Islam: page 2

                Islam and the Abrahamic Tradition

              True Islam is a Demonic deceitful evil murderous religion

         Secret Tradition of Islam

          EXTREME ISLAM Anti-American Propaganda of Muslim Fundamentalism Edited by Adam Parfrey

        DOCUMENTS FROM THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION

        FeedBack: "Extreme Islam" 2/5/02

       Beyond the Undifferentiated Mass

      Diversity in Islam for Absolute Beginners

Roughly 1 in 5 of the world's population is muslim - that's over a billion people. Yet for all the talk about a global society with the telecommunication revolution bringing knowledge to the masses, what most westerners from christian backgrounds know about Islam can be written on the back of a small postage stamp. So here then is a crash course.

Fundamentalism?

Islam, like christianity is an expansionist religion rather than the traditionalist beliefs of a closed community. Conscious of itself as a new initiative, it seeks to preach to and convert pagan and unbeliever. However, whereas christianity found itself growing within a pre-existing state system (the Roman empire) and made concessions to a separate political power, Islam, starting as a means of filling a political vacuum, was the creative force of a new state.

As such the tension (and eventual division) between church and state that marks christianity does not occur within Islam. Hence the "fundamentalist" label is misleading. In the modern western tradition the tension between church and state has come to be expressed as a belief in a "novus ordo seclorum" where life is separated into two spheres - a secular public sphere of politics and a private sphere within which the individual can divide his or her time to the worship of god or mammon as they see fit.

The term "fundamentalism" originated in the US from a political movement of anti-progressive christians who wished to abolish the secular independance of the state from christian beliefs. It is misleading to apply the label of "fundamentalist" in this sense, to muslims as it is a formal part of their belief that no such division between matters social, political and religious should exist. That doesn't mean that there aren't differences as to how this formal unity between religion and politics should be put into practice, but the label fundamentalist only obscures the issue.

Religious or Cultural conservatism?

An important feature of the spread of Islam is the way it has accomodated itself to the pre-existing cultures it has come into contact with. Where pre-existing cultural practices are not explicitly in opposition to codified islamic practices, they have been adopted into the newly islamised culture. With the passage of time many of these pre-islamic cultural practices have retrospectively been labelled as sanctioned by islam by conservative forces in society.

Consequently it is often the case that what is claimed to be islamic practice is more often the pre-existing cultural and social traditions of a given ethnic society. Many of the declaredly islamic traditions of the Pashtuns of Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, for example, have much more to do with Pashtun cultural norms than islamic law.

A Unified Ideology?

Like any ideology that emphasises unity as a primary aim, Islam has in practice suffered any number of splits. There is no room for a full history in a piece like this but we must realise that what exists today is the result of long dialectic histories of orthodoxy, heresy, struggle, repression and reform.

Sunni

The Sunni branch of Islam is the dominant one to which 90% of muslims belong. Although the split between the two branches that would become Sunni and Shia was originally a matter of who should succeed Muhammed, they later evolved more substantial political and philosophical differences. As Muhammed failed to produce a son by any of his many marriages, the muslim community was left with no clear successor after his death.

The main body decided that the leadership (the Caliphate) should pass to whoever from within Muhammed's clan the muslim establishment best felt represented continuity. The Shias, in contrast, supported the claim of Ali, the husband of the prophet's favourite daughter. They insisted that the legitimacy of the Caliphate came only from god, not the religious establishment.

In time as those who had known the prophet and remembered his sayings and acts began to die off, this oral tradition of guidance supplementary to the Koran (the sunnah) was written down into several books, six of which became recognised as authoritative sources of guidance - the Hadith. For Sunnism then, society's laws must be determined through reference to the Koran and the Sunnah. For Shi'ites, however, the true path can only be found through the divinely appointed intermediaries - the true Caliphs or Imams.

Kharawaj - too radical by far

As well as Sunni and Shia there was originally a third force, since eradicated, whose negative influence has profoundly shaped Sunni political philosophy. These were the Kharawaji, radicals who held that any sufficiently worthy muslim could hold the position of Imam, whether a descendant of Muhammed or a member of his Quraysh tribe or not. They also held that people were responsible for the good or evil of their acts personally, and that anyone who did evil was no longer a muslim, regardless of what they or anybody else decreed. The effects of this political philosophy was to challenge all authority and encourage all, especially the poor and dispossessed, to see the struggle against injustice as being divinely sanctioned.

Since the time of the Kharawaj, the history of the rise and fall of various dynasties of Caliphs and different empires has lead the Sunni tradition to view orthodoxy as something that needs to be tempered with a pragmatism of tolerating differences between muslims and not being over hasty in determining who, of the people who identify as muslims, is or is not a muslim. This catholicity along with an emphasis on the established majority opinion as the source of religious authority has helped to mitigate some of the destabilising effects of radicalism while allowing economic prosperity to be parallelled by a flowering of cultural, scientific and philosophical diversity and enquiry. However, even within the Sunni mainstream, revivalist and puritan sects have arisen both in the past and in more modern times.

Sufi - It's not my Jihad if I can't dance to it

As well as the various sects of Sunnis and Shias as Islam developed, some came to be more interested in the personal spiritual aspect of religion. The struggle to achieve some kind of direct personal union with the divine. This tradition shows the influence of contacts with eastern traditions of the search for enlightenment whether Hindu, Buddhist or Daoist. The Sufi traditions, often seen as borderline heretical by the centres of authoritarian Islamic power, have historically prospered in remote and mountainous regions. Especially towards the east where similar mystical traditions have been strong.

The introspective struggle of the Sufis is, according to them, a form of Jihad (devout struggle), one against the false, earthly self - the Nafs. These strivings have produced some of Islam's most loved poetry, but is also most famously associated with ascetic disciplines such as physical exertions including music and wild dancing to induce visions and spiritual breakthroughs - something which has always made them unpopular with those who believe that music, dancing and celebration in general is the work of the devil.

Shia or Shi'ite

The original underdogs, the Shi'ites today make up only 10% of the muslim world, they are a minority in nearly all muslim countries, except for Iran, where they are the state religion. They have at times been linked to a desire by non-arab muslims (e.g. Persians) to reject the tendencies for arab domination over islam that are sometimes expressed in the established sunni tradition with its power centres in arab lands. The Shia originated from a split amongst Muhammed's followers after his death with no male heir. The "traditionalist" Sunnis decided to appoint a leader (the Caliph). The "legitimist" Shias thought that Ali, the husband of Muhammed's favorite daughter, was the legitimate heir and Muhammed's privileged role, not only as earthly leader but spiritual too (the Imamate) was passed down this line. They are divided into:

Ithna 'Ashariyah (Twelvers) or Imamis

Who believe that there were twelve legitimate Imams after Muhammed and son-in-law Ali. They believe the twelth Imam disappeared in 873 and is thought to be alive and hiding and will not reappear until judgement day. The Imamis became the dominant Shi'ite form in the east, particularly in Persia where it became the official state religion in the 16th century. The Iranian revolution of 1979 was taken over by the Shia clergy and their followers who believed in the Imamate of Khomeini. The fact that Shi'ism is an oppressed minority in virtually all other states in the muslim world helped to isolate the Iranian Islamic Republic and limit their ability to export their 'revolution'.

Isma'ilite

After the sixth Imam there was a dispute over whether the legitimate successor was his elder son Isma'il or his younger son Musa al-Kazim. The majority supporting the young son went on to be the mainstream leading to the Twelvers. Of those who stuck with Isma'il they split into those who decided he was the last Imam (the Sab'iyah or Seveners) and those who believed the Imamate carried on in that line. Of these latter, various splits later left groups which still follow people today they consider to be the legitimate successor to Muhammed - the Aga Khan is one such (via, obscurely, Hassan e Sabah of Assasin fame). Other schisms led groups out of Islam proper, such as the Druze (of Lebanon fame) and the Baha'i.

We now move on to the two modern sects who have most influence on the story we are today interested in Afghanistan and related networks throughout the world.

Wahhabi - the only good innovator is a dead one

The peninsula of Arabia has since before Muhammed's time held two contrasting societies together. On the Red Sea coast trade routes from the south from Africa carrying gold, ivory, slaves and valuable crops meet routes from the east carrying spices and silks. Rich merchant settlements in Mecca and Medina have profited from the riches brought by these trade routes, travellers and pilgrims to holy relics such as the mysterious black rock of the Kaaba in Mecca. In the arabian interior harsh deserts and barren uplands have dictated a meagre semi-nomadic herding existence to the tribal peoples that inhabit the region.

A nomadic herding economy, with its main animal wealth being so easily carried off, lends itself to continual strife between tribes based around livestock rustling and struggles over access to grazing land and limited watering holes. This existence has formed a population where impoverishment sits together with a high degree of mobility and martial experience. Throughout history those people who have been able to unite the warring tribes against an external enemy have been able to mobilise a highly effective military force for conquest of the outside world. This was Muhammed's achievement, in getting the merchants of the trading cities of Mecca and Medina to pay taxes (zakat) to buy off the raiding tribes and lead them in a campaign of conquest accross the middle east and North Africa. Although a great and wealthy empire eventually resulted, by the beginning of the 20th century conditions in the Arabian interior remained pretty much as impoverished and undevelopped as they had in Muhammed's time.

On January 15 1902 a tribesman from the interior in his twenties, accompanied by 15 hand-picked men, scaled the walls of the city of Riyadh in the dead of night. Taking the garrison of the regional governor of the Ottoman empire completely by surprise, this daring band of Bedouin warriors, overwhelmed the garrison and their leader, who the world would come to know simply as Ibn Saud, was proclaimed ruler by the townsfolk. Ibn Saud went on to unite the tribal leaders of the interior and lead them in the conquest of the rich cities and holy centres of Medina and Mecca. He did so not only in the name of the House of Saud, but in the name of a new puritan brand of Sunni Islam - Wahhabism.

Wahhabism is named after the religious reformer Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab who teamed up with the founder of the house of Saud for a plan of conquest back in the 18th century. This double act had managed to cause the ruling Ottoman empire serious grief beforehand and had been almost wiped out several times previously. Now with Ibn Saud the old plan would finally be put into action again. By 1911 Saud was putting into plan an ambitious scheme to forge the disparate and eternally warring Bedouin tribes of the interior into a united and ideologically committed force.

