Taming Dragons

 

 

23.  TAMING DRAGONS- AND CONVERTING THEM

 

PART TWO: FIGHTING AND CONVERTING THE DRAGONS IN PEOPLE

 

Obviously we need to launch a dragon-taming program beginning with our resident dragon. It is impossible to tame others’ dragons without first taming our own wayward pet dragon. All normal people are aware that in them there is a higher watchman who watches over that person’s every thought, emotion, word and act. That is why we sometimes criticise ourselves and try to change course. For our inner watchman to help us properly he needs a long education in ‘dragonology’, i.e. how and why our bestial ego behave the way it does and how to first chain and then tame it. That we are always watching over ourselves and are often aware, at least vaguely that we may be in the wrong Allah verifies:

 

“Indeed man sees what his ego is up to no matter what excuses he can find for it” (75: 14-15)

 

A true believer is more aware of this situation than a dubious or non-believer. Read if you wish:

 

“As regards those who attained piety- when a dubious desire caresses them they insightfully consider and soon they see through it” (7: 201)

More details flow from the verse:

 

“Those who commit a wrong or let themselves down and then remembering Allah they instantly ask for pardon for their sins… they do not knowingly insist on what they had been doing (3: 135).

 

Such keen and constant observers and fighters of their inner dragon come to become such masterful experts in the ‘dragonology’ and ‘dragonoclasm’ (dragon demolishing) that they can recognise the dragons in others and tackle it as well as being able to teach others how to tackle and then tame their dragons. This is real Sufi mastership.

 

Lastly Allah’s choice servants need not appear as Sufi sheikhs at all although some do. A choice servant, i.e,  one belonging to Allah’s elect has an informal yet automatic power to improve all those who sincerely seek self-improvement. All of us must be aware of that rare kind of friend whose company is such pleasure and such help: one such is always ready with good advice, eager to give a hand in every good thing and sometimes despite having no pretensions to formal religious learning or mystical powers (as all spiritual crooks routinely pretend) they are like deep if nameless wells ever full with sweet waters readily drawable by multiple buckets for free by every thirsty visitor. People go to them aching and thirsty and come back healed and their thirst quenched. What such informal non-lecturing ‘teachers’ project is an egoless benevolence which attracts all, occasionally even apparently the bad and repels none.

 

Fighting and taming our egos (morally irresponsible lower side of our selfhood) is the single most civilising and pacifying as well as ennobling way to better humanity and here it is not positive science but faith and goodwill which can do the required work.

 

So let all those who want to attain their highest human potential and become agents and catalysts for good in and for as many others as possible work on themselves more than they work on any other project in life and they will soon find out what is hell and what is paradise and see the ineffable Face of Allah always lovingly and approvingly beaming at them, Amen.

 

24.  MERCY FROM DEVIL?

 

PREAMBLE

 

We in the West are living in a society which is sometimes described as the permissive society. Despite a lot of desperate and often only sporadic discipline and an insistence on manners like always saying ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ often mechanically and hypocritically, morality is in a flux and generally speaking in decline. There seems to be an almost conspicuous conspiracy to tear down that most time-honoured educational and emotional institution the family and make the breeding and raising of young generations a haphazard conglomerate of experimental arrangements outside traditional marriage which experimental arrangements range from unmarried bisexual and homosexual partnerships and the more recent so-called homosexual marriages in which naturally only adoption works. Add to these the children in the orphanages and those in the hands of mafias from prostitution to begging mafias and one can only wonder how our society is still functioning in a stable way.

 

But history is not made of chronology in which each month and year is recorded graphically with no comparison with what went before and what may come after. True history has a very big time scale and very wide perspective and it is telling us that there seem to exist some laws about social rise and decline. Some more prominent of these are as follows:

 

1.)

