Merits Of Islam
SUMMARY MERITS OF ISLAM, ITS COMPARATIVE POSITION IN THE FACE OF THE REST
A religion to be a vehicle of justice, peace and prosperity in every decent sense has to be:
1.
Unitive in theology and universal in scope. Islam is the most perfect in both respects. Allah is One and in charge of everything, no assistant or secondary gods are necessary to run the universe or the affairs of men. Scientifically this corresponds to the apparent absolute interdependence of all objects in the universe which interdependence culminates in natural law. The persistence and resilience of the universe or nature in existing and evolving demonstrates a unity of purpose set in material solidity and overall imperishability for all practical intents and purposes. More than one ‘God’ can only be misunderstanding. A savage or a member of a polytheistic faith sees the world a scene of unpredictable chaos simply because there are as many individual cosmic free-wills aS there are gods. That such a state of affairs would bring down the universe Allah clearly states:
“Had there been gods other than Allah in there (the universe) it would go haywire” (21: 22).
Even two managers in joint charge of a company cannot agree on everything for too long. Can two drivers drive a car jointly? An infinitely complicated universe can hardly admit more than one law, one will. Many gods bring in a war of gods and their respective peoples. In fact tribes fought on behalf of their gods under their banners flung in the name of their gods. In terms of unconscious psychology national or tribal gods are projections of the collective crass egotisms of the groups concerned while One Universal God is a projection of unified humanity where there is no longer ‘the other’ to defend interests against. Pick your choice! Allah as only One God can only be fair and impartial towards all races, all persons and values and will discriminate only on the basis of nobler character and higher piety grounds and nothing else. ONLY THE QUR’AN, among all scriptures declare this:
“O mankind! We have made you from a male and female and divided you races and nations in order that you recognise and deal honourably with each other; the noblest of you in the Sight of Allah is the more pious among you” (49: 13)
So a true Muslim is. He is for the equality of all men under both law and informal estimation. There are no superimposed classes, no born-with privileges among people of the world as far as Allah (or true Muslim) is concerned. All prejudices to the otherwise are vain, null and void in the sight of Allah and SO SHOULD WE REGARD THE MATTERS quoted. True, natural differences do exist and must be taken account of; but these cannot be institutionalised and used to hurt those on the disadvantaged side. All men are one people and have One God to worship and be protected by. This has never found as clear and definitive an expression as in Islam. In Islam an unbeliever has as much human rights as a believer both in war and peace although wise modifications come into play since the obligations and responsibilities of Muslim and non-Muslim are different. For example, Muslim must pay charity to Muslim; what the non-Muslims do among themselves in this respect is their own business. Consequently a non-Muslim is not entitled to benefit from zakat (pious wealth tax) imposed on Muslims simply because it is not imposed on non-Muslims. This is only fair.
2.
Salvation is through personal conduct and personal conduct alone and not through magical procedures or vicarious sacrifices, like the ‘redemptive’ death of an innocent person who then is called a saviour. The only boost one gets is from Allah direct and that boost is conditional on man’s trying his reasonable best in the judgment of Allah. This Islam’s attitude makes personal success each man’s own responsibility which is a great advance on all previous obscurantist and escapists myths of salvation. It is modern in full!
3.
Whatever the Law of God, man’s responsibilities are limited by his means and abilities. If one finds fasting as prescribed, for example, too difficult despite trying with sincere persistence then he need not to fast but pay a fixed amount of charity to the qualifying poor in lieu. If himself is poor then he must just offer apologies and Allah surely accepts. All too heroic deeds are discouraged in Islam and only reasonable and realistic ones are allowed. For example Islam has no patience with or favour for monastic and ascetic practices and dismisses them as not really necessary and does not recognise them as necessarily good. Remaining social and serving the fellow men is superior to any form or amount of asceticism. A hadith makes this clear: “(During a journey some of the companions of the Messenger of Allah came to him and said in the praise of a friend of theirs “We have not seen the likes of him. Wherever camp is made he immediately stands to pray, he recites the Qur’an almost continuously”. “Then who is looking after his chores?” asked the Prophet sws, “who is giving fodder to his camel or mount?). “Us” they replied. “Then all of you are better than him” said the Prophet sws (Abu Dawud).
We shall see how all above criteria and many others are failed by religions outside Islam. From class differences set in rock to parasitical and abusive institutions like priesthood as well as delusional practices like monasticism. The Buddha himself had tried monasticism for years, abandoned it as useless and led a normal life as a popular wandering philosopher.
The above should make it clear that Islam is squarely based on human nature and not a single too idealistic thing it allowed to compromise its workable and protective nature. In Islamic law there is an inalienable prospectus: Human life health, wealth, dignity and honour must always be protected. Even a Muslim himself may not harm himself like by suicide or deliberate under nourishment except for medical reasons; he can give away wealth in charity but cannot throw away wealth by wastefulness, for example; even a rich man must eat the last remnants of the food he is served or somebody else must eat it. Lastly, nobody can be punished in place of somebody else.