With the tribesmen having no common national identity beyond their tribe, the zeal of Wahhabism would act as the unifying glue that held the new state together in place of nationalism. In 1912 he founded the first Ikhwan (Brethren) colony with Bedouin from all tribes in new model settlements where they would undergo education and indoctrination by Wahhabi clerics along with military training. In time this would forge an unstoppable new military force that would sweep accross Arabia and conquer the holy cities. By 1921 this process was complete. However Saud now faced the usual problem of those who mobilise new radical forces to conquer political power - how to demobilise them before they started to destroy the very bases of political power itself.

The problems had already become apparent when the Ikhwan had taken Mecca. On hearing some unfortunate who had decided a welcoming blast on a trumpet should great the conquerors, the Wahhabis, for whom music is anti-islamic, rioted and mass destruction and slaughter ensued. Convinced that any innovation since Muhammed's time was anathema, they tore down minarets (developed, like much mosque architecture since Muhammed's time) and, believing that any worship of relics, saints, or tombs of holy men was an affront to the doctrine that only god can be worshipped, they went round smashing up many such pilgrimmage sites, much to the distress of those who made their living of the pilgrims that came to visit them. The wahhabi religious police (mutawa) led a reign of terror in the cities, crashing into people's homes and, if so much as sniffing the scent of tobacco, would thrash the unfortunates senseless.

More importantly for Ibn Saud, the Ikhwan wanted to continue military expansion, attacking the areas to the north occupied by the British and French since the end of WW1 and the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Saud wanted to avoid war with the British, both to keep what he had gained and also because he was rapidly running out of money for the payments to the tribal chiefs he needed to keep them in his grand coalition. The possibility of selling an exploration concession to western explorers interested in looking for oil in Saudi Arabia was too interesting to pass up.

By 1927 the Ikhwan were denouncing Ibn Saud for selling out the cause and eventually rose in rebellion against him. The ensuing struggle was bloody, one ultra-zealous band nearly managing to destroy the tomb of the Prophet himself, but the radicals were eventually put down. Their leaders fled to Kuwait, only to be handed back over to Saud by the eager to please British. Thus ended the first phase of the Wahhabi's jihad.

Although the Ikhwan's military campaign was halted, the Wahhabis continued to export their religious revolution. The most successful first stop was across the Red Sea in Egypt, where they supported the formation of Hassan al Banna's Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimun). The Brotherhood was formed to combat Egypt's secular constitution of 1923. After the defeat of Egypt and other Arabs trying to stop the creation of Israel in 1948, they rose against the government and were part of the revolution that brought the secular pan-arab nationalist Nasser to power. Nasser's programme was for an anti-imperialist struggle against the western powers (he nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956) combined with 'socialist' industrial development and modernisation.

This latter part was heatedly opposed by the Brotherhood and the ensuing failed assasination attempt brought about their suppression by Nasser and the undying opposition between militant Islamism and pan-arab nationalism ever since. Nasser's "socialist" rhetoric and friendliness towards the Soviet union, panicked the western powers, particularly the US who were holding the ring for western imperialism since the British bowed out of the region after the 1956 Suez fiasco. The US involvement with the militant Islamists as a bulwark against Soviet influence in the Middle East dates from this period.

Deobandis - back to basics

The Taleban, although a modern puritan Sunni sect, are not Wahhabis. They are part of a separate school that has its origin in the 19th century in India under British Imperial rule. After the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, which the British blamed primarily on muslims, muslims found themselves excluded from all institutions, including schools, of imperial society. Being excluded from official schooling meant exclusion from any role in the civil service which ran the country. In other ways too the mutiny forced a rethink on Indian muslim society.

In many ways the rising had been the last attempt to go back to the pre-colonial social order of India under the Mughal empire. The traditional leaders and ruling class had demonstrated incompetence or even refused to back the soldier-led mutiny at all. If Indian society was to escape from British clutches it would have to find a new way forward, rather than simply looking back.

Amongst muslims two main directions emerged. The first, intent on adopting some of the western methods, created new secularised schools where a similar education to the civil service schools could be provided to young muslims, so they would eventually be able to re-enter the administration of the country. The second approach was to create a revivalist islamic education that would return the power of their faith to young muslims and make them strong to reject the corrupting force of westernisation in preparation for throwing out the British oppressor. This second school took its name from the Indian town of Deoband where its leading religious juridical council (ulemma) was based.

Like the Wahhabis, the Deobandi's faith is a severe puritan one which bans music, dancing, worship of saints or holy relics and sees an external, physical Jihad (Jihad bis Saif) as a central pillar of the faith. They took part in the struggle for independance from the British and for the partition of Indian to create Pakistan. The Deobandis are one of the main Sunni communities in Pakistan and have been constantly in struggle both against the Shi'ite minority in Pakistan and the other main Sunni community the Brelvis.

These latter are more influenced by Sufi traditions that have long persisted in the harsh mountains of the Hindu Kush that dominate Kashmir and Afghanistan as well as in the mountainous Caucasus regions including Chechnya. Although the Sufi muslims of Chechnya and Afghanistan have certainly shown that the "inner" jihad for enlightenment (Jihad bin Nafs) is no contradiction to the external jihad of the AK47, in Pakistan the "Jihadis" that have fought the Indians in Kashmir and the Russians in Afghanistan, are almost exclusively drawn from the Deobandis. It was their religious schools (madrassas) set up on the frontier that took in the orphans of the Afghan war, that no one else would feed, and turned them into Taliban soldiers. Since the end of the war in 1989 hostility between Deobandis and Brelvis and both against Shi'ites, has resulted in a rising number of bomb and riot attacks on rival mosques and assasinations in Pakistan.

The Afghan War 1979 - 1989

The current situation is above all the result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent US proxy war fought there. This was fought both through Afghan factions and an international network of ideologically committed islamists ready to fight the Soviet forces in the name of Islam. The US State Department, wary of Iran's Shi'ite Islamic revolution, were more than happy to find their Saudi allies were able to mobilise, through Wahhabi networks, militant islamists who were as hostile to Iran as they were to the Russians. This would allow them, to fund the creation of a fighting force that would be strong enough to take on the Russians, yet were not in any danger of spreading the Iranian model, especially given the seeming loyalty many of the young radicals showed to the royal families of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

In this way the US and Britain helped build up a veritable International Brigade of Islamist fighters, funded by the proceeds of Gulf oil, sheltered and trained by the Pakistani intelligence services of General Zia ul Haq's regime and Western special forces. It was this network that brought together Wahhabis and Deobandis to create an international Jihadi movement of which Al Qaeda and its brother organisations like Egyptian Jihad (formed from the Muslim Brotherhood mentioned above). So what motivates this network?

The Al Qa'eda Programme

Al Qa'eda's activities may be illegal, immoral and indefensible but they are neither motiveless nor mindless. They have a programme and this is it:

The demands are:

1. Troops Out Now - that is, US troops out of Saudi Arabia

2. End Israeli oppression of Palestinians

3. End sanctions against Iraq

4. End western support for corrupt regimes in muslim/arab countries - control of oil wealth

(5. Anti-Communism and Statism)

The fifth demand is not stated but it is the foundation of the campaign against the Russians in Afghanistan that gave the movement its birth.

The defence of private property is part of the sayings of the Prophet and the subsequent Caliphs. Anti-communism is a matter of doctrine for orthodox islamists. Secondly, the creation of a state to enforce islamic law - Sharia - is the defining demand of modern islamism and has, as we saw at the very beginning, always been central to islam as a whole.

It follows then, that despite the seeming radicalism of the demand to stop western powers propping up corrupt despotic regimes in the muslim world (or more particularly, the arab world, because for all its islamic internationalism this particular network remains very much in the tradition of arab-centric sunni thought), this network has no agenda for the destruction of capitalism and the extraction of profit. Indeed of all the demands number 4 is most suspect. Osama bin Laden was friendly with his family's traditional patrons, the Saudi royal family, right up until they invited the US forces into Saudi during the Gulf war.

These demands are framed as a religious struggle to "free the holy places of islam", pretty much the same slogan that Ibn Saud used to rally the original Wahhabi Ikhwan fighters for the conquest of Arabia. However, much as bin Laden would no doubt like to refer back to such historical precedents, we must not let the surface similarities blind us to the significant differences. The original Ikhwan, coming from a world which had, not only religiously but technologically remained almost unchanged since the time of Muhammed, were fighting against modern technology and industry. Ibn Saud's allowing telephones into the country was one of the grievances for their revolt.

Bin Laden, by contrast has his own satellite phones, a modern education in civil engineering and no aversion to setting up modern factories, construction businesses or making millions on the international financial markets. Of course these modern means are all justified by the ends of jihad. But whichever way you look at it, bin Laden is a member of the local industrialist bourgeoisie chafeing at the bit to build up commodity production in the Middle East, not knock it down.

For all the pre-modern language of his movement, the content is for more technological and industrial development, not less. The military airbases and command posts that the US troops moved into in 1990 were built by bin Laden for the Saudis to use to build an independant military force against the threat of Saddam's Iraq (for much as the current Al Qa'eda demands include the dropping of sanctions against Iraq, we must remember that bin Laden was warning against Hussain's aggressive intentions from the late 80s onwards). Bin Laden wishes to see an independantly powerful islamic Middle East, and if that requires technological and economic development then he is all for it.

Beyond Al Qa'eda and Osama bin Laden's clothing of a industrialising developmental agenda in pre-modern clothing, we need to look at the social recruiting base and background of the footsoldiers of today's militant movements. In the time of Ibn Saud they were desert nomads from an essentially pre-capitalist existence. No more.

Material Foundations

Most of the islamic societies across North Africa and the Middle East were subjected to European colonialism or Ottoman rule at some stage from the 19th to the 20th centuries. Socially these regions, although containing some of histories great urban centres of civilisation, remained primarily subsistence economies for the majority of the inhabitants, whether settled farmers or nomadic herders. While colonial rule started the process of forcing the population off the land, this social transformation really got into gear under the rule of the post-colonial regimes after WW1 and, even more so after WW2.

The new post colonial regimes modelled themselves on their erstwhile colonizers, introducing a secular state and institutions, and often promoting western dress and culture. But many of the trappings of the new states, whether transport infrastructure, motor cars, telephones, etc. had to be bought from overseas. In the gulf states this could all be paid for by oil wealth without any need for the development of local industry or production. In the oil-less states the balance of payments pressure produced a need to go into commodity production in return, in order to pay for the imported materiel. But starting from a level of industrial development unable to compete with the west, the only industry ready for conversion to commodity production was agriculture. Combined with strong tariff barriers protecting western food crop production, the "balance of payments" cash crop has played the major role in throwing the peasantry off the land.