The natural environment, such as geography, local resources like rivers, lakes, seas, mountain, desert, flora and fauna etc. have important influences on the fortunes of peoples inhabiting an area. As examples we may cite all the great ancient civilisations like China, India, Mesopotamia (e.g. Sumerian, Babylonian) and Egyptian… all flourished around great rivers which ensured both plenty of water and very easy routes of transport

 

2.)

The harsher the environment the tougher and sturdier the people and also more aggressive and martially braver and more skilful. People inhabiting harsher environments with poverty always round the corner value discipline, endurance and obedience in their children and to supplement their meagre and precarious food supply are only too prepared to raid rival peoples of their own kind (tribal warfare) and if possible those peoples more fortunate than themselves, like settled and prosperous kingdoms. Huns raided and conquered both parts of China and Europe; under Attila they came very near to bring down the Roman Empire. Mongols wrecked both the Muslim and a lot of Christian powers until tamed and absorbed by them. Hitler’s almost land-locked and raw material-hungry neo-Huns (i.e. the Nazis) almost subdued the European continent.

 

3.)

Once a nation accumulates and maintains huge amounts of wealth they begin to lose their masculine character and grow effeminate: they begin to worship luxuries and entertaining leisure and cool off from arduous efforts and daring enterprises. Their attitude towards their children especially soften and eventually melt; they begin to indulge them more and more until applying discipline to them and educating them in a way helpful to the development of a strong and socially co-operative character with a sense of duty and responsibility goes more and more out of fashion with the result that the children grow up to become lazy, easy-going, self-indulgent, asocial and in general unreliable and negligent. Religious beliefs and traditional values and morality gradually decline and are replaced by unashamed egotism and hedonism with all the crimes and economic waste going with them. In such ‘permissive’ societies with ‘no thought for the morrow’ decline and even collapse is not far away by historical time-scale standards. Either slow decline or ideologically motivated anarchy and civil war or an external invasion sees to that.

 

4.)

A similar fate awaits nations which stagnate in their too backward civilisations. This time the aggressive rival civilisations on the rise attack and enslave them. This is what happened to the native American empires in the hands of Western Europeans who did the same to Asian and African nations a lot of which were Muslim. In these last type of stagnating societies a corrupt super-rich ruling minority oversaw the destruction of their sovereignty and all the indignities going with that. History is showing all these. Below we will be dealing with the currently rich and advanced societies (who go down through over indulgence of their senses and of their upcoming as well as ever-diminishing coming-up generations. They achieve this feat of a decline through ‘pitying’ their children and criminals too much at the expense of their grown-ups and their law-abiders respeactively.They are simply too merciful to those in the grip of the Devil which mercy is so misguided that it can be called ‘Mercy from Devil’.

 

5.)

Lastly, we will see that true Mercy is showing mercy to yourself by looking into a mirror and noticing your shortcomings and shames and doing something about them. Both the mirror for the self-inspection and the manual of the self-inspection science is in the Books of Allah, the last and currently effective none being one other than al Qur’an al Karim. So, help us Allah.

 

INTRODUCTION

 

Allah the Most Wise and Gracious said “Do not go overboard in your religion” (5: 77).

 

The occasion for this admonition was our Christian cousins’ unintelligible claim and passion that Jesus was the son of God and even God Himself. Let us see the details:

 

“Those who said ‘Allah is the Christ the son of Mary himself while the Christ had said ‘O the children of Israel, worship Allah my Lord and your Lord’. Whoever associates other gods with Allah, to such Allah made the Paradise out of bounds and his refuge shall be the Fire (Hell)… (5: 72). Again:

 

Say (o Muhammad the messenger of Mine): O (the Christian section of the) People of the Book) do not go overboard (boil over) in your religion beyond the truth, do not follow the vanities of a people who went astray before (namely many of the so-called church fathers) and sent astray many, sent astray from a plain and straight path (of true and simple monotheism) (5: 77)

 

Islam, that is to say the only way to relate to our Creator which way is total, willing submission to Him, is built around the principle of what is called ‘the golden mean’. It is finding and walking the middle way between excess in smallness and excess in bigness. Or excess departure to the left and excess departure to the right. Driving too fast and driving too slowly. Or excess avoidance of food or sex and excess indulgence in food or sex… so on and so forth ad infinitum.

