Global Corruption

 

19.  GLOBAL CORRUPTION- OUR WAGES FOR SIN

 

Suddenly we have a new doomsday scenario: Our global environment, that is to say, our lands, seas and atmosphere (our gaseous sea) are deteriorating fast. Many species are threatened; some which were around until recently are now feared to be extinct or facing extinction. Survivors are not faring much better: they are crippled by poisons we pour into the environment and now it is almost impossible to find, for example, any fish not contaminated by some hazardous artificial substances.

 

From another point of view the same phenomenon can be seen as follows: while man or scientifically speaking homo sapiens is appearing to be the most successful species ever, in actual fact he also appears to be digging his own grave; as he is increasingly downgrading his ecological environment he is increasingly risking a slow but inexorable destruction of himself. Unable to eliminate the poisons he is depositing into the three major elements of his environment, namely bodies of water, land and the atmosphere, he is having to ingest or absorb them into his delicate system and becoming ill as a result, often incurably so.

 

Environmental issues as far as man is concerned are not unconnected to social and psychological issues which affect him. Man is a totality of his body, mind and action, therefore whatever he thinks, feels and does affects his physical environment and that affects him back. Do we want, for example to do less kitchen work and have more leisure-time for having fun as a result? As a solution we may use paper plates and cups, plastic cutlery and canned foods and bottled ready made drinks. These leave a heap of rubbish which must be somehow put away: papers may be burned, plastics ploughed into soil and cans molten to make metal for reshaping into things. Some of these produce harmful gases, others degrade the soil we need for agriculture and still others consume energy in reprocessing; the cans will need a hell of an amount of energy to become steel or aluminium ingots, then to be recast or fabricated into other utensils. You see, laziness for some chores and preparedness to waste laboriously produced items to satisfy that laziness are contributing to environmental degradation. This degradation is punishing us. The same with waste of foods; each half eaten portion of food or half drunk drink means a waste of expensively produced edible items; suddenly such exquisite items dropped into refuse are turning into mouldy rubbish, fattening rats, festering with pathogens and eventually crumbling into soil where they had come from with great toil and expense.

 

Do we replace our any free ambition for moral and spiritual elevation (which religions tried to promote) with the very expensive ambition of physical attractiveness and sexual conquest? We must then wear newer and sillier clothes at every opportunity, spend small fortunes on grooming products, renew our wardrobes, especially with those satanically bizarre and fantastically expensive ‘designer clothes’ among which may be suits made from fishnets which cover nothing or blue jeans so torn and tattered artificially that some sexually most strategic parts of the lower body can glimpse through furtively while the brushy-tatty trouser legs ends sweep the ground to accumulate filth and carry it into our living rooms or offices . The reason why  some people, despite not being poor, want to dress like destitute vagabonds must be that they want to advertise their vulgarity at heart so as to arouse the sexual interest of others who can instinctively infer that the advertiser is available for mutual abuse.  In this last example we perhaps see the most eloquent declaration of modern life philosophy: Deliberate waste- the production of a pair of trousers only to be torn at a dozen places- intended to create an as vulgar as possible image of the wearer who thereby broadcasts that he or he is available for any vulgar indulgence with others. It is a plain statement of protest against values once held sacred all over the civilised world, values deriving from major religions and the traditions woven around them. Incidentally, some responsibility for this near universal escape from religion, I think, goes to some men of religion because they committed two crimes: one was the deliberate corruption of sacred texts in order to accommodate the unholy desires of the scribes concerned, unholy desires directed to mislead the believers into alleys where they could be exploited by the corrupters. To this effect, referring to the Jewish scribes Allah says:

 

“Woe to those who compose scripture by their hands and then say ‘This is from Allah’ in order to buy a mean benefit. Woe to them for what their hands thus wrote, and woe to them for what they gained thereby” (2: 79)

 

