On Crime And Criminals

 

 

ON CRIME AND CRIMINALS

 

INTRODUCTION 

 

The greatest obstacle before every spiritual aspirant is the attractions of this material world with prizes like wealth, power and the pleasures they may secure.  We must avoid here a mistake almost constantly made by almost all thinkers on the subject.  The mistake is thinking that the material world is evil by definition.  It is not.  As everything else the evil is not outside but inside us so far as we can cause our own future.  By evil I mean manmade evil and not natural mishaps and throughout this  essay evil will mean harmful results caused by deliberate acts or negligences by men who did or did not know better.  Which puts such evil, unlike natural mishaps (e.g., an earthquake) within man’s capabilities to control.  It is true and shall always remain true that no man is perfect and manmade evils will always be with us.  So, the soluble problem is not the total abolition of this evil but its reduction which may go a long way to make more people more happy. 

 

A good example is the contrast between one peaceful and prosperous country and another country where corruption and oppression is only too common and endemic and a spoilt luxurious and ruthless elite minority keep the rest in pain and poverty as if the latter were subhumans.  I hope no named examples are necessary.

 

In principle, muslim countries should be the justest and happiest but they certainly aren’t.  But this does not mean that that most prosperous and happiest-looking parts of the world are happy enough or couldn’t be far happier had they known how.  In other words all humanity need and can create more justice and resultant happiness if they knew how and did their best to do it.   This essays analyses and tries to offer a solution to this problem from Islam’s viewpoint.  What does Islam’s viewpoint mean?

 

ISLAM’S VIEWPOINT - This means a viewpoint from the perspective of this universe of ours having an Intelligent, Just and Kind Creator incomparably, in fact infinitely superior to us and this creator has already offered us extra guidance on top of the instinctive guidance He put in us through our genes and social association,  i.e one man learning from others so that he does not have to discover everything himself.  This extra guidance is His raising a prophet from among us and inspiring him with knowledge and wisdom the rest of us could not hope to get without his teaching us.  That there is something individual and not general in many gifts and abilities blessing the mankind is an undeniable fact.  As far as historical evidence goes it was a few extraordinary Greek philosophers that taught the rest of us logic and rationality and opened our minds to a mathematical and experimental understanding of the universe.  Similarly we owe to the individuals like Newton and Lavoisier,  Pasteur and Einstein etc. whose scientific discoveries revolutionized our understanding of our world and saved us from many difficulties hampering our control of it.
But material control of the world has never been enough or even the main problem of human happiness. 

 

At least as far as the manmade evil is concerned our salvation from it hardly depended on our skills of controlling the outside nature.  Instead it almost entirely depended on our understanding and control of our inner natures.  I need to know, for example, why I am angry or resentful or dishonest etc,  must feel unhappy about being too angry, too resentful or unjustly dishonest and desire to save myself from such.  The term ‘unjustly dishonest’ needs explanation. What I mean is this.  Sometimes it is morally imperative to cheat others.  Who won’t applaud a man who gives wrong information to another man who is out to commit a crime and needs a piece of information so that he can successfully commit the crime?  “Where is this brat hiding?” an angry and dangerous kidnapper may ask another man who he thinks knows the answer.  The latter saves the kid by misdirecting the brute with all the convincing skills of an actor and then spirits away the kid.  Heroic moral deed!  Evil is frustrated, good is made to prevail.  This has nothing to do with the control of the outside world and everything to do with the understanding and control of our spiritual natures-  that we are moral beings and we should do our best to enhance our moral qualities and wisdom about what is good and what is evil and go for the good and resist evil.   The misinformer and misdirecter was just doing what his developed moral sense as dictating to him. Without it he would remain a brute as the other did and could help the other brute for a share in the winnings.  Which example defines CRIME and the CRIMINAL.

 

CRIME AND CRIMINAL - Islam defines crime as any act that goes against God’s moral teachings.   These teachings are mainly contained in the Holy Qur’an and amply supplemented and expanded upon by the teachings and example of the Prophet sws.  So each man is not his own moralist but all men must abandon their ideas about good and evil and adopt what Allah and His Messenger sws tell them to be good and evil. 
This of course does not mean that no personal insight and judgment are necessary.  However much detail Allah and His Messenger give about what is good and what is evil life circumstances are not so black and white or as simple as named goods and evils can fit.  One needs a lot of knowledge, life experience and developed wisdom and insight to decipher complicated events of life and sort out what is good and what is evil in each situation.  This is where Tasawwuf (sufi spiritual development) comes in.  With or without a mentor all of us need to grow up and mature spiritually if we are to correctly tell good and bad apart and go for the good and shun the bad. Let us take drinking or smoking.  Even addicts often admit that what they are indulging is bad. 

 

Their trouble is they cannot say no to the evil they recognize.  Most of doctors and nurses in the UK do not smoke and drink less because they know far better than the rest of the population how terrible the results of indulgence can be. Which means the more we know about something resulting in evil consequences the more we can resist.  A driver seriously hurt in a terrible crash will often be more careful than another who hasn’t been hurt despite the fact that theoretically their knowledge of dangers from reckless driving are equal.  A man whose some immoral act hurts an innocent person and the guilty man observes at first hand the damage and suffering he caused to his victim and feels a terrible pain in his conscience will repent and apologize and offer compensation.  Sensible married couples learn from their mutual mistakes and gradually develop more accommodating and harmonious relations etc. etc.  These all are ACTUAL life situations and personal experiences from which we must learn lessons and only with them in our pocket we can understand the moral teachings of Islam as we should.  A sufi master (I mean a true one) acts only as a catalyst-  accelerates our learning process- and with or without one Allah is our spiritual Master and churns and molds us throughout life.  Only think we can contribute to our salvation by maturation is our loving consent.  When this consent is maintained we are assured of maturation and moral-based salvation which is the only real salvation.  