 

Now by ‘religion’ (deen) most people understand the formal and well-known concept of a cosmic belief system and what it seems to impose on us as proof of our practical obedience to its dictates. But from the standpoint of human psychology as well as popular if unarticulated wisdom any obsessive and motivating belief which rules a person or group of persons is a religion simply because it imposes on him or them all the main features of religious behaviour. Beginning with popular wisdom we sometimes say about an extremely avaricious person that his religion is money. Another ‘worships women’ we say. As for groups I wonder what is the psychological, behavioural difference between a group of Muslim or Christian worshipers and the behaviour of a group of nationalists, communists or animal liberationists; all equally believe in a larger than life value and ambition system, have mottos to repeat with conviction and symbols to honour regularly and regular stereotyped symbolic actions which can only be called ritual- and fight for quite bitterly. Obviously man is a religious animal in need of gods and worshipping rituals; even the crassest atheists, like the Marxists have developed a pantheon featuring infallible masters like Karl Marx and Lenin and Mao and while established as state power they held mass rituals to celebrate and perpetuate the belief in these gods. Whole school curricula were designed with this religious concern in mind, all media worked to maintain the illusions prescribed for mass consumption. This religion has declined recently but still lives, full-fledged, in Cuba and North Korea for example.

 

With this broader definition of ‘religion’ understood we may now extend it to all organised social mass behaviour patterns. For the purpose of this article we will chose the modern philosophy of liberalism.

 

LIBERALISM

 

Western history, that is to say the history of the part of the earth from the west of what is now Turkey to the Atlantic in farther west (Portugal being the terminus) and the recent extensions of this area in Americas and Australia and New Zealand, is regarded as the expanded if gradually modified survival and development of the classical Greek civilisation. This last owes very much to the earlier civilisations to the east of it, like the Babylonian, Egyptian and Persian.

 

What distinguishes the Greek civilisation from its uncles to the east is its democratisation of both government and knowledge. While in the east paternalistic royal government represented by god-cum-chief priest absolute monarchs and an oligarchy of priests in Greece an aristocratic democracy flourished whereby all the free citizens of the city states like Athens and Sparta could join the governing process and elect officials with limited tenure to act on their behalf and be responsible to them. Greek city states had a tribal basis; each tribe’s chief was a member of the city council and at their regulated meetings debated communal and political issues and voted on them. Incidentally, so were the Arab urban societies like Mecca, Taif and Medina when the Prophet was sent to them.

This ‘liberal’ political system of the Greeks had both its advantages and disadvantages, surely the first outweighing the second.

 

As for the advantages we may cite the security it gave to each and every free citizen as regards his person and property and the right it conferred on him to participate in the decision-making process and the pursuing of justice.  As for the disadvantages, it was a tribalist and racist system despising other races as ‘barbars’, with no rights whatsoever, alongside slaves. In other words a Greek freeman was not, in principle, bound by any obligations to a non-Greek whether living in the Greek society or elsewhere. Any treaties made with non-Greeks, at least in practice could be broken and become praiseworthy if it yielded benefits to the Greeks. This was in fact the same with all other races except those with advanced faiths like the Persians whose prophet Zoroaster had preached them what we may call a prototype of Islam including its universal outlook. I think the Buddha, the Chinese mystic teacher Lao Tse and practical philosopher Confucius were similarly enlightened humanists. Interestingly all four flourished at about 6th century BCE. Of course, as always, how much the nominal followers of each sage practiced such excellences of their respective faiths is quite another matter. In any case it was not much, but at least the principles were there.