This mass of newly landless peasants, drifting towards the shanty towns surrounding the urban centres, looking for wage work, is the sleeping giant of politics in the Islamic world. Any rising by this new proletariat would be an earthquake strong enough to shake the foundations of all the established powers, mostly despotic as they are, in the region. It is amongst this multitude that the islamists have worked hard to establish a base.

They have done so by setting up a religious based welfare system. Most of the post colonial states are too concerned about paying their debts to western banks and the IMF to spend any of their meagre tax revenues on social welfare. Further the standard IMF "structural adjustment" terms prohibit any such social spending, even were any of the regimes farsighted enough to consider them. Islam has a redistributive "social democratic" taxation system built into its foundations as zakat, one of the five obligations of the religion. Islamists are able to lean on the benificiaries of trade with the west, or oil rights, for money. In return they promise to keep a lid on popular revolt, particularly any socialistic or class war elements.

The current regimes, mostly being founded by people who themselves dallied with socialistic or national liberation politics in their struggle to depose colonial power, are all to aware of the destabilising potential of such politics, not too mention the interests of the local capitalists. So they are happy for the islamists to hold ideological sway over the urban proletariat, so long as their anger is diverted to handy external scapegoats, such as Israel or America.

This welfare system though is dependant upon attending the mosque and being integrated into the whole islamist system of ideological formation. The system provides not only material aid, but also meeting places, places to hear news from co-religionists from afar and abroad. In a sense the islamist mission amongst the urban poor corresponds to the institutions that workers across the world have built for themselves (friendly societies, meeting houses, public speaking and international correspondance, etc.), except that in this instance these institutions and spaces are not the autonomous products of workers activity. Rather they are funded by the bosses and the rich and controlled by a power that mediates between the two, usually antagonist classes and the state. This state of affairs is not due to some innate failing of political consciousness amongst the urban proletariat, rather it is a product of the economic environment of mass unemployment and regime of accumulation that has not yet reached the stage of accumulating through relative surplus value, but remains founded on the absolute exploitation of those in work. The mass of the urban proletariat in many islamic countries does not have enough spare cash to set up their own autonomous spaces and aid projects, compared to the resources the islamists can access, especially for comparatively expensive services like modern health care.

But the creation of autonomous spaces in the islamic world is what is desperately needed by local workers and radicals. It is in this area that international solidarity can play the most important role in the future. Solidarity can help build up the spaces for the proletariat of North Africa and the Middle East to find a libertory path between the devil of rotten despotic regimes and the deep blue sea of militant islamic capitalism.

Reproduced From The Anarchist Pamphlet: Against War and Terrorism

Subject:

 True Islam is a Demonic deceitful evil murderous religion

http://www.golshan.com/rationalthinking/ 

I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, maim them in every limb.Quran 8:12 Muhammad is Allah's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another. Through them Allah seeks to enrage the unbelievers. Quran 48:29

A thorough study of Quran and Hadiths reveal an Islam that is not being presented honestly by the Muslim propagandists and is not known to the majority of Muslims. Islam as it is taught in Quran (Koran) and lived by Muhammad, as is reported in the Hadith (Biography and sayings of the Prophet) is a religion of intolerance, inequality, violence, discrimination, superstition, fanaticism, and blind faith. Islam advocates killing the non-Muslims, abuses the human rights of the minorities and women. Islam expanded by Jihad (holy war) and forced its way by killing the non-believers and the dissidents. Apostasy in Islam is the biggest crime, punishable by death. Muhammad was a fundamentalist himself therefore fundamentalism cannot be separated from true Islam. Islam, which means submission, demands from its followers to submit their wills and thoughts to Muhammad and his Allah, a deity that despises reason, democracy, freedom of thought and freedom of expression. I reject Islam a) because of Muhammad's lack of moral and ethical fortitude and b) because of the absurdities in Quran. a) Muhammad lived a less than holy life. His lust for sex, his affairs with his maids and slave girls, his pedophilic relationship with Aisha a 9-year-old child at the age of 53, his killing sprees, his massacre and the genocide of the Jews, his slave making and trading, his assassination of his opponents, his raids and lootings of the merchant caravans, his burning of the palm plantations, his destroying the water wells, his cursing and invoking evil on his enemies and his revenge on his captured prisoners of war disqualify him as a decent human being let alone the messenger of God

b) An unbiased study of Quran shows that far from being a "miracle" that book is a hoax. Once Quran is scrutinized with rational thinking, almost every sentence proves to be false. Quran is replete with scientific heresies, historic blunders, mathematical mistakes, logical absurdities and grammatical errors. Could possibly the author of this Universe be as ignorant as it appears to be in Quran?

Quran tells Muslims to kill the disbelievers wherever they find them (Q. 2:191), to murder them and treat them harshly (Q. 9:123), slay them (Q. 9: 5), fight with them, (Q. 8: 65 ) even if they are Christians and Jews, humiliate them and impose on them a penalty tax (Q. 9: 29). Quran takes away the freedom of belief from all humanity and tell clearly that no other religion except Islam is accepted (Q. 3: 85). It relegates those who disbelieve in Quran to hell (Q. 5:10), calls them najis (filthy, untouchable, impure) (Q. 9: 28). It orders its followers to fight the unbelievers until no other religion except Islam is left (Q. 2: 193). It says that the non-believers will go to hell and will drink boiling water (Q. 14: 17). It asks the Muslims to slay or crucify or cut the hands and feet of the unbelievers, that they be expelled from the land with disgrace and that "they shall have a great punishment in world hereafter" (Q.5: 34). "As for the disbelievers", it says that "for them garments of fire shall be cut and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water whereby whatever is in their bowls and skin shall be dissolved and they will be punished with hooked iron rods" (Q. 22: 9). Quran prohibits a Muslim to befriend a non-believer even if that non- believer is the father or the brother of that Muslim (Q. 9: 23), (Q. 3: 28). Quran asks the Muslims to "strive against the unbelievers with great endeavor (Q. 25: 52), be stern with them because they belong to hell (Q. 66: 9). The holy Prophet demanded his follower to "strike off the heads of the disbelievers"; then after making a "wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives" (Q. 47: 4). As for women the book of Allah says that they are inferior to men and their husbands have the right to scourge them if they are found disobedient (Q. 4:34). It teaches that women will go to hell if they are disobedient to their husbands (Q. 66:10). It maintains that men have an advantage over the women (Q. 2:228). It not only denies the women's equal right to their inheritance (Q. 4:11- 12), it also regards them as imbeciles and decrees that their witness is not admissible in the court (Q. 2:282). This means that a woman who is raped cannot accuse her rapist unless she can produce a male witness. Muhammad allowed the Muslims to marry up to four views and gave them license to sleep with their slave maids and as many "captive" women as they may have (Q. 4:3). He himself did just that. This is why anytime a Muslim army subdues another nation, they call them kafir and allow themselves to rape their women. Pakistani soldiers raped up to 250,000 Bangali women in 1971 after they massacred 3,000,000 unarmed civilians when their religious leader decreed that Bangladeshis are unislamic. This is why the prison guards in Islamic regime of Iran rape the women and then kill them after calling them apostates and the enemies of Allah. This site scrutinizes Islam with Rational Thinking. It rejects time- honored beliefs that cannot stand the probing of reason. It asks questions and encourages independent thinking. It promotes unity of humankind, equality between men and women, abolition of prejudices and freedom from dogmatism and blind faith.

In a world that has become so technologically advanced that even the poorest nations that cannot feed themselves boast having sophisticated nuclear and biological weapons, small misunderstandings can cause catastrophic results. Religion has always been the biggest source of misunderstanding. For religion, people are ready to die, kill and destroy everything else. Only a religious person would believe that he would go to paradise if he kills other human beings. Only a religious person has no regards for the lives he destroys because their faith is not right.

In the past century Islamic fundamentalism has been on the rise, and with that terrorisms, revolutions, and upheavals ensued. Millions of lives were lost and still counting. Let us pause for a moment and take a second look at Islam. We may just have made a mistake. The reason I think Islam is harmful and must go is not due to the fact that Quran says Earth is flat or the stars are missiles that Allah fires at the jinns who climb the heaven to eavesdrop the conversation of the exalted assembly. These tales could even amuse us. Islam must go because it teaches hate, it orders killing the non- Muslims, it denigrates women and it violates the human rights. Islam must go not because it is false but because it is destructive, because it is a danger; a threat to peace and security of humankind. With the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Islamic countries, Islam has become a serious and a real threat to the survival of our species.

Ali Sina

October 2000

Assassinations

Lying and murdering are great sins in Islam. Yet Muhammad himself ordered his followers to lie and to assassin his enemies.

QUOTE FROM BUKHARI, VOLUME 5, #369

Narrated Jabir Abdullah:

Allah's messenger said "Who is willing to kill Ka`b bin al-Ashraf who has hurt Allah and His apostle?" Thereupon Maslama got up saying, "O Allah's messenger! Would you like that I kill him?" The prophet said, "Yes". Maslama said, "Then allow me to say a (false) thing (i.e. to deceive Ka`b). The prophet said, "You may say it."

Maslama went to Ka`b and said, "That man (i.e. Muhammad) demands Sadaqa (i.e. Zakat) [taxes] from us, and he has troubled us, and I have come to borrow something from you." On that, Ka`b said, "By Allah, you will get tired of him!" Maslama said, "Now as we have followed him, we do not want to leave him unless and until we see how his end is going to be. Now we want you to lend us a camel load or two of food." Ka`b said, "Yes, but you should mortgage something to me." Maslama and his companion said, "What do you want?" Ka`b replied, "Mortgage your women to me." They said, "How can we mortgage our women to you and you are the most handsome of the Arabs?" Ka`b said, "Then mortgage your sons to me." They said, "How can we mortgage our sons to you? Later they would be abused by the people's saying that so and so has been mortgaged for a camel load of food. That would cause us great disgrace, but we will mortgage our arms to you."

Maslama and his companion promised Ka`b that Maslama would return to him. He came to Ka`b at night along with Ka`b's foster brother, Abu Na'ila. Ka`b invited them to come into his fort and then he went down to them. His wife asked him, "Where are you going at this time?" Ka`b replied, None but Maslama and my (foster) brother Abu Na'ila have come." His wife said, "I hear a voice as if blood is dropping from him." Ka`b said, "They are none by my brother Maslama and my foster brother Abu Na'ila. A generous man should respond to a call at night even if invited to be killed."

Maslama went with two men. So Maslama went in together with two men, and said to them, "When Ka`b comes, I will touch his hair and smell it, and when you see that I have got hold of his head, strike him. I will let you smell his head."

