Zahir
Ebrahim | Project
Humanbeingsfirst.org
[
Tuesday, August 02, 2011, 2nd day of Ramadan in the United States,
Muslim year 1432 ] Despite a slight throbbing headache due to
abstinence from my usual cups of morning tea on my second day of
fasting, I feel motivated to address an observation made by a fellow
Muslim at an Iftar
dinner in a Pakistani restaurant in Islamabad many
years ago. In the past few years I have spent many a Ramadan in
Pakistan and often visited the same restaurant for breaking the fast
with a lavish buffet meal. Servicing a mere day's hunger from
self-imposed deprivation can be a sight to behold. Any sensible
person watching privileged Muslims feast at Iftar
with perfunctory courtesy to Islam would surely wonder about
our religion. Thank goodness non-Muslims don't approach Islam by
looking at the behavior of us gluttonous Muslims, but rather, by
approaching the Holy Qur'an directly. And that's the topic of this
column – understanding Islam directly from its singular source,
the Holy Qur'an.
The
good fellow who was one of the restaurant managers and was pursuing
part-time studies in Arabic, sometimes would sit with me for a cup of
tea. As I vividly recall, on one of these visits for a hearty meal,
he had asked me a rhetorical question to which I had partly
replied in some seriousness with reference to the Holy Qur'an. My
interlocutor's immediate riposte to me was something like this:
“don't
quote me the Qur'an; everyone quotes their favorite verses to justify
their own narrow positions; the shias quote
it, the sunnis quote it, the wahabis
quote it, the barelvis quote it, the
deobandis quote it, the qadianis
quote it, and yet they all have slightly different understanding of
the same Holy Qur'an and each would rather die for that difference
than relent in their view.”
Indeed,
as many Muslims who have read the Holy Qur'an are aware, anyone can
pretty much find at least some justification for any agenda, any
belief, and mainly the one into which one is socialized at birth, in
that most unusual Book.
It
is an empirical fact that that's how
Muslims become divided into sectarianism. Not by rationalism, logic
or investigation, but by the fact of being born into a Muslim home
and adopting the dominant theology and practices of the sect to which
the parents belong – whether or not they be practicing Muslims.
Often times, the de facto socialization parameters are determined by
the dominant sect of the culture, nation, or civilization where one
is raised. This is why the majority of Muslims in the world are
classified in general terms as sunnis – the dominant sect among
the Muslims. This is also why a Saudi Muslim is different from an
Iranian Muslim, for example. Neither chooses their sectarian version
of Islam – each is born into it. But each claims to be the sole
custodian of Islam's true interpretation. As the dominant mainstream,
the sunnis don't consider themselves to be a “sect” by
the fact of being the majority. Only the other minority is a “sect”.
Every minority of course think the majority is usually wrong pointing
to how it killed Socrates. Some ask: is the religion of Islam a
“democracy” – that fifty one percent of the people
who are born into it define what Islam and its Book must mean for the
rest of the forty nine percent? Isn't that also called mob rule –
where majority ignorance rules? Should one follow the majority just
because they are a majority irrespective of the merit of their
position? And what objective merit is that when every group, big and
small, sees maximum merit only in their own socialized interpretation
of Islam?
The
vast majority of the 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide are directly
socialized into our sectarian beliefs from birth. As adults, our
understanding of the religion of Islam is thence derived almost
exclusively from our birth-sect's dominant worldviews.
Our respective beliefs are further strengthened when we see our
sect's ullema (Muslim religious
scholars) most eloquently argue their respective theological raison
d'être for differing with that other
sect's mumbo jumbo directly from the Holy Qur'an, and from other
secondary and tertiary books of their own sect. That fact of
socialization applies recursively to all scholars and compilers of
antiquity as well. The bulk of their writings constituting
the secondary and tertiary sources of information for subsequent
generations of Muslim scholarship. Each group or sect naturally
selecting the narrow views of their respective socialization to
promulgate forward to the next generation in a classic example of a
crippled epistemology which incestuously
feeds upon itself.
