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ISLAM Page III
Iran: Some Angles on the Islamic Revolution Islamic Dilemma and the Sufi Message Censored by conservative Catholic newspaper
Iran:Some Angles on the Islamic RevolutionIvor Benson An exploration of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and its meaning for the rest of the world can begin with three wide-ranging generalizations:
In the wake of the Salman Rushdie affair, and ongoing terrorism threats against aviation and other vulnerable points, Iran and its farflung adherents remain persistently in the world's eye. An exploration of the Islamic Revolution in Iran conveys two great truths with vast implications: religion can still be a more potent mobilizer of mass political action than can secular ideologies, and the longtime hegemony of Western social models has ended. The Iranian Revolution thus emerges as one of the most important events in modern history, on a par with the watershed French and Russian revolutions. There are innumerable reasons for believing that the emergence of highly dynamic Islamic fundamentalism in Iran is a development of incalculable worldwide consequence. The Center for International Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had this comment:
Dr. Algar, professor of Persian and Islamic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, observes:
Dr. Kalim Siddiqui, director of the Muslim Institute, London, offers this assessment:
In 1979 the mullahs in Iran overthrew the Persian monarchy, one of the oldest in the world, while at the height of its power, replacing it with an Islamic republic dedicated to the implementation of the Sharia, a law of private and public conduct prescribed in the Koran. Since then no day has passed without news involving Islam: an ongoing revolution in Afghanistan, troubles in several Soviet republics with Islamic majorities or minorities, endless conflict in Kashmir, terrorism all over Europe traced to Islamic sources in Algeria, to name a few. Writes Amir Taheri, a former newspaper editor in Teheran:
Imperialism and ColonialismIn Iran, more clearly perhaps than elsewhere, it has been possible for the observer to isolate and study separately the major influences which have been at work in dramatically awakening an Eastern religion which long was thought to be in slow decay. In particular, we can see, step by step, how a purely religious set of ideas and values was able to inspire enough public support to topple a powerful regime backed by a great army and with virtually unlimited foreign support. Three major factors need to be explored:
About the broad putlines of the history of Iran during the last 150 years there can be no doubt. Foreign powers have heavily influenced the country's international affairs to suit their own economic and strategic interests, with scant regard for the opinions and interests of the citizenry. Until 1945 the foreign powers dominating Iran were mainly Russia and Britain. Russia was interested in territorial expansion, Britain in cornering the Iranian market for British trade, in securing the continental land bridge to India and later, of course, in controlling Iran's oil resources. The Iranians continued throughout this period to demonstrate their hostility to foreign intrusion, with the clergy (ulama) invariably playing a leading role. From 1952 the British were replaced by the Americans working in close alliance with the Israelis, drawing the Shah and the masses mobilized by the ulama into the final bitter and violent struggle. This culminated in the 1979 overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza, last of the Pahlavi dynasty which had been installed by the British shortly after the end of World War I. Since what looked like a combination of America and Israel was actually something very much bigger and more complex, it is the motives and actions of the intrusive foreign powers that we need to examine before we can hope to understand what happened in Iran. Indeed, we find that what these powers had been doing in Iran was only another example of what they and other European intersts had been up to during the same period in many other parts of the world, all manifestations of the phenomena known as imperialism and colonialism. The subject was explored at depth and most comprehensively at the turn of the century by a prominent British journalist and author, J.A. Hobson, whose book Imperialism: A Study deserves new attention. A book that was meant to be a warning to the British people was turned to good account by Lenin in 1916, when he was preparing his own thesis on capitalism: "I made use of the principal English work on imperialism, J.A. Hobson's book, with all the care that, in my opinion, this work deserves." [5] Writes Hobson in a prefatory note:
The social pathology of which Hobson writes is the debasement of politics, especially the politics of nationalism, by what he calls "Special interests," financial in character, which promote policies inconsistent with the interests of the community. In other words, the peoples of the colonizing and imperialist countries of Europe were the victims rather than the beneficiaries of aggressively acquisitive policies conducted all over the world in their name. For a definition of nation, Hobson quotes the philosopher John Stuart Mill:
It is a debasement of this genuine nationalism by attempts to overflow its natural banks and absorb the near or distant territory of reluctanct and unassimilable people, says Hobson, that marks the passage from nationalism to a spurious colonialism on the one hand and imperialism on the other. Hobson pinpoints the factor of illegitimacy in politics which was to prove so destructive of the interests of the British people and cause so much conflict and dislocation around the world; he asks:
He quotes Sir Thomas More:
Conspiracies of "the few" seeking their advantage at the expense of the community as a whole have always, of course, been endemic in human society; but very different were the usurpations of "the few" in the last century, which drew many of the nations of Europe into an insane rivalry for conquest and possession in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. Sectional interests in society -- in this case big business and high finance -- like a cancer in the human body, prosper while society as a whole suffers. This was something Hobson could see with perfect clarity at the turn of the century:
Hobson exposes as almost wholly illusory the notion that the driving force of the new imperialism was an eagerness to find new markets for the products of Europe's burgeoning industries. In Britain, he remarks, the manufacturing and trading classes made little out of the new markets, paying, if they only knew it, in taxation more than they got out of them in trade, but it was quite otherwise with the investor. In other words, the driving force of the new imperialism was primarily financial and not broadly economic. Here is how Hobson saw it all before the turn of the century, while Britain was involved in a war in South Africa that was to signalize the beginning of the end of the British Empire:
What happened to any country which contracted a debt and was unable to gurarantee payment of the interest was demonstrated again and again in many parts of the so-called undeveloped world - for what other reason did France invade and attempt to conquer Mexico? More frequently the insufficient guarantee of an international loan gave rise to some other form of interference in the internal affairs of the debtor nation. We see an example of this in Egypt, which became for all practical purposes a province of Britain and where a bloody suppression of popular revolt had the support of enormous British national fervor. Tunis likewise became a dependency of France for no other reason than the securing of loans granted to that country. Perhaps the greatest sufferer of all was China, where all the imperialist nations established footholds, complete with extra-territorial rights which they were ready at all times to defend with armed might. But how could the people of Europe, especially their educated classes, including even their churchmen, allow all this to happen? How did this imperialism escape genera] recognition for the narrow and sordid thing it was? Each nation would accuse its rivals of hypocrisy in masking greedy, aggressive and destructive behavior with pretensions of altruism, but all were permitted by these educated classes to be equally guilty. Church and Big BusinessThere always existed in all the countries of Europe a proportion of people with a genuine desire to spread Christianity among the heathen and to diminish the cruelty and suffering thought to prevail among them. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the greedy and aggressive forces that directed imperialism would make good use of such disinterested movements, some of which had worked abroad -the Catholics in China and Ethiopia, for example-long before the birth of imperialism. Writes Hobson:
So, too, Leopold, King of the Belgians, when taking possession of the Congo with all its natural resources, was able to proclaim:
Since most of the educated classes in Europe who allied themselves with imperialism were nominally Christian, and since the church itself was an imperial component of the alliance, there can be no disguising the fact that imperialism, which helped to precipitate an age of conflict unprecedented in recorded history, was as much nominally Christian in character as it was financial. The use of the word Christian in this context, however, must be qualified with the reminder that the missionizing impulse was animated by the dynamic of an essentially power-oriented church, an institution with a strong appetite for expansion and growth, both in terms of adherents and of material advantage. The dual character of the church nowhere was more clearly epitomized than in Winston Churchill's account of the religious service at Khartoum immediately after the defeat of the Mahdi's forces, which had sought to overthrow British hegemony in Sudan:
Churchill omitted the final touch: the deliberate shooting of the wounded crawlers. Hobson saw this Janus-headed imperialism as aseeking to float Christianity upon an ocean of profitable business," a process which excited in the baffled Chinese a fanatical detestation of the Foreign devils." Wrote an educated Chinese:
The incongruity of so vast an exercise of cunning and force in the service of a cause "whose kingdom is not of this world" should need no emphasis. However, the hostile logic of a century and a half of imperialism is self-evident: those who offered any obstruction to what in the West was generally regarded as progress were held to "fully deserve" the punishment they got, however severe. Since it is supposedly one of the main purposes of religion to help people distinguish between right and wrong, or good and evil; since a century and a half of aggressive imperialism would have been impossible without the compliance and complicity of the Christian churches; since it has always been one of the functions of the intelligence, informed by religious insights, to restrain and regulate the appetite for acquisition and power -- it would seem that there was something radically faulty about Christianity as preached and practised during those decades of rampaging rival national imperialisms. Iran's Mullahs Show Their PowerForeign intrusion and interference during the century and a half before the revolution were experienced by the Iranians as a continuous unfolding process. But, for the purpose of in depth analysis, this needs to be considered under two headings representing the periods before and after World War II. On the one side of this divide, we find separate national imperialisms, mainly British and Russian, and on the other a consolidated global imperialism wearing the outward appearance of an alliance of America and Israel. However, the pattern for both periods-that of mounting conflict between the foreign interest and Iran's religious class as mobilizer of mass political action-was set quite clearly in 1892. This was a confrontation triggered by the action of the shah in selling to a British company a monopoly for the cultivation and marketing of tobacco. The leading mullah of the day, Mirza Hassan Shirazi, promptly issued an order prohibiting the use of tobacco. Not only was this order instantly obeyed -- even, it is said, by the ladies of the royal household -- but angry crowds took to the streets. Appalled by this show of strength, the shah backed down, cancelled the contract and paid compensation to the British company. The message was clear: there could be no security for the foreign interests and no "progress" of the kind they offered unless the power of the religious class could be broken. It was, therefore, with the tacit approval of the British and the Russians that the shah in 1905 yielded to revolutionary demands for representative government of the kind recently introduced in Russia, hoping no doubt that party politics could be used to undermine the power of the mullahs. A parliament (Majlis) was set up, and in 1906 Shah Musal Firudin became, nominally at least, a constitutional monarch. However, he died the same year. The mullahs who had given their support to the demands for constitutional reform were not deceived by the rubber- stamp Majlis that emerged, and the agitation continued, involving both religious and secular elements. At the height of this trouble, the British and Russians, without consulting the Persian government, announced that they had divided the country into two spheres of influence so as to counter any possible German threat to their interests. The Russians helped the new shah, Mohammad Ali, to suppress the revolution, occupying Tabriz in the process. A number of mullahs were hanged and the shrine of Imam Reza at Mashad, one of Iran's most famous places of pilgrimage, was shelled. Mohammad Ali was then deposed by the majlis and replaced by a regency which continued until Ali's son Sultan Achmad reached the age of 18 and was crowned in 1914-marking the commencement of a period of almost total national disintegration, as the whole country became a stamping-ground for foreign powers. The British Install a New DynastyBrushing aside the young shah's declaration of neutrality at the outbreak of the 1914-18 war, British, Russian and Turkish forces invaded the country, but the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 eliminated the main patron of the Qajar dynasty. By 1919 Persia had no effective central government and separatist movements were in power in the provinces of Khuzistan, Gilan and Khorasan. Eventually the only coherent force in the country was a Persian Cossack division which, after fighting against the Bolsheviks, had retreated through the British lines. Its leader, Brigadier Reza Khan, restored some semblance of order in Teheran and became the strongman in national politics. After the Persian government signed a treaty with the Soviet government, restoring relations with Russia, Reza Khan was encouraged by the British to stage a putsch. Shah Sultan Achmad was deposed and by 1925 the Cossack officer had been raised to the throne as shahanshah (king of kings), assuming the dynastic name Pahlavi. In fairness to Shah Reza Khan, it should be noted that, unlike many of his predecessors, it was not in his nature to be a mere puppet of the foreign powers. On the contrary, he imagined himself destined to be the savior of his country and defender of its national independence, and he therefore patiently cultivated the fiction that he was an actual descendant of Iran's ancient kings. With Kemal Ataturk, Turkey's great modernizer, as his model, he was convinced that the religious classes were the only real obstacle to progress; and he proceeded with the ruthlessness of a Cossack soldier to try to destroy their power. It was, therefore, mainly for the purpose of strengthening his own position against the mullahs that he sought and used the support of the foreign powers, playing one off against the others wherever possible. The effect was a transformation of the traditional monarchy, always tyrannical but inefficient, into a modern dictatorship armed with all the expertise and appurtenances of modern totalitarianism, including a ubiquitous secret police. Writes Professor Hamid Algar:
Early in the 1930s the shah sought to protect Iran from both the British and the Soviet Union by entering into an alliance with Germany; and by 1940 thousands of Germans were working in Iran and hundreds of Iranians were studying in German universities and technical colleges. This short-lived alliance was to prove the shah's undoing. In 1941, as the German forces were advancing deep into Russia, the British and their Soviet allies called on him to expel all the Germans and to permit the transit of supplies and reinforcements to the Russian front. When he refused to comply, the Allied forces invaded Iran and the shah's 120,000-strong army vanished like "snow in summer." Britain carried out a surprise attack on the Iranian navy at Khorramshahr, destroying all the ships and killing many of those on board. Iran was divided into two zones of military occupation and the British, who had appointed Reza Khan as shah, now sent him into exile in South Africa, where he died three years later. As his son, Mohammad Reza, was to remark later in his memoirs: "It was deemed appropriate by the Allies that I should succeed my father."
