spiritual tradition can manufacture what is called a perfect man who is identical with God except in aspect. Such Sufis use the verse about the Prophet’s casting a handful of pebbles towards his enemies in the Battle of Badr saying “Let their faces be black (with shame of defeat)”. The verse says “When you (Muhammad sws) threw (those pebbles) you did not throw them but Allah threw them” (8: 17) which they interpret to mean or nearly mean that the Prophet sws is none other than Allah except in aspect. They are either forgetting or concealing the fact that before this clause in the verse comes “You (o believers at the Battle of Badr) did not kill them but Allah killed them”. Should not this give the same status to the Muslim soldiers as was given to their commander the Prophet (sws)?
There is even far more conclusive and unanswerable ways to debunk such misguided claims by extremists among the Sufis. One is to remind all concerned that it is not enough for people to be identified with Allah their doings things Allah happily intended to do through them. All creatures, even insects (and unbelievers among men) do Allah’s Will. As they remain servants so do all. That nobody can be divinised through his personal improvements or pious acts is the truth we can see from the following example. As we know, Christians did not only imply that Jesus was God- they kept saying ‘Jesus is God’. Their reasons for saying this was even greater than what is contained in the phrase “it was not you who threw but Allah threw”. Jesus had resurrected the dead!!! But Allah deflates both the Prophet Jesus and his saintly mother Mary who were spiritually impregnated by the Holy Spirit as mere human beings when He All-Knowing, All-Wise says:
“Jesus son of Mary is none other than a messenger. Messengers before him came and went. His mother was a saint (siddiqa). Both used to eat food. Look how We are detailing Our verses and look how they are still turning away!” (5: 75)
Which means this ‘perfect man’ identical with God’ idea and therefore god-man business is a bogus. Perfection in any and every sense belongs to Allah alone and applied to creatures it is only a figure of speech meaning excellence in comparison with other servants and nothing more. Two of the greatest troubles with only half good Sufi aspirants are their literalist attitude to God’s Words. In the case of the verse quoted, i.e, ‘You did not kill them.. did not throw but Allah …” the correct understanding should be “Allah very much enjoyed and approved of your act”. One should not be overwhelmed by emotion and lose sight of reason and reality. Once the reason (aql) is knocked out or pushed aside only error results. Allah All-Wise says “Allah puts filth on those who do not use their reason” (10: 100). Here the filth (rijs) means polytheism/shirk.
All such delusions about and subversions of Islam exploit the process of idealisation as opposed to realism. An spiritual guide idealised in the heart of a disciple can only produce an unrealistic dreamer who will run from blunder to blunder and even sin all the way to blasphemy. Because the reason why the idealiser worships the idealised is attaining strange and extraordinary creative powers and euphoric mental states, morality which is almost the whole practical aim of a true faith gets a poor and dubious second place if it gets any place at all; as a result and not surprisingly sinful and illegal acts are so frequent among such super-exaggerating, cultic believer-worshippers. Such leader-idealising systems are called a ‘cult’ although they may ascribe themselves to a formal religion. Buddhists and Christians fell into this pit, we need not do likewise but must stick to the real historical Messenger of Allah sws who was born in 570 CE and died in 634. Thanks to the Qur’an Allah granted him and kept sound for us as well as his well-researched and published memory/example we have the real Muhammad sws to refer to as if he is still almost physically alive among us, for the solution of our real problems whether physical or psychological. Only reality, however prosaic or mundane-looking can help and save us here end now and there and thereafter and a plastic and bombastic representation of a spiritual leader through unwarranted distortions and exaggerations only destroys his precious and most curative memory and example and infects us with what infected other religious/cultish groups before us. Do we or can we really afford that?
That Islam is squarely based on practical and practicable realities both in the spiritual/dogma and legal/behavioural spheres can be seen from what the Allah says:
“Say (o Muhammad sws) ‘Is there any from among those you associate with Allah, who can originate life and then return it (after death)? It is only Allah Who can originate life and then return it. How is it that you are deluded?’
Say ‘Is there anyone from among your associates who can give guidance?’ Say ‘Only Allah guides to the truth. Who is then more entitled to be followed; the one Who guides to the truth or the one who cannot find the truth until himself is given guidance? What is happening to you (o idolaters and cultists)? How are you judging such?’
The fact is that most of them are not following anything but mere opinions. Opinon though never can help against the truth. Allah knows what they are doing only too well
This Qur’an (unlike their myths and theories, like the Hermetic Tradition or polytheistic cult) is not concocted by anybody but is from Allah. It just confirms what went before it likewise (as true Divine Scripture) and details and expands on the Book in which there is no doubt, descended from the Lord of the Worlds” (10: 34- 37). And more:
“They say ‘Allah adopted a son’. High Exalted is He. He has no need! All in the heavens and in the earth are His. Have you got any proof to that effect? Are you saying things about Allah you do not know?” (10: 68).
