by BS Murthy
It is another matter, that such surahs of the Quran would only sicken the nonbeliever of a reader soon enough, though he might realize they are all contextually linked to Muhammad's life. Even a cursory reading of the Quran would bring to the fore the paradox of banning books perceived as offensive to the religious sentiments of a community in a country. Oh, how the Quran can afford to abuse the Jews and the Christians, and still have a free reign everywhere! And the poor kafirs, so roundly condemned, still have to contend with it being referred to as 'The Holy Quran' by the believers.
Be that as it may, the M uslim mind finds itself doubly squeezed by a wronged feeling on one side and the change of value system on the other in the modern era. It is the tragedy of the M usalmans that they would be trained to treat the contextual content of the Quran as the unalienable code of Islam. And that hampers the fluidity of their thought that is needed to cope up with the realities of the given times. Muhammad's autocracy and obscurantism that denied freedom of expressing what he himself had led them to believe, leave alone to thinking for themselves, might have inadvertently contributed to this debilitating M uslim inability. The following episode in M artin Ling's biography of M uhammad would be illuminative.
"At his ('Uthman's) funeral the Prophet heard an old woman address the dead man with the words "Be glad, 0 father of Sa'ib, for Paradise is thine."
The Prophet turned to her somewhat sharply and said: "What giveth thee to know that?"
"0 Messenger of God," she protested, "It is Abu s-Sa'ib!"
"By God," he said, "we know naught but good of him."
Then, to make it clear that his first remark had been in no sense directed against 'Uthman' but merely against her for saying more than she had right to say he turned to her again and added:
"It would have been enough for thee to say: "He loved God and His M essenger."
It was as if the purity of Islam would have been polluted even by the noble utterance of a pious believer.
Just as M uhammad's Quran is averse to having partners to Allah in Mary and Jesus so it seems he himself kept out others from the legacy of his hadith. It's thus M uhammad saw to it that Islam is all about Allah and His M essenger unlike Jesus who thought it fit
to Commission the Twelve for the sake of Christianity. It's as though the Seal of the Prophets imbibed the divine character of Jehovah the jealous God who couldn't stomach sharing the Jewish affection with any other god."
The Muslim dilemma about how to tread on the straight path in the ever changing world of every age owes to the constraints and contradictions of M uhammad's life in his quest to establish Islam. Needless to say, the mullahs who follow the Prophet's suit deny freedom of expression to the congregated faithful even in the precincts of the masjids. Try putting an inconvenient theological question, or air an unconventional Islamic view, and one should consider himself to be lucky if only he were to be debarred from the masjid, and not manhandled as debauched.
It's thus; the Islamic tune came to be set in the Quranic "0 ye believe" tone sans the accompanying instruments of debate and discussion. Hence it is no wonder that the intellect of a M usalman is measured on the scale of the Islamic theology.
Coupled to this is the ghetto mentality that only accrues the 'frog in the well' vision to the M uslim intellect, which furthers their inability to see things from the others' point of view, and this makes it hard for the M usalmans to gain cosmopolitan insight to nurse an egalitarian mind-set amongst them. On the other hand, the Islamic emphasis of Muslim separateness insensibly leads to the stagnation of the Musalmans in the medieval Quranic age. This is about the burden of belief that Islam imposes upon its believers, and without a demur the M usalmans submit.
And that is something to say about how a faith can condition the mind and the mood of its followers regardless of the change in the surroundings. True, the faith of Allah needed a band of blind believers then to help M uhammad achieve his ambition to hoist the flag of Islam on the Kabah, but what for are they needed except to pursue the unachievable Islamic dream to see the whole world in green hues. Above all, how the M usalmans are going to progress in the modern times without imbibing the process of inquiry so essential in acquiring knowledge and wisdom? It is this trap of belief into which the Musalmans are born and there is no reformist around anymore, after M ustafa Kemal Ataturk the Great to extricate them out of the Islamic quagmire.