Yet the greatest example of this scripture manufacture and ritual invention must be Christianity and especially the Roman, more usually called Catholicism. Here, by the evidence of all unbiased experts we find some already unreliable reports about the life and teachings of Jesus being taken up by the very business-like Romans and used as mortar to cobble together a new paganism otherwise directly descended from the Etruscan tradition of sculpted and painted gods residing in candle-lit shrines and massive and ornate temples full of mythical figures and the depictions of their legends- something Jesus as an orthodox Jewish prophet could never condone (Etruscans, a nation who had come from the East and colonised Italy were the real founders of Rome and were replaced by and absorbed into Latins after a few centuries of struggle) . This revised Etruscan paganism with Jesus as chief god made sure that the neo-pagan Italian priests could continue to sell their services and collect taxes from their flocks just as all frankly pagan priesthoods had done before them. This power to control and tax the masses was behind the power of priesthood which power often eclipsed that of kings. The Roman Catholic Church, at least until recently, did often excel the kings or governments in controlling and exploiting people and in some countries it still does. This is the second thing we promised to consider, i.e. the other sense in which men of religion abused their powers by raising themselves above kings even. Given their great authority so manufactured they often scandalised those among the more intelligent people who could see through their pretensions. Taking again the Roman church we find some popes being anything but godly and almost everything in ungodliness. Of course the same applies to all priesthoods; the powers they traditionally enjoyed were too great not to corrupt them. As late W. Churchill put it, power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Witness late Saddam’s example, among only very many.

 

Yet all this should not mean religious faith per se is bad. On the other side of the coin called religion we find equally great things in the opposite direction, things we call godliness or saintliness. This plague of a dichotomy of the opposites is not peculiar only to religion; it applies to all systems of power based whether on belief or tangible, mundane benefits; it simply is the case that spiritually unreformed and unimproved men are incapable of holding to their bargains with others for too long too much.  This last argument can only justify religious belief provided it is like Islam’s. In Islam priesthood is not allowed and each believer is free to make his judgments on spiritual matters albeit with varying degrees of consultation with those who know better. In this context a believer can entirely look to those knowing better than himself and adopt their views as his own- which is what the majority of Muslims do of their own free will- or, in the case of a more intelligent man, study the matters himself and arrive at conclusions for himself and do accordingly. Provided he has both goodwill and enough intelligence he will be entitled to his well-informed and considered views: that was how reputable Islamic sects (mazhabs) were born and new ones can be launched if necessary. So pursued, Islamic faith with its laws inseparable from it provides us with the best ever basis for moderating and naturalising our moral values and practical conduct. 

 

As a result, a truly Islamic community will have none of the silly and wasteful and often also malignant attitudes and behaviour patterns of today’s secular civilisation which is based on as much silly freedom as possible so long as the long-term disastrous effects of those freedoms can remain concealed from people in general. Take the new institution of homosexual marriage and its natural extensions like gay adoption. Here we find a most sinister inroad into the holy institution of natural, that is to say, reproductive and cohesive family wherein, like among many species of most advanced other animals (e.g.   apes, lions, elephants) each individual, so long it needs care, can look to a comfortable and safe social life among its blood relations less any pressing circumstances like the necessity of evicting some young male lions from the pride in order to encourage them to seek their own chances of reproduction and family headship in the company of lionesses outside his close family circle- which is the healthy option. True, some young lions do go to waste, but life is always a dangerous adventure which we cannot avoid pursuing if we want self-fulfilment and extending ourselves in healthy directions.

 

Now we may make another surprising discovery: There is no clear cut division between rule based on secular principles and religious. While secular principles alone can never make a moral and wise society, religious principles, especially the Islamic, under some good kind of leadership, can make a moral and wise society within reason; within reason because creating an ideal society is impossible under any circumstances, simply because ideal is ideal, that is to say imaginary and wishful- and also wrong- and not natural and therefore sustainable. Our discovery does not end here: Islam is not idealistic in the least but realistic and pragmatic to a fault. We can demonstrate this conclusively by quoting hundreds of Qur’anic verses and another hundreds of prophetic hadiths but let us do with a few for demonstration’s sake.

 

Allah says: “Allah will not burden a soul more than it can bear” (2: 286). He also says:

 

“If you shun great sins you have been banned from (i.e. murder, robbery) We indulge and pardon your lesser sins and make you enter a gracious place of entry (Paradise) (4: 31).

 

You see, no idealism, not too much scrutiny- just avoid the most glaring offences and the rest Allah covers up and ignores and treats you as if you have been a saint all your life! Provided of course you also privately feel sorry for your offences which every sensible and decent person does. This needs no extra effort.

