World History And Islamic Alternatives

 

 

CROSS-SECTIONS FROM WORLD HISTORY AND ISLAMIC ALTERNATIVES

 

All antique civilizations historians studied and described contained very harmful superstitions and barbaric laws and practices.  Living habits among most were also filthy to a large extent.   Morals were tribal and never universal.

 

As already mentioned  human sacrifice and legal torture were endemic to almost all of them.  Implacable class inequalities were often regarded as  destiny and rebellion against the system, if it could occur at all, were  punished incredibly ruthlessly.  The entirely justified rebellion of Roman slaves under Spartacus for example (73BC) after some spectacular successes had been crushed by the Roman legions and all survivors including Spartacus were crucified.  Crucification was slowest possible death with greatest possible pain.

 

For its part Islam denied and denounced classes and their privileges and only reluctantly allowed slavery to continue pending the further enlightenment of men. In the meantime it made kind treatment of slaves mandatory and their setting free the most charitable act for the expiation of sins.  So much so that many saintly muslims spent their wealth on deliberately buying and setting free as many slaves as they could afford. Which means the eventual abolotion of slavery could only make Islam happier than ever before.

 

Infanticide has been another barbarity caused by the absence of Islam’s guidance.  Men of all abilities and lights were so blind to the wantonness of killing a child for economic or ‘shame’ reason that,  forget about savage tribes, even that intellectually and spiritually rarefied and sophisticated classical no lesser minds than that of Plato and Aristotle did not denounce but condoned it as if it was nothing to worry about.  In great Socrates’s Athens,  that capital of world civilization and birthplace of democracy a father could simply remove any young child, especially a baby and taking it to the temple grounds in a pot abandon it with no care about its future.  Then childless people could go around and pick up anyone they fancied and the rest, the great majority, just piteously cried to the full capacity of their shrill voices in their dozens if not hundreds.  They perished in their potty prisons either from exhaustion or being picked up and eaten by wild animals like foxes or birds.

 

Women also were of not much consequence. Both Plato and Aristotle regarded them as defective minds and easily corruptible morals and once reached puberty they were kept indoors and could go out only by the permission of their menfolk having covered themselves from top to toe. Yet the same modest women could cast aside everything and dance and join sexual orgies in the temples during religious festivities and it is on record that Socrates himself consummated his marriage in the public square naked and in full view of applauding citizens.  We see this exact ambiguity about sexual modesty fully inherited by Christians of Europe. In Medieval times, women were regarded only as servants of men who had almost infinite rights on them.  They could be killed summarily on suspicion of immodesty (which is still the case in south Europe like in rural Sicily) yet there almost as a tacit agreement among men that they could seduce any woman among themselves and children born from that remained with the household of the seduced women the husbands wearing their horns gracefully realizing that they could also hit back or had already done so.  The women except the nobles covered themselves heavily yet during great public festivities inherited from pagan times but christianised by the addition of processions of monks and ikons both girls and married women drank heavily in the company of men and throwing off their vestments engaged in indiscriminate and anonymous sexual orgies under the very eyes of their bishops and saints.  

 

Lastly polygamy was condemned in theory and practiced with a vengeance in practice;  kings, nobles and clerics could and in the great majority of cases actually took on mistresses and concubines,  produced children from them and went about in public with them proudly in tow.  Most popes were surrounded by their spoilt sons and daughters from their adulteries and fornications, whom they euphemistically called their nephews and nieces, married them to nobility and the super rich and appointed them bishops and cardinals from infancy thus making them recipients of vast lucrative revenues from corresponding estates and tithes paid by their subjects,   paying from the huge incomes for new palaces,  great works of art,  armies of poets, sycophants,  entertainers and other parasites and retainers-  all in the name of the unquestionable authority handed down from the Holy Spirit.    

 

For its part Islam, on the other hand legislated for the  kind treatment of slaves like unto almost familiy members and punished assaulting them- a  master slapping a slave faced being slapped by the slave if the case went to court).  What is more Islam advised and encouraged the freeing of slaves and a slave’s blood relations had the right to buy his or freedom anytime.  Islam truly anticipated the wholesale abolition of slavery, could not enforce it however by law;   that was because too many social and economic balances were at serious stake and its abolition should have to make further social and economic change.  It did not impose it but just tolerated it after great ameliorations and would not shed a single drop of tear were it just disappear from the face of earth.     them.  Yet apart from such secular and religious princesses women were of no consequence, all their inheritance and marriage gifts given them as well as all their earnings belonged to their husbands.  They had no legal existence, could not testify at courts and had to bear with their husbands whatever he husbands chose to do with them.

 

Islam on the other hand strictly banned any form of infanticide and gave rights to women independently from their husbands and children rights independently of their fathers they enjoyed never before.