Any expectations which the British and the Soviets may have had about their future role in Iran were to be disappointed, for in power-political terms World War II was to inaugurate an entirely new game in which the aims and ambitions of separate nations, like Britain and the Soviet Union, were to be of diminishing consequence. Unnoticed, except by a few percipient observers, a new global imperium had come into existence, geographically centered in the United States, but not specifically American. The different nations would maintain their embassies and continue to be involved in many ways, but their separate power to influence events in Iran would henceforth be only marginal. While World War II was still in progress, the Soviets worked quite openly for the creation of independent republics in the northern province of Azerbaijan and Kurdistan, hoping to be able to incorporate these later into the USSR. The British also were frantically busy trying to create conditions favorable to their future interests; they set up and financed the Khuzistan Wellbeing Party in the hope of being able to detach this oil-rich region when Iran fell apart, as expected, after the war. The Soviets organized the Communist Tudeh Party, and the British set about securing the allegiance of various dissident groups like the Bakhtiari chiefs and certain Anglophile mullahs and powerful families. But no resistance could be offered to the United States, now by far the world's most powerful nation-even without the atom bomb. Quietly, under pressure from Washington, London and Moscow signed a treaty with Iran under which all their forces would be withdrawn within six months of the war. In 1943 the United States set up its Persian Gulf Command and the American presence became increasingly conspicuous. British and Soviets duly withdrew their forces in 1946, the nascent republics in the north were crushed, and the Tudeh Party was pushed into the background of public affairs. Developments continued according to program, but it was a program that remained for most people a great mystery. The New ImperialismIt is the revolutionary change in the nature and character of imperialism which now calls for a more detailed explanation. It rather looked as if a British imperialism which had prevailed in Iran without interruption since the end of World War I was supplanted after the end of World War II by an American one - or, rather, by one consisting of an alliance of America and Israel. Indeed, from quite early in the 1950s an American-Israeli presence was the dominating foreign influence in Iran; and it was almost exclusively against the Americans that the hostility of the mullahs and the masses was directed, culminating in the invasion of the US embassy and the subsequent hostage drama. The reality, however, was very different, for what looked so like an America-Israeli alliance was in fact only the picture presented by an altogether different imperialism which had come into existence, displacing and replacing all the separate national imperialisms. What began quite early in the present century, and proceeded at a much accelerated pace after the end of World War II, was the progressive dismantling of all the separate national imperialisms, including the American, and their absorption into something unprecedented in recorded history -- a global financial imperialism. Instead of the moral illegitimacy, or political pathology, of parasitical conspiracies of "special interests" inside the different Western societies, now a vast cosmopolitan parasitism of "special interests" operated on a global basis and with ends far more ambitious: nothing less than a world economic and political imperium. Nationalist imperialisms were thus subsumed in a single international imperialism in the same way as we have seen very large commercial, industrial and financial enterprises swallowed and ingested into the concentrated ownership and control of vastly bigger, mainly financial conglomerates. The overthrow of the tsarist regime in Russia in 1917, the dispossession of all the European powers of their colonial empires, the setting up of the United Nations as a world government-in-waiting, and much else, were all part of a power-concentrating process which began last century and continues to this day. This change in the character of imperialism was one of the consequences of a radical change in the realm of high finance, which can briefly be explained as follows. For a long time after the beginning of the modern industrial era, finance-capital (not to be confused with private enterprise capital) existed almost entirely in national concentrations: there was a British finance-capitalism, nominally answerable to a British government, which was in turn nominally answerable to an electorate; a German finance-capitalism, a French one, a Dutch, and so on, each joined to a national government and each government nominally answerable to a national electorate. These nations were, in fact, plutocracies -- each one an instance of what Hobson calls "social pathology," capable of maintaining themselves in power with a public opinion not sought and consulted, as before, but created as required, by news-media propaganda, patronage and other rewards of the business world. Money had become the measure of all things, with a ruling elite drawn less from the land and more and more from the factory and the counting-house. Last century and well into the 20th, these national concentrations of financial power were in vigorous competition, a major example of this being the scramble for colonies and markets in the so-called underdeveloped world. What then happened was that the many national vortices of financial power were drawn into a global vortex of financial power. There can be no doubt that a major factor in bringing about this change in the realm of high finance was the long-continued existence within the different nations of Europe of Jewish banking families or dynasties which had always specialized in transnational operations. [15] The story of how these financial dynasties consolidated their power on an international basis is explained at some length by Prof. Carroll Quigley in his 1300-page "History of the World in Our Time," Tragedy and Hope. It all began with what Quigley called "the third stage in the development of capitalism ... of overwhelming significance in the history of the 20th century, and its ramifications and influences subterranean and even occult." He adds:
The truly revolutionary change was to occur in the 1930s, when the control of this international financial system passed out of the hands of those who had created it -- the likes of J.P. Morgan in America and Montagu Norman in Britain -- into the hands of a cosmopolitan elite no longer "high Episcopalian, Anglophile, and European-culture-conscious." The shift occurred at all levels, says Dr. Quigley, and was evident in the decline of J.P. Morgan, which had hitherto dominated Wall Street. [17] Thus it can be said that much of what was to happen in Iran and in many other parts of the world after the end of World War II had its parallel in the United States, where the great American pioneering families found themselves without the power to control their own universities, and where their national newspaper, the New York Herald-Tribune, fell into irreversible decline and died, like a ring-barked forest giant. The use of words like America and American in any discussion of world politics can thus be grossly misleading unless it is clearly understood that "American power" has ceased to be essentially American. The dismantling of an essentially British oil empire in Iran and its reorganization on an international basis (as was done with Belgium's copper empire in the Congo in 1960) was, therefore, to be expected -- having much the same effect as that produced by "decolonization" in so many other parts of the world. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) had been exploiting the oil fields in Khuzistan since 1901, and the demarcation of those fields, covering an area of 15,000 square miles, has been laid down in a 1933 agreement. This giant company, writes Vincent Monteil, trained British subjects to take an interest in Iran's internal affairs, and "took pleasure in appointing the number of votes inthe 'free' elections." In return -- to take only one year as an example -- AIOC paid Iran royalties or rent of £10 million in 1949, compared with £28 million paid in tax on profit alone to the British treasury. [18] In 1950, shortly after the shah's visit to the United States, where he had talks with President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the Americans began to show great interest in the Iranian oil industry. A number of oil experts, businessmen and technicians visited Iran, and began to lay the powder-train for a political explosion which was to take place less than 12 months later; they did this by explaining how much more generously they treated their partners in Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and elsewhere. A fiery atmosphere was thus created as AIOC began negotiating for a further renewal of its contract. In the wildly confusing situation that ensued, the weight of probability suggests that it was the British who were instrumental in persuading the shah to appoint the army chief-of-staff, Ali Razmara, as prime minister, charged with the task of handling these negotiations. However, the British were soon conducting a furious campaign of character-assassination against Razmara, while the Americans sought to bolster his regime with aid and by upgrading their embassy to first class. This little drama within a drama ended suddenly, when Razmara was assassinated, supposedly as a warning to any politician who might frustrate the growing demand for nationalization of the oil industry. The killing was done by the Fedayen of Islam (Martyrs for Islam), but is was generally believed at the time that orders for it had come from the British by way of one of their former employees. But why? A draft bill for a renewal of the agreement with AIOC, introduced by Gen. Razmara, was defeated and a few weeks later another bill introduced by Dr. Mohammad Mussadeq, nationalizing the oil industry, was passed. Mussadeq was appointed prime minister and Iran became involved in a great struggle with the British at the World Court and also at the United Nations. A great British company with many years of experience in Iran evidently had no intention of surrendering without a struggle. Writes Amir Taheri: "That the United States wanted Mussadeq to succeed was demonstrated by the increase in American aid from $500,000 in 1950 to nearly $24 million two years later." [19] However, if the Iranians expected the Americans to help them to re-establish the oil industry on a national basis they were soon to be disappointed, for American policy was to be dictated by considerations of a kind wholly inaccessible to the scrutiny of ordinary politicians and journalists. Whether, therefore, it was the British or the Americans who were responsible for the small army revolt which dislodged Mussadeq has continued to this day to be a debatable question in Iran. As a sincere nationalist politician enjoying much support from the religious class, himself being a practising Muslim, Mussadeq had.performed the task required of him and had now to be removed. The Americans, therefore, joined willingly enough in the world-wide champaign, engineered by the British, to make it impossible for the Iranians to make a go of their nationalized oil industry. In the ensuing turmoil the shah hurriedly left the country, and as quickly returned after order had been established by the army. President Truman's 'Point 4' PlanThe Iranians may find a key to the riddle of one of the most baffling periods in their much-troubled history in something that had happened in Washington a couple of years earlier (1949). This was a speech by Mr. Truman in Congress inaugurating his first full term as President, in which he unveiled a grandiose plan to "save the world from Communism" (so soon after America had saved the Soviet Union from Hitler!). This plan proclaimed a "bold new program for underdeveloped areas," a program "to greatly increase the industrial activity in other nations" and "to raise substantially their standards of living." The executors and agents of this plan, which came to be known as "Point 4" and Agency for International Development" or AID, were soon afterwards pressing American asssistance and advice on all the so-called "underdeveloped" countries, including Iran. What President Truman had presented, as we now can see more clearly, was the prefiguration of a new global financial imperialism whose main purpose it would be to dismantle and dislodge all the national economic imperialisms of the preceding century and a half. A Washington report at the time said that American officials Concerned with President Truman's "Point 4" were working to the principle of "a new type of benevolent imperialism designed to spread prosperity without exacerbating political nationalism." In other words, if the undertaking went through, "American nationals will serve on the governmental as well as the technical level in the politically independent countries concerned." Although "a startling innovation" in Asia and Africa, this was to be regarded "only as an extension of a system already in operation in Latin America." [20] That all sounded benevolent enough, but how was it to be prevented from becoming a form of American political hegemony? After former London Times foreign correspondent Douglas Reed had carefully digested President Truman's speech and the explanatory literature that accompanied it, he had a strong feeling that he had read it all before somewhere. And so he had: as he turned over the pages of a book he had read a couple of years earlier, there it was. The book was Teheran, Our Path in War and Peace. Its author: Earl Browder, leader of the Communist Party in America. Browder's words:
The Communist leader was referring to Africa in particular, but he went on:
Significantly, it was a capitalist America and not a Communist Soviet Union which the Communist Party boss called on to undertake this ambitious program of financial and economic imperialism. Douglas Reed could only marvel:
Indeed. And to the same hidden source must be traced the reality of American state policy during and after the last war, as distinct from policy as publicly stated, the promotion of two causes that were never declared but simply came to pass: the advance of the Red Army to the center of Europe and to the Pacific coast of Asia, and the continuous pouring of billions of financial aid every year into the then-new state of Israel. That should help to explain a phenomenon which seems to have baffled Amir Taheri and other observers. Writes Taheri:
Grand Design and Counter-RevolutionThe Ayatollah Khomeini's angry young men who seized the American embassy after the revolution did not fail to notice that many of the most telling policy directives from the State Department in Washington were wholly out of register with reports and interpretations from the men on the spot, the poor wretches who afterwards had to bear the full brunt of passionate Iranian animosity. Members of the American embassy in Teheran, says Taheri, were gradually led to understand that they should not report what they saw but, rather, should see what Washington wanted them to report. What this meant was that a grand strategy and system of tactics were being implemented to which only a tiny minority of policy-makers at the top were privy, creating an environment in which deeply clandestine purposes were heavily masked with an ostentation of innocent and benevolent intentions. The effect was an utterly baffling melange of contradictory utterances and actions. As Taheri put it:
This hell's kitchen of secrecy and intrigue outside Iran had its equivalent inside the country. In the aftermath of the. revolution all the Freemasonry lodges in Iran were closed and their archives seized, confirming what many had suspected. Many of them were controlled by Jews or Bahais of Jewish origin, providing another channel of secret communication with Israel and Zionism in general. So, how did the American Communist Party leader come to present in broad outline an ambitious program for Third World development, to be undertaken later at great cost by the United States and a wide network of international agencies? Another question: How did it happen, and how was it possible, for Armand Hammer, son of Julius Hammer, one of the founders of the American Communist Party, to proceed to Russia immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution and begin at once to organize a massive transfer of finance, industrial equipment and technology from the capitalist West to its supposed enemy, the Communist East? [24] The short answer to both questions will be found in what the German historian Oswald Spengler wrote immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution:
Those who have penetrated the mystery of the weirdly ambivalent relationship of high finance and Communism will not be surprised to learn that the Soviet Union supported the shah to the end, and that articles in Pravda about events in Iran were almost exactly the same in tone and content as those in the New York Times. If the unfolding history of our century can be said to be the product of an alliance of money and intellect (what else could it be?), it was the role of Earl Browder and very many of his kind, only a few of them to be identified as Communists, to take care of the intellectual half of this alliance. Writes Professor Hamid Algar:
This then was the new imperialism, American and Israeli in appearance but international and cosmopolitan in character, drawing into its orbit power-wielding elements from all the previous national imperialisms, financial, political and intellectual. The Iranian oil industry, hitherto a British monopoly, was "internationalized," the nominal national ownership of it left intact but its management entrusted to a consortium owned by AIOC, renamed British Petroleum (40 per cent), eight United States oil trusts (40 per cent), Shell (14 per cent) and French Petroleum (6 per cent). We must now try to make some sense out ot the phantasmagoria of confused and seemingly contradictory facts which emerged in the struggle between the shah and his people that was to ensue. The entire Iranian struggle after the end of World War II can be visualized in the broadest terms as a confrontation of mutually antagonistic hierarchies of ideas, values and vortices of power, actual or potential, the one belonging to the West and the other to the East, the one having modern America as its grand symbol of human progress and welfare, and the other regarding America as the arch-symbol of political illegitimacy, "The Great Satan." [27] And the shah, because he could imagine no future for Iran except one modeled on the industrialized West, and because he, too, regarded his country's religious class as the great obstacle to progress in that direction, allowed himself to become, in every way, the main instrument of the foreign power. As Taheri reports, a great variety of ideological forces came into existence after 1953 to combat the dictatorship of the shah and his subservience to the foreign powers; but behind all of them religious influence was increasingly discernible; so much so that even socialism, a secular ideology borrowed from the West, reappeared in Iran as "The Movement of God-fearing Socialists." This increase in religious influence came to a climax in 1963 with the sudden emergence into prominence of the Ayatollah Rohallah Khomeini, who was to play a role in the revolution resembling in many ways that of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century, combining in a remarkable way the functions of a religious and secular leader. [28] A maximization of the power of the shah to enforce his will on the population was being met with a corresponding increase in the power and influence of a religious class which symbolized the will and instinct of the mass of the people. They could all see what was being offered, and they did not want it. There were two ways in which the shah's power to enforce his will was enormously increased: 1) an increase in the amount of money at his disposal as oil production was resumed, and again as the price of oil rocketed; and, 2) close cooperation with the external power, especially with its Israeli component, in the sophisticated use of secret police and prisons as instruments of terror and compulsion. Even moderate opposition after 1963 was suppressed with exile, imprisonment, torture and murder, and the army was brought in to crush mass demonstrations mounted by the ulama in Teheran and other cities, when thousands of people were killed. In 1975 the director of Amnesty International's British section described Iran as "world leader" in torture, executions after sham trials, and widespread political imprisonment. The sharp edge of the power which the shah was able to bring to bear on his internal opponents was almost wholly supplied by his two main foreign supporters, the United States and Israel; these were, however, never really separate but only two aspects of one and the same world-revolutionary force. In fact, American and Israeli influence were at all times inseparable. Prof. Algar says that after the coup of 1953, which ousted Mussadeq, there was cooperation at all levels, especially in intelligence and security work. He adds:
Algar continues:
This Age of ConflictThe career of Shah Mohammad Reza illustrates to perfection Lord Acton's maxim that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Through the process of unrestrained personal ambition the shah became wholly separated from his own people -- the corruption of leadership in its ultimate form. He believed in what he was doing, enjoyed the support of the greatest concentration of power outside his own country, and was able to draw from his oil industry so much wealth that he needed nothing from his people except their submission. From 1970 he was even able to expand his power abroad by giving away vast quantities of money, having raised his own country to a position of power and influence unprecedented in centuries. Writes Taheri:
Iran's galloping arms expenditure in the wake of the 1973-74 oil-price rise helped Western economies to avoid recession. At the same time, under the Nixon-Kissinger doctrine, Iran was seen as the regional power that would defend Western interests and act as policeman in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. The shah had assigned to himself a role in history comparable, in his imagination, only with that of the founder of the Persian Empire in 600 BC. Of this he informed the world in October 1971 when, flanked by his generals, he presented himself before the tomb of that great monarch, now little more than a pile of stones in a vast arid plain, and ceremoniously read a eulogy which began with the words: "Lie in peace, Cyrus, for we are awake!" This was followed by a party among the grandiose ruins at Persepolis attended by more than five hundred dignitaries, including kings, presidents and prime ministers from 60 countries. All this, as the shah remarked at the time, was intended to mark "the rebirth of the Persian Empire and Iran's return to the forefront of human experience." Other products of the shah's megolomania were the proposed 1,200-acre Shahestan-e-Pahlavi architectural extravaganza at Teheran and 20 planned nuclear power plants. This kind of development favored Western economics and Western contractors who shared the pickings with a new class of Iranian monopolists and technocrats, but did little or nothing for the Iranian economy as a whole. Carried away by this dream of national greatness, what the shah seemed unable to understand was that the role he had assigned to himself was wholly subordinate to another which had been assigned to him by those who were encouraging him in his ambitions. In other words, that the Iranian national drama, so impressive when viewed separately, was intended to be no more than an episode in a vastly bigger world-historical drama. So, it is the motivational system of the likes of Henry Kissinger - during most of the 1970s the shah's warmest friend and most trusted adviser -- that calls for some consideration. How and for what purpose were these powerful individuals trying to use the shah? A short but inadequate answer is that the new international cosmopolitan imperialism, spearheaded by Israel, had come to regard the Arab world and its Islamic religions as being by far the greatest hindrance to the attainment of its great objective, a one-world government which it could control at all levels; and Iran, with its considerable non-Arabic population and huge oil wealth, was seen as a possible countervailing force which could be used against the Arab world. The first step was to make Israel virtually synonymous with America in terms of foreign support in all fields, and then, by steady progression, provide the shah with a means of suppressing all internal opposition. In fact, the shah's security forces were virtually taken over by the Israelis and reinforced with non-Islamic personnel, largely recruited from non-Muslim population elements, especially the Bahais, largely people of Jewish descent no longer practicing the Jewish religion. This gave the shah an instrument which could be used with the utmost ruthlessness against the population and against the religious class in particular.. Prof. Algar states the position exactly:
The commanding importance attached to Iran as a piece on the checkerboard of global power politics was emphasized shortly after the fall of the shah when support from both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain was given to Iraq, and when the most flagrant violations of international law by Iraq, including the first attacks on neutral shipping, and even the use of poison gas, were disregarded or excused. The external powers, the USSR included, also doggedly refused to name Iraq as the aggressor. Then when it had become clear that Iraq could not win, the combined efforts of the external powers had to be used to prevent an Iranian victory -- an exercise which eventually called for direct American military action in the Persian gulf. The Battleground of the MindThe Iranian struggle was won and lost on the battleground of the mind. All the ideas which the shah could muster in favor of the visible benefits of the Western social model, supported with a maximum application of force and terror, proved to be no match for a system of ideas, promoted by the mullahs, which united the people as never before and infused them with death-defying courage. This was something the shah could never understand: an invincible unity of the people which embraced old and young, uneducated and educated, including even those who had received their schooling in the West. Thus, we learn that the shah's last visit to Washington at the invitation of President Carter in November 1977, was marred by unprecedented demonstrations by Iranian students, and that the teargas used by the police drifted across the White House lawns and caused the shah to shed a few tears. For the purpose of study and discussion, this victorious system of ideas can be considered under two headings: populism and religion. The use of the word populism, however, calls for an explanatory note: it means what democracy used to mean and is still assumed to mean -- namely, government by the people, direct or representative. However, since the word democracy is now almost universally applied to states which are not democracies as defined in the dictionaries, it can only be said to have ceased to be "lawful tender." The nations of the West are, in fact, plutocracies, or special-interest oligarchies, wearing many of the trappings of democracy -- political parties, the ballot box, all the rest. The word populist is now used in all the English-speaking countries to designate popular movements offering opposition to the bogus democracies. The concept of populism thus establishes common ground between political activists persecuted by the shah and those in the West now being persecuted and execrated as "rightwing extremists," "neo-Nazis," or "Fascists," any debate with them being totally proscribed. [33] All these populist movements have their origin in a deeply rooted instinct, a social or political instinct, which prompts people to react negatively to any rule which, judged by the results produced, they do not feel to be truly their own. Primitive societies which have endured down the ages can be regarded as models of legitimate rule and an example to the huge sophisticated societies of the modern world, in which the factor of legitimacy is increasingly elusive, if not wholly absent. The actual system matters very little: it could be a monarchy, or a dictatorship, or an oligarchy or a conventional democracy; there is no system of rule which has not been known to work to the satisfaction of those ruled; any system acceptable provided that it is implemented by those who can be regarded as the legitimate nominees of those ruled, leaders who are sensitive to the feelings, values, beliefs and group memories of the ruled. Amir Taheri, a West-oriented Iranian journalist and no friend of the mullahs, says of the shah in 1976:
And the shah had long since abandoned the practice of travelling around the country to make direct contact with his people. Other populist resistance movements in Iran since before the turn of the century, some of them modeled on similar movements in the West, were all influenced in some degree by the religious class, but the one that finally triumphed was religious through and through, inspired by a great religious leader and organized and managed throughout by the ulama. From all of which it would seem to follow that for the West, with all its bogus democracies and its Christian church falling into disarray and demoralization, there should be much to learn from the role of religion as a mobilizer of mass political action, and about politics in general. However, any consideration of the role of religion in Iran - a role unthinkable today in the West -- needs to be preceded by a few thoughts about religion in general, not this or that manisfestation of it but religion as a factor of commanding importance in human affairs everywhere and at all times of which we have any record. Religion can be said to have two main aspects: personal and social. Religion can be a strictly personal phenomenon, joined to or wholly independent of any prevailing orthodoxy or doctrine. A sound attitude towards the totality of existence, a submission of the will to a system of cosmic law external to and superior to the intellect, no matter how such an attitude may have been acquired, is all that is needed for what C.G. Jung describes as "a religious attitude to life," or state of psychic well-being. For most people at all times a taught religion has provided the easiest access to such an attitude, for which the only proof needed is that it works. Religion can, therefore, also be a social phenomenon, a system of consensus belief having its origin in some prophet and offering psychic security and some measure of creative release to an entire community, even to an epoch. Consensus religions, like all other human artifacts, are exposed to the vicissitudes of time and change and thus are liable to lose some of their pristine efficacy, their power to fulfill the purpose for which they came into existence. So, what is the purpose of a consensus religion, if any, apart from that of helping the individual to find psychic orientation? One simple but of course insufficient answer is that a consensus religion serves as a repository of values and a system of tested knowledge in respect of what is "right" and "wrong" in human relations. This implies that certain cosmic laws relative to what people do, or what is done to them, are encoded in human nature, not as ready-made ideas but only as instinctual intimations which must then be conceptualized and verbalized as ideas capable of being communicated and discussed. These laws we categorize as "moral" or "metaphysical," laws of a most volatile and elusive kind which are easily lost and are continually having to be rediscovered and verbalized in a new way. And it is these laws which, if observed and applied in whatever form, keep a society as it were "on course," preserving it against disintegration and disorder. Islam and ChristianityOnly blind prejudice can prevent anyone who has gone to the trouble of studying even a summary of the contents of the Koran from realizing that Muhammad the Prophet was a moral genius, a person who, under pressure of a personal crisis of the mind, gained a quite extraordinary insight into those metaphysical laws, so hard to grasp, which prevail inexorably inside the human mind and in human relations. And it was the circumstances then prevailing that made it possible, even inevitable, that one man's breakthrough to a rare state of enlightenment would expand quickly into a consensus religion destined to spread very quickly over most of the then known world. Muhammad, like Jesus Christ about 600 years earlier, was living in what can be described as "end times" -- much like conditions in the Western world today -- when societies, no longer sufficiently in register with the unalterable realities of human nature, have begun to disintegrate. Social existence degenerates into a frantic scramble for personal survival and advantage as people cease to find in their social group a sense of shared security and mutual obligation and duty, and many begin to suffer in their minds. What is most significant is that the Church in the West is disintegrating along with everything else, compounding rather than counteracting the process of decline in the West. Here a clear distinction must be drawn between two aspects of Christianity as a consensus religion: the Church Extant and the Church Invisible; the church as a great property-owning and power-oriented institution and the church in its nascent form as a message of personal deliverance. Both Christianity and Islam spring from the same insights and share with the earlier Judaism the same even more ancient monotheistic symbolism. The Koran says: "Jesus the Messiah, the son of Mary, was a Messenger of God, His word which He placed in Mary, and His spirit" (IV.171). There was, thus, no fundamental antagonism between Islam and Christianity. The big difference between the two religions is that Islam did not create a church or its equivalent, and that the Christian Church, obedient to the laws of worldly growth, was everywhere inclined to make common cause with centers of worldly power. The failure of the church in the West is summed up in Balzac's trenchant remark that "there can be no universal application of Christianity until the money problem has been solved." Alas, the church has never been at odds for long with "Caesar" in the ultimate form as concentrated financial power. It is mainly for this reason that Islam, with its unflinching prohibition of usury, now is seen as a major threat to a vast structure of power in the West, challenging the moral foundations on which it has been reared. The code of conduct, both for rulers and ruled, explicit in Islam's Sharia, was largely implicit in Christianity's basic teaching ("Do unto others as you would be done by."). The main difference between the two faiths arose out of the fact that Muhammad was compelled by the circumstances of his time to become a political leader, administrator and soldier, as well as religious leader. The meanings belonging to "a kingdom not of this world" were thus brought into close relationship with meanings more directly relevant to the unavoidable actualities of "this world." Perhaps the most important fact of all in the context of the present world situation is that Islam presents in clear outline the moral configuration of Economic Man: worker, owner, dealer in the products of labor, his duties, obligations and rights. The injunction on the subject of usury may not have seemed all that important at the time when few, if any, of the Prophet's followers might have been interested in the lending of money. But, today, usury is the linchpin without which the greatest concentration of worldly power ever would fall apart. Centuries of antagonism between the Christian and Muslim worlds can be traced to a great variety of causes, but one of its main effects, as we can now see more plainly, was that of preventing the people of the West from recognizing and getting to grips with a corrupting principle which had been planted in their midst. Shi'ism: Religion of the RevolutionFor an explanation of the Iranian Revolution, it is not Islam in general but a particular version of it called Shi'ism that needs to be more closely examined, a kind of fundamentalism which, besides setting Iran fiercely at odds with the Western world, has had the effect of driving Iran into isolation, separated also from the rest of the Islamic world. Writes Professor Algar:
There is no need, however, to explore the difference between Shi'ism and other schools of Islamic thought, because this difference fades into relative insignificance when compared with the change which occurred in Shi'ism itself after its introduction by the Turkish conqueror and the inauguration of the Safavid dynasty in 1502. So, it is what the Persians made of Shi'ism, rather than what they received, that now sharply distinguishes it from other schools of Islamic thought. What has happened can be stated in a few words: Shi'ism has presented in sharper and clearer outline of the religious configurations of what we might call Political Man. This has entailed the politicization of the ulama and its involvement in public affairs to a degree unequalled anywhere outside Iran. The leaders of the other Islamic states, while sharing with Iran deep concern about policies being implemented by the Western powers in the Middle East, see what has happened in Iran as a usurpation by the religious class that could place their own regimes in danger. This involvement in politics by the religious class has deep roots in history and is supported with considerable scholarship. Writes Prod Algar:
Prof. Algar explains briefly how the burdens of state came to be placed on the shoulders of the religious scholars and how they learned to cope:
This experience over an extended period produced a change in Shi'ism; for there had to be some change in theory and scholarship to accommodate an expanded range of duty and mental activity. And so there arose a great debate about the duties of the religious scholar, whether he should confine himself to the sifting of the teachings of the Prophet and its interpretations, or whether it was permissible for him to engage in independent reasoning in respect of legal questions. The first position acquired the Arabic name akhbari and the other the usuli. It would be hard to exaggerate the profundity and far-ranging implication of this debate; the question at issue is whether a consensus religion can be a "total way of life" for any society unless its scholars and teachers are also experts in jurisprudence and other affairs of state and have been trained to exercise their intellects in secular as well as religious matters, thereby acquiring competence to monitor the performance of the rulers. Were it not for the triumph of the usuli position in the 18th century, the religious scholars would have been reduced to an extremely marginal position in society and the Iranian Revolution of 1978 would have been impossible. The whole significance of the Ayatollah Khomeini arises from the fact that he was the living embodiment of this activist tradition, the fruition of long years of political, spiritual and intellectual development. As the mass of the Iranian population was instinctively repelled by the conditions of existence created in the name of Westernization and progress, and after the failure of many attempts by various popular movements, like Mussadeq's National Front, to place some curbs on the shah's dictatorial power, all turned to the ulama and accepted it unreservedly as the sole legitimate authority and thereafter responded automatically to its commands. Khomeini could, therefore, feel secure in the knowledge that he had the mass of the population behind him when early in 1963 he virtually launched the revolution with a series of public declarations at Qum. In these he accused the shah of having violated the constitution and the oath he took when enthroned that he would protect Islam. He also attacked the shah for his subordination to foreign powers, naming the United States and Israel. The secret police Savak had permitted some qualified criticism of America but had always rigorously enforced the rule that not even the name of Israel must ever be mentioned in public discussion. After one of these addresses, Khomeini's center at Qum was stormed by paratroopers and Savak members, a number of people were killed and the ayatollah arrested. Released a few days later, the ayatollah continued to attack the shah, with the result that there followed on June 5 a vast uprising in many Iranian cities. This was repressed with great force and it was estimated that within a few days at least 15,000 people were killed in the shooting ordered by the shah. Khomeini was arrested again and sent into exile in Turkey, whence he moved later to Iraq and then to Paris. Two features of the ensuing revolution which culminated in the final explosion of public anger towards the end of 1978 call for special notice. The more important of these was the factor of martyrdom, that is resistance of a kind undeterred by the fear of death. The other was the communications factor, the seeming magic with which the leader of the revolution, even from distant Paris, could reach a widely distributed population with information and instruction. The communications factor is more easily explained: the ulama represented a nationwide communications network with its mosques and madrassas, its mullahs and its students, vastly expanded and expedited by two products of modern technology, the telephone and the tape-recorder. A declaration by the ayatollah, spoken into a telephone in Paris, would be recorded in Teheran or some other Iranian city, copied and transcribed and retransmitted to other parts of the country, where the process would be repeated until within a few hours it would have reached even small and widely separated villages. All this was possible, however, only by reason of the accumulated learning and preparatory work of four centuries which had equipped the ulama for such a role, so that all knew exactly what they were expected to do and why, a rare condition in any society. This communications system, wholly dependent on the zealous participation of thousands of individuals, proved in the end to be more than a match for a powerful press, radio and television, all vehemently supportive of the shah's regime. All that needs to be said about the highly abstruse martyrdom factor is that in Shi'ism the concept has been more thoroughly elaborated as a main component of the Islamic faith. It is something ever present in the consciousness of the Iranians. Hence the Shi'i maxim: "Every day is Ashura and every place is Karbala" - referring to the martyrdom of the Imam Hussain. It was this factor that gave to mass political action in Iran, especially throughout 1978, a diamond-hardness that was proof against all the ruthless and sophisticated physical force which the shah and his close Israeli ally could mount against it. During the first days of December 1978, a large number of people appeared in the streets of Teheran and other cities wearing their shrouds, prepared for martyrdom and advancing unarmed on the rows of machine guns ready to be used to deady effect. By no other means could the people of Iran have overthrown one of the 20th century's most powerful and ruthless tyrants. Notes