This
is quite empirical. Pick up any book of antiquity, from tafseer
to hadith compilation to history, and one
will see the clear separation of shia vs.
sunni dichotomy run through them. Examine
the background of the authors and they invariably exactly fall along
that same boundary. A very peculiar state of affairs which is
inexplicable, since all sects claim to have the same exact text of
the Holy Qur'an, unless one begins to understand the power and
influence of incestuous socialization in Muslim scholarship. Few
escape it. And this fact is evidenced by the straightforward
observation that socialized masses and scholars alike, don't account
for their own socialization in their self-righteous proclamations
entirely rooted in the superiority complex of their respective
inheritance.
Is
the religion of the masses therefore, practically speaking, merely
reduced to an inheritance?
The
Author of the Holy Qur'an vociferously decries that notion of
following in the footsteps of one's forefathers, unequivocally
warning not to follow the religion of one's ancestors just because
one is born into that religion. Surah Al-Baqara is replete with that
theme. E.g.,
“This
is a people that have passed away; they shall have what they earned
and you shall have what you earn, and you shall not be called upon to
answer for what they did.” (Surah
Al-Baqara, 2:141);
“(On
the day) when those who were followed disown those who followed
(them), and they behold the doom, and all their aims collapse with
them. And those who were but followers will say: If a return were
possible for us, we would disown them even as they have disowned us.
Thus will Allah show them their own deeds as anguish for them, and
they will not emerge from the Fire.” (Surah
Al-Baqara, 2:166-167)
The
Holy Qur'an repeatedly invites individual reflection of every human
being in the matters of beliefs instead of merely inheriting the
beliefs from one's forefathers, as in Surah Al An'aam:
“So
when the night over-shadowed him, he saw a star; said he: Is this my
Lord? So when it set, he said: I do not love the setting ones. Then
when he saw the moon rising, he said: Is this my Lord? So when it
set, he said: If my Lord had not guided me I should certainly be of
the erring people. Then when he saw the sun rising, he said: Is this
my Lord? Is this the greatest? So when it set, he said: O my people!
surely I am clear of what you set up (with Allah). Surely I have
turned myself, being upright, wholly to Him Who originated the
heavens and the earth, and I am not of the polytheists.”
(Surah Al An'aam, 6:76-77-78-79)
The
Holy Qur'an enjoins such reflection even while also accepting
socialization as an empirical fact among mankind. The Author of the
Holy Qur'an Itself proclaims that It created mankind in tribes and
nations:
“O
mankind! Lo! We have created you from male and female, and have made
you nations and tribes that ye may know one another. Lo! the noblest
of you, in the sight of Allah, is the best in conduct. Lo! Allah is
Knower, Aware.” (Surah Al-Hujraat, 49:13).
And
sent His message to them all in their own languages:
“And
We never sent a messenger save with the language of his folk, (
بِلِسَانِ
قَوْمِهِۦ )
that he might make (the message) clear for them.”
(Surah Ibrahim, 14:4)
And
that:
“If
Allah had so willed, He would have made you a single people, but (His
plan is) to test you in what He hath given you:”
(Surah Al-Maeda, 5:48)
So,
as the verse continues its advocacy:
“so
strive as in a race in all virtues ( فَاسْتَبِقُوا
الْخَيْرَاتِ
ۚ ).
The goal of you all is to Allah; it is He that will show you the
truth of the matters in which ye dispute.” (Surah
Al-Maeda, 5:48)
The
Holy Qur'an therefore rationally countenances socialization for those
pursuing their respective beliefs other
than Islam, despite the Holy Qur'an oft stating that Islam supplants
them all as the final Revelation in a tamper-proof package:
“In
a Book well-guarded, Which none shall touch but those who are clean.”
(Surah Al-Waqia, 56:78-79)
See
the examination of Surah Al-Fatiha and Surah Al-Maeda in Islam
and Knowledge vs. Socialization
for the consequent principles of pluralism for virtuous conduct
regardless of beliefs inherent in the message of the Holy Qur'an
which unequivocally avers:
“There
is no compulsion in religion.” (Surah Al-Baqara, 2:256)
“Surely
We have shown him the way: he may be thankful or unthankful.”