 

As for hadith, consider the following story and draw your own conclusions:

 

A destitute married young family man came to the Messenger of Allah and confessed to having sex with his wife despite the time being a Ramadan day and he and his wife fasting (Fasters can, among other legitimate things, only make sex after sunset when they can break their fast). The Prophet ruled that he had to fast for sixty one days consecutively after Ramadan. The man pleaded that he could not, it would be too hard on him. The Prophet then ruled that he should pay daily maintenance to sixty destitute persons in lieu. The man replied that he was too poor to afford that. Just after this another man walked into the Prophet’s company and laid down a huge basket full of dates- the staple Arab diet item- which he said he was donating as part of his alms-giving. The Prophet told the young man “Here you are, take this basket and distribute it among sixty poor people” (They were only too plentiful in Medina). The man picked up the basket and walked off only to come back a few hours later with the basket intact and remarked “O Messenger of Allah, I could not find a home poorer than mine”.  The Prophet laughed until his molars were exposed and concluded “If that is so then take it to your home and you and your family eat it” meaning ‘that will do’. This is Prophet’s Islam! 

 

What Islam is subsequently made by its too many zealots is another sorry matter. I believe that all idealism is Satanism in disguise and as a result leads to Satanic results like tyranny and slaughter. Witness the later epochs and especially the present history of Islam. From the quite jolly if subtle and disguised tolerances of Allah and His Messenger we arrived at strictures and anathemas rivalling the Medieval Catholic examples! Allah and His Prophet know that man is weak and needs a lot of indulgence if he has to make and sustain a modicum of moral effort; the semi-learned but spiritually illiterate and self-styled illuminati of present day Islam neither know nor do they want to know that man is weak and need a lot of indulgence which is loving compassion. No wonder Islam and Muslims are made the bogeymen for all outside them!

How tolerant and generous Allah can be we can see from the following Everest of a Divine verse:

 

“Say (O Muhammad on behalf of Me to my servants): O My Servants who exceeded in wronging themselves- do not despair of Allah’s Mercy: Verily Allah forgives all sins without exception; He indeed is, yea, He is the Merciful Forgiver” (39: 53)

 

May I warn you that this is not an open licence for oppressing others and debauching; it is a medicine for those who somehow lost their way against their better judgment and find themselves ruined in their conscience, too ashamed or too despairing even to ask for Allah’s pardon.  Allah rescues them with this ultimate show of compassion. But the fact remains that Allah is very merciful, merciful beyond all expectations PROVIDED we are ashamed of ourselves, desperately seeking for a way out of the hell our conscience is giving us. If we then offer our unreserved apologies to our Creator and Sustainer, namely Allah, He promises to forgive and reinstate us in His favour. This again is the true Islam and not the terribly Satanic pontifications of some present day supposed scholars of Islam or those of the pathological enemies of Islam among non-Muslims.  I am aware of the irreconcilable-looking opposite statements in Allah’s Book about the punishments and contrarily the pardon of Allah of the sinners but I have been gradually made wiser than seeing them as contradictions: my humble Sufi training taught me that both Allah and His Messenger are supreme pedagogues and diplomats who know how to use language and manipulate emotions to impress on the decently impressionable souls the need for them to develop a finer and finer conscience until they attain any possible degree of human moral perfection and emotional grace and also implant in them similar pedagogic and diplomatic skills in winning other people to the noble ways of God as they themselves were won by other Sufis. To wit, a Sufi, a true one, means a Muslim initiated into the secrets of Islam.

It is this attainment which can save our world from the confused and misguided living habits which are leading us into the swamps of self-destruction.

 

What are these habits, just to recapitulate. But before that what is their basis. Let our Lord All-Wise, All-Knowing tell us: Referring the uninformed, unrefined human ego He Almighty says “Whoever refines it and keeping in mind his Lord and is prayerful at all times is definitely saved. Unfortunately you are preferring this world’s life despite the hereafter being far better and also more enduring” (87: 16- 17)

 

You see, it is our unrefined, coarse, selfish and hedonistic egos which are driving us into both dangerous and/or immoral territories of behaviour. Only a refined ego, an ego which has found its Gracious Creator in itself and is living with His Presence and is keeping a prayerful watch of its Lord can drop sinful, dangerous habits and develop godly habits effusing loving merciful understanding towards whole creation and the wisdom necessary for dealing with them constructively. Is modern all-greed, all-competition, all for consumption man like this? Often not! He cannot wait to find another silly and bizarre habit or way of indulging his senses; out of this insatiability for newer and newer lust arousing and then means of satisfaction of the new lusts vicious circle spin newer and newer products and services each depleting our natural resources and choking our ecological system with ever-increasing contaminants until even the life forms  at the bottom of the oceans are victimised.