For their part religions outside Islam have always something unnatural or unjust about them which elements lead their believers to do many wrongs which only Islam can see as wrongs. For example, desire to live and not to die prematurely is built in all men. No theological argument should contradict this entitlement to life if that argument it is to be valid. Yet, to cite just one example, in some Asian religions wives, however young and healthy or desirous to live, must be burnt or buried alive with their dead husbands so that they serve them in the other world as they did here! Such incredible superstitions live on to this day and only the secular power of the modern state is opposing and phasing it out. Even Christianity is not without its many unnatural and unjust legal superstitions: The catholic ban on divorce and remarriage after divorce or death of a spouse or confusion of chastity with celibacy are examples. Such religions are full of many other barbarities and superstitions yet their mystics weave most high-sounding theologies and salvific (salvation delivering) formulas as if the wanton destruction of human life is nothing to be bothered about. Many Christian ascetics in the past deliberately mutilated their sexual organs to make sex impossible, the most famous example being the church father Origen (3rd century).
Despite this reckless attitude towards that all-precious human life and health, in many such religions some animals are taken as gods and spared from all harm and also slavishly fed and pampered! Crocodiles, troops of monkeys and snakes are worshipfully fed while human beings my be left to starve. In fact many primitive religions accepted cannibalism legitimate and human sacrifice to gods, some animals like crocodiles, the best piety. Such beliefs and the practices they lead to can only deserve the name of superstition and not religion in an advanced sense. Lastly, as an advance on human sacrifice, Jews burned their animal offerings to ashes believing that the smoke billowing from the combustion took it to God. Christians abolished animal sacrifice and replaced it with the symbolic consumption of the Christ. The always sensible Muslims found the middle way and both sacrificed animals and ate them too, especially allowing the poor to eat it.
All the same the closest to Islam in goodness is Christianity but still, as can be seen from a few negative examples above, the gap between the champion and the runner-up is great. Christianity’s main defects are four: It compromises the unity of God, it binds salvation to things which are not in man’s control or to his credit; thirdly it recognises no Divine Law but turns out its own laws over time and with not much credit. Until mid- 19th century wives could not hold property or inherit their husbands; nor could they give testimony at a court of law- they simply were not legal persons. Such were the laws made by the church! And fourth, it cannot tolerate other faiths as well as deviants but must murder them as an act of piety. Not even mainly racist Judaism can match that.
As for the first, the compromising of the unity of God leads to slight idol worship and a confusion of means and values. Whatever unity is claimed between the three persons of Godhead three remains three and the equality is denied when it is always the Son who begs the Father and never the other way round. Additionally the third personality leads a confused existence; in theory it is the Holy Ghost while in practice it is Mary to whom prayers are actually addressed.
As for the second point, salvation depends on not any merit and good work on the part of the believer but on both vicarious sacrifice (of the Christ) and magical acts like the Holy Communion both of which are pagan. In an advanced religion there should be a solid link between sincere charity borne of love and compassion and salvation. Christian church never understood that salvation meant salvation from one’s moral and emotional shortcomings; It projected it into a post-mortem future not related to one’s pre-mortem conduct except accepting the dogma of the saving power of the vicarious sacrifice.
With such creedal defects good character and good works at best can only play as poor second fiddles to unreasonable dogmas and wastes time and resources with only imaginarily effective magical acts. As we will see in due course the idea of vicarious sacrifice and the magical practice of ‘eating the god’ (symbolic in Christianity) have a far more ancient origin than Christianity and for all practical intents and purposes helped an entrenched and superbly organised parasitical priesthood to invent and keep a number of matchless privileges. Emperors and empires came and went in all areas of the earth but local or national priesthood stayed put and prospered thanks to their very ingenious tactics. A good example is the Catholic Church; no Christian empire survived for more than a few centuries while for two thousand years the empire called the Catholic Church remains and its emperors the popes still rule.
Fourthly, keeping and pampering a priestly class made Christianity far less egalitarian and democratic than Islam. In Islam no Muslim could be used as a serf. In Christianity millions of Christians lived as serfs of manor lords and other higher nobles. The lawlessness of Christianity was such that most pagan barbaric traditions and abuses survived into the Christian life and attracted no papal censure. One of the worst and most obscene was the ‘Le Droit de Seigneur’, the supposed right of a lord to sleep with any bride the first night and only then the husband take delivery of her! This was also the case in ancient
Christianity’s only real glory is some of its moral laws which Islam fully shares albeit with wise and realistic corrections and modifiers. We shall have occasions to exemplify all these in due course. At the end we shall offer a criticism of Muslims and their usual understanding of Islam and we shall not be less strict in this matter than in the case of other religions.