 

 

CRIME IS THE RESULT OF THE OPPOSITE OF THIS ATTITUDE

 

We can recognize the criminal from his disinterest in anything religious however glorious.  Like a cat eyeing and prowling in view of chirping sparrows the criminal is concentrated on the prizes of the material world and everything else is subordinated to that singular aim.  Some criminals are as intelligent as hell and can dissemble (accurately imiatate) any degree of high morality and sociability until such time the prize or victim comes to crosshairs of their telescope of lust and then they pounce without warning and stike like lightning.  A very good example is a sexual seducer.  In order to conquer a shy and greatly honorable would-be partner the seducer studies in great and minute detail the likes, dislikes and styles and flairs of the intended partner and executes an ever improving simulation of a perfect lover, soulmate and incorruptible decency. 

 

As love or at least fascinated admiration develops in the intended sexual victim the seducer increases his or her bodily contacts with such skilful discrimation and graduality that the victim’s caution abandons him or her and he or she eventually succumbs without knowing how.   Exactly the same method is used by top criminal geniuses to mislead government officials into taking bribes or corrupt but charismatic politicians to funnel the voters’ votes to themselves.  The seduction process in all of these areas begin with genuine looking praises to and sympathy for and even commiseration with the victim(s) and when the wad of banknotes or list of ‘solid’ promises are slid into the hand of the victim(s) the conquest is made.  Of course the ‘victim(s)’ need not be too innocent in all cases and they indeed rarely are.  Only that small minority among people have developed enough conscience to resist corrupting attempts and come out unscathed.  Which mean this:

 

To improve the chances of good to prevail in a society we need to increase the proportion conscientious enough citizens.  We must realize that there is another and opposite minority of serious and almost incorrigible criminals who, for perhaps some genetic defect as perhaps aided and abetted by some social deprivation made them into solidified criminals whose only antidote are at least equally solidified good characters acting as pillars of the society the two sides belong to. 

 

History of nations consist of alternations between periods when the criminal and the decent have had the upper hand by a margin of this or that magnitude but overall the criminals did better individually when going was smooth and the decent did better when it came to save the day.

 

Thus we learn from history that when a nation or city state achieves riches and comforts its morals decline, class differences become more accentuated and and means of self-defence become less effective despite their physical superiority and the less prosperous and less sophisticated rivals  harass and attack them until in the end they come to conquer and subdue them.   In other words a nation ruled by prosperous criminals is destroyed by another nation of barbarians or more decents one way or another. 
What is needed then is a growing nation of decents who will moderate the influences of both the criminal-run nations and the barbarians who are out to become the criminal-run societies of tomorrow.  This problem is not entirely soluble or the illness entirely curable but every bit of work which can reduce their severity will be a great boon.

 

 

CAUSES OF AND REASONS FOR CRIME

 

Crime is a way of expressing human selfishness when provoked by lust and presented with the opportunity.  Which means there are three factors in the realization of crime,  namely,  selfishness, provocation of lust  and the opportunity to commit.  The Law of Islam tackles all three as they need to be tackled.  Let us take sexual crime as an example, one crime which is very common nowadays and is becoming even commoner.

 

The selfishness involved in a sexual crime expresses itself in the form of paying exclusive attention to the pleasure of using the victim as a mere sexual object and thinking nothing about the consequences for the victim or even the criminal himself.  The unmitigated power of blind lust so possesses the spiritually bankrupt culprit that he is shut of to any inner our outer pleadings for reason and conscience and goes ahead with his intentions.   Because of this consuming power of lust Islam resorts to hopefully more powerful emotion of fear-  a terrible punishment in this world up to execution and in the hereafter up to eternal burning in hell. 

 

As to the second factor the provocation of sexual lust Islam enjoins both modest dress and modest behavior.  Male or female what each muslim can expose of his body parts and display as behavior with a sexual message are limited.  Each sex must avoid displaying those parts of the body which are characteristically special to their own sex, but with women more stringently.  The reason for the last named stipulation is that men are more provoked by sight while women are so by word and context.

 

The top among the taboo parts are certainly the sexual organs and their environs which in both sexes cover the area from the navel to below the knees  (al awrat al ghlaiza).  And for men that is the limit of the area to be covered in public at all times.   For women all parts except functionally most active, namely the face, feet and hands are to be covered in public.  For the visual-minded men cannot help being aroused by a woman’s far more smooth and less hairy skin which includes the well-developed mammae so characteristic of women.   When a women covers herself as so defined and ADDITIONALLY maintains a honorable and serious mien men still show interest but that mostly consist of respect borne of the motherly prerogative of the female sex which prerogative every man comes to recognize thanks to be raised by a mother, the most loved and respected figure in man’s life.  As soon as a woman not too closely related to a man and in good enough condition exposes parts of her body other than the three essential exceptions man’s interest shifts from the respect position to lust position to the degree that the exposed parts are nearer to the sexual zone.  Then it is no surprise that sexual crime shoot up albeit allowing for a period of confused hesitation. 