(Surah Al-insaan 76:3)
While
accepting socialization as a fact, the Qur'anic recipe to circumvent
socialization as a means for independent evaluation of beliefs, is to
approach the Holy Qur'an with a cleansed heart. (Ibid.)
But one still observes all the cleansed hearts
throughout the ages still pretty much fall along the same sectarian
demarcation among the Muslims. Why does the cleansed heart
recipe evidently fail when it comes to sectarianism for the topics
which divide the Muslims? Perhaps the hearts aren't cleansed
enough? That platitudinous metaphor for bringing utmost earnestness
when seeking a rational as well as spiritual understanding of the
Holy Qur'an, not bringing preconceptions and prejudices to its study
and reflection, doesn't really lend any additional insight into the
subject of why even the most earnest seekers of truth come away
understanding the Holy Book pretty much along the axis of their
socialization. Focusing on the heart is a dead-end
as far as further intellectual inquiry is concerned.
Therefore,
the question naturally arises, that if it is empirically observed
that everyone finds their own self-serving justifications to validate
their respective socialization in the Holy Qur'an, how is one to
study the Holy Qur'an objectively, independent of one's own
socialization, in order to learn and comprehend what its own Author
wanted to convey in that most revered Book of the Muslims?
How
are we to prevent the hijacking of the Holy Qur'an from a
self-serving understanding of it for our own selves?
Before
one can even begin to perceptively answer that crucial question,
commonsense suggests that one has to first diagnose and dissect the
problem more precisely.
Therefore,
we begin by formulating the problem in this way:
What
are the inherent impediments for studying
the message of the Holy Qur'an which make the Book so amenable to
self-serving interpretation, socialization, and even bastardization
by anyone?
Just
to briefly footnote the usage of the latter villainous word,
bastardization, it is no secret that today, its harbingers
include the most notable Western propagandists. E.g., Bernard Lewis
of Princeton University who skillfully crafted the mantra of 'Clash
of Civilizations' and subsequently wrote the thesis “Crisis of
Islam – Holy War and Unholy Terror”; and Dr. Zbigniew
Brzezinski who easily gave to the USSR its
Vietnam War in Afghanistan in Muslim blood with nothing more profound
than a simple retake on the German Third Reich's battle cry Gott
mins uns (God be with us): “God is on your side”.
“In
1990 Bernard Lewis, a leading Western scholar of Islam, analyzed 'The
Roots of Muslim Rage,' and concluded: 'It should now be clear that we
are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues
and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less
than a clash of civilizations – that perhaps irrational but
surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our
Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide
expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side
should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally
irrational reaction against our rival.'” (Samuel Huntington in
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,
page 213)
That
supposed “Muslim Rage” of 1990 was turned into the
egregiously titled full blown propaganda treatise The Clash of
Civilizations by Bernard Lewis' Zionist-imperialist confrere at
Harvard University, Samuel Huntington, in
1995:
“The
underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is
Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the
superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of
their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the US
Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose
people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe
that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the
obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the
basic ingredient that fuel conflict between Islam and the West.”
(Ibid. pages 217-218)
And
Huntington's myth crafting of 1995 was turned into the perpetual “War
on Terrorism” on September 11, 2001 by the
Zionist-imperialists' errand boy, George W. Bush Jr., the President
of the United States, with “either you are with
us, or with the terrorists”!
Moreover,
today, both “militant Islam” and “moderate Islam”,
the Hegelian Dialectic to continually advance and sustain the cause
of empire's “War on Terror” as
a “self-fulfilling prophecy”,
draw justifications from the Holy Qur'an. One for Holy War, the other
for Holy Peace. Each side has its partisans among the public because
each side easily sees the correctness of their own position –
it is, after all, (selectively) rooted in the Holy Qur'an they each
claim. See Response
to the Fatwa on Terrorism in the Service of Empire.