Chapter 15 Blinkers of Belief
Though Muhammad's religious constituency was the 'meek of the world', as paraphrased by Jesus, he seemed to have shaped Islam but to their detriment. Thus, it calls for an analysis as to how his personal agenda would have influenced the Islamic credo that has come to mire the lives of the poor M usalmans, moreso its women.
So, it is for the women in Islam, the 'educated' among them, to delve into the proclivities of their prophet that shaped the precepts and practices of their faith to their detriment. However, instead, blinded by their faith, they tend to take the aberrations of their life as the Will of Allah and the price they have to pay to be on His right side on the Day of Reckoning, well, with Muhammad in tow with Him. Moreover, being born a M uslim, nevermind even as a female, is in itself the greatest blessing 'here', paving the way for eternal bliss in the Hereafter, such is the M ohammadan brainwash.
Leave aside the plight of women in the M uslim brotherhood; it is not too hard to see how the faith, supposedly shaped for the poor among men, in theory is heavily loaded against them in practice. But then that's the religious crocodile craft, the crafty prophet had perfected in his famous address to the Yathribs,
"0 Helpers, are ye stirred in your souls about the things of this world whereby I have reconciled men's hearts that they may submit unto God, when you yourselves I have entrusted unto your Islam?",
which is seemingly designed to favour the privileged of the faith. That is not all, what is inimical to the poor amongst the faithful is that the long and uncertain path to the 'Hereafter' is paved with sharp needles of sharia.
It was Muhammad's ideal of a puritanical society that seems to have unwittingly pitted the poor of Islam against its cruel penal code, copied though from the Mosaic Laws. Well, why should the well-to-do steal at all, to land up on the wrong side of the sharia! Needless to say, it's the poor of the faith that most satiate sharia's devilish urge to mutilate as well as decapitate human beings. And true to its character, sharia is at its cruelest best when it comes to women that stray out of their marital bed, whatever be the provocation, no questions asked, no explanations sought, but stoned to death in, and by, the public as a religious duty. It doesn't seem to occur to the M usalmans how all that depraves them as human beings besides becoming inhuman towards those their faith frown upon; it's thus their barbarism against the others stems from their cruelty towards their own folks.
But when it comes to male promiscuity, Islam goes out of the way to be accommodative. After all, the four wives norm, not counting the divorces and remarriages, with nikah halalas as bonuses for a lucky few, would provide the required female variety to spice up the M usalmans' sex life, wouldn't it? As if that concession is not good enough for the libido of the men of means, there is the sharia-sanctified instant nikah lasting but, lo, a single ejaculation, if one so pleases. Why the world was witness to that sexual convenience at the height of the Islamic moral policing in Iran that brought brisk business to its poor kazis. And this is about the height of Islamic hypocrisy in that even as it frowns upon adultery and punishes the involved female with savagery, yet it provides to its resourceful males enough and more detours to circumvent the sharia to satiate their lust with gusto ‘here’, where life is not only depreciated but deprecated too in the Quran.
But then, why only blame the sharia when even the modern penal code too is tilted heavily against the poor to ensure that they are kept at arm's length from the privileged, so as not to spoil their party. Why doubt that for the theft of a thousand the law is smart to catch up with the poor thief but when it comes to the
embezzled millions under the white collars, it is slothful in sniffing at the scent of the conmen. Well, law is not an ass, made to explain away its aberrations, but in effect is the watchdog of the rich to ward off the poor.
Nonetheless, the hard up M usalmans, who tend to be better M usalmans 'here' than their well-heeled brethren, so to say, get even in the Islamic 'there' but then the wait is long and its hard grind as well! So be it, but yet they serve the faith 'here' by enabling their women in bringing more believers into its fold than they can reasonably bear, nevermind that confines them all to the lowest rung of the economic ladder. But meanwhile, the sharia lets the rich and the mighty get away with even murder, albeit through the bribe route of blood-money.