 

As for ‘barbarous’ punishments by today’s standards Islam has had the fewest and the lightest. Remembering that today in many most ‘civilized’ countries death penalty is still extant and is inflicted by horrible methods like gassing, electric shock or hanging and all ancient civilizations couln’t be more enthusiastic about them as well as merciless Islam’s executions and mutilations were on the lenient side.   What is more Allah lifted them on the repentance of the culprit or forgiveness by the victim while the Prophet sws discouraged their implementation as far as he could, thus anticipating again their disapperance from statute books.   Against the chopping the hand of a substantial thief we find thieves in Europe who were publicly tortured with tortures like plucking off their tongues, noses, ears,  disembowelling them while conscious, gouging out their eyes, quartering them (chopping them to pieces slowly and carefully enough so that their death would delay) and eventually hanging them.  Once hanged they would be left on the gallows for passers-by to see and birds and wild animals to eat them to a skeleton which could take months.  Pagan Romans for their part enjoyed human-human and human-beast fights to death and kept both gladiators and ferocious beasts like lions whose mortal combats they watched reclining on their couches and eating and drinking merrily. Their feeding Christians to lions is legendary.

 

What is worse in the case of Christians who won in the end they did no better than their past tormentors.  The ‘good christian’ public loved to watch all such spectacular barbarities we described above (e.g chopping up of thieves) while vendors of food and refreshments had a brisk business.  Children were raised on shoulders to see the show.

 

Again Islam banned all torture except in desperate cases like eliciting information from an enemy without which national safety was at grave risk and in general stipulated that man or animal, all who were to be legitimately killed should be killed by the least painful and speediest way.  Burning or drowning were totally banned and in general deliberate inflicting of pain on top of what might be expected from a standard bodily punishment was out.  It also encouraged forgiveness even for murder and offered incentive in  the form of compensation instead.      

 

As late as 19 century there were neither toilets or baths in homes in north and western Eurpope at least (In ancient Greece and Rome there were only public toilets in important public squares. These consisted of open air stone benches with rows wholes to sit upon and under which a stream of water flew.  The users just bared their bottoms in full view of the public and relieved themselves while also chatting). There wasn’t even a habit of changing and washing clothes.  Kings included people wore their underwear until they disintegrated on them. The clergy from pope or archbishop down took pride in not washing at all and under their magnificent (but never washed) outer wear next to their skin they wore a hairshirt in order to feel piously uncomfortable, which shirt swarmed with lice until it fell to pieces which could take many years.

 

Everything, everywhere and everybody stank and swarmed with lice. Rich people used massive amounts of perfumes perfuming themselves, their palaces and burned perfumed candles to drown out the stench their whole society produced.  Bodily waste was either discharged anywhere outdoors or into receptacles to be emptied on any grounds outside or emptied into basements indoors.  Streets ran with urine and muck and people just walked carefully around them as best as they could, without complaint. Any dead animals whether rats, cats or dogs lied rotting where they had dropped dead together with corpses of the hanged awaiting full decomposition. Epidemics of plagues, typhus and cholera were both frequent and devastating; nobody blamed the filth they lived in but jews, witches  or heretics whom they routinely turned upon and killed.  Child mortality was arguably highest in the world with hardly 2 or 3 children making it to 10 and only 1 reaching his 20s.  Death among royal babies was surprisingly perhaps even higher.

 

Doctors were hardly more than barbarous quacks bleeding and purging their patients to death in the belief that they had to expel the poisons in their system. It took the total mess-up of the whole Thames river in London by mid 19^th century for example, which made the members of the Parliament at Westminster unable to function from the intolerable stench from the nearby Thames and persuaded them to decide to do something about the indifferent and indiscriminate disposal of fithy effluents.  They commissioned a famous engineer to built a waste disposal system which took 20 years to complete when it was well about the last quarter of that ‘most modern’ 19^th century.  Against this we have in Islam cleanliness and hygiene in everything  compulsory. Muslim homes have always had both toilets and bathrooms however humble and muslims washed their bodies, clothes and places frequently and regularly as part of their religious rituals. They regularly trimmed their nails,  shaved their private parts,  groomed their hair and beards,  washed thoroughly at least once a week using soap and took care not to contaminate anything they wore, sit on or nearby lest their prayers could be invalidated.   Even shoes somehow messed had to be cleaned thoroughly.