 

In this respect it is instructive to follow the loosening of sexual conduct in a big muslim country I better not name.  Only three decades ago it was unthinkable for a woman to wear shorts in public even in the most Westernized and ‘high society’ part of its biggest cities while now this is the case even in many villages.  The divestment of women started only gradually in big cites’ more westernised parts and filtered down even more hesitantly and gradually to rural areas.  Furthermore what increasingly became almost universal in westernised parts of big cities still remains a brave minority affair in rural areas and the daring of divestment also reduces as more amd more rural areas are reached.  And sex outside marriage exactly shadowed this same gradation-    in westernized high society parts of biggest cities almost every sexual daring seen in the West can be seen and heard and TV companies are overdoing themselves with soap operas depicting  and glamorising this filthy glitzy glory.   These programs and similar cinema films are watched all over the country gradually eroding centuries old pious sexual inhibitions and the erosion is slower father away from big urban centers.    In big cities marriages are becoming more rare and also more fragile and more children are traumatized and despairing on  account of their parents’ separation and litigations.  ALL THIS GUILT AND FILTH JUST TO INDULGE THE SEXUAL LUST MORE SELFISHLY, IRRESPONSIBLY AND SAVAGELY and often pervertedly!!!

 

The flooding of the sexual sewer waters into more and more unnatural or perverted areas like homosexual and paedophilic and the parallel explosion in prostitution as well as haphazard seduction and unpaid promiscuity   in the West is also slowly invading this muslim country.  As in the west rapes and kidnappings are soaring,  a dozen form of sexual perversions and abuses proliferating.  Naturally veneral diseases topped by as yet incurable AIDS have reached even most rural areas thanks to husbands’ dallies in neighboring towns with prostitutes mosly coming from the ex-communist parts of Europe.  Totally chaste and innocent women and their children are suffering from AIDS for no fault of theirs.  Which means exposing of taboo body parts and the parallel deterioration in sexual propriety IS causing all these crimes and catastrophies.

 

Lastly, the opportunity to commit a sexual crime.  This is even more enhanced  than the above two factors.  Islam limits the opportunities of the two sexes mixing.  It is not as strict as most traditional sections of muslim populations allow and nowhere near what the Western habits impose.    The extreme segregation of the sexes and the equally extreme veiling of women does not come from the Prophet sws but from the Classical as well as Medieval Greek (Byzantine) practice which was copied from the Persian practice because Persia was initially the more developed and envied and therefore emulated civilization.  Both in Mecca and Medina the muslim women of the Prophet’s times  never stood so apart from men nor did they veiled themselves so intensely.  The Prophet sws visited them and they visited him and talked at length including questions about legitimate sexual matters and in Umar’s time (the strictest of the first four caliphs)  women still made a substantial part of the mosque congreation and could interrupt the caliph while he was delivering his sermons, object to his rulings and argue for alternatives all of which Umar reacted with almost Western acceptance.  In one case he withdrew a ruling of his and adopted a woman’s ruling arguing shouting it from the rear part of the mosque! 

 

“Woe be to you Umar” he said to himself “Even women are better jurists than you”.   But when Islam swallowed up the Persian and Greek lands the converts there was free to keep their segregating and veiling practices and Islam did not bother because these practices seemed to help even more against sexual misbehaviors.  But as pointed out by some sociologists too much segregation and veiling have had their own harmful effect in that males became so depraved of an essential minimal exposure to the presence of women that their natural desires had to find a substitute to female charms which they found in young boys-  hence the deplorable and notorious penchant of both the Persians and the Greeks for homosexuality.  It was so bad that almost all boys had to serve as male paramours for older and socially more powerful adult men until such time they could marry just to produce children and reserve their real sexual zeal to upcoming boys!  

 

This filthy tradition also to some appreciable extent survived into the Islamization of the said areas and one finds even in the most valued sufi books and poetry antholologies frequent references to and despription of male homosexual relations in such matter-of-fact style that one horrifiedly realizes that sodomization of boys was an accepted part of medieval muslim life at least in bigger towns and among the upper classes including the madrassa and convent life!  One can be found in these books and poems could only be found in Western literature in the homosexual pornography.  However today the Western literature is catching up and an unabashed ‘gay’ literature is filling the main shelves of high street book shops.    As a result all three factors promoting sexual sins are in place and the sins are not only exploding like firesworks but also ceasing to be seen as sins but on the contrary as proud freedoms!
One must still be thankful that at least rape and paedophilia  remain as crimes.

 

 

THE SICK SOUL OF NON- ISLAM

 

INTRODUCTION - We are supposedly living in the Age of Reason having undergone the ‘Enlightenment’.  In fact the ‘we’ here more specifically applies to the post-Christian Western society extending from Alaska to Australia via Europe.  But loosely it applies to at least the two thirds of mankind now who are busy emulating almost everything the Westerners are doing.  Some out of sheer necessity, some out of apery.
Before we proceed further let us note and admit that many things the Westerners represent today can only be qualified as ‘good’  and some ‘real very good’.  The top among the good things in the West are two-    democratic freedoms and the social security network. All can, within generous limits, speak their minds about everything and make their choices about their personal lives. If one falls on hard times help is round the corner like a free basic income and equally free medical treatment.
But something sick,  in fact very sick survives from its past. What this past was like?