Appendix I: Islam and Economic ManIf a single all-embracing reason is to be sought for the dread of a resurgent Islam now prevailing in the highest centers of worldly power, it may be found in the Islamic moral delineation of Economic Man, a system of ideas which challenges the entire foundation of great power in the West. Monetary reform campaigners in the West, especially in the United States, might be astonished by the quantity and quality of thinking which Muslim scholars have put into the subject of banking and of economics generally, all of it constellated by the Prophet Muhammad's simple utterances. Here are some of the key elements of the Islamic economic philosophy: * Individual rights: These are a consequence of the fulfillment of duties and obligations, not antecedent to them. In other words, first comes: the duty, then the right. Property: Ownership is never absolute, conferring on us the right to do with our property wholly as we please. As the Sharia puts it, all property belongs to God: we are only its temporary incumbents and trustees; there are duties and responsibilities inseparably attached to the ownership of property. Work and wealth: Islam exalts work as an inseparable dimension of faith itself and reprehends idleness. We do not need work only in order to earn a livelihood; we need work to preserve our psychic health; we need to exercise creative skills and to spend energy in work. Usury: The Koran forcefully prohibits the payment and receipt of interest, or riba as it is called. Interest on a loan is regarded as a creation of instantaneous property rights outside the legitimate framework of existing property rights. The evil inherent in usury, however, is more recondite and elusive than that. The lending of money at interest can in many instances be advantageous to borrower as well as lender; fortunes have been made with borrowed money. It is only in the contest of a total way of life of a community that the evil nature of usury becomes more clearly visible to the moral imagination. The principle of usury, once accepted, gives rise to the regular practice of it, requiring or making possible the emergence of a class of moneylender; human nature being as it is, and taking into account the circumstances in which money most often needs to be borrowed, the practice of usury is seen as conferring a compounding advantage on the moneylender class. *See "The Islamic Banking system in Iran and Pakistan" Mohsin S. Khan and Abbas Mirahker, Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, 1986. About the authorIVOR BENSON is a South African journalist and political analyst. He wrote for the Daily Express and Daily Telegraph in London, and later was chief assistant editor of the Rand Daily Mail. From 1964 to 1966 he served as Information Adviser to Ian Smith, Prime Minister of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Mr. Benson has lectured on four continents; he produces a monthly newsletter, Behind the News (P.O. Box 1564, Krugersdorp, 1740 South Africa). Reproduced From: Journal Of Historical Review
Islamic Dilemma and the Sufi Message
By Jay Kinney As the West comes to grips with the terrorist attacks and threats, there is a strong temptation to see things in simple terms of Good and Evil. But before we are stampeded into a “clash of civilisations,” we need to step back for a moment and examine the real forces at work. Islam is undergoing its own crisis, with many conflicting voices clamouring to be heard. The angry cries for Jihad threaten to drown out the saner counsel of Islam’s living mystics, the Sufis. What follows is one attempt to clear the air, in the hope that disaster might be averted. Ironies abound. Amidst all the uproar it is easy to forget that in Arabic, “Islam” means “surrender,” and that it is derived from the same root word as “peace.” Those who are disposed to dismiss religion itself as an irrational scourge are happy to see this as just another case of religious hypocrisy. After all, if we add up all the casualties caused by holy wars, crusades, inquisitions, and other battles taken up in the name of God, the endless line of corpses would seem to give the lie to religious claims of a higher morality or compassion. “All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few,” Stendhal cynically observed. But, as Oscar Wilde noted: “Who is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” While religions have failed to live up to their own ideals, the same charge can be levelled against Democracy, Communism, Humanism, Monarchy, Science, and every other means of human self-organisation and inquiry. Of this we can be sure: no sooner will a model for social benefit be formulated than a dozen uses will be found to employ it for social ill. Social institutions – by their very nature – become arenas for the exercise of power and greed: the forces of the reptilian brain which take us back to Step One, over and over again. Yet despite the abysmal record of folly and destruction, there is an enduring human need for a sense of spiritual connection to something greater than ourselves. Religions may be imperfect, but they have nevertheless provided a moral anchor for billions of people throughout history. Even if a believer’s faith be relatively unsophisticated and dependent on others’ say so, when sincerely held, it does offer some sense of connection with the Universe. This is no small thing, but it hardly exhausts the possibilities. Fortunately, there is clear testimony that some individuals and groups have been able to fully realise the kernel of truth that too often lies slumbering within the religious husk. Anyone who has given sincere attention to the accounts and writings of genuine mystics, such as Meister Eckhart, Ibn ‘Arabi, or Plotinus, cannot fail to see that a higher consciousness, which encompasses both the Infinite Source of Being and the human individual, is possible. This consciousness, as a direct and authentic experience, does not depend for its existence on theological or religious doctrine. Indeed, mystics say that this consciousness itself clarifies and illuminates doctrine. Religions, as theological and social structures built around the realisations of their founders, must accommodate themselves to and address the traditions and customs of the cultures in which they evolve. Had Jesus been born in a Chinese manger or had Buddha been enlightened while sitting under Newton’s apple tree, the religions that followed in their wake would have been far different affairs. In order to better understand the current state of Islam, a brief look at its origin and evolution is in order. There is no question that Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, was a profound mystic whose lot it was to be born into a Bedouin tribal society shaped by intense family ties, trading routes, localised pagan gods, and relatively primitive cultural forms. The Qur’anic message, articulated by Muhammad in poetic Arabic, was received in discreet parts over the course of 22 years – years marked by attacks on the Prophet and his small band of followers by other hostile tribes. Muhammad’s communion with the Real was called upon to provide guidance to the Muslims as they struggled to defend their faith amidst war and social chaos. As observed by some Qur’anic scholars, such as Fazlur Rahman, some passages of the Qur’an are addressed to a specific time and place, while others are of a more universal nature. This is important to note, as it accounts for some of the seeming contradictions between verses, as well as the problems that arise when verses are quoted out of context. But in any event, the Qur’an’s identity as a dialogue with the Supreme Being is so intertwined with the circumstances of its birth that, to this day, Muslims only consider a Qur’an to be the Qur’an if it is in its original Arabic. All translations into other languages are merely “interpretations” and inexact facsimiles. This is an admirable attempt to preserve fidelity in transmission, though one wonders if even this devotion to the original text isn’t a case of closing the barn door after the mule is gone. For the special value of a living mystic or prophet is the dynamic nature of their expression of the Real, to which they have access. The Qur’an’s words in the absence of Muhammad’s living interpretation, like Jesus’s parables without his own commentary, are susceptible to a dogmatic crystallisation induced by the limited understanding of later followers who risk mistaking their own piety for insight. One early attempt within Islam to head off a decline in religious practice following Muhammad’s death, was the collection and preservation of hadiths (quotations from the Prophet), among which are the hadiths qudsi (Prophetic quotations conveying messages from God, given outside of Qur’anic passages). Hadiths typically contain testimonies, by the Prophet’s companions, of Muhammad’s suggestions and judgments on the details of daily life and specific questions of practice, law or family concerns. The hadiths qudsi are understood to provide an extra-Qura’nic source of Divine guidance. A secondary source of information is the “Sunna,” a recording of the Prophet’s own personal habits and practices, including quite intimate reports by his wives. Unfortunately, even preserving the specifics of the Prophet’s interpretations, insights and behaviours still finds them anchored to their time and place. At the same time, there is much dispute over various hadiths’ authenticity, with many being suspected of later manufacture for partisan purposes. Islam’s institutionalisation, once the Prophet was gone, saw Muhammad defined as the most perfect exemplar of Islam, with all questions of right behaviour and scriptural meaning referred back to his own statements and behaviour, or to the Qur’an. The best means that later Ulema (scholars and jurists) could suggest in rendering decisions was “analogy” and “consensus of the community” – processes that have left little room for creative insights or inspired interpretations. Because Muhammad served his community as resident mystic, prophet, commander in chief, and social arbiter, Islam – again, in taking him as its exemplar – developed an ideal of theocratic rule as its civilisation grew. As in Medieval Christianity, there was little sense of separate spheres for religion and civil society – Islam was “a way of life.” The combined figure of Sultan (Ruler) and Caliph (Religious leader), though hardly consistent throughout the succession of Islamic empires, was in place in the final centuries of the Ottoman Empire, only to collapse along with the implosion of the Ottomans following WWI. The Caliphate was abolished by Ataturk in his effort to constitute a secular Turkish republic on the ruins of the Empire. The inroads made by European colonialism in the waning decades of the Ottomans, and particularly post-WWI, helped stir the pot of Arab nationalism, Pan-Arabism, and radical Islam, all of which arose in response to the splintering of Islamic civilisation. There was no single Islamic solution put forth that commanded universal support. A multitude of Islams, ethnic nationalisms, and dictatorial regimes carried the day. It is this sequence of events that brings us to the present reality of a decentralised and dispirited Islamic world mourning its former glories, riven along nationalist and sectarian lines, resentful of previous Western colonialism, and defensive towards an encroaching globalisation that promises to be more pervasive and invasive than mere colonialism ever was. The lightning rod for Muslim resentment towards this state of affairs has come to be symbolised, for better or worse, in the creation of Israel, in what was previously Palestine. What was seen by Jews as a refuge from Nazi persecution, and by the Zionists as the fulfilment of a scriptural and political dream, was seen by many Muslims as an exclusionary Western wedge, achieved by Haganah, Irgun, and Stern Gang terrorism: an ethnically-defined state disenfranchising its former residents, and a surrogate for the present Western superpower, the USA. The Israeli/Palestinian blood-feud, terrible enough in itself, has metastasised throughout the Muslim body, taxing the Islamic immune system, and readily diagnosed as the underlying Western cancer which can be blamed for every painful social malady. As stated at the beginning, ironies abound. The very virtue that enables millions of Muslims to feel a brotherhood across national and racial divides – the sense of an Umma (community) of believers – also fuels the presumption of extremist Islamic terrorists to represent the whole of Islam in their assault on the West. In truth, bin Laden and Co. (or Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah) no more represent Islam than the judicially-selected Bush regime represents the whole of Western democracy. Behind each camp’s stated purposes and PR, loom the reptilian brain’s Will to Power – the opposite of the mystic’s realisation and of the stated goal of most religions: surrender to the will of God. Religion, devoid of the mystic’s link to the Real, may not save us – in fact when religion is used as a rationale to wage political warfare, it may condemn us to a hell on earth of its own creation. But that doesn’t mean that we should turn our backs on the spiritual impulse toward realisation and human perfection that lies at the root of religion. The survival of Sufism within the broader confines of Islam is a significant case in point. Sufism is a term coined by Western orientalists for the mystical path in Islam, commonly known as tasawwuf by Muslims. I’ll continue to use it here for the sake of simplicity. Sufism isn’t a sect or subgroup within Islam, so much as it is an expression of the mystical understanding underlying Islam. Despite Muhammad’s roles of prophet, commander in chief, and social arbiter, it was his vocation as mystic that preceded and subsumed his other responsibilities. According to Sufi tradition, Muhammad acknowledged Ali, his nephew and son in law, as his spiritual successor, i.e., as the one Muslim within his inner circle who had also been blessed with a potent mystical awakening. Because the roles of spiritual and political leader had been combined in Muhammad, they became the object of the power struggles following the Prophet’s death. Those struggles eventually resulted in the division between Sunni and Shia Islam, though that need not concern us here. Suffice it to say, that for most Sufis, Ali represents the continuation of the mystical impulse within Islam, and nearly all Sufi brotherhoods trace their initiatory lineage back to Ali. The operating premise of Sufism is that the mystical consciousness (but not the Prophetic role) of the Prophet and Ali is possible for others. The encounter with the Real – in which the dynamic paradox of the Infinite and the finite, the Absolute and the particular is known and experienced – is not relegated to the distant past or possessed by a designated few, but is within the capacity of everyone, should they so desire. Authentic mystics have usually occupied a position in tension with established religion, because their dynamic relationship with the Infinite has often placed them at cross-purposes to the theological certainties promulgated by religious authorities. It is to Islam’s credit that it made more room for its mystics than did Christianity, its chief rival. This leeway was sometimes due to the patronage of Sultans who were interested in tasawwuf, and sometimes due to the popular support that some saints enjoyed. This is not to say that Sufis were always honoured or even tolerated. They were sometimes persecuted as heretics, executed or merely silenced; but whether welcomed or deplored, they were able to pass along their wisdom and methods from generation to generation. The predominant means of this transmission was through Sufi brotherhoods or Orders (tariqas) – caretakers of continuous lines of teaching methods derived from the founding inspiration of a particular mystic. Unlike Christian contemplative monastic orders that demanded celibacy and a sequestered life, the Sufi tariqas were generally composed of everyday people, with families and outside professions. Thus, up to the present, the Sufis have provided a street-level access to mystical experience. Jalaluddin Rumi, whose mystical poetry has enjoyed great popularity in the West in recent years, is the best known representative of Sufism. His emphasis on Love as the key entry-point to communion with the Divine has led many people to assume that this is true of all Sufism. However, just as Yoga can be subdivided into several parallel paths to the Divine, including Hatha (physical), Jnana (mental), Bhakti (devotional), etc., so each Sufi order has its own flavour and emphasis, derived from its founding saint. Still, whatever their emphasis or methods, all Sufis share the ultimate goal of a spiritual awakening or “opening,” where the seeker comes to intimate knowledge of the Real. This may sound terribly remote from anything of practical value, especially if one imagines this awakening to be a state of everlasting bliss which renders its recipient incapable of dealing with mundane affairs. However, Sufism teaches the need for the mystic to “descend” again into daily life, where he can function in normal situations while maintaining an expanded awareness. This is truly the path of Muhammad, who from the mystical point of view stands as exemplar for the “completed human:” one who is both physically and spiritually alive, and able to interpret his own Qur’an. Such individuals light the way for others, often serving inconspicuously as conduits of inspiration and encouragement. A pharmacist in Istanbul, a shopkeeper in Fez, a poet in Damascus – there is no predicting where one may find those who are called “friends of God.” Fundamentalist movements originate out of a form of spiritual inspiration themselves. Despairing of the decadence and corruption they perceive in the present expression of their Faith, the fundamentalists – as their name suggests – try to return to the pure fundamentals. For “religions of the Book” – religions based on revealed scriptures – this commonly takes the form of cleaving even closer to scriptural authority. But rejecting the succeeding centuries of religious evolution, and not privy to dynamic interpretation of the founder or of mystics, the fundamentalists commonly opt for the most literal readings of their holy texts. And when those texts are as ambiguous and nuanced as the Qur’an, this can lead to confusion and incoherence, thinly veiled by rigidity. The result is a proliferation of mini-Caliphs or Popes, certain of their own purity and the truth of their interpretation, cut off from scholarly commentary and discourse, and contemptuous and dismissive of all who disagree. In eras of profound change and discord, the fundamentalists reduce the Infinite Source of Being to a static icon created in their own image, in a tragic reversal of the creative process. Those who kill and terrorise in the name of God demonstrate their own distance from any real connectedness with the Whole. This is the dilemma of Islam at the dawn of the 21st century. The Umma of believers are themselves held hostage by the terrorists who claim to represent them. As Zia Sardar has written in The Observer (UK - Sept 23, 2001): “. . . all good and concerned Muslims are implicated in the unchecked rise of fanaticism in Muslim societies. . . . We have been silent as they proclaim themselves martyrs, mangling beyond recognition the most sacred meaning of what it is to be a Muslim. . . . The terrorists are among us, the Muslim communities of the world. . . . And it is our duty to stand up against them.” The Prophet affirmed that “Allah’s Mercy supersedes his Wrath.” (Hadith al-Qudsi). One can only hope that the moderate Muslim majority will draw upon the wisdom of those within their own tradition who know that Mercy intimately and find the courage to stand up. © Jay Kinney, 2001. Jay Kinney is the co-author, with Richard Smoley, of Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (Penguin/Arkana, 1999). He is editor of The Inner West (forthcoming from J.P. Tarcher, 2002). More of his writings can be found at http://www.gnosismagazine.com .