Ka`b bin al-Ashraf came down to them wrapped in his clothes, and diffusing perfume. Maslama said, "I have never smelt a better scent than this." Ka`b replied, "I have got the best Arab women who know how to use the high class of perfume." Maslama requested Ka`b "Will you allow me to smell your head?" Ka`b said "yes." Maslama smelt it and made his companions smell it as well. Then he requested Ka`b again, "Will you let me (smell your head)?" Ka`b said "Yes". When Maslama got a strong hold of him, he said (to his companions) "Get at him!" So they killed him and went to the prophet and informed him."

How a man can hurt Allah? How can God be hurt by one of his creatures? If he is hurt and wants revenge by killing the person who hurt him can't he kill him himself? Why he needs to ask his messenger to send one of his followers to do his dirty work? This is more befitting for a mafia godfather than the God. To lie and commit murder are not godly deeds, unless Muslim's god is different from the real God.

The stories of Muhammad's plots and assassinations are among the most damaging stories about Muhammad. May modern Muslims prefer to deny the authenticity of these hadithes than try to explain them. However, this is not that easy. These hadithes are classified as sahih (authentic). Why should anyone forge such hadithes in the first place? No intelligent person would accept that Muslims, who fabricated so many false stories about Muhammad's "miracles" to make him look saintly and a superior being, would fabricate stories that implicate him as a gangster godfather and an assassin. That would have defied their faith and defies our intelligence.

Would a believer say such damaging things about Muhammad if they were not true? In fact the Muslims in their fanatical zeal disregard even human reason to save Muhammad from blemish. While their loyalty is noteworthy, their intellectual honesty is deplorable. Why in the world believers would fabricate so many stories about assassination plots of their prophet? Why Bukhari and Muslim would listen and write hadithes of such horrible nature if they were not true? Why so many Muslims read them for so many centuries and no on denied them? If you pay attention to the details in those stories you would admit that they couldn't be fabricated. There are names of the people involucrated and there are so many of them. These were people known to everyone.

There are many phony hadithes that anyone could have made-up. Like the one that says water flew out of the fingers of Muhammad, or the stones moved around to hide him when he went to answer the call of the nature, or that he started to praise Allah as soon as he was born. These are unintelligent stories that have no base. Nevertheless the believers loved to hear them because they strengthened their faith. But the accounts of his assassinations are not the kind of stories that someone would willingly fabricate for the person he loves most.

It is not just one story that portrays Muhammad as an assassin. There are many of them, reported by several people and preserved by several Hadith collectors. All of them corroborate each other. Those who don't believe in hadithes as religious source of guidance, must accept them as historic sources. The stories of Muhammad's assassinations do not contain religious guidance, (though it became the standard of conduct for Muslims throughout the history) but they are "historic" facts.

There are two categories of Muslims. The first are those that unabashedly defend Muhammad and whatever he did irrespective of any consideration for decency, rightness or justice. The second group, are those that dishonestly deny the facts about him and try to twist the evidence to make Muhammad acceptable by modern morality and values.

I don't want to pass the judgment as which one is better, but I certainly admire the honesty of the first group that the second group lacks. Sometimes ago I had a debate with someone representing the first category. He had no difficulty accepting the stories of Muhammad's assassinations and tried to prove Muhammad's greatness by reminding me that the assassin who went to kill him hurt his ankle and Muhammad touched it and it healed. This gentleman could not think that if Muhammad had powers to heal he would have been able to kill his enemies by remote control and would not have needed to recruit an assassin.

However in my view the greatest enemies of democracy and reform are those pertaining to the second group. These are the ones disguised as intellectuals and modernists. They want to present Islam as a peaceful and tolerant religion. They lie. They twist the facts. They hide the evidence not because they truly believe that Islam is a religion of peace, for anyone who reads that book knows that this is not so. They lie to gain advantages, especially in the West as long as Islam is in the minority and as long as it is weak. But as soon as Islam become powerful, all that sweet talk of tolerance is put aside, the mask will be off and the real face of Islam as evinced by its founder will become manifest. Then those phony smiles give way to showing the fangs. This is precisely how the Prophet himself acted. When he was in Mecca and weak, he spoke of tolerance, but when he became powerful he forgot all that talk and started his campaign of genocide of the Jews and the Christians of Arabia.

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Saturday October 27 10:53 AM ET

Pakistanis Leave for Holy War

By RIAZ KHAN, Associated Press Writer

TEMERGARAH, Pakistan (AP) - In buses and trucks, pickups and vans, more than 5,000 people rolled out of a northeastern Pakistan village Saturday morning, bound for the Afghan frontier and vowing to fight a holy war against the United States.

Hundreds were reported crossing into Afghanistan over rugged mountains by Saturday evening, Pakistani border police said.

Thousands of Pakistani men, young and old, had massed in Temergarah on Friday night with assault rifles, machine guns, even rocket launchers. A few even carried axes and swords.

Their mission, they said: to enter Afghanistan's Kunar province and help the country's ruling Taliban defend against any ground incursions by American troops.

``I am an old man. I consider myself lucky to go - and to face the death of a martyr,'' said Shah Wazir, 70, a retired Pakistani army officer. In his hands Saturday morning, he carried a French rifle from about 1920.

Organizers said similar-sized groups were massing in other towns across North West Frontier Province, an enclave of ethnic Pashtuns with ties to - and deep feelings for - neighboring Afghanistan.

Volunteers gathered in scores of groups of 20, sitting on the ground to be briefed on the ways of jihad - Islamic holy war - by military commanders wearing black turbans and full beards similar to the Taliban militia. One key rule: obedience to leaders.

``It is a difficult time for Islam and Muslims. We are in a test. Everybody should be ready to pass the test - and to sacrifice our lives,'' said Mohammad Khaled, one brigade leader. Would-be warriors embraced and chanted anti-American slogans.

Hussain Khan, 19, a carpenter from the area, carried a Kalashnikov and stood with his friend. He said he was leaving behind a fiancee and joining a just cause.

``Whether I come back alive or I am dead, I'll be fortunate because I am fighting in the service of Islam,'' Khan said.

The call for holy war came this week from Sufi Mohammad, an outspoken Muslim cleric who runs a madrassa, or religious school, in nearby Madyan. He exhorted ``true Muslims'' to mass and prepare to go to Afghanistan - to repel any U.S. ground incursions.

What they will do upon arrival is uncertain. But hundreds of vehicles - more than 1,000 volunteers - rolled into the mountains that separate the two countries Saturday night, said Himdallah Khan, a police official at Bajur Agency, a borderland area. Many returned empty. Hundreds of other Pakistanis from different areas were converging near Bajur.

In this region of Pakistan, Mohammad's organization, Tehrik Nifaz Shariat Mohammadi Malakand, or Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Laws, has been embraced.

And the cleric's message - that, despite its insistence to the contrary, the United States is waging war on Islam - hits home.

``This is a strange occasion of world history,'' Mohammad said Friday. ``For the first time, all the anti-Islamic forces are united against Islam.''

It was impossible to verify how many supporters were actually en route to join him. In recent weeks, many militants have claimed far more backing than rallies eventually produce.

However, the numbers in Temergarah on Saturday morning - and the people jammed into trucks and on bus rooftops - suggested support was heavy. Mohammad's backers say the number to enter Afghanistan will reach 100,000.

``We are not worried about death,'' said Khaled, the brigade leader. ``If we die in jihad, it is something much more greater than to be alive. And we will be taken into paradise.''

The night before, men had massed by the thousands in Temergarah and other wind-whipped mountain villages in northeastern Pakistan's mountains.

Out-of-towners, their conversation crackling with anticipation, roamed Temergarah's streets. Pickup trucks patrolled town with loudspeakers attached, calling people to assemble with a chant: ``Afghanistan will be a graveyard for Americans.'' Men huddled around radios, listening for news about the conflict; most tuned in to the BBC.

People camped on porches, beneficiaries of local hospitality. Others slept on floors of public buildings. Mosques lodged as many as they could, and supplied food and blankets.

``I cannot tolerate the bombing and the cruelty of Americans. I must go,'' said Mamoor Shah, a medicine salesman who, at 18, already has a wife and child. ``Muslims cannot keep silent.''

For many young men, this is no mere rite of passage. It is religion - and it is blood, heritage and family.

``I'm going. My mother sent me to fight for our faith,'' said Farooq Shah, 21, a student from Buner, 50 miles away. When she told him to go, he had no Kalashnikov. So she went out, sold her jewelry and bought him one.

 

Islam and the
Abrahamic Tradition

 

"We firmly believe in the truism that all faiths are the paths leading towards the Ultimate Reality, just as the spokes of the wheel converge to its axis. When the people are too immersed in the dogmas and rituals of their chosen religion, it appears to them to be the only one worth following and they defend their own particular faith. However, when they have acquired enough wisdom, charity and discernment, they too are bound to perceive that the road to Heaven is nobody's monopoly and that the Divine laws apply equally to all. It is the dogmas, ritual and the mode of worship that divide the faiths and not the basic essence of their beliefs.

"But I am not in favour of conversion from one faith to another, neither do I believe in the fusion of all religions into one. The Ultimate Truth is one, but it has an infinite number of aspects and what is more beautiful than that each faith should reflect only one facet of the Divine, all of them together creating a shining gem of beauty. Would the world be more if all the flowers on earth had been blended into one uniform colour or all mountains razed to make the globe monotonously flat? Each religion offers something glorious, peculiarly its own, to point out the road to the Ultimate Reality. What man or group of men would be able to prescribe a single form of religion that would satisfy all and everybody? That would be an attempt to give a finite concept of the Infinite and of course, it would fail."
--- Abbot Mingzing

The foundation of all the celestial religions is one; that oneness is Truth and Truth is oneness that does not admit of plurality. This foundation is not multiple for it is Reality itself. Truth is one, and it is the same for all those who, by whatever way, have attained to its understanding. The Religion of God therefore is one, but its forms and types vary in accordance with the variation of races, cultures, civilisations, and environments.

History is testimony to the great impulses brought to humanity by the Great Educators - the Prophets. Jesus revealed the spirit behind the forms of the laws of Moses. Muhammad, like all the Prophets, upheld the same one foundation. We can see the same purpose behind all the Prophets of God. They were the sources of spiritual empowerment, elevation and order to the communities they were sent.

The various Scriptures or Holy Books contain the primary Divine Revelations that of necessity are adapted in their style and expression to a given people at a given historical period, since "water takes on the colour of its container," as Junayd wrote.