 

THE PAGAN WEST - Anthropologists tell us that all societies were pagans (nature worshippers- as they saw it) in their old enough past.   No doubt before the spead of Christianity in Europe the people of the Continent were pagans,  believing in various nature spirits and above them a pantheon of gods to all of whom they set up shrines and temples as the case might be.  They prayed to and propitiated these natural spirits and gods and celebrated their feasts and festivals.  The propitiations included things which we totally find shocking and disgusting today;   human sacrifice, self-mutilation,  test of fire or water (if not burnt or drowned the suspect is innocent) etc.  Sex was both feared and occasionally badly indulged, like in the orgiastic ceremonies at the temples staffed by temple prostitutes regarded also as priestesses. 
These now barbaric looking beliefs and practices were not confined to Europe but to the whole world, from the Pacific to the Atlantic.  The otherwise brilliant civilizations of the pre-Columbian Americans, like the Incas’, surprise one with the superstitious barbarity of their religious ceremonies where human sacrifices were common and sometimes saw thousands killed at one go to please gods. 

 

No doubt, news and ideas did travel both within and between the continents and Columbus was certainly not the first ‘discoverer’ of America. Vikings had been there centuries before him as well as the Asians like the Chinese. As a result the paganism each area displayed had many elements imported into it from other areas of the world over very many centuries.  Which means the Europeans were not the complete inventors of their paganism but also heavy importers and adapters.  In fact its Christianity was one such import- a Semitic monotheist and legalistic renewed Judaism,  adapted to the paganism in Europe.

 

 

HOW DOES PAGANISM WORK

 

Paganism represents man’s ignorance and powerlessness in the face of his natural environment.  From rapacious wild animals to fire spewing volcanoes he is seriously defenceless against the terrible possibilities of nature. He can only respond in two separate but simultaneous ways to these threats.  One, learning from experience, he can invent defences like better shelters and weapons, as well as intelligence, e.g, signs of a volcanic eruption  or impending storm.  These are his scientific activities.  Two, he can invent beliefs which supposedly explain the dangers in spiritual terms and allows the design of equally spiritual counter measures.  For example, a volcano may be taken as a god and tried to be persuaded not to blow up by offering presents to it in the form of human and animal sacrifices on top of singing praising hymns to it.

 

But foci of danger are only too many in any natural environment.  Rivers, forests, precipitous rocks as well as rapacious animals like lions or crocodiles may need be deified and placated similarly. Thus many Africans including the Pharaonic Egyptians offered human sacrifices to crocodiles as well the Nile itself to prevent them from doing harm.
All said, the most serious drawback of paganism is its generation of imaginary monsters. Almost all nature spirits imagined by the pagans are evil and their gods only reluctantly and rarely kind.  Fear and anger underline all spirituality. The gods themselves are often immoral and prone to all human moral weaknesses like succumbing to sexual or power temptation.  They may abduct and rape both women and goddesses, form conspiratorial alliances and slaughter each other.  Yet, equally they may preach and sometimes also practice great virtues and punish human beings for moral reasons. All of which show that pagan gods are projections of their mortal and infallible subordinates the men and are equally ambivalent in every moral and social matter.

 

Deapite its many moral drawbacks, namely the belief in imperfect and therefore themselves often selfishly criminal gods,  paganism gave its believers a perspective to look at things on a cosmic level, ‘explain’ events at least subjectively and do something about what they disliked or feared.  All these are hallmarks of religion. But imperfect in all these departments it left man shorn between moral scrupples and selfish and often criminal lusts. For its gods were the same except their incomoparably superior powers.  In this also the pagan tried to emulate his gods-   accessing these suprior powers himself through magic.

 

 

MAGIC

 

Magic is a direct descendant if not an original ingredient of paganism.  Its aim is to secure for its practitioner his desires irrespective of both apparent natural laws and moral justification.  In other words it is the methodology of a self seeking the satisfaction of its desires as isolated from his moral obligations and limits.  That is why all major religions like Islam and Christianity banned and condemned it.  Major religions aim at curbing our egos by making the satisfaction of desires limited by moral considerations at every turn.  The desire to resort to magic is therefore seen as a primary declaration of war against such moral restraints.  The only alternative to magic in the way of satisfying desires which seem impossible by ordinary means is prayer and  prayer for its part can only be morally sound if it is to stand a chance of acceptance by Good God.  He may accept a bad man’s some bad prayers at times but that is only for punishment-  what is granted turns out to be a curse rather than a boon and the servant who insisted asking for it too much learns a terrible
lesson.

 

Magician and his customers are believers in superstitions.  A superstition suitable for magic is one which arouses very strong emotions, especially on the horrible side.  Parts from corpses, for example, the more putrefied or horrible looking the better. A bar of soap used in washing a dead body is a precious item for the magician. Rat or dog droppings,  bat liver, dead scorpions or a baby’s or virgins blood…  hold enormous magical powers. A Renaissance noble lady washed herself in the freshly obtained blood from virgins in order to preserve her youth and beauty.   Some magicians summon, command and employ various occult beings like the spirits of the dead, genies, fairies, demons etc. to obtain them or their customers their desires.