THE ANIMISTIC AND MAGICAL RELIGIONS OF THE SAVAGES
The great geographical and anthropological discoveries of the recent few centuries gave us a lot of insight into how most primitive men lived and worshipped. Many isolated parts of the globe, be them small and distant islands in an ocean or a part of the earth isolated from the rest by vast jungles or deserts came to light. The overall opinion of scholars is that religion among the savages (another name for the primitives) accords with young children’s projecting into everything around them consciousness and personality. I myself as a child of a few years remember myself seeing a broom in the garden like I would see another conscious being; in a cold winter night I remember myself asking my grandmother to take the broom inside our home lest it would suffer in the cold. By just attaching an animal mask made from paper to their faces our elder siblings could scare us the younger to death. The flimsy mask suddenly converted a benign playful elder into the very feared beast. That must explain the culture of wearing bestial masks in primitive pagan rituals. Young girls play with their dolls with all the seriousness of a mother and sometimes can only go to sleep with their favourite doll or at least a teddy bear in their almost romantic embrace.
As all we know, children’s stories feature many objects like rocks or trees who are members of the cast, talk to their human co-players and are talked to by them. American poet Edgar Allan Poe talks to a star in the sky from the level of the immortal child in him “Twinkle, twinkle, the little star”. He of course knew that stars are neither people nor little but imagination allowed that no matter what the intellect said.
Therefore, in the primitives, who are perpetual infants in big bodies, the cause and substance of the mechanism creating faith is this natural childhood mind which refuses to depart from the savage. He cannot outgrow his self-projecting habit characterising his childhood and keeps seeing all objects endowed with consciousness and responsive to his dialogues. In other words he imagines a soul, an ‘anima’ in each and every object. Hence the name ‘Anismism’ for primitive religions.
Both because all objects have a soul and are potential sources of pleasure or harm, the child that the savage is cannot afford not to cultivate friendships with all objects around him. Any regularly helpful objects deserve his friendship so that they may continue to help him when help is needed while any regularly dangerous objects deserve his friendship by way of appeasement and propitiation, i.e., to avoid their malicious harm.
The more impressive an object on the scales of his hopes and fears the more friendship it deserves; hence a nearby volcano or a large, deathless- looking crocodile in the nearby river becomes the chief great spirit or god to be kept happy. Because the the volcano consumes people by its eruptions and the crocodile by its swallowings the savage may conclude that a policy of regularly feeding the volcano or the crocodile with human sacrifices is a better option than leaving them desperate for food and devouring people or their animals randomly. In fact most savages were cannibals and understood their gods’ taste for human flesh only too well.
Offering sacrifices to their feared gods was only the one side of the equation. The savages also ate some of their gods and chief among them was the totem animal. Each tribe boasted of descending from an animal they fancied most for whatever reason; it was the jaguar for some South American natives while the likes of the elephant or the cobra for the Indians. Or they altogether banned the eating of the animal god, like the Hindu ban on eating the cow. They also believed that their gods needed feeding and even could starve otherwise; they therefore brought food of all sorts and of best quality and value to the temples for gods’ maintenance; apparently few knew that the food was vicariously eaten and that by the priests. So were consumed or stored all non-food gifts. It was these taxes which fattened the pagan priesthood and even converted them into bankers holding even kings in their usurious debt and ransom. This institution of tax-collecting and blessings-monopolising priestly class survived into more advanced religions like Judaism, Christianity and also Shia Islam. No wonder then the
“O (Muslim) believers, (know that) the religious scholars and ascetics (of other religions like the Jewish and the Christian who are organised into a caste) consume the wealth of people for false reasons and divert from the Way of Allah” (9: 34)
Lastly and at the expense of repeating the immediate above, all primitive religions threw up all-powerful priests; it began with individuals variously called a shaman or witch-doctor and grew into vast cadres of priests arranged in a hierarchical way with the chief priest at the top who often was the same as the king.
The uniform characteristic and barbarism of primitive religion was insensitivity to human suffering; not only individuals irrespective of guilt or innocence were killed as sacrifice to gods but the priests themselves could commit suicide as a pious act with the same non-concern for their lives. Apparently people by believing too much too uncritically could justify anything which shocks or disgusts more perceptive men with more natural mercy. In fact both among the societies of semi-developed religions like the Sumerians and Greeks as well as more developed religions like Christianity were exceptional individuals who questioned matters which to us today look barbarous or superstitious. We shall have occasion to see examples. It is important for us to note such items in order to appreciate from where to where Islam brought us. By simplification of creed, rationalisation of law and worship and abolition of the parasitical caste of religious professionals Islam emancipated man and opened for him all the ways of genuine advancement and moral perfection a humane and universal civilisation need to have. Islam is a great advance on Christianity and Muslims can only prosper and peacefully conquer if they properly understand Islam and conscientiously purify themselves from as much moral defects as they possibly can. It can also beat the increasingly secular culture of the West, for its laws are juster, its ideals and motivation nobler and its ultimate aims more humane in actual and practical terms barring any anachronistic prescriptions which were never intended to be implemented, at least in the longer term. This matter we shall in sha Allah explore at the end of this essay.