Our attention, in this article, is specific to the world faiths that have emerged from the Abrahamic 'tree' simply because this is still the most recognizable religious inheritance for Westerners. By so doing we are certainly not excluding the venerable religions of the Orient such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, or even the illustrious so-called 'pagan' wisdom of the Greeks, Egyptians, Sumerians and others. Indeed all the great religions of antiquity can be appreciated through the Divine Conception.

Christianity and Islam represent the heritage of the Primordial Tradition according to different and specific historical development. The European Muslim writer Michel Valsan points out:

"The Islamic doctrine is formal on the point that all the Divine Messengers have brought essentially the same message and that all the traditions are in essence one...As regards the Islamic form of the tradition this is in any case originally and essentially based on the doctrine of Supreme Identity..." (L'Islam et la Fonction de Rene Guenon, Paris, 1984)

Islam

Islam, as the last of the revealed religions in the Abrahamic stream has an intimate relationship with the other two and axiomatically expresses the Divine Conception of Religion. A religion based principally on knowledge compared to its predecessor Christianity based on love. Here is a vital example of unfolding revelation. Out of the Abrahamic 'tree', the Torah emphasised the Divine Law, preparing the way for the Gospels that emphasised the element of Divine Love. Islam, while acknowledging the two former revelations emphasised Divine Knowledge. Hence Abdul Latif of Sind proclaimed: "Love and Intellect are the two wings of the bird."

The foundation or core of the timeless One Religion is called in Islam the din al fitrah and Man is defined in terms of it. Every human being is endowed with this core at birth. This is the 'natural state' all humans are created in. The built-in sensus numinis by which the creature recognizes its holy, transcendent Creator. The Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said: "Every man is born a Muslim; his parents make of him a Christian or a Jew". That is to say, every person is born with this 'sensus numinis' by which he innately and 'naturally' comes to recognition of the existence and unity of the Absolute. Rene Guenon offers us an esoteric appreciation of this concept:

"the proper meaning of the word Islam is 'submission to the Divine Will'; hence it is said, in certain esoteric teachings, that every being is Muslim, in the sense that there is clearly none who can elude that Will, and accordingly each necessarily occupies the place allotted to him in the Universe as a whole." (Symbolism of the Cross)

Here is 'Divine Islam', the core of Islamic doctrine, above time and place, purged of all elaboration and prescriptions of history. Constituting the Religion of God in the highest sense of the term.

The one Religion of God, the primordial 'Divine Islam' means surrender and submission to the Divine Will. Being above history it predates the Prophet Muhammad. All Knowers of God being 'Muslims' - those who surrender - to the Almighty. Some having surrendered unto God through the Gospels, others through the Quran and some through other forms of Divine Wisdom.

Islamic doctrine teaches that the Quran is the last expression of the Revelation, Muhammad the last of thousands of Prophets, peace be upon them. The Sufi poet Mahmud Shabestari thus declared: "If the Muslim only knew what Islam really means, he would become an idol-worshipper."

The institutionalized Islam that we see in the world is only a temporal manifestation of the 'Divine Islam', conceived in the beginning: "It is the Religion (millah) of your father Abraham; it is he who called you Muslims aforetime." (Quran 22:78)

"Therefore set your face in devotion to the true faith, the upright nature with which Allah has endowed man. Allah's creation cannot be changed. This is surely the true Religion, although most men do not know it." (Quran 30:30)

'Divine Islam' is synonymous with the Religion of primordiality. Religion originally is one as God is One, and if the source of religion is God, and God is One, then there can only be one Primordial Religion.

"For each of you we appointed a Divine Law and a way of life. Had God so willed, He could have made you one people; but so that He might try you by that which He hath bestowed upon you (He willed otherwise); so compete in doing good. Unto God ye will all return, and He will inform you concerning that wherein ye differ." (Quran 5:48)

Charles Le Gai Eaton, the deputy director of the Islamic Centre in London, writes in Islamic Spirituality:

"Islam...claims by implication a particularly direct relationship to this 'perennial philosophy', since it defines itself as the final revelation of a timeless message of which mankind has been 'reminded' again and again by countless 'messengers of God'. The Quran acknowledges without ambiguity that the laws and practices of the different crystallizations of the din al-fitrah have differed according to time and place, but the truth of the Divine Unity and the decisive principles that are derived from this do not change, have not changed, and can never change. The doctrine of Unity is unique, so it is said. All else is illusion."

The Quran states that all the Prophets were in reality Muslims, and that each one of them had enjoined the people to submit themselves to God: "They say: 'Become Jews or Christians if you would be guided (to salvation).' Say thou: 'Nay (I would rather) the Religion of Abraham the True, and he joined not gods with God."

This Divine Conception of Islam, revealed in the Holy Quran, taught by the Prophet Muhammad and lived by the early generations of Muslims was the dynamic that spread the light of Islam throughout the world.

"Say: O People of the Book! come to common terms as between us and you: That we worship none but God; That we associate no partners with Him; That we erect not, from among ourselves, Lords and partners other than God" (Quran 3:64)

Holding to this Divine Conception the Muslims came as liberators to a Christian world wallowing in idolatry, narrowness and priestcraft. The foremost historian of Eastern Christendom, Father Nicolas Zernov wrote that for many of the early Christians, the Muslims "came as supporters and liberators". In his definitive work on the origin and growth of the Eastern Orthodox Church we read:

"Many Byzantine strongholds gladly opened their gates to the armies of the Prophet, welcoming them as their co-religionists...It is usually insufficiently realized how close Islam was in its early years to the Oriental version of Christianity. The Koran taught not only the virgin birth and Christ's freedom from sin, but also regarded Him as the God appointed Judge of mankind at the Last Judgment." (Eastern Christendom)

A study of the relations between the early Christians and Muslims shows that they regarded each other as co-religionists who held to the same core, the same one foundation of truth. Benjamin Walker comments:

"It is noteworthy that medieval Christian scholastics did not look upon Muslims as members of an alien or non-Christian faith, but rather as those who had broken away from a fundamentally Christian doctrine. They were regarded as heretics and seceders, and not as heathens. In denying the divinity of Christ, which Muslims did with consistent emphasis, they were not far from the position of many Christian theologians who were condemned on that score by the Church as schismatics." (Gnosticism, Its History and Influence, 1983)

"The Muslims," wrote Christian author Sir William Jones, "are already a sort of heterodox Christians: they are Christians, if Locke reasons justly, because they firmly believe the immaculate conception, divine character, and miracles of the Messiah."

Such a view was shared by the early Christian church whose theologians, such as St John of Damascus, looked upon the Muslims as a Christian sect.

When the crescent triumphed over the cross in southern Europe it was a harbinger of a civilisation that had no equal in its day. In Studies in a Mosque, Stanley Lane-Poole writes:

"For nearly eight centuries under her Muslim rulers Spain set to all Europe a shining example of a civilized and enlightened state. Art, literature and science prospered as they then prospered nowhere else in Europe. Students flocked from France and Germany and England to drink from the fountains of learning which flowed only in the cities of the Moors. The surgeons and doctors of Andalusia were in the vanguard of science; women were encouraged to devote themselves to serious study, and a lady doctor was not unknown among the people of Cordova. Mathematics, astronomy and botany, history, philosophy and jurisprudence, were to be mastered in Spain and in Spain alone."

There are numerous historical examples of chivalric honour and respect accorded to the European Christians by the Arab Muslims reflecting an appreciation of the essential unity between the 'people of the Book'. The Caliph Omar, after the capture of Jerusalem, renounced praying in the basilica that the patriarch had placed at his disposal, in order to avoid its being claimed later by the Muslims. In the midst of battle the great Muslim leader Saladin presented a richly caparisoned horse to his enemy the Christian King Richard-the-Lion-Hearted, whose horse had just been killed. No doubt the Muslims recalled the words of the Quran:

"We believe in Allah, and in what has been revealed to us and to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob and the descendants (of Jacob) and in what was given to Moses and Jesus and in what the other Prophets received from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and we are those who submit to Allah." (Quran, Chapter 2, Verses 135-136)

The historian Syed Amir Ali details the period when the Divine Conception of Islam was practiced:

"Ever since the establishment of the Islamic power, the Christians had enjoyed the utmost toleration; they were protected in the practice of their religion and in the enjoyment of their civil rights and privileges. They were allowed to move freely about the empire, to hold communication with princes of their own creed in foreign countries, and to acquire lands and property under the same conditions as the Moslems. Public offices (excepting under some tyrannical governors) were open to them equally with the Moslems. Christian convents and churches existed everywhere, and Christian pilgrims from the most distant parts were permitted to enter Palestine without hindrance. In fact, pilgrimage to the Holy Land had been stimulated, rather than suppressed, by the conquest of the Arabs, and the Saracens contented themselves with maintaining order among the rival sects of Christianity, who would have torn each other to pieces in the very sepulchre they professed to worship. In Jerusalem, which was regarded as holy by the followers of both religions, a special quarter was set apart for the Patriarch and his clergy, which was inviolable on the part of the Moslems. When Palestine and Syria passed into the hands of the Fatimids in the year 969 A.C., the change of supremacy was to the advantage of the Christians. But no amount of toleration would conciliate the fanatics, who looked upon the presence of the Moslem in Jerusalem as an abomination." (A Short History of the Saracens)

While the Divine Conception was upheld, Muslims and Christians lived side by side in peace, while still maintaining their distinctive Traditional exoteric forms and practices. Many of the early Muslim writers studied the Bible, Old and New Testaments. The historian Tabari in particular quoted the Bible frequently. St John of Damascus held a high position at the court of the Caliph. He was not required to 'convert' to Islam, any more than were St Francis of Assisi in Tunisia, St Louis in Egypt or St Gregory Palamas of Turkey. While a prisoner of the Ottomans for a year, St Gregory had friendly discussions with the Emir's son, but was not 'converted', nor did the Turkish prince become a Christian. The Sufi Ibrahim ibn Adham had for a time as his spiritual master a Christian hermit, without either being converted to the other's religion. Only later centuries widened the gap between the two faiths and their Sacred Books. Crusades and wars, inquisitions and persecutions, alienated those who should have been 'nearest in love' to one another.

"Thou wilt surely find the nearest of them in love to the believers are those who say 'We are Christians'; that, because some of them are priests and monks [those devoted entirely to God], and they wax not proud." (Quran 5:85)

Rejected Knowledge

There has always persisted an 'underground' of 'rejected knowledge' within Western Christian culture. Forming a suppressed Opposition to the Establishment forces, this minority acted both to preserve - consciously or unconsciously - some of the highest elements of Traditional Wisdom and critique the growing materialism of the age. Within this 'underground' can be found the Rosicrucians of the 18th century who claimed sources in Arabia for their Ancient Wisdom teachings. Much could be written of the connections between the Templars and Ismaili Muslims during the Crusades. Frederick II, Goethe, and Nietzsche, all held Islam in high esteem.