That nobody of from among passed generations remained alive and Muhammad sws would also have to die is plain from this verse:
“We did not appoint (wordly, physical) deathlessness (khuld) to any human being before you (o Muhammad sws). If you are to die are they going to remain forever?” (21: 34)
Yes, only realism can be a true and viable basis for a religion and Allah testifies many times over that He sent all His true prophets with truth and reality and those prophets were not concocters of so called spiritual teachings and moral laws. Only cultists do such blasphemous acts. In human heart there is a radar and a computer attached to it which can separate truth from falsehood. Those with best intentions only are aware enough of their God-given inner monitor and recognise a true prophet and a true Divine scripture and follow the true religion they represent. For those with less than moral and honourable preoccupations false teachings and false teachers become more attractive as wine is more attractive to a man with a mind to sin and debauch, more attractive than natural healthy grapes (from whose abuse wine is made)- natural (God-made) grapes which represent teachings from Allah through His true prophets in their undoctored, unfermented and therefore un-alcoholised forms. It must not be for nothing that only Islam bans alcohol while all the rest not only allow it but hallow it as well. It must not be for nothing that some fringe and deviant Sufis (in contrast to the true ones) call their lore ‘wine’, their convents ‘wine taverns’ and their ecstatic moods ‘drunkenness’. They could not expose themselves more for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see.
May Allah guide us always to what is true and therefore dear to Him and spare us from following the satanic in any form of spirituality whose main trade mark is- distortion through exaggeration. Amen.
SPECIAL ARTICLE - SOPHISTS AGAINST ISLAM
BACKGROUND NOTES
Once upon a time there was a class of philosophers in classical Greece who went about arguing any case and ‘proving’ or ‘disproving’, ‘verifying’ or ‘discrediting’ any claim or argument. These philosophers were called the sophists and their method ‘sophistry’. Like all methods of philosophising this also survived down the ages and among all modern nations there are speakers and writers who can supposedly prove or disprove anything. Today’s sophists are no longer recognised as philosophers but are rather called demagogues. Demagogues are employed to promote commercial products which activity is called ‘advertisement’. Demagogy is another and new name for sophistry and it rules the scene even more in politics than in commerce. Lastly all forms of media resort to demagogy or sophistry call it what you will and the result is a constantly confused and agitated and often also wrongly believing and acting public.
Basically what a sophist does is splitting any claim he is to defend or attack into artificial elements or aspects and exaggerating and distorting the ones he can use to prove his case while rubbishing to insignificance and irrelevance the rest (among which can be the best elements of the claim)
To cite a famous example, Descartes the French Enlightenment philosopher was defending cruel biological experiments on monkeys as follows: The terrible cries an animal issued on being forcibly taken from its cage for another painful experiment were no more and no less bad than the loud creaking noises made by a rusty door being forced to open! Well, so do think those who torture political dissidents in the secret torture chambers under a totalitarian dictatorial regime. Conversely a most beautiful and worthy object can be dismissed by focussing on those of its elements to the exclusion of others and then castigating that element and thereby supposedly discrediting the object. For example, there has been some exceptionally negative women who hate children, refuse to bear any children and if asked why they will say “What is a child but a terrible nuisance from the word go. The woman must first be subjected to ‘a rape’, then bear with a most uncomfortable and even dangerous forty- week pregnancy, then very painfully and bloodily eject the accursed creature and then suckle, cleanse, look after it for ages until she loses all her youth and opportunities for enjoying her life all because of that bloody and often also ungrateful brat!”. Here you are, case proven! Compare this with the evaluation of a good, adoring mother. Who is right? Apply such a method to any good thing including Islam. It always succeeds, at least as far as fools as foolish as the sophists themselves are concerned.
One of the most unfortunate victims of sophistry is the institution of religion and recently the most victimised religion in this respect has been Islam. Islam is subverted for mean or mercenary reasons by two separate but invisibly spiritually linked groups of people who may or may not be conscious of their foul roles.
One group has been non-Muslim, whether members of other faiths or frank atheists. The first among them to begin a vendetta against Islam, other than the pagans of Arabia in the Prophet’s time, has been the Arab Jewry and then the Christian church. From the day they heard about the Prophet to the day they were entirely displaced from Arabia most of the leaders of the Prophet’s fellow Jewish Arab citizens, alongside with the Prophet’s (sws) pagan opponents, resorted to anti-Islamic sophistry to discredit both the new Prophet and His claims. After Islam began to conquer Christian lands it was the turn of the Christian church leaders to subvert Islam by sophistic distortions. In the Middle Ages, especially before and during the Crusades sophistic or demagogical distortion of Islam reached its zenith and since then it did not decline too much seeing that several centuries elapsed.