However,
mechanisms for the bastardization of a religion is not the
focus of this analysis. See Islam
and Knowledge vs. Socialization,
Islam
vs. Secular
Humanism
and World Government,
and Case
Study in Mantra Creation
for these details. The political novel (or historical fiction –
the only fair way to characterize it) “Memoirs
Of Mr. Hempher, The British Spy To The Middle East”
is further revealing of how the hijacking of the religion of Islam
can be so diabolically engineered by planting and cultivating stooges
for cognitive infiltration into the religion via a subversive sect
creation in the 18th century. In PART SIX of the novel, key
insightful observations are made about the religion of Islam and the
Muslim psyche which, regardless of who authored them – whether
as historical fiction or a real handbook of subverting Islam –
are empirically visible even today. Empiricism lends direct credence
to the description of the Machiavellian methods of subversion of the
religion of Islam in that political treatise (read pertinent excerpt)
irrespective of who is its author or what literary device is employed
to convey the malignant thesis.
Just
as “Philip
Dru Administrator : a Story of Tomorrow 1920 - 1935”,
by Edward Mandell House, depicts in a fictional narrative, the first
principles used for the author's own Trojan Horse role in controlling
President Woodrow Wilson's presidency (1912-1920) as a puppet on
behalf of oligarchic powers behind the scenes. First principles which
one can observe being practiced for all American presidencies ever
since, including today for President Obama's puppet presidency. Just
as empiricism also lends incontrovertible
weight to the Machiavellian methods in the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion regardless of who wrote that malignant treatise whose effects in
the world today are plainly visible as if blueprinted directly from
that villainous recipe book of subversion. All these political
treatises in varying forms are akin to the political novel The
Prince by Machiavelli, written in the 16th century which still
forms the guide-book for modern statecraft, and that is the heart of
the matter – the principles of subversion espoused in them.
Just as Machiavelli is read and followed in statecraft, so are any
recipe books which permit subverting the enemy, including the 2500
years old Chinese treatise of Sun Tzu, The Art of War
(read all these works).
And
lastly, in that same vein of subversion of a lofty religion for
seeding havoc among its followers, the two articles Egypt
and Tunisia – The 'arc of crisis' being radicalized!
and Unlayering
the Middle East War Agenda: Making Sense of Absurdities,
delve into the more recent cultivation of the shia Iranian Revolution
of yesteryear to connect with the present “revolutions”
suddenly erupting in the Middle East against the same tyrannical
rulers who were previously aided and abetted to remain in power over
their peoples just like Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Its juxtaposition to
the cultivation of the sunni “Mujahideens” in Afghanistan
at exactly the same time period, both of them to fertilize the “arc
of crisis” with bipartisan Muslim blood, is frightening
testimony of the persistence of vulnerable fracture points among the
followers of Islam which are perennially ripe for harvesting.
The
Muslim fratricide of Iran-Iraq war was only made possible by deftly
employing the age old historical schisms of
shia-vs-sunni, arming both sides and contriving the fratricide in
untold millions. That contrivance is a textbook example of game
theory being put into practice for a global agenda. The effects
of fertilizing the “arc of crisis” in Muslim blood
predictively percolated into enabling other premeditated global
events, ultimately setting into motion the creation of a New World
Order – of one world government. Read
the aforementioned two articles to fathom the self-serving
Cassandra-like predictions made by Zbigniew Brzezinski right after
lighting that fuse to what he prophetically (sic!) called the “arc
of crisis”. A fuller understanding of that epoch of the
latter half of the twentieth century minimally requires a book-length
read which perceptively re-links the seemingly disparate and often
unlinked antecedent and subsequent events, wars, collapses,
revolutions of the past century, melding directly into the searing
event of the New Pearl Harbor on September 11, 2001. See a précis
in Of
Ostriches and Rebels on The Hard Road to World Order.