ASIAN RELIGIONS OF EARLY WRITTEN HISTORY
Nobody knows when writing was invented and the present archaeological evidence goes only as far back as about 4000 BCE. At that date two civilisations compete for priority- the Sumerian and the Egyptian. Majority opinion is that Sumeria preceded
In both civilisations the religion was polytheistic under a chief god, usually a sun god or a sky god. Again, the more noticeable stars were regarded as gods as were some animals which impressed the people for certain reasons. Both human and animal and even god sacrifices were current. Although the priestly caste formally was under the king as the chief priest and even as the living god, it in the long run always proved more decisive than the king and could depose kings when its interests were too badly under threat.
SUMERIAN RELIGION
Sumeria was a kingdom which flourished in what today is
Sumeria then was the first example of a settled civilisation which could only achieve an advanced culture and technology. They invented or inherited from an unknown culture the cuneiform script, the first alphabet known to history.
Sumerian religion as well as other religions flourishing in other well-settled areas like
In Sumeria the chief god was Shamash, the sun god (Shams- sun in Arabic). King Ur-engur claimed that he received a set of laws from Shamash which laws he proclaimed. This is the first heavenly law (shariah) known to us. Shamash was not the sun itself but the sun was rather the wheel of his heavenly chariot. Under him were lesser and lesser gods.
The greater among them was Enlil and his wife Ninlil. More special was the virgin earth goddess Innini who became Ishtar of Akkadians and among others partially Demeter and partially Aphrodite of the Greeks. Why the sky or its chief character the sun and the earth became gods is because these people saw that the foods they needed were the joint gift of the sky and the earth. The sky was male and by watering the female earth crops grew and animals and men found food. If these two ultimate parents of all living things were to be kept producing the necessities of life they had to be flattered by praises and complimented by polite, servantly requests. If they refused to budge then the reason was that they were somehow offended and needed to be given gifts to soften. What better gift than what we men ourselves enjoyed? Accordingly all the choicest dietary items the worshippers prized were taken to the temples and laid at the feet of the gods. Gold and silver also were given and all such gifts were collected by the resident priests on behalf of the gods. As for who actually consumed or hoarded them one can only guess.
Among the lesser gods were Ninkarsak as the ‘mater dolorosa’, the sad spiritual mother of mankind who interceded with harsher gods on behalf of suffering or repentant men and women; as such she pre-figured Mary as Madonna or the Mother of God. Tammuz was the god of vegetation who died to pay for the sins of men and was resurrected, thus serving as the earliest known pre-figurement of the Christian Jesus (who is different from the historical). Most of these gods lived in the temples and depended on their worshippers charity not to starve. A list for the needs of the gods went as follows: Oxen, goats, sheep, doves, chicken, ducks, fish, dates, cucumbers (tomatoes were unknown then), butter, olive oil and cakes. Originally though the most favourite item was human flesh; apparently gods also were becoming more civilised over time alongside their worshippers.
As a result of such generous provisions the clergy became immensely powerful and also increasingly tyrannical and overbearing. Apparently the public were becoming suspicious as well as weary and a Jesus or Luther had to rise. It was Urukagina who took up the role of the scandalised critic and reformer. He denounced the clergy for their avarice, corruption and tyranny and got popular acclaim and support. Like Jesus he raided the temples and ejected and evicted the corrupt priestly officials and for a time could impose some reforms, like reducing religious taxes and relaxing the gift quotas. But as soon as the reformer was dead the priests did not delay to recover the lost ground.
Sumerians believed in an afterlife but it also was earthly in an underground sense and even more depressing than the overground. To keep the dead as much contented as possible the living relations had to provide for them. To make things practical and bearable they buried with the dead items they used to need and use while overground, items like kitchen utensils and more durable foods like grain and honey. Still, many echoes of the advanced religions are also found, like gods creating man for happiness but man sinning and losing his chance and a flood washing them away for their sins. The only survivor was Tagtug but he also lost his chance for eternal life when he ate the fruit of a forbidden tree.
Yet among all these myths and superstitions and abuses a thin undercurrent of monotheism never ceased to raise a whisper. As we shall see later this theme was repeated from time to time in all polytheistic faiths to follow.
This Sumerian religion was basically copied by all neighbouring and subsequent civilisations and when Jesus came variations of it were ruling the minds of the members of innumerable sects. It was this environment which took Jesus over from his Jewish home and modified him in its own image. This revised Jesus neither the historical Jesus nor his Jews could recognise.