 

Both the central strength and weakness of the Greek thought lied in its free enquiry spirit, I mean enquiry without reference to a Cosmic Higher Power which we call God. Sure, many Greek philosophers spoke about God with enough reverence, among whom perhaps Plato is the most notable. But that was not based on revelation from God but on philosophical inspiration in the speaker. Plato was not that Semitic prophet type who found his way through discrete pieces of revelations from God which also included a heavy element of moral criticism, exhortation and sometimes legislation as well (as in Moses and Muhammad). Plato just thought, felt and spoke his way into a theology, a spiritual cosmology and principles of ethics. Perhaps that was how it should be for Greeks- their spiritual guides should not be like the authoritarian, God-inspired messengers of God like the Biblical prophets but accomplished philosophers very much concerned with morality and sometimes with a mystical bent of mind as well, like Pythagoras.  Against this strain of mystical philosophers another parallel strain went through the likes of Thales, Hippocrates, Democritus and Lucretius. The mystical line became responsible for gentile (non-Jewish) Christianity while the rational line awoke in Renaissance and through the so-called Enlightenment laid the foundations of today’s Western culture.

 

What is the ideational pedigree of this Western culture? It is liberalism- free thought, free expression of thought, no bonds to a supernatural or superhuman power or authority and eventually free enjoyment of all senses as far as both physically and socially possible. To lift the social bars the liberals had to fight the religiously-minded; they did fight and cornered them; they limited them to their private sphere and their temples under the principle of freedom of religion. Once rid of the influence and power of Christianity they were free and ready to change the course of the Western culture from one deeply God-conscious if largely misguided to one deeply self-indulging and liberties-celebrating.

 

WHAT TODAY’S LIBERALISM PRESENTS

 

Present Western nations’ dominant attitude towards human freedoms is one which they themselves call ‘permissiveness’.  What basically it means is that people should be allowed to do anything they want ‘as far as themselves are concerned’ except what is prohibited by secular (and the only enforceable laws)- this despite what any religion or moral philosophy say to the contrary. What is more secular laws themselves are under constant revision in order to relax previously accepted moral rules more. Many times though even the already significantly permissive secular law and an infringement of it sit side by side and push at each other. Let me give you just two examples.

 

Present laws ban many substances which alter the mind, drugs like heroin, marijuana and ecstasy. But without asking questions clinics treat the users. It is like finding a citizen harmed by a contraband item (like smuggled cigars) and not questioning him where he got them from. Or finding a man who shot himself in the leg by a gun he had no legal licence to carry and just treat his wounds and release him.

 

The other and even more tragic example is underage sex. Under the current UK law nobody can engage in a sexual act with another person who is under sixteen years of age. But that the perhaps the majority of under-sixteens are having some sort of sexual relations with just anybody is an open secret and what is worse schools, pharmacies and clinics are ordered to help them without asking any questions. Even more ridiculously, even schools keep stocks of contraceptives to give to their underage school girls as well as morning- after pills to give them once they ask for them after having done sex with a man! The law which is so much and so deliberately blind to its breaking by almost everybody will then arrest and hand down a fifteen year imprisonment to a man who just dared to touch a girl under sixteen on the buttock! The same man could get away with a full sex with the same girl which resulted in a pregnancy had the girl either consented or declined to reveal the identity of the man! Was it not illegal and a serious crime to do a sexual act with a person under sixteen? Why every instance of drug use and sex involving an underage person is not investigated? It is not because these crimes are so widespread that no public body including the police have the time and resources to pursue them; all services are over-stretched and over-whelmed and a day must come when all restrictions on such presently illegal activities will have to be lifted.