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HoffmanWire: Censored by conservative Catholic newspaper March 27 2002 at 2:21 PM THE HOFFMAN WIRE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE HOFFMAN WIRE Dedicated to Freedom of the Press, Investigative Reporting and Revisionist History Michael A. Hoffman II, Editor http://www.hoffman-info.com/news.html ******************************************* March 26, 2002 Editor's Note: The following letter was allegedly refused publication by "The Wanderer," a nationally-circulated, conservative Roman Catholic newspaper. Dr. Samarrai's missive is a pithy, learned and measured corrective to an exercize in ignorance by Arthur Hippler, author of one among a legion of Islam-bashing articles now in vogue across the spectrum of American right wing publications. Your editor would have no problem with a factual critique of the spiritual and theological errors of Islam, though attacks on religion have generally been regarded as bad form in the modern West (a gentility to which this writer does not subscribe). What is galling is the bullying. These conservative 'zines have finally grown themselves a pair of testicles, but only when it comes to kicking Islam. Mum's the word concerning the anti-Christ blasphemies, Talmudic racism, war-crimes and Kabbalistic, occult evil in Judaism, which has incomparably more influence in government and the media of mass communication than any Muslim ever has. It takes no courage to be anti-Muslim these days. It's the trendy bias, the faddish bigotry of the herd and of the voice of the herd, the American government and its mouthpiece media. But to expose Judaism to scrutiny is to invite not only calumny and loss of career and good name, but homicide as well. Here are a few lines typical of the e-mail your editor receives by the bushel. This lovely specimen was sent March 25: "I visited your website and I must say that I was disgusted...I swear, there must be people out there who would beat you to a bloody pulp, if not kill you, on sight. I also noticed your constant references to the palestinians and israelis. According to you, the palestinians are f****ing SAINTS, am I right?... I swear, for your sake, I hope I never see you in public..." (End quote from fan mail) As for the person and character of Muhammed, the Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle observed: "The lies which well-meaning zeal have heaped 'round this man are disgraceful...Such a man is what we call an original man...the words he utters are as no other man's words...he was one of those who cannot but be in earnest...(who taught) that we must submit to God. That our whole strength lies in resigned submission to Him (God)....Not by flattering our appetites; no, by awakening the Heroic that slumbers in every heart, can any Religion gain followers... 'If this be Islam,' says Goethe, 'do we not all live in Islam?' " (Carlyle,"On Heroes and Hero Worship," May 8, 1840) -- Michael A. Hoffman II A. I. Samarrai, Ph.D. Feb. 21, 2002 Editor, The Wanderer 201 Ohio Street St. Paul, MN 55107 Arthur E. Hippler’s essay, “On the Difficulties With Islam” (The Wanderer, February 7, 2002) purports to enlighten the readers about Islam and the Muslims. Many people, Dr. Hippler tells us, “think they know something about Islam,” when in fact they are “mostly wrong in their imaginings,” because they obtain their knowledge about Islam and the Middle East from the mass media. Such information “is invariably incomplete and unfortunately, not always completely accurate.” Utilizing his “own background and professional work,” Dr. Hippler wishes to straighten things out. He does this, however, “with the understanding that there is no way to include a mass of sophisticated and subtle nuances,” nor does he “ have any pretense that [his] analysis is exhaustive.” Nevertheless, he assures the readers that “to the best of my professional understanding, what I am presenting is reasonably accurate.” Unfortunately, Dr. Hippler’s essay compounds the confusion by adding errors of fact. Much of the essay consists of his personal opinions and attitude about Islam, the Muslims, and the Arabs. He doesn’t like the Muslims and the Arabs. There isn’t much one can do about that, except that it is not really conducive to polite discourse to cite, approvingly, such terms as "Wogs" to describe Arabs and Muslims. In this response, however, I will concern myself mostly with the errors in Dr. Hippler’s article. (1) Dr. Hippler believes that instability in the Middle East would encourage Greece to expand at the expense of Turkey. “At a minimum,” he declares, “Greece would try to regain Crete.” The last time I visited Crete it was a part of Greece. I suspect that Dr. Hippler had Cyprus in mind where there is a movement among the Greek population of the island to unite Cyprus with Greece. And although Turkey illegally invaded northern Cyprus, the island is not part of Turkey. (2) The Kurds do not “predominate in the entire western half of Turkey,” as Dr. Hippler asserts. Turkish Kurdistan is located in the southeastern area of Turkey. This is how Turkish forces sometimes pursue Kurdish rebels inside Iraq. (3) Dr. Hippler’s assertion that “[w]hat tends to unite the Mideast (and indeed all of Islam) is a generalized antagonism of varying degrees toward everyone else in the world, a hatred especially directed toward the West” is so absurd that one wonders where the author obtained his impression. Throughout their history, Middle Eastern peoples have had conflicts and wars among themselves as well as with others – just like Europeans, American, Chinese or others. They also entered into alliances with others. They concluded treaties, commercial pacts and various international agreements . Dr. Hippler seems to be under the erroneous impression that there is such a thing as a monolithic Islam. Such a monolith does not in fact exist. Even in the Middle Ages the various Islamic and European Christian States pursued their own “national interests.” Even during the period of the Crusades, Islamic and Christian States concluded treaties to regulate commerce and trade. An interesting treaty concluded in 1293 between the Mameluke sultan of Egypt and James II of Aragon stipulates that the King of Aragon is obligated to allow his subjects to carry to the Islamic ports such “strategic items” as iron, iron helmets and timber – contrary to Church policy. James II also agreed to inform the Muslim sultan of any hostile movements on the part of other powers, including the Holy See! (I discussed this and other commercial and diplomatic relations between Islam and Europe in an article in "The Canadian Journal of History," April, 1980, pp. 1-21). As to Dr. Hippler’s question: “Why does Islam hate us?”, one can only respond thus: “Dr. Hippler, when did you stop beating your wife?” (4) Religion is a matter of faith, and the Muslims believe that the Qur’an is literally the word of God as revealed to Muhammad. Dr. Hippler passes the following judgment on the Qur’an: “About one fifth of the Quran is incomprehensible in any language and no one knows what it means.” When I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1950s, I and others had the pleasure of knowing the polyglot genius Dr. A. R. Nykl whose knowledge of Arabic was phenomenal. I asked him once why he didn’t write a book about the Qur’an. Dr. Nykl’s answer was this: “The Qur’an is like a beautiful woman. You enjoy her, you don’t dissect her.” This is what the late Professor Philip K. Hitti (the great Princeton scholar – a Christian, by the way) says about the Qur’an: “Its literary influence has been incalculable and enduring. The first prose book in Arabic, it sets the style for future products. It kept the language uniform.” The style of the Qur’an is different from that of any other literary work. “This is basically what constitutes the ‘miraculous character ‘(i’jaz) of the Koran.”(Philip K. Hitti, Islam: A Way of Life, p. 29). A Latin translation of the Qur’an was made in the 12th century under the direction of Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny. Dr. Hippler admits that the Qur’an and Islamic law provide “a general attitude that ‘people of the Book’ (Jews and Christians) are to be treated tolerantly, and even with respect by the Muslims.” Later on, however, he contradicts himself when he asserts that “Mohammed himself in the Quran urges violence against Christians,” and that verses in the Qur’an “include blood-curdling exhortations to do violence to others, especially Christians and Jews.” To support his claims, he cites, out of context, parts of two Qur’anic verses which have nothing to do with Christians or Jews. Dr. Hippler cites Qur’an 2:191 thus: “kill the disbelievers wherever we find them.” The actual context is as follows: Qur’an 2:190: “Fight in the way of God against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! God loveth not aggressors.” Qur’an 2:191: And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter. And fight not with them at the Inviolable Places of Worship until they first attack you there, but if they attack you (there) then slay them. Such is the reward of disbelievers.” Qur’an 2:192: “But if they desist, then lo! God is Forgiving, Merciful.” I can only conclude that Dr. Hippler has deliberately distorted and misrepresented the evidence to support his preconceived idea. His partial quotation from Qur.5:34 is of a similar quality. The punishments meted out in that verse were for “those who make war upon God and His messenger and strive after corruption in the land.” Dr. Hippler doesn’t inform his readers of this. All this has absolutely nothing to do with Christians or Jews as Dr. Hippler falsely asserts. (5) According to Dr. Hippler “The Quran, indeed all of Islamic thought, is filled with warfare and violence as the appropriate way to expand the religion by forced conversion. Those who do not believe as Muslims do are considered vile enemies.” First of all, this statement contradicts his own earlier statement that Islam teaches “that ‘people of the Book’ (Jews and Christians) are to be treated tolerantly, and even with respect by Muslims.” Nevertheless, Dr. Hippler obviously confuses the expansion of the Islamic State in the 7th and 8th centuries A. D. (which was achieved by military conquest) and the spread of the Islamic religion. In his book, "Europe Emerges" (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, pp. 298-299), my major professor at Wisconsin, the late Robert L. Reynolds, writes the following: “The peoples were still Christian for a long time after the Mohammedans came in. The idea that the latter came with the Koran in one hand and a sword in the other is completely wrong. That they came with the Koran in one hand is true, but the tax collector’s money bag was in the other.” This is a reference, of course, to the additional tax levied on Christians and Jews in the medieval Islamic state from which they would be exempted upon conversion to Islam. “Perhaps this,” Professor Reynolds writes, “moved more people to turn Mohammedan than any threat of the sword.” As a matter of fact, the Umayyad state developed a vested (financial) interest in not seeing too many converts to Islam in their empire! And for centuries, the inhabitants of the Islamic state were mostly non-Muslims (Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, etc.). Furthermore, in places like Indonesia, Islam was introduced not by conquest but by merchants and missionaries (P. K. Hitti, History of the Arabs, 6th ed. p.344). (6) Hippler admits that the Muslims in the Middle Ages “were very advanced in the arts, architecture, the sciences, and medicine in comparison to Christian Europe. The West derived a great deal of learning from Islam during this period.” Yet, he attributes the present backwardness of Islamic countries to an incurable obscurantism within Islam itself. It is really difficult to deal with this type of irrational pattern of thought as exhibited by Dr. Hippler. Let me put it this way: I don’t know how, on the basis of religious doctrine, would Dr. Hippler explain the backwardness and authoritarianism in Catholic Latin America in comparison to, for example, the United States or Canada or France or Germany. Simply put, the Islamic world went through numerous experiences over the centuries: ups and downs, achievements and tragedies, successes and failures. Like the Roman world, the Islamic world was subjected to barbarian invasions that destroyed many centers of learning. The Mongolian invasions of Iraq , for example, effectively put an end to medieval Baghdad with the slaughter of virtually its entire population. As for violence in general, let us look at the 20th century. Tens of millions upon millions of Europeans and others were slaughtered by Europeans during World War I and World War II and other “conflicts.” The scale of twentieth-century carnage and destruction has no precedent in history. This was not the work of Muslims, nor can it be explained in terms of religious doctrine. (7) One of Dr. Hippler’s most confused efforts to attack the Muslims is found in his portrayal of Muslim attitude toward contemporary “Western” culture. He points out that the Muslims view “with horror” the “tide [in the West] of pornography, homosexuality, bestiality, and every form of sexual degradation known.” This, he points out , explains the “seeming incongruous alliance of the Vatican and Islamic countries in opposing the spread of legalized abortion.” I am not sure what Dr. Hippler’s objection is to the Muslim point of view in this regard. It seems to me that "The Wanderer" and the Muslims are on the same “wavelength,” so to speak. In his book, "Ecumenical Jihad" (Ignatius Press, 1996), the Catholic scholar Peter Kreeft advocates cooperation with Muslims to confront the subverters of Western culture. He points out that “when the British Broadcasting Corporation ran a blasphemous skit about Christ, the Muslims demanded and got an apology, whereas the Christians remained silent.” (P. 37). (8) Dr. Hippler’s criticism of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as “questionable” is embarrassing. This principle deals with quantum physics and the behavior of atomic and subatomic particles like electrons and protons. Attempting to apply this principle to culture or society is nonsensical or tragic. Einstein’s comment that “God does not play dice with the universe” is a metaphor, not a theological statement. Let’s not rush in where angels fear to tread. Readers of The Wanderer may wish to consult Fr. Stanley L. Jaki’s "The Absolute Beneath the Relative." (9) Regarding the creation of the Israeli state, Dr. Hippler commits several errors. His statement that “there were not a majority of Muslim Arabs in Palestine, according to many observers, prior to the formation of Israel” is completely false. This is an old propaganda line that even the Zionists now have ceased to repeat. Here are the facts: “[T]he population of Palestine at the end of 1946 was estimated at 1,269,000 Arabs and 650,000 Jews.” (Ian J. Bickerton & Clara L. Klausner, A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Prentice Hall [1991], p. 89). The Israeli author Simha Flapan tells us how the Palestinians became refugees: “For the entire day of April 9, 1948, Irgun and LEHI soldiers carried out the slaughter in cold blood and premeditated fashion . . . The attackers ‘lined men, women and children up against the walls and shot them, … The ruthlessness of the attack on Deir Yassin shocked Jewish and world opinion alike, drove fear and panic into the Arab population, and led to the flight of unarmed civilians from their homes all over the country.” (Quoted in The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict, published by Jews For Justice In the Middle East, pp. 8-9). (10) It is not true that in Saudi Arabia “it is a capital offense to be a Christian who expresses his faith there.” Over twenty years ago I lived and taught in Saudi Arabia for two years. Our children attended an American school there. The school celebrated Christmas, and our daughter participated in a Christmas play. Neither my wife nor our daughters had to cover themselves with "abaya." They did wear long dresses in deference to local sensibilities. Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia is, in many respects, an anomaly. There is no native Saudi Christian population. This is not true of other Arabic and Islamic countries. In Kuwait City there are at least two Christian churches. In Iraq, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz is a Christian, not a Muslim. The former U. N. Secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a prominent Egyptian diplomat, is also a Christian, not a Muslim. According to Mordechai Ben-Porat , a former operative in the Zionist underground in Iraq, the Meir Tweig Synagogue in Baghdad “is still standing and has recently been renovated by the Iraqi authorities to serve the remnant of the Jewish community.” (Ben-Porat, To Baghdad and Back, Jerusalem, 1998, p. 119). Some of the most prominent spokesmen and advocates of Arab nationalism have been Christian. (E.g., Michel Aflaq, founder of the Ba’th Party; George Antonius, author of the influential The Arab Awakening; Prof. Edward Said, prominent spokesman for the Palestinian cause and author of the famous Orientalism.) (11) Final Remarks: Dr. Hippler’s essay can only be described as incompetent propaganda. One can go on and on refuting his assertions, which are erroneous and intemperate. While Dr. Hippler speaks of Islam and Muslims with contempt, Christopher Dawson speaks of “the three higher religions of the West – Judaism, Christianity, and Muhammedanism.” (Dawson, Dynamics of World History, p. 398). (My emphasis). The history of the relations between the Islamic world and the Christian world constitutes a vast field of scholarship. It deserves much more than the crudities of Dr. Hippler’s essay. Toward the end of his article, Dr. Hippler tells us that “Islam is an enemy of all of us and if it has its way, you and I and our children either will convert to Islam, or we will die. Islam … is in fact an enemy of civilization.” This is hysteria, real or feigned. It is nefarious ideas of this type that precipitate the genocidal horrors we have been witnessing all over the world. A. I. Samarrai, Ph.D. drasamarrai@charter.net Note: Readers who wish to familiarize themselves with Islamic and Arab history and Christian European relations may want to read some of the following works: Philip K. Hitti, The Arabs: A Short History. This is a shorter version of his monumental The History of the Arabs. Hitti’s Islam and the West includes seven introductory chapters and 29 documents. W. M. Watt, The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe. Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe, esp. Ch. VIII on Islam. Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the 12th Century. R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages. Michael Frassetto & David Blanks (eds.), Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. (This book [1999] includes my paper, “Arabs and Latins in the Middle Ages: Enemies, Partners and Scholars”). Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Islam in Modern History.