 

Witches and sorcerers are magicians who exclusively deal in black (harm-inflicting) magic and they also have personal supernatural powers like flying in air or changing into other persons or animals.  All such superstitions have been current among non-Muslims and evaluated in different ways. While some cultures approve magic as a legitimate activity, like among primitive tribes (whose magicians are called shamans or witch-doctors and enjoy great prestige)  others both believe and decry them, as in Christianity. Islam is the only major religion to dismiss both magic and the magician as frauds.  It also proscribes them as subversive, cheating and psychologically and spiritually harming the people who come in contact with them.  Islam’s proscription extents to fortune telling as well whatever form it takes.  Why only Islam holds such a view of all occult claims should be seen as another exceptional and compelling sign that IT IS THE BEST AND HIGHEST RELIGION.

 

There is an unsurpassable rationality and modernity in Islam which none other religion could have or retain.  Yes, there is belief in genies (jinni) in Islam but it is a neutral belief in the sense that such beings are simple inferiors to mankind whatever their physical abilities. What actually is  their nature is hardly discussed and contact with them is anything but encouraged.  They can only impinge on our lives briefly and accidentally if at all and may and rather should be ignored for all practical intents and purposes. As a result there has been no obsession among mainstream muslims with genies either good or demonic and such creatures rarely feature in their talk and most of the time as passing curiosities. The worst that can happen among muslims are when a muslim community is part and parcel of a primitive multi-ethnic, multi-faith nation (like in many parts of Asia and Africa) where whether they want or are aware of it or not the superstitions of their non-muslim neiggbours rub on to them as well, especially when they are poorly educated- which often is the case unfortunately.  As such Islam never bothers to look at the occult and the superstitious and often ignores them for good.  It simply is the case that the luminous body of Islam cannot house the darkness superstition and the occult proffer.

 

 

ACTIVE EXPLOITATION OF SUPERSTITION AND THE OCCULT BY RELIGIOUS HIERARCHIES OUTSIDE ISLAM

 

Since the Renaissance at least the Christian church stands accused of exploiting  both theological and popular (pagan origin) superstitions to control the masses and impose her will on them.   From the divinity of Jesus and his alleged crucifixion and resurrection to the alleged infallibility of the pope a number of theological superstitions were used to stifle free thought even by perfectly believing Christians. Mass (the Lord’s Supper) is another superstition which supposes that bread and wine becomes flesh and blood of God.  Luther was anathematised for denying papal infallibility and the Mass while fully believing in Trinity.  For his part he had his own incredible superstitions and unforgivable prejudices.
The Church exploited also the superstitions outside the proper jurisdiction of the Christian theology.  Pagan imaginary entities like ghouls, vampires and haunting dead and magicians dabbling in  the supposedly effective occult arts were taken seriously and fought against.  Both the clergy and the public believed, for example, that witches had the power to cause draught or bring the plague into Christian lands.   Accordingly, the Church led the way in exposing, arresting, trying and convicting witches ands the public enthusiastically participated in  the hunts and destruction of the supposed culprits.  Such injustices were done to the alleged culprits and such tortures and punishments were applied to them that no other religion can ‘boast’ of more or worse.

 

Other great civilizations, like the Indian and the pre-Columbus South American, indulged in similar great atrocities on the basis of superstition but none could match the Christian Church’s.  Of course today’s Church is almost totally cleansed from its Medieval image and mentality but that was thanks to its critics exhaustive criticisms from all angles.   But many of the old ways still linger on, especially in most backward parts of Christendom.  As for the Hindu barbaric superstitions the burning of the wives of a dead man on the same pyre as himself is still occasioned in some remote parts of the Asia.   Moreover, Hindu establishment (the temple) still preaches the old superstitions like re-incarnation,  the unspeakable caste system and the many burdens Hinduism imposes on the masses.

 

 

SECULAR REACTION AS BAD AS THE RELIGIOUS ACTION

 

Although the body of Western Christendom  was ultimately ripped into two opposite camps,     namely the religious (both Catholic and Protestant) and the secular (both the so-called liberal and later Communist) the spirit of dogmatism, intolerance and barbarism remained intact across the board .  To see how let us take three secular movements which shook the world since tha late 18th century. 

 

The first social Armageddon was the French Revolution of 1789.   For years philosophers like Diderot, Voltaire, D’Alambert and Rousseau…  had been variously blasting both the Church and the monarchy/nobility until many both in church and among the nobility became so much cowed with the intellectual power and eloquence of these philosophers that some among them became even converted to anti-clericalism (more properly called secularism or laicism) and anti-monarchism.  While some of the accusations levelled against the two institutions were amply justified others varied from insensitive exaggerations to wild lies and slanders. The reason was the same as the reason employed by the accused.  Dogmatism so selfish and uncompromising that regarded certain lies and exaggerations against any opposition not only legitimate but meritious.  Telling religious and sectarian lies are two of the several trademarks of cultic behaviour and the Western mind retains these on all sides of the ideological divide.

 

Christianity itself as we know it today is based on lies and exaggerations and is only loosely and selectively based on the reported sayings and doings of Jesus. It is more based on what Paul reportedly said and did and also benefits from a heavy serving of pre-Christian Gnostic and pagan sauces and seasonings.  All seems an effort at  syncretism to make it appeal to all tastes and preferences.   After all the organised church needed as many sheep to herd and milk as possible and so did the gradually Christianising Roman State. It has room for both monotheism and ‘three-theism’ of sorts, and also room for covert polytheism when it allows its saints to act as minor gods as in antique Greek and Roman fashion.  They are worshipped and prayed to, often in the form of paintings and statues and popularised by numerous shrines to each all over the land.   It also domesticated many  pagan rituals, ceremonies and festivals, from Christmas to Halloween.