 

In non-Islam except in Buddhism animals had no rights whatsoever and could be killed by any means with or without reason.  Often men not belonging to the class, tribe or religious community were fair game as well.  This total lack of care about people not belonging was especially demonstrated in war.  Non-combatants, when met or captured could be abused or killed in any way desired and fall of a town was usually followed by a total and wanton massacre of all except when the winning commander chose a more lucrative alternative and sold as many as he cared spare into slavery.  Against this we have Islam’s commandments to the effect that war should be the last resort in  any serious dispute; the enemy should be invited to choose either of two course-  embrace Islam and win immediate equality with muslims and with their lives and property intact,  or,  submit and pay a light yearly pol tax again their lives and property intact. 

 

If both alternatives were rejected only then fighting could start, non-combatants could never be harmed and if the enemy was conquered  all survivors were spared death and could only be enslaved.  These slaves had to be treated well and set free as soon as their relations paid a reasonable ransom.  Those who found nobody to ransom them could still be freed against their labor or just as charity.  Wanton killing of any prisoner was simply out of question.  Incidentally muslim judges set any slave free as compensation to his or her master’s unjust treatment.  Such leninent and enlightened laws and policies was never known outside Islam let alone implemented.  People simply didn’t know what pity was except towards their own kind.     

 

So everything equal’ as they put it, which means all other factors (like prosperity, public education etc.) Islam offers a society a catalogue of objective and scientifically provable benefits no other teaching be it religious or secular can or did ever match.

 

And that is on top of its spiritual benefits from One Perfect Universal God (meaning one equal and charitable human society all over the globe), a set of extremely easy, comforting and elevating as well as rationally appealing rituals and a promise of most felicitious eternity again no other faith could make as simple and believable. 

 

CONCLUSION

 

So we must study our history course with all the above in mind and never hold Islam per se responsible for any unpleasant things muslims as only humans and not angels couldn’t escape doing.

 

We must always keep in mind that any wrongs done by muslims were not done because of but in spite of Islam while many wrongs done by non-muslims were done because of their wrong beliefs and laws.

 

It is like the traffic laws.  Fully obeyed, today’s traffic laws and regulations are so good that accident’s should rarely happen and when one did they would be due to human error or ‘an act of God’, as law calls it, like a tree falling on the road.   Yet they do occur a lot and in the UK about six thousand people perish in traffic accidents every year.  In some backward countries the death toll can be many times despite having far less vehicles on the road per thousand population if you please simply because the drivers are more ignorant,  more immature so as to regard their vehicles more as toys than necessary transport and with their magically-thinking minds they may think themselves somehow invulnerable. I have personally heard some such immature drivers, while driving extra fast and recklessly saying things like “I am the god of this car,  I can do anything with it etc. “ clearly being in a ‘high’ state without any cocaine or pot.  Which means the same laws may be obeyed at different levels by two groups of people and the difference between the results therefore must be due to people quality and not the quality of the laws.

 

Lastly,  the description of the barbarities of the non-Islamic civilizations is not intended to ridicule them but to show that what Islam brought in the way of civilizing laws could not be invented by mortals less than a Divinely inspired prophet in a thousand years.   The unwashed and stinking king, the witch-burning ‘saint’, the marriage-banning pope were simply tragically and innocently unaware of their errors;  not only that,  they were also quite reluctant to listen to a true prophet sws telling them the error of their ways and offering them something better.   Our sages said:  There are two levels of ignorance.  At the shallower the ignorant knows that he does not know.  At the deeper level of ignorance the ignoramus has no doubts that he knows the truth and totally unaware that he does not know it.  That is why he can never find the right path and perish in his ignorance singing the hymns of his ignorance.  The never calming seas of Christian controversies which began with the first step St Paul took into the Apostolic Church and passed through many stormy synods and bloody wars and incendiary persecutions could be abruptly ended had Christians embraced the successor of Jesus Christ.  Yes, muslims also had controversies and wars but they were overwhelmingly political and not on dogma or piety.  And they were far less frequent, far less destructive; and as already said, not so much due to issues of faith but plain political rivalries which Islam never encouraged.  In other words not the traffic regulations themselves but the drivers were at fault.

 

It is most likely that no man and no society will ever be perfect as we see it but any and every advancement towards that goal, however infinitesimal, is better than nothing and today’s Western civilization is a good example.  From the abysmal depths of its Medieval roots as exemplified from preceding descriptive cross-sections it was able to pull itself free thanks to its double act of hat- tricks;   it re-discovered its classical Greek and Roman ancestry, partly via an Islamic root and although proudly denying its debt, copied a lot of civilizing elements direct from Islamic civilization which it gradually became a close and prolonged observer via its Crusading experience and the Spanish Islamic example. Whatever its still remaining defects, which are very grave, it is incomparable to what went before.  Let’s pray that Allah further guides all mankind everywhere to their most civilized and humane.  Amen.