 

It is manufacture, manufacture, manufacture and poison and poison and poison. And, perhaps very surprisingly for those not informed enough about Islam this vicious circle or rather down spiral is clearly mentioned and warned against in Allah’s Book:

 

“Because of what people have been earning with their own hands corruption appeared in the land and the sea in order that Allah makes them taste some of what that did so that they may turn back (from the brink)”.  (30: 41)

 

If you want to know the name of this Chapter 30 in the Qur’an it is ‘al Rum’, the Romans which at least in the time of the Prophet it meant the Europeans like Greek, Italian and all the rest. This understanding remained the same until the collapse of the last great Muslim empire, that of the Ottoman turks who called all their lands in Europe ‘Rumeli’, the ‘Romanland’ and those in Asia Minor (Turkey proper) as Anadolu (from Greek ‘Anatolia’). The verse we just quoted therefore fits the present global environmental crisis like a glove fits a hand: Industrial Revolution, escape from religion and mass hedonistic consumerism at the expense of irreversible environmental deterioration are all the brain children and handiwork of the Europeans or as we call them more often, the West. Countries like USA and Australia are mere dislocated extensions of Europe. Thanks to their handiwork first their own countries suffered environmental deterioration; they did taste the bitter fruits of their dashes into ungodliness in the forms of both ill health and the two atrocious world wars borne of economic hegemonic competition. It is related that when, towards the end of the Second World War Hitler learned that American air force was dropping tens of thousands of Christmas rations on American troops in Europe, rations consisting of hot roast turkey, cakes, chocolates and hot coffee, his morale at last collapsed, he threw up his hands and remarked that his war was lost simply because American power to supply American troops was inexhaustible while his Germans were starving on top of being outclassed by the Allied weaponry both in amount and quality. The same America could evaporate the undefeatable-looking Japanese resistance by two atomic bombs.

 

By then the Second World war was the single most environmentally destructive human enterprise in history; today only China’s yearly output of heat and pollutants is excelling it. Accounting for a quarter of world’s heat output and other pollution items USA is yearly outdoing the total environmental damage the last war caused in its six years of duration. Now, thanks to this destructive depletion of natural resources and their conversion into pollution the climate is hotting and drying up on the one hand while on the other the genetic integrity and therefore health of all species including us homo sapiens are deteriorating towards an incalculable end. We do not have to sermonise on a religiously motivated doomsday scenario. All those in the know in the scientific community now are agreed that the danger is only too real and already in place and inexorably increasing.

If still it is possible to avert total disaster man has to turn to God’s Qur’anic guidance whether he names it as such or not. It consists of a formula as follows:

 

Eliminate your both unnecessary ‘needs’ and your dangerous habits and instead learn to make do with only the satisfaction of your natural, health- and wellbeing- wise needs. Remake chaste family institution your main plank of social cohesion and economy of living, with women mainly acting as nurses, carers and educators of their children and later as part-time workers at any profession suitable for their abilities and compatible with their any remaining domestic responsibilities. On top of other great social benefits this will go a long way in conserving and protecting natural resources and massively reducing waste and thereby help tackle the environmental deterioration problem.

 

There is more to women’s returning to their natural duties: Children will have heaven with their mothers around, supervising, educating and helping. To provide for such mothers girls’ education should be separated from that of boys at around puberty and the girls should undergo an education until, say eighteen, which will make them almost professional pedagogues, house managers and nurses. Surely some girls are exceptionally bright and will be let down and frustrated if not allowed to pursue technical or scholarly careers like boys and become doctors, sociologists, political scientists etc depending on their aptitudes and choices but the fact is that for most women a prosperous, well-run home is the career of choice if into these women are not pumped masculinising ideas in the name of women’s emancipation. This does not mean that they will not have birth control: our world is over-populated and in places where population growth dangerously outstrips the economic, a reduction in births is a sensible response: the Messenger of Allah allowed it; when asked by some companions whether it was alright for them to withdraw from their wives just before ejaculation (‘azl) to prevent pregnancy he allowed it. You see, some men were too poor not to fear more hardship for their whole family if the number of their children kept rising. In our time birth control is a less messy business and may be practiced in various ways the healthiest of which is avoiding contact during the most fertile period of the woman or else block insemination during it. Another fact is that as the number of children in a poor family grows infant deaths reap some of them which deaths are caused by malnutrition, accidents caused by lack of care and the hazards of poorly constructed and unsanitary dwellings and in general impossibility of providing enough supervision. Obviously it is more responsible and far less tragic not to have numbers of children one cannot cope with the care of.