Napoleon, while in Egypt, "held long discussions with the Ulema [religious scholars] of Cairo on Moslem theology, holding out to them the possibility of the whole French Army being converted to Islam." (Napoleon and the Awakening of Europe) The French writer Gourgaud noted in his Memories, "the Emporer reads the Koran in silence. He raises his head and says, as in a dream: Muhammad's religion is the most beautiful."

The spiritual poverty, ignorance and vain dogmatism - with the resulting hypocrisy, mediocrity and confusion - manifesting in the contemporary world stem from rejection of the Traditional Wisdom brought by all the Prophets of God. The Tradition that, as an unfolding perennial revelation of the Divine Will, can be compared to a stream with its origins in a primordial and eternal pure spring of Truth.

Working from the universal perspective of the Divine Conception, the darkness of ignorance, dogmatism, legalism and fanaticism vanishes before the Sun of Truth. This Divine Conception is an understanding that points us to the one universal Religion of the Prophets and gives us access to progressively higher levels of Knowledge and an ever-widening vision of reality. Then we appreciate the words of the Muslim teacher Al Ghazzali - "The higher one ascends a mountain, the farther one sees."

The above article appeared in
New Dawn No. 26 (August-September 1994)

© Copyright New Dawn Magazine, http://www.newdawnmagazine.com . Permission to re-send, post and place on web sites for non-commercial purposes, and if shown only in its entirety with no changes or additions. This notice must accompany all re-posting.

 

Secret Tradition of Islam

By LIFE SCIENCE FELLOWSHIP

The initiatic journey to Islamic soil has been a repeated theme of European esotericism, ever since the Templars settled in Jerusalem and the mythical Christian Rosenkreuz learnt his trade in "Damcar" (Damascus). We find it in the lives of Paracelsus and Cagliostro, then, as travel became easier, in a whole host that includes P. B. Randolph, H. P. Blavatsky, Max Theon, G. I. Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, Rene Guenon, R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, and Henry Corbin. There was very likely some element of this in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1797, when he announced to an astounded audience that he, too, was a Muslim..
- Joscelyn Godwin1

In the modern world, religion has been reduced to 'moralism' and a question of faith. Once cherished doctrines are now just simple formulas and routine practices, devoid of any higher meaning. It is not really surprising that for large numbers of people in the Western world the great religions are unable to answer the most fundamental questions of existence. Yet throughout history we find people convinced the great religions are a necessary 'outer shell' veiling a Primordial Wisdom that alone can reveal humanity's real origin, purpose and destiny. Hidden behind vital religious practices and doctrines is an esoteric or occult knowledge. But as the scholar of religion James Webb points out:

Something may be hidden because of its immense value, or reverently concealed from the prying eyes of the profane. But this hidden thing may also have achieved its sequestered position because the Powers That Be have found it wanting. Either it is a threat and must be buried, or simply useless, and so forgotten.2

Some of Europe's leading seekers after ancient secret wisdom were convinced that in the Muslim lands of the Orient could be found a Primordial Tradition transmitted from generation to generation within closed communities of initiates. They sought inspiration in a cultural and religious milieu long denounced as the 'enemy' by European Christianity.

The French poet and historian Gerard de Nerval (1808-1855) was of the opinion that secret Islamic communities, principally the Druze, the Ismailis and the Nusairis, had been responsible for transmitting ancient wisdom to Europe through their influence on the Knights Templar.

Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, the reactionary nineteenth century chronicler of secret societies, believed the Knights Templar (and the Freemasons) derived their doctrines and practices from the Ismaili Assassins, who in turn inherited them from the ancient Gnostics.

Godfrey Higgins (1772-1833), whose books influenced Madame Blavatsky and the early Theosophists, also concluded the Ismaili Assassins passed their mysteries on to Europe's Templars, Freemasons, and Rosicrucians. Higgins resolutely defended Muhammed, the Prophet of Islam, and expressed the hope to visit the Moorish lands of Egypt, Palestine and Syria before he died.

Early this century the writer and mystic Laurence Oliphant reasoned the Druze and Nusairi sects were the custodians of the most complete system of secret knowledge. In The Treasure of Montsegur, an authoritative book on the medieval Cathars, the scholar R.A. Gilbert argues that the doctrines of the Nusairis are identical to those of the Cathars.

Wherever we look we find historians and authors searching for the key to spiritual enlightenment among the Orient's arcane Muslim communities. Elaborate 'myths' may guard the source of the teachings of Europe's occult fraternities, but they all point to the Muslim lands of North Africa and the mysterious East.

Eighteenth-century Rosicrucians claimed sources in Arabia for their secret wisdom. Indeed, a central Rosicrucian 'myth' tells how young Christian Rosenkreuz [Rosie Cross] journeyed to "the mystic Arabian city of Damcar" in search of lost knowledge. According to Manly P. Hall:

C.R.C. [Christian Rosie Cross] was but sixteen years of age when he arrived at Damcar. He was received as one who had been long expected, a comrade and a friend in philosophy, and was instructed in the secrets of the Arabian adepts. While there, C.R.C. learned Arabic and translated the sacred book M into Latin, and upon returning to Europe he brought this important volume with him. After studying three years in Damcar, C.R.C. departed for the [Moorish] city of Fez, where Arabian magicians declared further information would be given him.3

Returning to Europe from his sojourn in the Moorish lands, C.R.C. is said to have established a secret "House of the Holy Spirit" modelled on the Muslim "House of Wisdom" he visited at Cairo in Egypt. Even the name Rosicrucian, a follower of the path of the Rose Cross, is remarkably similar to the common Moorish Sufi phrase "Path of the Rose." One has only to intelligently study Rosicrucian rituals and legends to see the borrowing of Moorish imagery and the debt to Islamic esotericism.

The Rosicrucians - also called the 'Society of Unknown Philosophers' and the 'Invisible College' - counted among their number not only Sir Francis Bacon, but Robert Fludd, Saint Germain and Cagliostro. Held to be one of the founders of Western science and philosophy, Francis Bacon is also the real author of Shakespeare's works. Within the writings attributed to Shakespeare can be found Sufi ideas placed there by Francis Bacon.

Roger Bacon, known as the "miraculous Doctor," received his knowledge of medicine and the natural sciences from North African Moorish teachers. He often wore Arab dress at Oxford, knew the Arabic language, and translated Sufi texts. Bacon asserted that his knowledge was only part of a whole body of ancient wisdom known to Noah and Abraham, to Zoroaster, to the Chaldean, Egyptian and Greek masters, and to Muslim mystics.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Napoleon invaded Egypt. The French Emperor "held long discussions with the Ulema [religious scholars] of Cairo on Moslem theology, holding out to them the possibility of the whole French Army being converted to Islam."4 The French writer Gourgaud noted in his Memories, "the Emperor reads the Koran in silence. He raises his head and says, as in a dream: 'Muhammad's religion is the most beautiful'." Under Napoleon's patronage, one of his generals embraced Islam and founded the secret Order of the Seekers of Wisdom.

Like Christian Rosenkreuz, the Sicilian magus Alessandro Cagliostro (1743-1795) reputedly travelled to the Moorish lands in pursuit of ancient wisdom. And like Rosenkreuz, Cagliostro - dubbed the "noble traveller" - was seen as the emissary of a powerful secret society. He claimed to have received initiation into Eastern mysteries at the pyramids of Egypt. Cagliostro wore Moorish robes and worked to establish a universal esoteric Order "above all sects and schisms, which would restore the patriarchal religion under which Adam, Seth, Noah, Abraham, etc., were in direct communion with God, and eventually lead mankind back to the state enjoyed before the Fall."5 After spreading his ideas throughout Europe Cagliostro travelled to Rome, where he was arrested by the Catholic Inquisition and died in prison.

Dr. Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875), the influential Black American Rosicrucian author, also followed in the footsteps of the legendary Christian Rosenkreuz. He journeyed over much of the old Moorish lands through Ireland, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Arabia, Palestine and Turkey. His encounters with Sufis, Dervishes and other Muslim mystics undoubtedly influenced much of his writings. In these Randolph refers to the Muslim "Ansairs" (also known as the Nusairi and Alawis), the "Ansairetic Mysteries", and the secrets of "the Syrian mountaineers." From his solitary travels in the Orient, he claimed to have brought back arcane knowledge and practices that revolutionised Western esotericism. Randolph's biographer says his ideas "left their traces on Madame Blavatsky, her Theosophical Society, and many practising occult organizations in Europe and America today."6

The enigmatic teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1872-1949), who travelled the Orient in search of lost wisdom, mentions the mysterious "Aissors" in his book Meetings with Remarkable Men. At least one writer speculates they are the same as the secret community of Islamic esotericists encountered by Randolph. Today, Gurdjieff's students believe his system to be derived from centuries old arcane traditions, whose representatives he met in the Muslim lands of Central Asia. The Russian journalist P.D. Ouspensky, perhaps Gurdjieff's greatest pupil, thought his teacher had derived his ideas from the hidden wisdom found among the Muslim Sufis. The British author and mystic J.G. Bennett attempted to replicate Gurdjieff's journeys in Central Asia. In Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Persia he met Sufi masters and wandering Dervishes.

Early this century another "noble traveller", Noble Drew Ali (born Timothy Drew), the self-taught son of former Black slaves, took a job as a merchant seaman and found himself in Egypt. According to one legend, Noble Drew Ali travelled around the world before the age of twenty-seven, in an effort to discover all he could about the heritage of his people and the tenets of Islam. It is commonly believed he received a mandate from the king of Morocco to instruct Black Americans in Islam. At the Pyramid of Cheops he received initiation and took the Muslim name Sharif [Noble] Abdul Ali; in America he would be known as Noble Drew Ali. On his return to the United States in 1913 he founded the Moorish Science Temple, "to uplift fallen humanity by returning the nationality, divine creed and culture to persons of Moorish descent in the Western Hemisphere."

A charismatic leader, Noble Drew Ali taught that the true origin of Black Americans was 'Asiatic', and Islam their original religion. "The fallen sons and daughters of the Asiatic Nation of North America," he wrote, "need to learn to love instead of hate; and to know of their higher self and lower self." Allah, the one true God, has been known by many names, "but everywhere His is the causeless cause, the rootless root from which all things have grown". Noble Drew Ali acknowledged Prophet Muhammad as "the founder of the reuniting of Islam" and the promised one foretold by Jesus. All prophets came with basically the same message, and Islam was the original divine faith to which Muhammed called people to return.