 

ISLAMIC HISTORY IN CONTEXT

 

INTRODUCTION

 

Islam is a very history-conscious faith like Judaism but unlike it Islam identifies with the whole humanity and its whole history.

 

In the Qur’an we find bits and pieces of a world history from a religious perspective in the sense that the history told is based on an anxiety to prove that a true faith and piety are always pitted against dis-  and mis-belief which produce harm and cruelty in their proponents. The history is extrapolated to a future world (al Akhira) where a final settlement of all disputes and wrongs shall be sorted out in a most perfect and enduring way.  Obviously the aim is not narrating events but impress on the reader the lessons drawable from them within the context of a process beginning in the heavens aeons ago and bound to end in another world which will be eternal in all things.

 

The science of history itself has no such anxiety and no moral thesis either to inculcate or to defend.  Rather it aspires to both establish and understand the facts of our past here on this earth.  To this end its method is scientific research more like a detective work than laboratory research. The modern historian is supposed to locate and decipher documents and artefacts coming down to us from past ages, compare notes both between conflicting evidence and conflicting interpretations of them on the part of other historians so that more and more insight can be gained into the part of history under scrutiny.  In this sense muslim historians can claim to be the first real historians in the modern sense.  It was they who first took a solidly document and evidence –based view of history building giving myth, legend and hearsay a poor secondary place. 

 

The earliest example of best muslim historical scholarship is the History of Tabari’s (828- 983)  which runs into 30 volumes.  Although it has necessarily included a lot of Biblical and mythical lore (for nothing much more was known about ancient history) as the events became more recent Tabari put in great scholarship to establish his facts.  He both reported and quoted from recent historians and interviewed witnesses at length about recent events when he could find them. Of course muslim historical scholarship is not a sudden peak in the history of historical scholarship.  Before muslims it was the Romans who had given history a radical facelift and a high pedigree which paved the way for modern scholarship via muslims.  Roman historians like Tacitus provide us with  a rich foretaste of what was to come with the likes of Taberi.  Tacitus is rich in detail and realistic in treatment of his subjects.  Cicero and Julius Caesar also left us quite modern-looking accounts of their times and adventures.  In fact the Romans had greatly improved on  Greek historical scholarship. The latter was more mythical and legendary in their histories than factual and documentary.  In fact Greeks had always been philosophers and mystics as well as scientists while their pupils the Romans were not so much philosophers as legalists and social organizers and not so much scientists but engineers.  In other words Greeks were theoretically while the Romans practically talented and oriented.

 

Muslims inherited both cultures and others as from the second century of Islam.  Their great pious anxiety about preserving the Revelation and the Prophet’s legacy helped them to take historical scholarship to unprecedented heights of standards.  In fact the only thing which separates muslim scholarship in a basic sense from the modern Western is this:   Muslim historians extensively dug out and arrayed the facts of history and compared them at length in great detail,  rarely thinking about commenting on them at length and passing judgment from a personal  perspective.   The Western historian does all its muslim predecessors did but does not stop there.  He also fills any (and they are always many) gaps in evidence from his imagination and adds generous sauces of personal opinion based on his backgound and ideological prejudices. That is why we end up finding many Western works on Islam which spoil their respectable objective evidence with injecting into their mass large quantities of opinionated and mostly imagination-based commentaries and judgments. For example when they talk about the Prophet sws they cannot resist imagining in him motives which are less than honorable or filling gaps with imagined details guessed from a not too clean mind’s perspective.  In other words they read their own pre-occupations and apply their own prejudices into the set of facts in order to create a highly speculative and opinionated account. 

 

This of course does not mean that some imagination and secular explanation of historical figures and events are not necessary if we want to understand our past.  In this  respect we have the best and first example in Ibn Khaldun (1332- 1406).  Modern historians regard him as the founder of both scientific history and sociology. In his famous classic ‘al Muqaddima’ (Preface) he for the first time ever attemps to explain historical events and trends not so much as the will of the actors participating in them but many impersonal and objective factors like economy, climate and location.  He analyses social classes and institutions, cultural and racial factors in the causation of events as much as the wills and characters of the actors.  Yet he avoids the pitfalls of many modern historians by not filling gaps with prejudiced opinions and psychological projections of himself into the events and guesses. 

Our Islamic History shall attempt to incorporate the best aspects of all above.  Firstly it shall be underwritten by the Qur’anic perspective in the sense that it will try to derive pious lessons from the trends and enents it will record.  Secondly it will  comment realistically on striking crucial events in as impartial way as possible- not too much glorifying, not too much demonising.  Thirdly project the lessons to our own era and condition so that we can judge ourselves in their light and chart the way forward which will retain our pious commitments and both benefit from and answer the views of our critics and detractors. Allah help us.