 

Another great saving measure can be partially re-ruralising our settlements. The giant metropolis has a big responsibility in making our environment a hell: it brings millions of people with their fewer millions of motor vehicles, their hundreds of thousands of domestic, commercial and public buildings all with their heating and cooling needs and the massive public transport system and the oceanic sewage network and many more things to mess up our environment like a nuclear reactor somehow emitting sky-high mushrooms of poisonous gases and smokes while at the same time defecating into surrounding landscape and natural water deposits all the filth leaking from its residents. Food and all the other needed commodities have to be transported to it from long distances by plane, train, truck and boat, half retailed and consumed and the other rotted and dumped. This may be an ‘advanced’ economy but it is not an advantageous one; in the long run it is very disadvantageous. It could be better to plan and build towns smaller, greener and supplied by smaller farms and factories spread  strategically to enable them to distribute their wares with minimum energy consumption. What is even better is separating fully edible parts like lean meat and already trimmed and washed vegetables in fully and quickly biodegradable packs so that homes do not produce rubbish of food origin. Sewers should flow into reprocessing plants where they could be recycled into liquid and gaseous fuel, fertiliser and reclaimed industrial water. By this means the soil, bodies of both under and over-ground water and the atmosphere will be saved from pollutants.

 

Public education at schools and that in the media should tackle the issue of economy vs. waste, morality vs. crime and in general responsibility vs. hedonism in the name of human liberties. Man must be free but this freedom is more real, sustainable and beneficial as well as waste-preventing when it is the freedom from one’s egoistic ultimatums which will save us since our slavery of our egos which impose its irresponsible liberties on us for it to enjoy its bestial and at times plain brutal pleasures is at the bottom of our present sorry condition. This is the message of Islam. All waste must stop, the bestial pleasure seeking ego must be dethroned and a more enlightened, more self-controlling, more socially aware and responsible purer, godlier self must be ushered in as the new sovereign in our hearts. Only then will we be able to stop abusing ourselves more with greed and lust-driven wasteful habits and activities from food to dress and from sex unrelated to family joy and responsible reproduction to travel for hedonistic reasons. Time and energy saved from such foolish frivolities and resources saved from such unhealthy waste can then go in directions which may one day remove all poverty and depravity from the face of earth and usher in an age when this world’s inhabitants live juster and safer lives for all time to come. After all, Allah the Most High could not emphasise more the saving effects of spending our assets in His way like relieving the poverty of others; just direct your excess wealth which is enticing and enabling you to squander it in sinful pursuits to those who cannot even find enough food to fill their aching bellies and then to make them self-supporting and you will see that Allah will bless and protect you in a thousand ways you never thought possible.

 

What if we don’t do these but continue to tread the same path with supposedly clever modifications, like, in order to continue our over-producing, over-consuming economies we develop ‘greener’ ways of energy generation like harnessing the tide power and wind power or the solar energy. Nature cannot be cheated like that. Your new energy production methods will remain wedded to producing and consuming more products and services; you will fill and choke your waste disposal system as before, you will have to move from A to B as before in your heavy, energy-hungry vehicles, you will continue to take drugs and indulge in irresponsible and hazardous sex; in fact and for example when you steal energy from the winds the winds, so robbed of their energy, will fail to deliver their benefits to the destinations they are moving towards; so, if the wind would  cool a town ten miles away it now will not be able to and the people there will have to switch on their air-conditioners more. Geothermal energy? Don’t make me laugh! At this present and ever-increasing speed of robbing the energy sources of our planet the massive removal of heat from the deeper parts of the earth will shrink it so dangerously that a day will come when the deeper geological formations will break up and earthquakes follow. What is more the global warming will continue because now what heat was kept in the belly of our earth would come out to heat our air more. I am a chemical engineer and can even calculate how will this happen and quantify it to the last decimal point if I am given the necessary data. The real and sustainable solution is shrinking the world economy- repeat SHRINKING, until it only serves the satisfaction real needs and not imagined, invented necessities like silicon-filled breasts or over-packaged foods. So long, out of greed for unnatural glamours or in pursuit of vain ambitions, theft and stealth against our precious, irreplaceable and very seriously endangered environment remains our secret criminal agenda we cannot solve our environmental problem and will have to ‘taste the painful fruits of the work of our hands’ as Allah warned us in the verse we quoted.

 

May Allah save us from ourselves by transforming our selves into wise Godly selves. Amen.