 

But this eclectic and ecumenical inclusiveness came at a very big price. Against this generosity the believers had to accept the word and will of their clergy as the word and will of God!  Any deviation and disobedience meant blasphemy which meant very painful death, usually burning at stake.  Just disagree with the definition or the portfolio of the Holy Spirit and you are beyond pale and redemption.  Just suspect the efficacy of the Mass and you blasphemed and deserve torture and execution.  To stamp out any such deviations the Church was all eyes and ears and even idle suspicion could be used as grounds for an investigation. As a result, millions perished from the second to the mid-19th century in the hands of Church’s inquisitors whether that term as such was in use or not.  From Tertulllian to Bruno many perished in the hands of the Established Church who sometimes turned around after centuries and canonised whom it had once condemned.

 

This very same strict and cultic dogamatism and persecution mania, inquisitorial attitude and extremely savage punishments for any who dared to suspect or challenge the established ideological authority remained the same both with the French Revolutionaries and later Fascists and  Communists.   These sworn enemies of Church dogmatism and persecution spirit displayed all those curses at least at the same level.

 

One of the basic stories of the French Revolutionaries was that the Bastille (the famous Parisian prison) was overflowing with unjustly imprisoned and savagely tortured political prisoners.  On the first day of the long-brewing revolution this prison was stormed by the mob and its inmates released.  The story was that hundreds were freed.  This supposedly heroic act of Revolution since became the staple argument and boast of the Revolution, appearing in all school books since.  The fact however is that only seven inmates were there and all except one were commom criminals. The exception was the notorious Marqui de Sade whose name gave us the noun Sadism, cruelty and self-indulgence taken to their limits.  In other words lies and exaggerations were heavily employed to justify a radical regime change.   The cause on the other hand was the shifting balance of power between the nobility (landed class) and the businessmen class who now were the richer class thanks to the enormous developments in trade, industry and banking they owned.  This class had to lie and exaggerate through their servants the intelligentsia (philosophers etc.) whom now they were subsidizing more than the nobility could subsidize them. 

 

Equally the case was that the nobility and their natural allies the high clergy had dug their own grave by abusing their advantages too much for too long.  It was now the turn of the businessmen to abuse theirs and invite Communism whose future leaders, once in power would abuse theirs!    If the nobility and the church stood accused of taking the masses for granted and abusing them as they would abuse farm animals the new business class (bourgeois) leaders equally discredited themselves by abusing the proletariat, the propertyless working class.  In some countries like England,  the bourgeoisie could not entirely replace the nobility and the masses continued to suffer from the domination of both!   Perhaps the best example of such double suffering was the Victorian Age (mid-  to late 19th century). 

 

Then the old serfs were party converted to the new proletariat who, as men, women and children were asked to keep the ever-speeding wheels of industry running.  The earth all over the country was dug up miles down and about to reach mines, mostly coal, to satisfy the thirts for raw materials needed by the Industrial Revolution and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children press-ganged into them to toil from smallest hours to the biggest possible under the most unsanitary and dangerous conditions imaginable. So oppressive and unrelenting were the demands on them and so little consideration were given to their needs and dignity that all these worse thn serfs often worked stark naked, coughing, tearing and sweating profusely hundreds of feet under the ground axing away chunks of sulphurous coals and dying in their dozens and hundreds as explosion followed explosion and collapse followed collapse. Many were so dazed and depressed with their hellish existence that they committed suicide by throwing themselves from bridges or cutting their wrists to bleed to death.  All sorts of terrible illnesses were rampant with tuberculosis topping the league.  Factories were equally brutal.  All of which makes one to wonder what had changed for the common man by moving from serfdom into proletariat status.

 

The same sick soul of ruthlessly exploiting and sacrificing the weak for the strong was still the same and best epitomised the SICK SOUL OF THE WESTERN EDUCATED MIND! 
It should then be no wonder if this very same mind colonized, robbed and brutalized almost all the rest of the world and presided over that most unconscionable era of modern history-  colonial imperialism.   What native Americans, Africans, Asians and Australians… went through under their Western colonial masters is no less barbaric than the Babylonian, Assyrian,  Pharaonic or Roman barbarities towards their conquered victims and was arguably even worse.  The massacres of the Natives by the Spanish conquistadors is an epic of brutality which history of any age before could barely match.  The sick soul of ‘strong eat the weak’ was going unchecked and unchallenged and Christian church itself was too involved to offer an alternative- the cross was following the sword and the gun into all colonies to be robbed and brutalized.

 

 

THE SPRIT OF SWINGING EXCESSES 

Another equally damnable aspect of the sick soul has been its swings from one excess to other instead of attaining optimal balances between two opposite positions.  We see this best in the evolution of the attitudes towards sex in the West. 

 

In Greek-Roman times ‘honour’ was enforced only on the females while a blind eye was turned towards men’s sexual sins.  Not only men were practically free to conquer as many women as they could but male homosexuality was almost institutionalised.  In Athens for example boys nearing and attaining puberty were launched into a role of sexual partner to older and better established men.  This was supposed to habituate the boys to sexual practices without the risk of unwanted pregnancies to all concerned.  The fertility of females was a great problem for men and problem of begetting too many children had to be addressed.  Despite the great mortality rates among infants marriages often produced to many children in the eyes of their fathers if not mothers. To curb this they killed as many children (especially) girls by abandoning them at the temple courtyards to starve or be picked up by predators like foxes or crows.  Additionally men satisfied their sexual appetites by sodomising boys and each other.  They lost their way and minds in this practice so much that homosexual love came to rival the heterosexual and jealousies leading to murders became as common as in the case of the heterosexual love.  To protest against this male evasion of duty towards them some women led the way to female homosexuality until both sides became equal in depravity. 