Unjustifiably though, the Musalmans are proud that their faith grants equality to women vis-a-vis men, i.e. in spite of polygamy. It's true; the Quran ordains that in any polygamous arrangement, the M usalman should treat his wives equally. But, what sort of equality would polygamy entail those multiple wives of a M usalman, well, pegged at four! It should not be lost on any that even in bigamy, besides emotional restraints, woman has to bear with the sexual constraints it imposes, and so it's not hard to imagine how frustrating it could be for her as and when her man opts for her co-wife while she herself was in the right mood then. But in Islam, we are not even dealing with bigamy but polygamy, involving four women at that! And how the All-Wise Allah Ta'ala missed this female conjugal constraint is anybody's guess. What's worse, he denied women any sexual escape route in that, so to say, he made them wear chastity belts all
the while 'here'. But what if the rationed intimacy and limited emotionality of a polygamous marriage trip women over the promiscuous line into the adulterous arena, and what solace doth the sharia provide for such pining females in a wrong embraced? Why, stoning to death!
However, in the 'Hereafter' though Islam grants its women their polyandrous time; but besides being a long wait that wouldn't make it a level playing 'sexual' field for them as it's not a case of role reversal there either for men too have their hurries for the asking 'there'. Well, it's a different matter though that Islam has so much concern for the satiation of all those black-eyed virgins 'there', who are wedded in their scores to the Muslim martyrs. Why, Allah increaseth the vigour of each and every martyr a hundred fold to indulge with his harem of huries seventy-two. So, 'there', man's virility is not subject to the innate limitations biology imposes upon him 'here'! And that could be no less an attraction for the believing M usalmans to crave to go over 'there', earlier the better. But then, the M usalmans too have this M irza Ghalib's sher to ponder over 'here':
zanat ki hakikat hame malam hai lekin / Heaven is myth for all we know dilko behalone ke liye ye khayol atha hai / Yet feels it nice to think it's there.
Above all, wonder why it does not occur to the fidayen that with his martyr' body, or parts of it, buried 'here' itself, there is no way for him to sexually engage the black-eyed virgins over 'there'! Not for nothing had Muhammad ensured that Musalmans do not develop the faculty of thought and reasoning that comes with it.
And what does veiling women in Islam mean? Won't it reveal the lack of masculine understanding of feminine emotions? Oh, how the veil and all that goes with it stunt the female sexuality in the Islamic half! Maybe the embarrassment of Muhammad in desiring Zaynab, wife of his adopted son Zayd, could have caused him to stress upon the veil for the female as a barrier against male frailty. Besides, he was extremely possessive about his women, in particular Ayesha; in fact, he hoped that she were dead ahead of him though she was some forty-three years younger than him, and in spite of the divine diktat that wives of the prophet were barred from a fresh nuptial.
The Islamic burka thus, is the legacy of a man, who was extremely fond of women while at the same time believing them to be objects of male possession, if not vassals as such. And ironically, it is his dual attitude towards women that denies the fair sex of umma the feel-good that normal socializing would have afforded them! Though the medieval man's attitude, all over, towards women was, no different, more or less, from that of his, the burka he ordained the women of his creed to wear, deprives them whatever little freedom their sisters of other faiths have!
Thus, if the globe were to become an umma as Muhammad had dreamed, if and when that happens, as its mullahs are bound to rein its fair sex, half of it would be reduced to 'walking tents'. On this score, can it not be said that Islam, exhibiting its lack of concern for the female well-being, is inimical to the development of half of its believers? And yet, some hypocritical apologists of the burka would have it that what the Muslim women are hiding from the public view is not their personas but their poverty, exemplified by the rags they wear!
However, the moot point that Islam misses here is the need for the male to develop self-restraint in the society of females and not to veil them, so to say, from head to foot, for that's what burka does. But then, if the veil is so vital for the niyyat (character) of the M usalmans, why Islam has no remedy for those male believers living in the non-veiling societies of 'the others'? The answer to this, as well as to other predicaments of the Islam is that M uhammad had devised the Islamic code for the Arabic culture and society of his time but not beyond.
Well, if burka were to be a barrier against male promiscuity, then it's still worth its cloth, if not for anything but to avert the exploitation of women, but it's not the case either. Thus, it's an irony of Islam that in veiling its women it veils the vision of its men as well. It is this mind-set of Muhammad that made the word of a 'believer' woman unequal to that of the male believer in the Islamic evidentiary value system! Nonetheless, Muslim women are wont not to complain about this and other such gender biases of Islamic socio-religious practice and precepts. And that speaks for the potential of Islam to stymie women's mental development in the Islamic socio-religious fold.