by Gary Miller Calling the Qur'an amazing is not something done only by Muslims, who have an appreciation for the book and who are pleased with it; it has been labeled amazing by non-Muslims as well. In fact, even people who hate Islam very much have still called it amazing. One thing which surprises non-muslims who are examining the book very closely is that the Qur'an does not appear to them to be what they expected. What they assume is that they have an old book which came fourteen centuries ago from the Arabian desert; and they expect that the book should look something like that - an old book from the desert. And then they find out that it does not resemble what they expected at all. Additionally, one of the first things that some people assume is that because it is an old book which comes from the desert, it should talk about the desert. Well the Qur'an does talk about the desert - some of its imagery describes the desert; but it also talks about the sea - what it's like to be in a storm on the sea. Some years ago, the story came to us in Toronto about a man who was in the merchant marine and made his living on the sea. A Muslim gave him a translation of the Qur'an to read. The merchant marine knew nothing about the history of Islam but was interested in reading the Qur'an. When he finished reading it, he brought it back to the Muslim and asked, "This Muhammed, was he a sailor?" He was impressed at how accurately the Qur'an describes a storm on a sea. When he was told, "No as a matter of fact, Muhammed lived in the desert," that was enough for him. He embraced Islam on the spot. He was so impressed with the Qur'an's description because he had been in a storm on the sea, and he knew that whoever had written that description had also been in a storm on the sea. The description of "a wave, over it a wave, over it clouds" was not what someone imagining a storm on a sea to be like would have written; rather, it was written by someone who knew what a storm on the sea was like. This is one example of how the Qur'an is not tied to a certain place and time. Certainly, the scientific ideas expressed in it also do not seem to originate from the desert fourteen centuries ago. Many centuries before the onset of Muhammed's Prophethood, there was a well-known theory of atomism advanced by the Greek philosopher, Democritus. He and the people who came after him assumed that matter consists of tiny, indestructible, indivisible particles called atoms. The Arabs too, used to deal in the same concept; in fact, the Arabic word dharrah commonly referred to the smallest particle known to man. Now, modern science has discovered that this smallest unit of matter (i.e., the atom, which has all of the same properties as its element) can be split into its component parts. This is a new idea, a development of the last century; yet, interestingly enough, this information had already been documented in the Qur'an which states: " He [i.e., Allah] is aware of an atom's weight in the heavens and on the earth and even anything smaller than that..." Undoubtedly, fourteen centuries ago that statement would have looked unusual, even to an Arab. For him, the dharrah was the smallest thing there was. Indeed, this is proof, that the Qur'an is not outdated. Another example of what one might expect to find in an"old book" that touches upon the subject of health or medicine is outdated remedies or cures. Various historical sources state that the Prophet gave some advice about health and hygiene, yet most of these pieces of advice are not contained in the Qur'an. At first glance, to the non-Muslims this appears to be a negligent omission. They cannot understand why Allah would not "include" such helpful information in the Qur'an. Some Muslims attempt to explain this absence with the following argument: "Although the Prophet's advice was sound and applicable to the time in which he lived, Allah, in His infinite wisdom, knew that there would come later medical and scientific advances which would make the Prophet's advice appear outdated. When later discoveries occurred, people might say that such information contradicted that which the Prophet had given. Thus, since Allah would never allow any opportunity for the non-Muslims to claim that the Qur'an contradicts itself or the teachings of the Prophet, He only included in the Qur'an information and examples which could stand the test of time." However, when one examines the true realities of the Qur'an in terms of its existence as a divine revelation, the entire matter is quickly brought into its proper perspective, and the error in such argumentation becomes clear and understandable. It must be understood that the Qur'an is a divine revelation, and as such, all information in it is of divine origin. Allah revealed the Qur'an from Himself. It is the words of Allah, which existed before creation, and thus nothing can be added, subtracted or altered. In essence, the Qur'an existed and was complete before the creation of Prophet Muhammed, so it could not possibly contain any of the Prophet's own words or advice. An inclusion of such information would clearly contradict the purpose for which the Qur'an exists, compromise its authority and render it inauthentic as a divine revelation. Consequently, there was no "home remedies" in the Qur'an which one could claim to be outdated; nor does it contain any man's view about what is beneficial to health, what food is best to eat, or what will cure this or that disease. In fact, the Qur'an only mentions one item dealing with medical treatment, and it is not in dispute by anyone. It states that in honey there is healing. And certainly, I do not think that there is anyone who will argue with that! If one assumes that the Qur'an is the product of a man's mind, then one would expect it to reflect some of what was going on in the mind of the man who "composed" it. In fact, certain encyclopedias and various books clam that the Qur'an was the product of hallucinations that Muhammed underwent. If these claims are true - if it indeed originated from some psychological problems in Muhammed's mind - then evidence of this would be apparent in the Qur'an. Is there such evidence? In order to determine whether or not there is, one must first identify what things would have been going on in his mind at that time and then search for these thoughts and reflections in the Qur'an. It is common knowledge that Muhammad had a very difficult life. All of his daughters died before him except one, and he had a wife of several years who was dear and important to him, who not only proceeded him in death at a very critical period of his life. As a matter of fact, she must have been quite a woman because when the first revelation came to him, he ran home to her afraid. Certainly, even today one would have a hard time trying to find an Arab who would tell you, "I was so afraid that I ran home to my wife." They just aren't that way. Yet Muhammed felt comfortable enough with his wife to be able to do that. That's how influential and strong woman she was. Although these examples are only a few of the subjects that would have been on Muhammed's mind, they are sufficient in intensity to prove my point. The Qur'an does not mention any of these things - not the death of his children, not the death of his beloved companion and wife, not his fear of the initial revelations, which he so beautifully shared with his wife - nothing; yet, these topics must have hurt him, bothered him, and caused him pain and grief during periods of his psychological reflections, then these subjects, as well as others, would be prevalent or at least mentioned throughout. A truly scientific approach to the Qur'an is possible because the Qur'an offers something that is not offered by other religious scriptures, in particular, and other religions, in general. It is what scientists demand. Today there are many people who have ideas and theories about how the universe works. These people are all over the place, but the scientific community does not even bother to listen to them. This is because within the last century the scientific community has demanded a test of falsification. They say, "If you have theory, do not bother us with it unless you bring with that theory a way for us to prove whether you are wrong or not." Such a test was exactly why the scientific community listened to Einstein towards the beginning of the century. He came with a new theory and said, "I believe the universe works like this; and here are three ways to prove whether I am wrong!". So the scientific community subjected his theory to the tests, and within six years it passed all three. Of course, this does not prove that he was great, but it proves that he deserved to be listened to because he said, "This is my idea; and if you want to try to prove me wrong, do this or try that." This is exactly what the Qur'an has - falsification tests. Some are old (in that they have already been proven true), and some still exist today. Basically it states, "If this book is not what it claims to be, then all you have to do is this or this or this to prove that it is false." Of course, in 1400 years no one has been able to do "This or this or this, " and thus it is still considered true and authentic. I suggest to you that the next time you get into dispute with someone about Islam and he claims that he has the truth and that you are in darkness, you leave all other arguments at first and make this suggestion. Ask him, "Is there any falsification test in your religion? Is there anything in your religion that would prove you are wrong if I could prove to you that it exists - anything?" Well, I can promise right now that people will not have anything - no test, no proof, nothing! This is because they do not carry around the idea that they should not only present what they believe but should also offer others a chance to prove they're wrong. However, Islam does that. A perfect example of how Islam provides man with a chance to verify it authenticity and "prove it wrong" occurs in the 4th chapter. And quiet honestly, I was surprised when I first discovered this challenge. It states: "Do they not consider the Qur'an? Had it been from any other than Allah, they would surely have found therein much discrepancy." This is a clear challenge to the non-Muslim.Basically, it invites him to find a mistake. As a matter of fact, the seriousness and difficulty of the challenge aside, the actual presentation of such a challenge in the first place is not even in human nature and is inconsistent with man's personality. One doesn't take an exam in school after finishing the exam, write a note to the instructor at the end saying, "This exam is perfect. There are no mistakes in it. Find one if you can!". One just doesn't do that. The teacher would not sleep until he found a mistake! And yet this is the way the Qur'an approaches people. Another interesting attitude that exists in the Qur'an repeatedly deals with its advice to the reader. The Qur'an informs that reader about different facts and then gives the advice: "If you want to know more about this or that, or if you doubt what is said, then you should ask those who have knowledge." This too is a surprising attitude. It is not usual to have a book that comes from someone without training in geography, botany, biology, etc., who discusses these subjects and then advises the reader to ask men of knowledge if he doubts anything. Yet in every age there have been Muslims who have followed the advice of the Qur'an and made surprising discoveries. If one looks to the works of Muslim scientists if many centuries ago, one will find them full of quotations from the Qur'an. These works state that they did research in such a place, looking for something. And they affirm that the reason they looked in such and such a place was that the Qur'an pointed them in that direction. For example, the Qur'an mentions man's origin and then tells the reader, "Research it!" It gives the reader a hint where to look and then states that one should find out more about it. This is the kind of thing that Muslims today largely seem to overlook - but not always, as illustrated in the following example. A few years ago, a group of men in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia collected all if the verses in the Qur'an which discuss embryology - the growth of the human being in the womb. They said, "Here is what the Qur'an says. Is it the truth?" In essence, they took the advice of the Qur'an: "Ask the men who know." They chose, as it happened, a non-Muslim who is a professor of embryology at the University of Toronto. His name is Keith Moore, and he is the author of textbooks on embryology - a world expert on the subject. They invited him to Riyadh and said, "This is what the Qur'an says about your subject. Is it true? What can you tell us?" While he was in Riyadh, they gave him all of the help that he needed in translation and all of the cooperation for which he asked. And he was so surprised at what he found that he changed his textbooks. In fact, in the second edition of one of his books, called Before we are born... in the second edition about the history of embryology, he included some material that was not in the first edition because of what he found in the Qur'an. Truly this illustrates that the Qur'an was ahead of its time and that those who believe in the Qur'an know what other people do not know. I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Keith Moore for a television presentation, and we talked a great deal about this - it was illustrated by slides and so on. He mentioned that some of the things that the Qur'an states about the growth of the human being were not known until thirty years ago. In fact, he said that one item in particular - the Qur'an's description of the human being as a "leech-like clot" ('alaqah) at one stage - was new to him; but when he checked on it, he found that it was true, and so he added it to his book. He said, "I never thought of that before," and he went to the zoology department and asked for a picture of a leech. When he found that it looked just like the human embryo, he decided to include both pictures in one of his textbooks. Dr. Moore also wrote a book on clinical embryology, and when he presented this information in Toronto, it caused quite a stir throughout Canada. It was on the front pages of some of the newspapers across Canada, and some of the headlines were quite funny. For instance, one headline read: "SURPRISING THING FOUND IN ANCIENT BOOK!"! It seems obvious from this example that people do not clearly understand what it is all about. As a matter of fact, one newspaper reporter asked Professor Moore, "Don't you think That maybe the Arabs might have known about these things - the description of the embryo, its appearance and how it changes and grows? Maybe there were not scientists, but maybe they did something crude dissections on their own - carved up people and examined these things." The professor immediately pointed out to him that he [i.e., the reporter] had missed a very important point - all of the slides of the embryo that had been shown and had been projected in the film had come from pictures taken through a microscope. He said, "It does not matter if someone had tried to discover embryology fourteen centuries ago, they could not have seen it!". All of the descriptions in the Qur'an of the appearance of the embryo are of the item when it is still too small to see with the eye; therefore, one needs a microscope to see it. Since such a device had only been around for little more than two hundred years, Dr. Moore taunted, "Maybe fourteen centuries ago someone secretly had a microscope and did this research, making no mistakes anywhere. Then he somehow taught Muhammad and convinced him to put this information in his book. Then he destroyed his equipment and kept it a secret forever. Do you believe that? You really should not unless you bring some proof because it is such a ridiculous theory." In fact, when he was asked "How do you explain this information in the Qur'an?" Dr. Moore's reply was, "It could only have been divinely revealed."! Although the aforementioned example of man researching information contained in the Qur'an deals with a non-Muslim, it is still valid because he is one of those who is knowledgeable in the subject being researched. Had some layman claimed that what the Qur'an says about embryology is true, then one would not necessarily have to accept his word. However, because of the high position, respect, and esteem man gives scholars, one naturally assumes that if they research a subject and arrive at a conclusion based on that research, then the conclusion is valid. One of Professor Moore's colleagues, Marshall Johnson, deals extensively with geology at the University of Toronto. He became very interested in the fact that the Qur'an's statements about embryology are accurate, and so he asked Muslims to collect everything contained in the Qur'an which deals with his specialty. Again people were very surprised at the findings. Since there are a vast number subjects discussed in the Qur'an, it would certainly require a large amount of time to exhaust each subject. It suffices for the purpose of this discussion to state that the Qur'an makes very clear and concise statements about various subjects while simultaneously advising the reader to verify the authenticity of these statements with research by scholars in those subjects. And as illustrated by the Qur'an has clearly emerged authentic. Undoubtedly, there is an attitude in the Qur'an which is not found anywhere else. It is interesting how when the Qur'an provides information, it often tells the reader, "You did not know this before." Indeed, there is no scripture that exists which makes that claim. All of the other ancient writings and scriptures that people have, do give a lot of information, but they always state where the information came from. For example, when the Bible discusses ancient history, it states that this king lived here, this one fought in a certain battle, another one had so may sons, etc. Yet it always stipulates that if you want more information, then you should read the book of so and so because that is where the information came from. In contrast to this concept, the Qur'an provides the reader with information and states that this information is something new. Of course, there always exists the advice to research the information provided and verify its authenticity. It is interesting that such a concept was never challenged by non-Muslims fourteen centuries ago. Indeed, the Makkans who hated the Muslims, and time and time again they heard such revelations claiming to bring new information; yet, they never spoke up and said, "This is not new. We know where Muhammad got this information. We learned this at school." They could never challenge its authenticity because it really was new! In concurrence with the advice given in the Qur'an to research information (even if it is new), when 'Umar was caliph, he chose a group of men and sent