The Christian distorters of Islam, unknown to them had their allies among Muslims who again did not know the Christian help they were receiving in subverting Islam. ‘Muslim’ distorters came under many names and but only in two types. The first were the politically motivated desperados who began in the form of those who, by bitterly opposing Uthman the third caliph, for a while seemed to champion Ali the fourth caliph but eventually demonised and destroyed him as well. They came to be known as the Kharijis or defectors because they had defected from Ali’s camp, finding him ‘impious’!!!. They set up an accursed example for all future doctrinal-political dissenters among Muslims and inflicted almost as much damage on Muslim as the Crusaders as far as their local nuisances were concerned. One later offshoot of them, called the Karamita began as fanatical doctrinal and political insurgents in the third century of Islam, wrestled from the Abbasid power large tracts of territory around the Persian or Arabian Gulf and at one point expanded their power to Bahrain in the South and Mecca and Medina in the West. They routinely raided neighbouring Muslims and their caravans, killed as much as they could and plundered anything they could lay hands on.
Over time, the heretical and fanatical traits characterising Muslim doctrinal and political dissenters mellowed and even looked extinguished; dissenters of recent centuries and today are largely orthodox-looking zealots being grown in nurseries in the form of privately founded and funded madrassas which are mushrooming all over the more tolerant parts of the Islamic lands. These dress in ancient costumes which they wrongly claim to be identical with the dress of the companions of the Prophet and refuse to modernise any of their domestic and social habits and look down on those Muslims who, however meticulously practice the rituals and display the high morality and good manners of Islam but otherwise adapted themselves to modern forms of dress, habitat and neutral activities. Many such archaic-looking groups are otherwise harmless but some are real if reasonably well-concealed threats to the peace and order of Muslims and the world in general. Like the old kharijis and helped and incited by the modern adaptation of ‘Kharijism’, namely the Wahhabi establishment (not to be confused with and identified by the Saudi government) these new doctrinal and political dissenters are increasingly taking on both Muslim and non-Muslim governments and involving themselves in illegal and terrorist activities. Their occasional notorious terrorist acts and their bad human rights records in places where they rule expose a serious flaw in their understanding of Islam, which understanding may amount to a fascism dressed in Islamic dress and fighting an Islamic cause of reform and improvement, especially in the moral field. But distort Islam they do and as such they give ammunition to the haters and detractors of Islam in the West.
The second kind of ‘Muslim’ traitors have been those who played fast and loose with Islam’s doctrines and Law, hiding behind images of being Gnostics or profound philosophers etc. These were often hardened hypocrites who at times spurted out sarcastic remarks against things Muslims believed in or valued, Resurrection of the dead being their favourite target. Contrarily, those traitors who posed as gnostics or mystics (often the same thing) declared their godhead and took it from there to all the way where it could go. The rest of the Muslims they just despised as fools.
These in the West are again of two kinds. One descends directly from the clerical antagonists of Islam in the Mediaeval church and among these the present pope is a barely disguised actor. Despite their unrepentant and uncompromising prejudice against Islam this group is the less dangerous one. Pushing their Christian doctrines to replace those of Islam, the very weakness of the Christian doctrines prove their undoing. For example to believe that Jesus is God a Muslim must be mad. Not to see that the Christian teachings are mostly post-Jesus innovations a moderately learned Muslim must throw away his common sense: even learned Westerners admit that Christianity has only a limited debt to Jesus and most of the debt goes to later self-styled teachers, the first among them being none other that chameleon called St Paul. What is more, Christians cannot even prove that all the letters ascribed to this replacement ‘disciple’ were actually written by him. You see, all are so dubious in Christianity except the goodwill and simple piety on the part of some individual Christians which Islam always recognised and approved, not least in the Qur’an itself.
The second kind of anti-Islam Westerner is represented by one who is not a practicing Christian but an atheist. These are modernists with no Christian scruples and they hate Islam (and may also equally hate Christianity and in fact all faiths and the phenomenon of religious faith itself) on the basis of the bad images of some Muslims’ as these non-religious Westerners see them. For them being a believing and practicing Muslim necessitates shabby and ridiculous dressing, often also filthy, equally filthy eating habits, derelict and unsanitary housing and municipal neglect, indolence and begging and at the worst end deceit and treachery in business and other inter-personal transactions. These images are more or less reinforced when such Westerners visit and stay in a Muslim country while their impressions are also daily reinforced in the areas of the West where these indigenous Westerners live side by side with immigrant Muslims. Few are the fair-minded and objective Westerners who also notice the excellent decency, civility and utility of the majority of their Muslim neighbours, for old prejudices die hard. The Medieval church so poisoned the soul of her subjects that they sometimes retain their Islamophobia even after converting to atheism or agnosticism.