Noble Drew Ali laid the foundations of the Islamic movement in the United States. He showed that knowledge of one's own identity - one's self, community and religion - is indispensable to a creative life for the individual and community. Noble Drew Ali commented, "When we rely upon others to study the secrets of nature and think and act for us, then we have created a life for ourselves, one which is termed 'Hell.'" Through his message thousands of Black Americans were exposed to Moorish history, culture, religion, as well as the Islamic principles of "Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom, and Justice." But his meteoric success brought disaster. Noble Drew Ali died in 1929, in the words of one commentator, "some say from severe police beatings, others say he was assassinated by his rivals in the movement. In his sincerity and undoubted innocence, Noble Drew Ali met a martyr's end."7

Esoteric Core

[The] conception of every doctrine as having two aspects, one exoteric and the other esoteric, apparently contradictory but in reality complementary, may be taken as a general rule since it corresponds with the nature of things as they are. Even when this distinction is not openly acknowledged, there exists of necessity in any doctrine of any depth at all something which corresponds to these two aspects, illustrated by such well known antitheses as outer and inner, the bone and the marrow, the visible and the occult, the wide road and the narrow, letter and spirit, the rind and the flesh.8

When we examine the life of Jesus, as presented in the New Testament as well as the so called apocryphal Gospels, we discover he made a clear distinction between the inner, hidden or esoteric teachings and outer, external or exoteric ones. There are several places in the Gospels where Jesus publicly gave exoteric teachings to the masses of the people, while privately instructing his trusted disciples in the inner (esoteric) meaning. After the manner of the apostles, the early Christians preached openly to the public the Gospel message, while preserving the esoteric doctrines for those who became initiated disciples.

The distinction between outer doctrines and their higher inner meaning was known to Moses, an initiate of Egyptian wisdom, and the Israelite prophets. The exoteric form of the Mosaic revelation contained laws and commandments supremely suited to the people and conditions of that era. While the esoteric doctrines, explaining the meaning behind the external forms and rituals, were preserved by the real priests and prophets.

By the time of Jesus, the esoteric spiritual side of the Hebrew religion had been corrupted and almost lost. People were enslaved to the "letter of the law," kept in the bondage of ignorance by false teachers, not realising that "the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." Thus the Essenes, being the true Israelite priests and the mystic precursors of the early Christians, concerned themselves with rediscovering the inner meaning of the Mosaic Law.

Within the first four centuries after Christ, the teachings of Jesus underwent the same corruption and loss as those proclaimed by Moses. Christianity emerged as a powerful institution dominated by a clerical hierarchy largely ignorant of the original esoteric truths. The Gospels, like the books of the Old Testament, underwent editing and revision to comply with the exoteric Christian creed. The many Christian Gnostic texts, that spoke of esoteric doctrines, were denounced and confined to the flames.

Messenger of Allah

At the same time that in the West the Church of Rome emerged triumphant, in the East arose a new prophet and Messenger of God. In the ancient land of Arabia, in fulfilment of age old prophecies, Muhammed began to proclaim complete surrender to the One God of all mankind. His message became known as Islam, the last of the great revealed religions. And after the manner of Moses and Jesus, the prophet Muhammed distinguished between the exoteric and esoteric dimensions of religion. Being the last of all the celestial faiths, Islam contained the essential divine truths of all the earlier revelations.

In his youth Muhammed spent time in the desert conducting caravans from Mecca to Syria. Here, according to some, he first encountered seekers looking for the "original religion of Abraham." Later he began the practice of retiring each year to Mount Hira near Mecca for a time of meditation and prayer. During one of these periods he entered a level of higher consciousness and while in a sublime trance state the Archangel Gabriel revealed to him the first chapter of the Holy Quran, the sacred book of Islam and the direct Word of Allah (God).

At first Muhammed confided his experience only to a small group of close associates. Soon, an inner circle or secret school of disciples began to form around him, and in time they publicly proclaimed the exoteric message of surrender to Allah. Prophet Muhammed never claimed to found a new religion. In fact, he always said he was just continuing the primordial tradition that was working long before him. Like Moses and Jesus, Muhammed came in a long line of prophets who from time to time delivered to their people, under divine inspiration, the same revelation of God's nature and of Man's relationship to Him, as had been given to Adam. Muhammed came to reinstate this eternal pristine message that had been obscured by ignorance, idolatry, and used to enslave rather than liberate humanity. From this perspective the Holy Quran teaches the primordial unity of all religions and the common origin of each. It affirms that there is not a nation or people to whom a prophet has not been sent.

The central message of Islam is the declaration of faith (shahada): "There is no god but God [Allah] and Muhammad is the Messenger of God [Allah]." From the esoteric perspective this is also understood as "there is no reality except Reality". The exoteric practice is summed up in the 'Five Pillars of Islam'. These are Faith, Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving and Pilgrimage.

The Holy Quran has both an exoteric (zahir - the outer or apparent) meaning and an esoteric (batin - the inner or secret) meaning. Within Islamic esotericism, as in the original Mosaic and Christian revelations, knowledge is made accessible depending on the integrity and cognitive ability of its recipients, with the consequence of requiring the withholding of information from the uninitiated. This is why there has always been a gradual unveiling or communication of spiritual truths to mankind. What Muslim esotericists call the "wisdom of gradualness" (hikmat at-tadrij).

Spiritual knowledge, states a highly regarded Islamic esoteric text, is like food and light:

Just as a small child needs to be fed gradually, stage by stage, until it reaches adolescence, so that it may not eat something detrimental to its constitution, and just as light is appropriate only to persons with open, healthy and strong eyes, so that a person whose eyes have been shut, or had just emerged from darkness, will be severely dazzled by daylight, in the same way, those who get hold of this Letter should communicate it only to those who are in need of it.

Christian mystics travelled to Arabia seeking a genuine spiritual Master Teacher. In fact, mystics surrounded Muhammed during his life. These Companions, as they are known, he privately instructed in the doctrines of Islamic esotericism. Two of these Companions, the Prophet Muhammed's close friend Abu Bakr and his son-in-law Ali, later inspired their own Orders.

Although Muhammed, as the last of the prophets, was the repository of a complete treasure of precepts, Muslim tradition asserts he publicly declared only some of them, leaving the rest undeclared. This was due either to their inapplicability at the time, or because of the expediency of disseminating them in that particular period of history. It is said even Prophet Muhammed himself mentioned certain secret moments of revelation, saying, "If the Muslims knew of them, they would stone me." He therefore entrusted the undeclared precepts to the Companions and through them to the worthy of succeeding generations so that they would progressively reveal them at appropriate junctures according to their wisdom, whether by inferring the particular from the absolute, or the concrete from the abstract.

After the death of Prophet Muhammed in 632 A.D., the Companions, particularly Abu Bakr, Ali and Salman al-Farisi, continued to preserve the esoteric tradition within the exoteric faith of Islam. Abu Bakr becoming the first Caliph, leader of the Muslim community. However in time, just as Muhammed had warned before his death, the thirst for power and political intrigue soon caused strife and division among the Muslims. The mighty Islamic empire became divided as positions of authority were usurped by individuals bereft of spiritual understanding. Those who seized power and wealth did so in the name of the prophet and the exoteric creed of Islam. The outer creed represented by the law (sharia), the accumulated customs of the Prophet (hadith), and a literal reading of the Quran, emerged as 'orthodox' Islam. Again, exotericism appeared to vanquish esotericism. Many Muslim initiates, custodians of esoteric wisdom, went into hiding or exile. Yet a number of Muslim spiritual teachers, considered by the people to be saints, did not conceal the fact they had been initiated by members of a school or brotherhood (tariqah) founded by one of the Companions.

The Sufis

Our cause is the truth of truth. It is the exoteric, the esoteric of the exoteric and the esoteric of the esoteric. It is the secret of the secret; it is the secret of that which remains wrapped in secret.
- Hadith of the Sixth Imam

At the end of the eighth century and the beginning of the ninth century, many Muslims who followed the spiritual path openly declared their connection with Islamic esotericism. They divulged truths based on spiritual experience that, because of their outward appearance, brought on them the condemnation of orthodox Islamic jurists and theologians. Some were imprisoned, flogged, and even killed. Historically, the practitioners of esotericism were associated with the descendants of the family of Prophet Muhammed. Ali, Muhammed's son-in-law, being universally regarded as the fountainhead of esoteric knowledge. The relationship between the Prophet Muhammed and Ali, symbolic of the exoteric form and the esoteric core of divine religion. This is similar to the Christian Gnostic idea of the relationship between Jesus, representing the exoteric, and the beloved disciple John to whom the esoteric doctrine was divulged.

Over time, from this Islamic esoteric tradition, eventually emerged distinct Muslim groups such as the Fatimids, Ismailis, Nusairi [Alawis], etc. Certain mystical brotherhoods and Orders formed within Muslim communities and became known as Sufis, the mystics or esotericists. It is commonly thought the word Sufi comes from the Arabic word suf ('wool'); the rough woollen clothing worn by early ascetics to demonstrate their detachment from the world.

The Sufi appeal and ".strength lay in the satisfaction which it gave to the religious instincts of the people, instincts which were to some extent chilled and starved by the abstract and impersonal teachings of the orthodox and found relief in the more directly personal and emotional religious approach of the Sufis."9 Clearly, the growth of Sufism was in response to the legalism of orthodox Islamic exoteric practice and the dry intellectualism of the mainstream Muslim thinkers.

The Sufi, like all genuine mystics, aims for a glimpse of the Eternal while still trapped by life in this world. To achieve such a personal encounter with their Divine Beloved, "the Sufis laid out the 'path' (tariqah) that would lead to gnosis (marifah) or mystic knowledge of the Lord. The 'path' of ascension to divine union with God passes through stages known commonly as 'stations' or 'states': the last stage is that of fana, or passing away in God, which is the ultimate desire of a successful mystic. The Sufi at this point ceases to be aware of his physical identity even though he continues to exist as an individual."10

Although the majority of Sufi Orders meticulously observe the Islamic law (Sharia), they believe it to be only the outer clothing or external shell protecting the core, the esoteric truth. The Holy Quran calls those who know the essence of things "the possessors of the kernels." The Sufis liken esoteric wisdom to a "kernel" hidden within a shell. Exoteric Islam, experienced as a traditional way of life, creates the environment, the culture, the community, and necessary psychological orientation, from which certain individuals are called to initiation into esotericism. The authentic gnostic and mystic is always a minority when compared to the great mass of humanity who are fully satisfied with exoteric religion.