 

Even in Islam it is the same: according to the Hanafi fiqh (jurisprudence) when a failure becomes universal its universality becomes a valid defence against any charges on it. Can any ruler, even a most rigid dictator impose and enforce a law which will ask people to abandon something they all do with zeal and persistence? Could Stalin for example ban vodka or Hitler ban beer? Vodka to too many Russians and beer to too many Germans equals contentment with life. Without it they may explode. Because all moral and spiritual barriers erected between what used to be rightly considered wrong, any laws trying to curb excesses in the commission of some of these wrongs limited in certain ways (like being punishable only when a sex act is done with or to an underage person) are doomed to failure and further concessions will eventually be made, if not in letter then in practice. This is what today’s shamelessly official handing out of contraceptives to school girls below sixteen represents. It is simply the case that the law, its maker the parliament, its enforcers the police and the courts are overwhelmed and had to do anything to accommodate the swelling tide of permissiveness in the society. The cost of this permissiveness is already proving back-breaking and the back of the western economies may well be broken in not too distant future.

 

But is this phenomenon of immoral permissiveness new and confined to the Western nations? Hardly!

 

It is not new but as old as civilisation. We find in history books how the all-conquering Romans, thanks to the enormous wealth they came to posses began to wind down and indulge in luxuries, comforts and hedonistic practices until they went soft, their ties of mutual loyalty and their sense of national duty dissipated until their once invincible armies became a camp of easy deserters and military commands went to either effeminate favourites or ambitious ex-barbarians who fought not for Rome but for personal aggrandisement at the expense of Rome. The once invincible Mongols, after being mellowed by the luxurious and increasingly indulgent and indolent lifestyles of the mainly corrupt Muslims they conquered, grew similarly soft until their armies ceased to frighten any Muslim kings with some of their old piety still around and were eventually absorbed into the Muslim ummah until no trace of them remained. Among the Western nations only USA remains a masculine power to some extent and that must be thanks to the remaining traditionality like religiosity of the Americans while the Europeans are now so real soft that the handling of a crisis like that in the 1990s Yugoslavia had to wait American intervention. Otherwise the likes of the Dutch troops guarding a town like Szebrinska could only look at the other side when Yugoslav troops massaced the men and boys of the town after their surrender on the condition that no harm would come to them. Why? Because that ethos of manliness and chivalry had long departed from the Western soul and replaced by one simple hedonistic ambition of staying alive at all cost and indulging in more food, wine, sex etc. for longer. Why do you think lands like Africa are falling dead with interminable savage wars and starving for decades while only a few percent of the annual income of the Western world could transform their condition to one of health and peace within a few years? Are they afraid of the African warlords? No need to fear them: all warlords fight for the possession of this world and there is few warlords who would not cease hostilities if his palms were oiled with enough oil. Over its declining centuries many once great but currently only rich powers like Rome checked their decline by paying tribute to their more virile enemies. Without it Rome could last only five centuries instead of a ten.

 

But why wait until such painful fears of and potential subjection to new conquering nations knock at our doors? For example why wait for China to excel USA in power and given its barbaric virility become the new masters of the world? Why should history repeat itself?

 

WHAT ISLAM SAYS ABOUT MAINTAINABLE NATIONAL POWER

 

Firstly Allah explains how His former favourites the Jews lost their power and then almost their existence. We read in Allah’s Book:

 

“Indeed Allah had taken a pledge from the Children of Israel and appointed for them twelve ruling judges (to the effect that). Then Allah said ‘I am with you; if you keep the ritual prayers and pay the zakat (social charity tax) and believe in My messengers and support them and loan Allah a goodly loan (spend your wealth for Allah against a promise from Him to pay you back handsomely overly) We will surely pardon your sins and surely enter you into the Gardens from under which rivers flow. Whoever among you after this (pledge) breaks faith will have strayed from the best of ways (5: 12)

 

“(Eventually) succeeding them (those prophets and their pious generations) came along successors who wasted prayers (salat) and instead pursued their lusts and shall hit the bottom” (19: 59).