them to find the wall of Dhul-Qarnayn. Before the Qur'anic revelation, the Arabs had never heard of such a wall, but because the Qur'an described it, they were able to discover it. As a matter of fact, it is now located in what is called Durbend in the Soviet Union. It must be stressed here that the Qur'an is accurate about many, many things, but accuracy does not necessarily mean that a book is a divine revelation. In fact, accuracy is only one of the criteria for divine revelations. For instance, the telephone book is accurate, but that does not mean that it is divinely revealed. The real problem lies in that one must establish some proof of the source the Qur'an's information. The emphasis is on the reader. One cannot simply deny the Qur'an's authenticity without sufficient proof. If, indeed, one finds a mistake, then he has the right to disqualify it. This is exactly what the Qur'an encourages. Once a man came up to me after a lecture I delivered in South Africa. He was very angry about what I had said, and so he claimed, "I am going to go home tonight and find a mistake in the Qur'an." Of course, I said, "Congratulations. That is the most intelligent thing that you have said." Certainly, this is the approach Muslims need to take with those who doubt the Qur'an's authenticity, because the Qur'an itself offers the same challenge. An inevitably, after accepting it's challenge and discovering that it is true, these people will come to believe it because they could not disqualify it. In essence, the Qur'an earns their respect because they themselves have had to verify its authenticity. An essential fact that cannot be reiterated enough concerning the authenticity of the Qur'an is that one's inability to explain a phenomenon himself does not require his acceptance of the phenomenon's existence or another person's explanation of it. Specifically, just because one cannot explain something does not mean that one has to accept someone else's explanation. However, the person's refusal of other explanations reverts the burden of proof back on himself to find a feasible answer. This general theory applies to numerous concepts in life, but fits most wonderfully with the Qur'anic challenge, for it creates a difficulty for one who says, "I do not believe it." At the onset of refusal one immediately has an obligation to find an explanation himself if he feels others' answers are inadequate. In fact, in one particular Qur'anic verse which I have always seen mistranslated into English, Allah mentions a man who heard the truth explained to him. It states that he was derelict in his duty because after he heard the information, he left without checking the verity of what he had heard. In other words, one is guilty if he hears something and does not research it and check to see whether it is true. One is supposed to process all information and decide what is garbage to be thrown out and what is worthwhile information to be kept and benefited from at a later date. One cannot just let it rattle around in his head. It must be put in the proper categories and approached from that point of view. For example, if the information is still speculatory, then one must discern whether it's closer to being true or false. But if all of the facts have been presented, then one must decide absolutely between these two options. And even if one is not positive about the authenticity of the information, he is still required to process all of the information and make the admission that he just does not know for sure. Although this last point appears to be futile, in actuality, it is beneficial to the arrival at a positive conclusion at a later time in that it forces the person to at least recognize, research and review the facts. This familiarity with the information will give the person "the edge" when future discoveries are made and additional information is presented. The important thing is that one deals with the facts and does not simply discard them out of empathy and disinterest. The real certainty about the truthfulness of the Qur'an is evident in the confidence which is prevalent throughout it; and this confidence comes from a different approach - "Exhausting the Alternatives." In essence, the Qur'an states, "This book is a divine revelation; if you do not believe that, then what is it?" In other words, the reader is challenged to come up with some other explanation. Here is a book made of paper and ink. Where did it come from? It says it is a divine revelation; if it is not, then what is its source? The interesting fact is that no one has with an explanation that works. In fact, all alternatives have bee exhausted. As has been well established by non-Muslims, these alternatives basically are reduces to two mutually exclusive schools of thought, insisting on one or the other. On one hand, there exists a large group of people who have researched the Qur'an for hundreds of years and who claim, "One thing we know for sure - that man, Muhammad, thought he was a prophet. He was crazy!" They are convinced that Muhammad (SAW) was fooled somehow. Then on the other hand, there is another group which alleges, "Because of this evidence, one thing we know for sure is that that man, Muhammad, was a liar!" Ironically, these two groups never seem to get together without contradicting. In fact, many references on Islam usually claim both theories. They start out by saying that Muhammad (SAW) was crazy and then end by saying that he was a liar. They never seem to realize that he could not have been both! For example, if one is deluded and really thinks that he is a prophet, then he does not sit up late at night planning, "How will I fool the people tomorrow so that they think I am a prophet?" He truly believes that he is a prophet, and he trusts that the answer will be given to him by revelation. As a matter of fact, a great deal of the Qur'an came in answer to questions. Someone would ask Muhammad (SAW) a question, and the revelation would come with the answer to it. Certainly, if one is crazy and believes that an angel put words in his ear, then when someone asks him a question, he thinks that the angel will give him the answer. Because he is crazy, he really thinks that. He does not tell someone to wait a short while and then run to his friends and ask them, "Does anyone know the answer?" This type of behavior is characteristic of one who does not believe that he is a prophet. What the non-Muslims refuse to accept is that you cannot have it both ways. One can be deluded, or he can be a liar. He can be either one or neither, but he certainly cannot be both! The emphasis is on the fact that they are unquestionably mutually exclusive personal traits. The following scenario is a good example of the kind of circle that non-Muslims go around in constantly. If you ask one of them, "What is the origin of the Qur'an?" He tells you that it originated from the mind of a man who was crazy. Then you ask him, "If it came from his head, then where did he get the information contained in it? Certainly the Qur'an mentions many things with which the Arabs were not familiar." So in order to explain the fact which you bring him, he changes his position and says, "Well, maybe he was not crazy. Maybe some foreigner brought him the information. So he lied and told people that he was a prophet." At this point then you have to ask him, "If Muhammad was a liar, then where did he get his confidence? Why did he behave as though he really thought he was a prophet?" Finally backed into a corner, like a cat he quickly lashes out with the first response that comes to his mind. Forgetting that he has already exhausted that possibility, he claims, "Well, maybe he wasn't a liar. He was probably crazy and really thought that he was a prophet." And thus he begins the futile circle again. As has already been mentioned, there is much information contained in the Qur'an whose source cannot be attributed to anyone other than Allah. For example, who told Muhammad about the wall of Dhul-Qarnayn - a place hundreds of miles to the north? Who told him about embryology? When people assemble facts such as these, if they are not willing to attribute their existence to a divine source, they automatically resort to the assumption someone brought Muhammad the information and that he used it to fool the people. However, this theory can easily be disproved with one simple question: "If Muhammad was a liar, where did he get his confidence? Why did he tell some people out right to their face what others could never say?" Such confidence depends completely upon being convinced that one has a true divine revelation. For example, the Prophet (SAW) had an uncle by the name of Abu Lahab. This man hated Islam to such an extent that he used to follow the Prophet around in order to discredit him. If Abu Lahab saw the Prophet (SAW) speaking to a stranger, he would wait until they parted and then would go to the stranger and ask him, "What did he tell you? Did he say, 'Black.'? Well, it's white. Did he say, 'Morning.'? Well, it's night." He faithfully said the exact opposite of whatever he heard Muhammad (SAW) and the Muslims say. However, about ten years before Abu Lahab died, a little chapter in the Qur'an was revealed to him. It distinctly stated that he would go to the Fire (i.e., Hell). In other words, it affirmed that he would never become a Muslim and would therefore be condemned forever. For ten years all Abu Lahab had to do was say, "I heard that it has been revealed to Muhammad that I will never change - that I will never become a Muslim and will enter the Hellfire. Well I want to become a Muslim now. How do you like that? What do you think of your divine revelation now?" But he never did that. And yet, that is exactly the kind of behavior one would have expected from him since he always sought to contradict Islam. In essence, Muhammad (SAW) said, "You hate me and you want to finish me? Here, say these words, and I am finished. Come on, say them!" But Abu Lahab never said them. Ten years! And in all that time he never accepted Islam or even became sympathetic to the Islamic cause. How could Muhammad possibly have known for sure that Abu Lahab would fulfill the Qur'anic revelation if he (i.e., Muhammad) was not truly the messenger of Allah? How could he possibly have been so confident as to give someone 10 years to discredit his claim of Prophethood? The only answer is that he was Allah's messenger; for in order to put forth suck a risky challenge, one has to be entirely convinced that he has a divine revelation. Another example of the confidence which Muhammad (SAW) had in his own Prophethood and consequently in the divine protection of himself and his message is when he left Makkah and hid in a cave with Abu Bakr during their emigration to Madeenah. The two clearly saw people coming to kill them, and Abu Bakr was afraid. Certainly, if Muhammad (SAW) was a liar, a forger and one who was trying to fool the people into believing that he was a prophet, one would have expected him to say in such a circumstance to his friend, "Hey, Abu Bakr, see if you can find a back way out of this cave." Or "Squat down in that corner over there and keep quiet." Yet, in fact, what he said to Abu Bakr clearly illustrated his confidence. He told him, "Relax! Allah is with us, and Allah will save us!" Now, if one knows that he is fooling the people, where does one get this kind of attitude? In fact, such a frame of mind is not characteristic of a liar or a forger at all. So, as has been previously mentioned, the non-Muslims go around and around in a circle, searching for a way out - some way to explain the findings in the Qur'an without attributing them to their proper source. On one hand, they tell you on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, "The man was a liar," and on the other hand, on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday they tell you, "He was crazy." What they refuse to accept is that one cannot have it both ways; yet they refuse to accept is that one cannot have it both ways; yet they need both excuses to explain the information in the Qur'an. About seven years ago, I had a minister over to my home. In the particular room which we were sitting there was a Qur'an on the table, face down, and so the minister was not aware of which book it was. In the midst of a discussion, I pointed to the Qur'an and said, "I have confidence in that book." Looking at the Qur'an but not knowing which book it was , he replied, "Well, I tell you, if that book is not the Bible, it was written by a man!" In response to his statement, I said, "Let me tell you something about what is in that book." And in just three to four minutes I related to him a few things contained in the Qur'an. After just those three or four minutes, he completely changed his position and declared, "You are right. A man did not write that book. The Devil wrote it!" Indeed, possessing such an attitude is very unfortunate - for many reasons. For one thing, it is a very quick and cheap excuse. It is an instant exit out of an uncomfortable situation. As a matter of fact, there is a famous story in the Bible that mentions how one day some of the Jews were witnesses when Jesus raised a man from the dead. The man had been dead for four days, and when Jesus arrived, he simply said, "Get up!" and the man arose and walked away. At such a sight, some of the Jews who were watching said disbelievingly, "This is the Devil. The Devil helped him!" Now this story is rehearsed often in churches all over the world, and people cry big tears over it, saying, "Oh, if I had been there, I would not have been as stupid as the Jews!" Yet ironically, these people do exactly what the Jews did when in just three minutes you show them only a small part of the Qur'an and all they can say is, "Oh, the Devil did it. The devil wrote that book!". Because they are truly backed into a corner and have no other viable answer, they resort to the quickest and cheapest excuse available. Another Example of people's use of this weak stance can be found in the Makkans' explanation of the source of Muhammed's message. They used to say, "The devils bring Muhammad that Qur'an!" But just as with every other suggestion made, the Qur'an gives the answer. One verse in particular states: "And they say, 'Surely he is possessed [by jinn], 'but it [i.e., the Qur'an] is not except a reminder to the worlds." Thus it gives an argument in reply to such a theory. In fact, there are many arguments in the Qur'an in reply to the suggestion that devils brought Muhammad (SAW) his message. For example, in the 26th chapter Allah clearly affirms: "No evil ones have brought it [i.e., this revelation] down. It would neither be fitting for them, nor would they be able. Indeed they have been removed far from hearing." And in another place in the Qur'an, Allah instructs us: "So when you recite the Qur'an seek refuge in Allah from Shaytaan, the rejected." Now is this how Satan writes a book? He tells one, "Before you read my book, ask God to save you from me."? This is very, very tricky. Indeed, a man could write something like this, but would Satan do this? Many people clearly illustrate that they cannot come to one conclusion on this subject. On one hand, they claim that Satan would not do such a thing and that even if he could, God would not allow him to; yet, on the other hand, they also believe that Satan is only that much less than God. In essence they allege that the Devil can probably do whatever God can do. And as a result, when they look at the Qur'an, even as surprised as they are as to how amazing it is, they still insist, "The Devil did this!" Thanks be to Allah, Muslims do not have that attitude. Although Satan may have some abilities, they are a long way separated from the abilities of Allah. And no Muslim is a Muslim unless he believes that. It is common knowledge even among non-Muslims that the Devil can easily make mistakes, and it would be expected that he would contradict himself if and when he wrote a book. For indeed, the Qur'an states: "Do they not consider the Qur'an? Had it been from any other than Allah, they would surely have found therein much discrepancy." In conjunction with the excuses that non-Muslims advance in futile attempts to justify unexplainable verses in the Qur'an, there is another attack often rendered which seems to be a combination of the theories that Muhammad (SAW) was crazy and a liar. Basically, these people propose that Muhammad was insane, and as a result of his delusion, he lied to and misled people. There is a name for this in psychology. It is referred to as mythomania. It means simply that one tells lies and then believes them. This is what the non-Muslims say Muhammad (SAW) suffered from. But the only problem with this proposal is that one suffering from mythomania absolutely cannot deal with facts, and yet the whole Qur'an is based entirely upon facts. Everything contained in it can be researched and established as true. Since facts are such a problem for a mythomaniac, when a psychologist tries to treat one suffering from that condition, he continually confronts him with facts. For example, if one is mentally ill and claims, "I am the king of England," a psychologist does not say to him "No you aren't. You are crazy!" He just does not do that. Rather, he confronts him with facts and says, "O.K., you say you are the king of England. So tell me where the queen is today. And where is your prime minister? And where are your guards?" Now, when the man has trouble trying to deal with these questions, he tries to make excuses, saying Uh... the queen... she has gone to her mother's. Uh... the prime minister... well he died." And eventually he is cured because he cannot deal with the facts. If the psychologist continues confronting him with enough facts, finally he faces the reality and says, "I guess I am not the king of England." The Qur'an approaches everyone who reads it in very much the same way a psychologist treats his mythomania patient. There is a verse in the Qur'an which states: "Oh mankind, there has come to you an admonition [i.e., the Qur'an] from your Lord and a healing for what is in the hearts - and guidance and mercy for the believers." At first glance, this statement appears vague, but the meaning of this verse is clear when one views it in light of the aforementioned example. Basically, one is healed of his delusions by reading the Qur'an. In essence, it is therapy. It literally cures deluded people by confronting them with facts. A prevalent attitude throughout the Qur'an is one which says, "Oh mankind, you say such and such about this; but what about such and such? How can you say this when you know that?" And so forth. It forces one to consider what is relevant and what matters while simultaneously healing one of the delusions that the facts presented to mankind by Allah can easily be explained away with flimsy theories and excuses. It is this very sort of thing - confronting people with facts - that had captured the attention of many non-Muslims. In fact, there exists a very interesting reference concerning this subject in the New Catholic Encyclopedia. In an article under the subject of the Qur'an, the Catholic Church states, "Over the centuries, many theories have been offered as to the origin of the Qur'an... Today no sensible man accepts any of these theories."