The Sufi schools and brotherhoods are renowned for propagating Islam throughout the world. Their piety, deep spirituality and tolerance, enabled the Sufis to attract a large following. As one author says:

The brotherhoods rendered their incalculable, monumental services to Islam in three different ways: they prevented Islam from becoming a cold and formal doctrine, keeping it alive as an intimate, compassionate faith; they were mainly responsible for spreading the faith in east Asia and sub-Saharan Africa; and they were among the foremost leaders in Islam's military and political battles against the encroaching power of the Christian West.11

By the tenth century, descendants of the Prophet Muhammed through his daughter Fatimah, and her husband Ali, established the Fatimid empire over a large part of North Africa. Many Muslims saw this as a fulfilment of a prediction attributed to the Prophet that a time would come in which "the Sun [of Islam] would rise in the West." Prior to accepting Islam, North Africa had been home to a number of Gnostic communities. One historian speculates the Fatimid's esoteric doctrines were widely received by the North African tribes "due to the fact that [they were called] to a contemporary version of their old beliefs, now clothed in the form of the newly dominant religion."12 The dynasty's enemies even claimed the Fatimids were the philosophical descendants of Bardesane, the renowned Gnostic Christian Master Teacher.

The Fatimids ushered in a 'golden age' of Islam. They established the city of Cairo in Egypt, calling it: "The Victorious City of the Exalter of the Divine Religion". From the new capital the empire grew to include Palestine. The public devotions of the Fatimids differed very little from the orthodox Muslims. Esoteric teachings being restricted to those of the community able to receive them. A proper understanding of their books required special education and years of training. At Cairo the Fatimids established the Grand House of Wisdom (Darul Hikmet) for the training of missionaries (dais) skilled in the propagation of Islamic esoteric philosophy.

Students came from all over the Orient to the House of Wisdom for instruction and initiation. Twice a week, every Monday and Wednesday, the Grand Prior convened meetings, which were frequented by adepts dressed in white. These gatherings were named 'philosophical conferences' (Majalis-al-Hikmet). The Fatimid Caliph was also the Grand Master of the House of Wisdom. One of the students who attended was Hasan Sabbah. On return to his native Persia, he formed the so called 'Assassins' with headquarters at the mountain monastery-fortress of Alamut.

From North Africa the Fatimid rulers despatched missionaries (dais) throughout the known world. Under cover they even infiltrated Christian Europe. Accomplished in the esoteric doctrine, the dais could use any outer form - be it artistic, scientific, religious or secular - to impart universal and perennial truths. Even poetry, for which the Sufis are renowned, could be used to transfer spiritual insights from one culture or religion to another. Their use of allegory and cipher amounted to a secret language, the universal language of initiates. Together with wandering Sufis, they transmitted ancient wisdom to Europe. A well-known ninth century Celtic cross bearing the Islamic Arabic inscription Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim ("In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful), suggests that the Celts were in close contact with North African Moorish initiates. The Fatimids also maintained communication with Persia, Turkestan and India through the secret networks of the dais.

So influential was the Fatimid House of Wisdom that, centuries later, European Freemasons copied its structure. In A Short History of the Saracens, the Muslim historian Ameer Ali says: "the account of the different degrees of initiation adopted in the [House of Wisdom] forms an invaluable record.In fact, the [House of Wisdom] at Cairo became the model of all the [Freemasonic] Lodges created in Christendom". By the time of the Fatimid empire's demise in the twelfth century it was famous for its tolerance, prosperity, love of knowledge and great cultural achievements. The Fatimids founded the renowned al-Azhar University, today the most venerable orthodox institution in the Muslim world.

The spectacular rise of the Fatimids in North Africa, together with the influence of their underground networks, provoked the largely orthodox Abbasid rulers in Mesopotamia to launch a campaign against 'heresy'. With the backing of the hyper-orthodox scholars and the legalists of exoteric religion, Mansur al-Hallaj, the revered Muslim esotericist and Sufi saint, was condemned to death. Hallaj had penetrated the outer shell that is exoteric Islam, to reveal the inner core. He realised illumination, fana, or what the Sufi's know as 'death to one's self' and 'passing away in the Divine Beloved,' exclaiming:

I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is.
We are two spirits dwelling in one body.
When thou seest me thou seest Him,
And when thou seest Him, thou seest us both.

Viewed from the perspective of mainstream Islamic law, such a declaration is indeed shocking and forbidden. However, understood esoterically it is nothing less than the sentiment of an illumined mystic. Hallaj further offended the legalists with such statements as:

To claim to know Him is ignorance, to persist in serving Him is disrespectful, to forbid yourself to struggle with him is folly, to allow yourself to be misled by his peace is stupid, to discourse on his attributes is to lose the way.

The public execution of Hallaj in Baghdad (922 AD) attracted large and sympathetic crowds. He was first scourged, gibbeted, and finally decapitated. As he died, he prayed for mercy for his executioners. Years after his murder he was openly hailed by Sufis, dissident Muslims, and even some orthodox writers, as a martyr of exoteric incomprehension.

For many years Hallaj had travelled widely in Persia, India and as far as the borders of China. This has led some scholars to speculate that Hallaj presided over a secret network of missionaries and wandering Sufis.

Three decades after Mansour al-Hallaj stood upon the gallows in Baghdad, a secret society emerged in the Iraqi city of Basra. Like the Fatimids, the group, known as the Brethren of Purity (Ikwan as-Safa), dedicated themselves to the pursuit of science as well as political action. They published a veritable encyclopedia of existing knowledge. Their works covered such subjects as philosophy, theology, astrology, metaphysics, cosmology, and the natural sciences, including botany and zoology. The brotherhood recognised truth wherever found, accepting the wisdom in other religions. A seeker of truth must "shun no science, scorn no book, nor cling fanatically to a single creed." They attempted to compile a common doctrine of Islamic esotericism beginning with self-knowledge and the emancipation of the soul from materialism leading to a return to God. The first letter of the brotherhood restated the Sufi axiom: "He who knows himself, knows his Lord". Condemned as 'heretical' and burnt by the authorities, their writings enjoyed a wide influence, even reaching Europe in the Middle Ages.

Knowledge Is Power

Traditional esotericism is at one and the same time doctrine and practice. It implies for the whole of the being, body, soul and spirit, a fundamentally different way of existence.13

Running through all Western culture are the threads of an 'underground' Primordial Tradition. In our current Dark Age of banality and materialism this great spiritual tradition is well concealed. That which in the West most often tries to pass itself off as 'secret', 'occult', or 'esoteric' knowledge is at best vain foolishness, at worst a dangerous counterfeit, a deadly parody of the universal supreme Truth. Nevertheless all things have their reason for being. Thus, as James Webb observed:

..if a newcomer to the vast quantity of occult literature begins browsing at random, puzzlement and impatience will soon be his lot; for he will find jumbled together the droppings of all cultures, and occasional fragments of philosophy perhaps profound but almost certainly subversive to right living in the society in which he finds himself. The occult is rejected knowledge: that is, an Underground whose basic unity is that of Opposition to an establishment of Powers That Are.14

For every fragment of truth there is a veritable cloud of confusion, ignorant speculation and falsity. In the present age of strife, this confusion, ignorance and falsehood is important because it permits the genuine Ancient Secret Tradition to remain hidden and protected.

On the eve of the twenty first century we do not need ever more 'new truths' but a conception that allows a rediscovery of that Primordial Revelation forgotten or parodied by the ignorant. For, as the Sufis say, "everything that comes from the Eternal One yearns to return to Him."

Footnotes

1. 01 Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment
2. 02 James Webb, The Occult Underground
3. 03 Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages
4. 04 Napoleon and the Awakening of Europe
5. 05 Joscelyn Godwin, Ibid
6. 06 John P. Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph A Nineteenth-Century Black American     Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician
7. 07 Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift, Essays on the Margins of Islam
8. 08 Luc Benoist, The Esoteric Path
9. 09 H.A.R. Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam
10. 10 Caesar E. Farah, Islam
11. 11 G.H. Jansen, Militant Islam
12. 12 Cyril Glasse, The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam
13. 13 R. Abellio, The End of Esotericism
14. 14 James Webb, Ibid

The above article appeared in
New Dawn No. 48 (July-August 1998)

© Copyright New Dawn Magazine, http://www.newdawnmagazine.com . Permission to re-send, post and place on web sites for non-commercial purposes, and if shown only in its entirety with no changes or additions. This notice must accompany all re-posting.

1/24/02 Acharya S acharya_s3@yahoo.com

EXTREME ISLAM Anti-American Propaganda of Muslim Fundamentalism Edited by Adam Parfrey

Reviewed by Acharya S

"Extreme Islam" is an important book, particularly in consideration of the immense wave of propaganda being promulgated in the Western world depicting Islam as a "peaceful religion." As should have been obvious to anyone who has been alive for more than a couple of decades, Islam is not a "peaceful religion" but has been the cause of violence and agitation for centuries, now taking its bloody show on the global road. Despite the denials and cries of "misinterpretation," the main Islamic holy texts, including the Koran, constantly call for the death and destruction of the "infidel," calls that have been heeded for hundreds of years. Islam's history, in fact, is full of violence, which makes the current nonsense regarding "peacefulness" that much more disingenuous and injudicious. It is with tremendous peril that the "free world" ignores the reality, which is that Islam is an ideology that exhorts domination over, or death of, "infidels," a moniker that includes anyone not willing to submit to one of the most oppressive and brutal dogmas ever developed by the human mind.

It is further apparent that Americans suffer from short memories and amnesia, evidently utterly forgetting that the rash of hijackings which took place in the 70's in the U.S. were committed by Islamic terrorists. In reality, those who are mindlessly buying into the "peaceful religion" propaganda must completely overlook the constant terror worldwide most definitely committed in the name of Allah and Islam, including the hijacking of the Achille Lauro, etc.; the suicide bombings in many places; fatwas such as the call for the death of Salman Rushdie; the actual murders of numerous writers, publishers and intellectuals; the abysmal treatment of women; or any number of aggressive acts. Thankfully, not all Americans and non-Muslims are so eager to believe the current disinformation concerning the nature of Islam.

Fortunately, editor and publisher Adam Parfrey does not shirk from facing this reality but seeks to expose the true nature of Islam in its "full glory." Using the words of fundamentalist Muslims themselves, "Extreme Islam" demonstrates clearly that terrorist acts are not those of a "deranged few" who are sullying the good name of Islam but, rather, fall squarely within Islam's main tenets. With essays and speeches from some of the leading Muslims, includin