 

To us the Muslims under Muhammad He All-Wise All-Gracious says:

 

“Allah has promised to those who believe and do good works ‘I will make them to inherit the land as I had made those before them to inherit it and stabilise the religion I am pleased with for them and exchange their fear with security for them. Let them then worship Me and not associate with me anything in worship…” (24: 55)

 

Is not everything clear? We have to believe in Allah, keep His commandments, be generous in His Way both financially and bodily effort-wise; if we do these He (all forces of nature and man under His control) will then perpetually work towards our benefit in this world and the next; our any financial and bodily sacrifices will count as loans to that richest and most honest of bankers, namely Allah the Most High and eventually we will be landed with His final and eternal company and compliment- that of joining Him in and beyond all heavens.

Given such an incomparable promise, applying to this world as graceful and humane domination of this world and exclusive enjoyment of the next, which man in his right mind will break faith with Allah (read ‘what is morally right in every situation’) and instead seek for more ways in indulging his lustful senses for their own sakes and in the course both ruin his body, his dignity and his moral standing along with creating innumerable victims along his path of impiety?

 

Only believing in Allah and conscientious obedience to His commandments in the light of genuine Sufi (spiritual) insights (which makes the belief more a witnessing and the obedience more willing and pleasurable)… only this can ennoble man’s character and bless his thoughts, words and acts. This is an unmissable boat. Only this creates mercy in man towards all, a mercy which is above all, wise.

 

MERCY FROM DEVIL?

 

The indulgent and permissive attitude the Western thought is advocating and the Western society is increasingly applying are promoted as merciful humanity while the past religious strictures on people’s behaviour are being anathematised as oppressive and inhuman. In the case of European Christianity this may be partially (just partially) true but in case of Islam it is not true at all.

 

Excessive indulgent, permissive softness towards children on the part of their parents and towards citizens on the part of the state is asking for disaster. Look at the treatment of criminals: thanks to the incessant and cumulative effects of the so-called human rights groups criminals are ending up with more rights than their victims whose any rare compensation is looking like peanuts compared with the lavish favours directed to the criminals. It is almost always the case that it is not the individual criminal who is so much to blame for the murder or burglary or battery and even rape which he committed but ‘the society’ who refuses to be as egalitarian, permissive, ‘non-judgmental’ etc. You see, the cultish human rights activists are motivated by mercy which all human beings deserve whatever they commit. But strangely and somehow there still is a group of people who, despite committing no crime or indecency, are still unforgivable: those who disagree with these so-called and self-styled human rights activists. If you do not approve of free sex, its encouragement through contraceptives and free abortions, if you do not approve of never punishing your children physically even when they might frequently run off into danger or commit crimes- punishing them physically as the last resort out of parental anxieties, if you do not approve of allowing children ‘to learn at their own speed and at their own leisure’ as if their years for learning are infinite and life can wait… if you try to make your children to inherit your faith and traditions and do not let them to dissolve in and flow with all the haphazard and unexamined trends flowing into the sea of the society from all sewages originating in the minds of freest and filthiest thinking men and women or those with transverse or double sexual false identities then you are not eligible for their tolerance and support but for their most hysterical abuse and censure- censure as totalitarian and tyrannical as any in history.

 

This alleged mercy of their towards humanity whom they believe has only been harmed by all past beliefs and traditions is a ‘mercy’ from Devil, therefore not mercy at all but the most merciless conspiracy ever to plot against humanity. It is designed to make them totally godless, totally self-indulgent and almost totally with rights and almost totally free from obligations except towards the permissive philosophy which is the new god whose new priest are the permissivity thinkers, storm troops and bureaucrats, all self-appointed, dogmatic and ruthless to the core from behind a mask of total and unconditional love of and mercy towards humanity.

 

This masked, false mercy from the enemies of Allah- Allah Who is the real symbol for all that is good and genuinely humane- is not wanted and will eventually be exposed as the gravest crime committed against humanity- that of emptying man of God and leaving him with his bestial instincts hidden in a bag of superficial, slick good manners.  No amen to that. May Allah send His friends to expose the mistake in progress and replace it with piety at its best! Amen.

 

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