!! Now here is the age-old Catholic Church, which has been around for so many centuries, denying these futile attempts to explain away the Qur'an. Indeed, the Qur'an is a problem for the Catholic Church. It states that it is revelation, so they study it. Certainly, they would love to find proof that it is not, but they cannot. They cannot find a viable explanation. But at least they are honest in their research and do not accept the first unsubstantiated interpretation which comes along. The Church states that in fourteen centuries it has not yet been presented a sensible explanation. At least it admits that the Qur'an is not an easy subject to dismiss. Certainly, other people are much less honest. They quickly say, "Oh, the Qur'an came from here. The Qur'an came from there." And they do not even examine the credibility of what they are stating most of the time. Of course, such a statement by the Catholic Church leaves the everyday Christian in some difficulty. It just may be that he has his own ideas as to the origin of the Qur'an, but as a single member of the Church, he cannot really act upon his own theory. Such an action would be contrary to the obedience, allegiance and loyalty which the Church demands. By virtue of his membership, he must accept what the Catholic Church declares without question and establish its teachings as part of his everyday routine. So, in essence, if the Catholic Church as a whole is saying, "Do not listen to these unconfirmed reports about the Qur'an," then what can be said about the Islamic point of view? Even non-Muslims are admitting that there is something to the Qur'an - something that has to be acknowledged - then why are people so stubborn and defensive and hostile when Muslims advance the very same theory? This is certainly something for those with mind a to contemplate - something to ponder for those of understanding! Recently, the leading intellectual in the Catholic Church - a man by the name of Hans - studied the Qur'an and gave his opinion of what he had read. This man has been around for some time, and he is highly respected in the Catholic Church, and after careful scrutiny, he reported his findings, concluding, "God has spoken to man through the man, Muhammad." Again this is a conclusion arrived at by a non-Muslim source - the very leading intellectual of the Catholic Church himself! I do not think that the Pope agrees with him, but nonetheless, the opinion of such a noted, repute public figure must carry some weight in defense of the Muslim position. He must be applauded for facing the reality that the Qur'an is not something which can be easily pushed aside and that, in fact God is the source of these words. As is evident from the aforementioned information, all of the possibilities have been exhausted, so the chance of finding another possibility of dismissing the Qur'an is nonexistent. For if the book is not a revelation, then it is a deception; and if it is a deception, one must ask, "What is its origin" And where does it deceive us?" Indeed, the true answers to these questions shed light on the Qur'an's authenticity and silence the bitter unsubstantiated claims of the unbelievers. Certainly, if people are going to insist that the Qur'an is a deception, then they must bring forth evidence to support such a claim. The burden of proof is on them, not us! One is never supposed to advance a theory without sufficient corroborating facts; so I say to them, "Show me one deception! Show me where the Qur'an deceives me! Show me, otherwise, don't say that it is a deception!" An interesting characteristic of the Qur'an is how it deals with surprising phenomena which relate not only to the past but to modern times as well. In essence, the Qur'an is not and old problem. It is still a problem even today - a problem to the non-Muslims that is. For everyday, every week, every year brings more and more evidence that the Qur'an is a force to be contended with - that its authenticity is no longer to be challenged! For example, one verse in the Qur'an reads; "Do not the unbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were joined together, then We clove them asunder, and made from water every living thing? Will they not then believe?" Ironically, this very information is exactly what they awarded the 1973 Noble Prize for - to a couple of unbelievers. The Qur'an reveals the origin of the universe - how it began from one piece - and mankind continues to verify this revelation, even up to now. Additionally, the fact that all life originated from water would not have been an easy thing to convince people of fourteen centuries ago. Indeed, if 1400 years ago you had stood in the desert and told someone, "All of this, you see (pointing to yourself), is made up of mostly water," no one would have believed you. Proof of that was not available until the invention of the microscope. They had to wait to find out that cytoplasm, the basic substance of the cell, is made-up of 80% water. Nonetheless, the evidence did come, and once again the Qur'an stood the test of time. In reference to the falsification tests mentioned earlier, it is interesting to note that they, too, relate to both the past and the present. Some of them were used as illustrations of Allah's omnipotence and knowledge, while others continue to stand as challenges to the present day. An example of the former is the statement made in the Qur'an about Abu Lahab. It clearly illustrates that Allah, the Knower of the Unseen, knew that Abu Lahab would never change his ways and accept Islam. Thus Allah dictated that he would be condemned to the Hellfire forever. Such a chapter was both an illustration of Allah's divine wisdom and a warning to those who were like Abu Lahab. An interesting example of the latter type of falsification tests contained in the Qur'an is the verse which mentions the relationship between the Muslims and the Jews. The verse is careful not to narrow its scope to the relationship between individual members of each religion, but rather, it summarizes the relationship between the two groups of people as a whole. In essence, the Qur'an states that the Christians will always treat the Muslims better than the Jews will treat the Muslims. Indeed, the full impact of such a statement can only be felt after careful consideration of the real meaning of such a verse. It is true that many Christians and many Jews have become Muslims, but as a whole, the Jewish community is to be viewed as an avid enemy of Islam. Additionally, very few people realize what such an open declaration in the Qur'an invites. In essence, it is an easy chance for the Jews to prove that the Qur'an is false - that it is not a divine revelation. All they have to do is organize themselves, treat the Muslims nicely for a few years and then say, "Now what does your holy book say about who are your best friends in the world - the Jews or the Christians? Look what we Jews have done for you!" That is all they have to do to disprove the Qur'an's authenticity, yet they have not done it in 1400 years. But, as always, the offer still stands open! All of the examples so far given concerning the I various angles from which one can approach the | Qur'an have undoubtedly been subjective in nature; I however there does exist another angle, among others, which is objective and whose basis is mathematical. It is surprising how authentic the Qur'an becomes when one assembles what might be referred to as a list of good guesses. Mathematically, it can be explained using guessing and prediction examples. For instance, if a person has two choices (i.e., one is right, and one is wrong), and he closes his eyes and makes a choice, then half of the time (i.e., one time out of two) he will be right. Basically, he has a one in two chance, for he could pick the wrong choice, or he could pick the right choice. Now if the same person has two situations like that (i.e., he could be right or wrong about situation number one, and he could be right or wrong about situation number two), and he closes his eyes and guesses, then he will only be right one fourth of the time (i.e., one time out of four). He now has a one in four chance because now there are three ways for him to be wrong and only one way for him to be right. In simple terms, he could make the wrong choice in situation number one and then make the wrong choice in situation number two; OR he could make the wrong choice in situation number one and then make the right choice in situation number two; OR he could make the right choice in situation number one and then make the wrong choice in situation number two; OR he could make the right choice in situation number one and then make the right choice in situation number two. Of course, the(only instance in which he could be totally right is the last scenario where he could guess correctly in both situations. The odds of his guessing completely correctly have become greater because the number of situations for him to guess in have increased; and the mathematical equation representing such a scenario is 1/2 x 1/2 (i.e., one time out of two for the first situation multiplied by one time out of two for the second situation). Continuing on with the example, if the same person now has three situations in which to make blind guesses, then he will only be right one eighth of the time (i.e., one time out of eight or 1/2 X 1/2 X 1/2). Again, the odds of choosing the correct choice in all three situations have decreased his chances of being completely correct to only one time in eight. It must be understood that as the number of situations increase, the chances of being right decrease, for the two phenomena are inversely proportional. Now applying this example to the situations in the Qur'an, if one draws up a list of all of the subjects about which the Qur'an has made correct statements, it becomes very clear that it is highly unlikely that they were all just correct blind guesses. Indeed, the subjects discussed in the Qur'an are numerous, and thus the odds of someone just making lucky guesses about all of them become practically nil. If there are a million ways for the Qur'an to be wrong, yet each time it is right, then it is unlikely that someone was guessing. The following three examples of subjects about which the Qur'an has made correct statements collectively illustrate how the Qur'an continues to beat the odds. In the 16th chapter the Qur'an mentions that the female bee leaves its home to gather food.l2 Now, a person might guess on that, saying, "The bee that you see flying around - it could be male, or it could be female. I think I will guess female." Certainly, he has a one in two chance of being right. So it happens that the Qur'an is right. But it also happens that was not what most people believed at the time when the Qur'an was revealed. Can you tell the difference between a male and a female bee? Well, it takes a specialist to do that, but it has been discovered that the male bee never leaves his home to gather food. However, in Shakespeare's play, Henry the Fourth, some of the characters discuss bees and mention that the bees are soldiers and have a king. That is what people thought in Shakespeare's time - that the bees that one sees flying around are male bees and that they go home and answer to a king. However, that is not true at all. The fact is that they are females, and they answer to a queen. Yet it took modern scientific investigations in the last 300 years to discover that this is the case. So, back to the list of good guesses, concerning the topic of bees, the Qur'an had a 50/50 chance of being right, and the odds were one in two. In addition to the subject of bees, the Qur'an also discusses the sun and the manner in which it travels through space. Again, a person can guess on that subject. When the sun moves through space, there are two options: it can travel just as a stone would travel if one threw it, or it can move of its own accord. The Qur'an states the latter - that it moves as a result of its own motion.'3 To do such, the Qur'an uses a form of the word sabaha to describe the sun's movement through space. In order to properly provide the reader with a comprehensive understanding of the implications of this Arabic verb, the following example is given. If a man is in water and the verb sabaha is applied in reference to his movement, it can be understood that he is swimming, moving of his own accord and not as a result of a direct force applied to him. Thus when this verb is used in reference to the sun's movement through space, it in no way implies that the sun is flying uncontrollably through space as a result of being hurled or the like. It simply means that the sun is turning and rotating as it travels. Now, this is what the Qur'an affirms, but was it an easy thing to discover? Can any common man tell that the sun is turning? Only in modern times was the equipment made available to project the image of the sun onto a tabletop so that one could look at it without being blinded. And through this process it was discovered that not only are there three spots on the sun but that these spots move once every 25 days. This movement is referred to as the rotation of the sun around its axis and conclusively proves that, as the Qur'an stated 1400 years ago, the sun does, indeed turn as it travels through space. And returning once again to the subject of good guess, the odds of guessing correctly about both subjects - the sex of bees and the movement of the sun - are one in four! Seeing as back fourteen centuries ago people probably did not understand much about time zones, the Quran's statements about this subject are considerably surprising. The concept that one family is having breakfast as the sun comes up while another family is enjoying the brisk night air is truly something to be marveled at, even in modern time. Indeed, fourteen centuries ago, a man could not travel more than thirty miles in one day, and thus it took him literally months to travel from India to Morocco, for example. And probably , when he was having supper in Morocco, he thought to himself, "Back home in India they are having supper right now." This is because he did not realize that, in the process of traveling, he moved across a time zone. Yet, because it is the words of Allah, the All-Knowing, the Qur'an recognizes and acknowledges such a phenomenon. In an interesting verse it states that when history comes to an end and the Day of Judgment arrives, it will all occurring an instant; and this very instant will catch some people in the daytime and some people at night. This clearly illustrates Allah's divine wisdom and His previous knowledge of the existence of time zones, even though such a discovery was non-existent back fourteen centuries ago. Certainly, this phenomenon is not something which is obvious to one's eyes or a result of one's experience, and this fact, in itself, suffices as proof of the Qur'ans authenticity. Returning one final time to the subject of good guesses for the purpose of the present example, the odds that someone guessed correctly about all three of the aforementioned subjects - the sex of bees, the movement of the sun and the existence of time zones - are one in eight! Certainly, one could continue on and on with this example, drawing up longer and longer list of good guesses; and of course, the odds would become higher and higher with each increase of subjects about which one could guess. But what no one can deny is the following; the odds that Mohammed an illiterate, guessed correctly about thousands and thousands of subjects, never once making a mistake, are so high that any theory of his authorship of the Qur'an must be completely dismissed - even by the most hostile enemies of Islam! Indeed, the Qur'an expects this kind of challenge. Undoubtedly, if one said to someone upon entering a foreign land, "I know your father. I have met him," probably the man from that land would doubt the newcomer's word, saying, "You have just come here. How could you know my father?" As a result, he would question him, "Tell me, is my father tall, short, dark, fair? What is he like?" Of course, if the visitor continued answering all of the questions correctly, the skeptic would have no choice but to say, "I guess you do know my father. I don't know how you know him, but I guess you do!" The situation is the same with the Qur'an. It states that it originates from the One who created everything. So everyone has the right to say, "Convince me! If the author of this book really originated life and everything in the heavens and on the earth, then He should know about this, about that, and so on." And inevitably, after researching the Qur'an, everyone will discover the same truths. Additionally, we all know something for sure: we do not all have to be experts to verify what the Qur'an affirms. One's iman (faith) grows as one continues to check and confirm the truths contained in the Qur'an. And one is supposed to do so all of his life. May God (Allah) guide everyone close to the truth. SUPPLEMENT An engineer at the University of Toronto who was interested in psychology and who had read something on it, conducted researched wrote a thesis on Efficiency of Group Discussions. The purpose of his research was to find out how much people accomplish when they get together to talk in groups of two, three, ten, etc. The graph of his findings: people accomplish most when they talk in groups of two. Of course, this discovery was entirely beyond his expectations, but it is very old advice given in the Qur'an: Additionally, the 89th chapter of the Qur'an mentions a certain city by the name of 'Iram (a city of pillars), which was not known in ancient history and which was non-existent as far as historians were concerned. However, the December 1978 edition of National Geographic introduced interesting information which mentioned that in 1973, the city of Elba was excavated in Syria. The city was discovered to be 43 centuries old, but that is not the most amazing part. Researchers found in the library of Elba a record of all of the cities with which Elba had done business. Believe or not, there on the list was the name of the city of 'Iram. The people of Elba had done business with the people of 'Iram! "Say, 'I exhort you to one thing - that you stand for Allah, [assessing the truth] by twos and singly, and then reflect.....' In conclusion I ask you to consider with care the following: "And they say, 'Why are not signs sent down to him from his Lord?' Say, 'Indeed, the signs are with Allah, and I am but a clear warner.' But is sufficient for them that We have sent down to you the Book [i.e. Qur'an] which is rehearsed to them? Verily, in that is mercy and a reminder to people who believe."
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