 

Then came along Christianity.   Although based on the name of the Christ which Jesus appears to have claimed to be in its Judaic sense Christianity was not so much Judaic as a mystery cult evolving from a mixture of then current and loosely similar cults like the Isis and Adonis cults.  The true disciples of Jesus were and remained orthodox jews and after a few decades disappeared from history.  If there was a religion based on the teachings  of Jesus it was theirs and it no longer is.  What we have today as Christianity is partly and unsecurely related to the teachings and example of the Jesus of the Gospels (as distinct from the imaginary Jesus of the Acts) and all real good it contains comes from that noble Jesus the prophet image.

 

Because Judaism is very positive towards marriage and Jesus seems to have stressed the permanence of the Law (of the prophets) it is unreasonable to think that he opposed marriage at all and saw celibacy as holiness.  This latter attitude was original and integral to the priests and monks of the mystery traditions which gentile Christianity modelled itself on.  In fact the monastic opposition was not confined to sex and marriage but to all things to do with the flesh (bodily appetites and worldly assets helping to satisfy them).  The monk had to be barely surviving in this world and ideally should have no assets or earnings at all.  It was ‘celibacy, poverty and charity’ or hell.  Since the man of God had no property his charity could be either to pass on any assets given him to the worldly poor or render free services like nursing to those who needed them.   Although very noble at first sight, this ideal becomes less so when viewed from a more realistic angle.

 

For one thing and as many sufi masters pointed out the conquest of the ego is not so much about denying ourselves the satisfaction of our legitimate and healthy needs but not going beyond what is enough and just.  This is a more difficult and therefore enlightening enterprise than shutting out all temptations by isolating ourselves from all sources of temptation.  A shocking example of the latter can be seen in the famous Christian monk Origen, who in  order to rule out sexual sin and be able to teach female students he castrated himself including the external parts!  In Islam this amounts to a major sin instead of a godly act.  Based entirely on common sense and realism Islam explains that the real sacrifice for God is keeping oneself inside the limits of the Law despite the temptations the world can throw at you which temptations you do have the power to indulge.  Origenic option is for the cowardly rabbits  while the Islamic is for the brave lions so to speak.  Said our grandsheikh Abdullah Daghestani Q.S. (d. 1973) “You are a saint when as a strong and healthy man you are left with a beautiful virgin in a desolate cave for forty days and not once it crosses your mind to anything to her Allah would not like you to”.  This is the Islamic, Sufi standard!  In the Naqsibandi Sufi seclusion arbaeen the disciple is required to take a shower (ghusl) every time a worldly desire including sex swells up in his heart.  But the same disciple is  free to attend to all needs of his wife and family once he is out.  In other words the whole thing is self-mastery inside out despite everything.  That is what makes Islam the greatest religion and its inner dimension Sufism the greatest spiritual tradition ever. 

 

The non-Islamic spiritual traditions which are almost always celibacy- and sensual deprivation- obsessed offend the God-made human nature and must and often do backfire, sooner or later, more or less catastrophically.  Therefore the Messenger of Allah said “La rahbaniyyata fil Islam”, i.e., there is no monasticism in Islam.
And one of the most spectacular, in fact the most spectacular and large scale backfiring has been the somersault the Western sexual mores made in modern times. 

 

In Medieval times Christians of all classes were oppressively yet ambivalently hysterical about sexual matters.  Pope or monk,  king or serf,  Medieval Westerners were tormented between the two sexual extremes of total abstinence and abhorrence on the one hand and total sexual abandon on the other. Both the palace and the village was rife with adultery and fornication behind an adamant appearance of sexual Puritanism. Kings debauched the wives of their lords who in turn vied with one another to present their wives and daughters to thr king’s bed in return for royal favours like political promotion or economic favours like a monopoly. In many cases kings openly kept mistresses at court some of whom could be married to somebody else. What is more bishops and sometimes even the popes and most of the rest of the high and middle clergy openly displayed  mistresses and children after whom they looked very well.  One of the great ironies of the scandal was that all these Christians criticised and condemned their Muslim counterparts in the East for their occasional  polygamous marriages while finding nothing wrong in practice themselves accessing many women simultaneously not only without the blessing of a marriage but despite some of these women being married to others!

 

Yet there always were and still are those Christians who either remained really celibate or genuinely confined themselves to a monogamous marriage. Perhaps they used to make the majority at one time or another.  Nobody knows except God.   But even these were under the curse of the extremist stance of Christianity on sex.  Many women, for example, were frigid out of fear of offending Jesus by their lustful feelings and so,  at odds with their natural instincts, led lives poisoned by sexual neuroses phobias. 