But it's naive to think it's the God's Will that way for he didn't ordain the Jewish and the Christian women to confine themselves in burkas. What is worse, while providing no clues for the Islamic adaptation to the changing times, the Quran and the sharia blindly bind the believers to the medieval values. It's thus Islam turns the Musalmans into square pegs in the round holes of life everywhere, including in dar al-lslams.
Chapter 16 Shackles of Sharia
"Say: 0 disbelievers, I shall not worship that which ye worship, nor will ye worship that which I worship, nor have I worshipped that which ye worship, nor have ye worshipped that which I worship. For you your religion and for me mine.”
This revelation, which is endlessly repeated by the Musalmans to showcase the Islamic tolerance towards other religions, as is known, came to Muhammad when the leaders of the Quraysh tried to persuade him to agree to a compromise. And that was to avoid the schism his Quranic creed was causing in M ecca.
Had the revelation revisited M uhammad after he broke Hubal's back at the Kabah, it is a different matter though that the history of religious strife would not have been what it has been. As is seen, the unique feature of the Quran as a Scripture is that its 'revelations' are invariably linked to M uhammad's life 'n times besides being contextual to his mission 'n means, which characteristic though the M usalmans seem to miss or are blind to it.
A large body of the umma has no means to read, much less comprehended, much that is in the Quran, save those faith-invoking suras of obedience and submission originated in M ecca and recited ad nauseam in the masjids. And it is these simple folks, who habitually cling onto Islam, and live like frogs in the M uslim wells. These poor and pious Musalmans, largely illiterate, try to subordinate their lot 'here' to their faith in Allah, and look up to Muhammad for deliverance in the 'Hereafter'. However, it is on their religious dogma that the fundamentalist elements and their power hungry despots feed upon. These simple folks could be turned into street mobs, at will that is, by the unscrupulous elements amongst them with the false alarm of 'Islam in Danger', either from within or without.
Next in the list, n
umerically speaking that is, are the mullahs who, by training as well as by occupation, strive to keep Islam as pure and as straight as possible in this everchanging world. The more the threat of dilution to their faith, all the more fundamentalists they tend to become, and one cannot blame them for it is thus the umma brings them into being. In a way, the moulvi-mullah combine erects the Islamic dams to protect the faith from being inundated by un-lslamic currents so that the masses that share alike the poverty of life as well as passion for the faith remain incapable to sniff beyond their Muslim noses. It's thus, owing to their lack of modern education or personal moderation, and /or both, large masses of the Musalmans
confine themselves to the economic fringes, even in developed societies in which they happen to live.
However, the Muslim rich, like their counterparts in any religious group, wouldn't, any way, share the religiosity of 'the God mad' poor though they make pretence of it. But, all the while, they grab the joys of the 'here' with both hands without any compunction as the pleasures of the 'Hereafter' are theirs anyway, for the mere fact of their being born M usalmans. After all, they have the Islamic assurance that a crook of a Musalman, and not even the saint of a kafir like Mahatma Gandhi, has a slot in the Paradise. Thus, the privileged M usalmans live in the rarefied world of Islam as their own masters, however, pretending to be the servants of Allah.
That leaves the educated Muslim middle-class to complete the grand spectrum of Islamic dichotomy. Well, their education and occupation wouldn't be conducive to nursing the pure Musalmanic souls in their contemporary bodies, as per the Islamic tenets that is. Besides, while their middle-class earnings would enable them access to the worldly goodies for mundane comforts that Islam is inimical to; their exposure to the secular outlook befuddles their religious belief. With the imbibed faith coming into clash with their acquired lifestyles, the middle-class umma tends to suffer from a certain religious guilt. Though they realize the benefits of going easy on Islam, and wish as well that their community sheds the oppressive Arab cultural baggage that forms its religious burden, the accompanying guilt feeling makes them voiceless.