With
the preceding bird's eye view of the age old villainous methods of
subversion and harvesting of the religion of Islam from within, the
focus in this article is exclusively on the natural impediments to
the earnest study of the Holy Qur'an by a genuine seeker of its
knowledge who willingly comes to the Book with an intent to learn its
contents.
So
now you open the Holy Qur'an to read, reflect, and study, with a
cleansed heart, Muslim or non-Muslim, native Arabic speaker or
reading many translations in your own language alongside. Common
impediments now make the study of the Holy Qur'an uncongenial to the
ordered mind. Let's dissect that uncongeniality
with a surgeon's scalpel. The result is not
as obvious as it might first appear.
Let's
begin with a thought experiment. Imagine Mr. Spock
from Star Trek curiously picking up the Holy Qur'an to examine its
fascinating contents. What will he find?
For
those unfamiliar with Mr. Spock, he is a fictional character in a
science fiction television series of the 1960s. Spock is a completely
logical being. He exhibits no human characteristics of subjectivity
and emotionalism. He has no intuition, no
imagination, and no inspiration. He makes rational analysis of any
matter based solely on available facts and data. He draws linkages,
makes inferences and deduction, theorizes and opines, based solely on
factual logic and not on intuition or other un-quantifiable
human notions of tea-leaves reading, sixth sense, gut feel,
love, hate, etc., all of which transcend rational logic.
Therefore,
Mr. Spock can put no subjective spin on his analysis. His opinion is
always supported by facts at hand. When he is forced to speculate, he
refrains by saying one needs facts to even speculate. When he
theorizes for the unknown, he only does so based on available factual
evidence. He is entirely impervious to the following human tendency:
'What
a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index to his
desires – desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If
a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts [or
worldview], he will scrutinize it closely, and unless [and at times
even when] the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe
it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a
reason for acting in accordance with his instincts [or worldview], he
will accept it even on the slenderest evidence.' — Bertrand
Russell, Proposed Roads to Freedom, 1919, page 147
It
is fair to say that Mr. Spock is completely un-socialized
into any worldview other than of pure logic, facts, and empiricism.
Therefore, unlike normal human beings, Spock brings no
presuppositions and no prejudices to his testimony other than that
which naturally falls out from pure logic applied to empirical data.
An
example to illustrate his logic mind is from the episode titled
“Court Martial” where Mr. Spock is being asked to testify
in a court martial of his captain. When Mr. Spock asserted that it
was not possible for his captain to be
guilty as charged because it was not in his nature to make such an
error, he was accused by the prosecutor of bias due to loyalty to his
captain; that Spock hadn't actually watched the captain not do what
he was charged with doing. Mr. Spock's response
is elegantly logical: “I know the captain. Lieutenant, I am
half Vulcanian. Vulcanians
do not speculate. I speak from pure logic. If I let go of a hammer on
a planet that has a positive gravity, I need not see it fall to know
that it has in fact fallen.”
As
the science officer aboard the Starship
Enterprise, Mr. Spock is the second in command and has the
distinguished record of one hundred percent objective situational
analysis of fast breaking crises one hundred percent of the time.
Just the kind of mind we need to launch our forensic examination of
the Holy Qur'an – the separation between the object under study
and the observer. Mr. Spock's logical mind
lends us that much needed cleavage.
Continued
in Part-II
Short
URL: http://tinyurl.com/Hijacking-Quran-pt1
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The
author, an ordinary researcher and writer on contemporary
geopolitics, a minor justice activist, grew up in Pakistan, studied
EECS at MIT, engineered for a while in high-tech Silicon Valley (
http://tinyurl.com/zahir-patents
), and retired early to pursue other responsible interests. His
maiden 2003 book was rejected by numerous publishers and can be read
on the web at http://PrisonersoftheCave.org.
He may be reached at http://Humanbeingsfirst.org.
Verbatim reproduction license at
http://humanbeingsfirst.org#Copyright.
First
Published August 03, 2011
Last
Updated 02/11/2013
12:05:18 am
3950
Part-I
Islam: Why is the Holy Qur'an so easy to hijack?
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