 

Their dreams were plagued by sexual symbolism caused by the sexual repression they were subjected to and sexual nightmares like being ravaged by male demons (incuba).  Repressed men were also similarly wrecked by neuroses and ravaged by female demons (succuba) in their dreams. It was on the basis if such a sexually repressed and distorted civilization as the Christian Western that the Austrian-Jewish psychiatrits Dr Freud built up his revolutionary theory of neuroses,  psychoanalysis.  It was a as perverted a picture of the human psyche as the almost exclusively Western sexual neuroses indicated.   His patients stood accused  of harbouring foul sexual desires including the incestuous and séance upon séance were tormented by their analyst to own up to them and attain catharsis and achieve peace of mind-   like the equally sick and perverted Christian confession of sins to one’s parish priest was supposed to achieve.  Incidentally in Islam shame and repentance are the cures to sins and the believer is asked to retain Allah’s gracious cover on his or her sins and ask forgiveness from Allah direct and in total privacy.  And Allah promises to forgive. What a difference, what a grace!

 

As a result of this inner melee of centuries of tensions the Westerners became so fed up with the inconsistencies,  the unnaturalness,  the contradictions and extremism of both the Christian teaching and church practices that they found the new ideas of the Renaisance and Reformation and then the so-called Enlightenment (explaining of man and and the Universe in scientific terms) god-sent opportunities to throw off the yoke of religion once and for all and although Christianity and its church survived the blow it survived as a near totally emasculated dwarf ready to accept every rebuke and adopt every blasphemous and sinful offer in reforming itself.  Today the agenda includes not only gay marriages but gay priesthood and tomorrow it may be a gay Bible from which all criticism against sexual morals are expunged.  The church now is the handmaiden of hedonism and secularism and despite all the concession it is making to its traditional haters it is still dwindling in popularity.  Obviously the Satan is insatiable as regards concessions and will not stop asking for more until the whole soul obeying it crashes to the bottom of the hell for good.
In fact a soul is called sick when it is hijacked by the Satan and that is the lot of the soul outside Islam, whether it is steeped in the East or the West.

 

 

NON-CHRISTIAN SICK SOUL OUTSIDE ISLAM

 

Christians are not the only cultural group suffering from a sick soul with no fault of their own (the fault is with the early Church Fathers-  like Athanasius for example who managed to impose on them the (full) divinity of Christ despite the objections of a majority headed by the more sensible and saintly Arius.

 

Without the Light of Islam all cultures, including the so-called Islamic,  have a sick soul.
If we take the most populous culture outside both Islam and Christianity, namely the Hindu, we see a lot of sickness which is unfortunately,  fundamental to it.

 

Hinduism and its offshoot Buddhism have recently been popular in the West who even now will not consider Islam as the alternative to either its Christianity or Atheism.  Any westerner disappointed with these two and on the lookout for spirituality often looks towards India first.  And Indian gurus are big business both at home and in the West,  especially in the USA.  As usual scams and scandals have never been away and many have been confirmed by court convictions.

 

Before we discuss in what way Hinduism is fundamentally sick we must declare what is our yardstick. It is easy to praise anything when objective, incontrovertible evidence deriving from the very essence and core of a teaching and seen also practiced,  is ignored.  I have recently been reading a book about the world’s spiritual traditions in which each and every one of them are equally praised although Hinduism seems to be the two authors’ favourite.  They even praise the American Indian Shamanism in which sef-mutilation (e.g., cutting off a limb) and human sacrifice to gods are inseparable parts of its teachings and practice!  Use of halluginogenic and psychedelic drugs are integral to both Shamanism and parts of Hinduism, yet these are also praised and defended by the authors as necessary vehicles for enlightenment.  All barbaric and delusional demands and consequences of these traditions are simply ignored.

 

Applying this yardstick of objectivity to Hinduism we are stopped dead in our tracts when its two cardinal principles are met:   The odious cast system and the barbaric superstitious burning of the wives of a dead men on the same pyre as him.  How can any enlightened and civilised man believe in a god who ordained a strict, unchangeable, born inequality among men in the form of four castes, namely the Priests (Brahmin), the Warriors, the Merchants and the Serfs (untouchables!) among whom no diffusion is possible no matter what!  A serf is so lowly regarded that it can be said he has no human rights whatsoever and his lord can deal with him as he pleases.  For their part the Brahmins are not responsible to anybody below their caste. Of course in practice the system has never worked that strictly because common sense and certain emotions like personal love could modify behaviours but the brutality of the principle is obvious enough and it worked almost as good as taught.  One can only marry within his or caste for example and a breach of this law is punishable by death even today! 

 

The second dumbfounder is the mandatory practice of burning any surviving wives of a man on the same pyre as the dead husband.  If believing in these two cardinal principles of Hinduism and approving and practicing them is not an indication of a terribly sick soul then what is?   Thankfully modern Indian government has been trying to undo such inequlities and their barbaric consequences but reasonably full success is still far away given the size of India and the vast illiteracy and poverty plaguing the nation.

 

The tendency among the too optimistic commentators is to ignore such fundamental errors at the base as well as in  the fruits of such spiritual traditions and instead, dwelling exclusively on mystical and theoretical claims forgiving all superstitions like polytheism and idolatry by explaining them away as symbols for the various facets of Divinity which is Single (but with another Trimurty or trinity, namely Brahma- Vishnu-Shiva,  from which the Christian Trinity has almost certainly to have been derived).   The commentators ignore the fact that Hindu believers big or small regard the idols as gods and claims about these gods coming  alive and for example laughing or weeping are avidly accepted.  The same credulity applies in Christianity as well-  especially among the Catholics bleeding Christs and weeping Madonnas are very popular.  What is more, among both Hindus and Christians both false relics manufacture and creation of illusory miracles are deep rooted habits.

 


 

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