Islam and Logos

by E Michael Jones

  we should have abandoned the population control policy in the mid-1370s [1990s]. I myself played a role in this mistake. Of course, it was a good policy at that time, but it should have been abandoned in the mid-1370s. We failed to do so, which was a mistake. As I said, our government officials and myself are responsible for this mistake. I hope Allah the Exalted and history forgives us. It is necessary to safeguard the young generation. As I said in a speech in the month of Ramadan, our country will grow old if we continue in this way. Our families and youth should have more children. The way it is practiced today, the policy — which limits the number of children that a family can have — is wrong. If we manage to keep our population young over the next ten, twenty years and far into the future, our youth will solve all the problems that our country is suffering from by relying on their characteristic preparedness, dynamism and talent.

  The main internal threat to the ongoing existence of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 is birth control. After initially encouraging a high birth rate as the demographic basis for political and economic national power under the Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary government after Khomeini’s death in 1989 inexplicably reversed his position and instituted what would turn out to be one of the most effective birth control campaigns in modern history. When Khomeini took power in 1979, Iran’s birth rate was 6.5. By the time his successor Khameni gave his speech in the fall of 2012 lamenting the population decline, the Iranian birthrate had plummeted to a European level of less than two children, which is to say below replacement rate. The New York Times was not slow in exposing the irony of the situation:

  Under the grip of militant Islamic clerisy, Iran has seen its population of children implode. Accordingly, Iran’s population is now aging at a rate nearly three times that of Western Europe. Maybe the middle aging of the Middle East will bring a mellower tone to the region, but middle age will pass swiftly to old age.

  Accounts differ on why and how the change came about. Some claim that the changes were instituted by the Rafsanjani government after the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini; other reports claim that Khomeini himself was responsible for the change. One source claims that: “In the late 1980s, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader, issued fatwas making birth control widely available and acceptable to conservative Muslims.” (LA Times, July 29, 2012.) Either way, the birth rate plunged, but more importantly, as the LA Times put it, the promotion of contraception began “to usher in social changes, particularly in the role of women.”

  Crippled by a sola scriptura approach to morality, the religious leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran inadvertently created a feminist fifth column which would rise up against the revolutionary government during the Green Demonstrations of 2009. Or as the LA Times put it:

  “Without intending to, Iran’s clerical leadership helped to foster the empowerment of Iranian women,” said Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an Iran expert at Virginia Tech. “The mullahs may be winning the battle on the streets, but women are winning the battle inside the family.”

  Now the Supreme Leader was faced with the unenviable task of putting the contraceptive genie back into the moral lamp from which he conjured it over twenty years ago. No wonder he was asking Allah the All-merciful for forgiveness. President Ahmadinejad joined in the anti-contraception campaign, as noted by the LA Times:

  Doubling the country’s population of 75 million would enable Iran to threaten the West, he [Ahmadinejad] said. He has denounced the contraceptive program as “a prescription for extinction,” called on Iranian girls to marry no later than 16 or 17 and offered bonuses of more than $950 for each child. So far, he has been widely ignored. “Iranian women are not going back,” said Sussan Tahmasebi, an Iranian women’s rights leader now living in the United States.

  On July 25, 2012, Supreme Leader Khamenei stated that Iran’s contraceptive policy made sense twenty years ago, “but its continuation in later years was wrong. Scientific and expert studies show that we will face population aging and reduction (in population) if the birth-control policy continues.” Similarly, deputy health minister Ali Reza Mesdaghinia, was quoted in the semi-official Fars news agency on July 29 saying that population control programs “belonged to the past,” and that “there is no plan to keep the number of children at one or two. Families should decide about it by themselves. In our culture, having a large number of children has been a tradition. In the past families had five or six children... The culture still exists in the rural areas. We should go back to our genuine culture.”

  At the end of the talk I gave in Iran in 2015 I said that the greatest threat facing Iran was its below replacement level birth rate, which went from 3.4 in the first decade after the Revolution of 1979 to 1.7, where it stands now. The majority of the Iranian people are now in their child-bearing years, largely because of the post-revolution baby boom. They could solve this problem overnight, but only if they acted now. In twenty years it would be too late. As a follow-up, I asked how many men were married, and about fifteen hands went up. I then went down the line of people with their hands up and asked how many children each man had. The answer was always the same. Zero, Zero, Zero. When I finally got to the last person in the room, it was clear to everyone that not one married man in that room had a child. Since the audience was made up of students, it would have been easy to dismiss my sample as unrepresentative and too young. On the other hand, it could just as easily be said, as the feminists said in Cairo in 1994 at the World Population Conference, that education is the best contraceptive. This is a fortiori true of women. I didn't ask them, but, in a sense, how could their situation be any worse? What number is lower than zero?

  After I touched on the same topic in a lecture I gave at the Holy Shrine of the eighth imam in Mashad, someone brought up the idea that that night was “wish night,” in the Shi’a religion, and so I said, “I have five children and fifteen grandchildren and my wish for you is that you have the same.” That statement made it into the Farsi language newspaper report on my talk which appeared the following day.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “So Is America the Great Satan?”

  After my talk in Mashad, the scholars at the Islamic Research Foundation gathered in private to ask me more questions. “So is America the Great Satan?” one scholar asked, as if I had been briefed by the Great Satan shortly before my flight left the United States. It was a portentous question and called for an equally portentous answer.

  The Ayatollah Khomeini launched the term “Great Satan” in a speech following the revolution, some say on November 5, 1979. After the death of Ayatollah Teleghani in February 1979, Khomeini agreed to give a series of five lectures on Surat al-Fatihah (or Surat al-Hamd, as it is called in Iran), the opening chapter of the Qur’an. In a speech delivered on September 10, Khomeini referred to Satan and the fact that:

  The prophets all came to make this world a divine world after it had been a satanic world, a world governed by Satan. It is Satan that is ruling us, too; we follow him, and our vain desires are a manifestation of him. As long as that great Satan that is our unredeemed soul exists within us, whatever we do will be done in egoism. We must destroy the government of Satan within us. When we migrate to the teachings of the prophets and the awliya, turn our backs on egoism, we will have begun to emerge from the pit. Some will even succeed, while still in this world, in reaching a stage that is now beyond our imagination — that of non-being, of being effaced in God. We must desire to make this migration from egoism, and be prepared to struggle in order to migrate.

  In 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeini felt that Islam could provide a united front against the Great Satan. By 1980 it had become clear that America was using its leverage with the Saudis and the Egyptians to divide Islam, and lure the Wahhabis and their Pakistani allies into an alliance against the Soviet Union, which had just invaded Afghanistan. Khomeini saw what was happening, but was powerless to stop it. In a speech to pilgrims which he delivered on September 12, 1980, Khomeini claimed that a
t the very moment when Islam was about to unite:

  the Great Satan has summoned its agents and instructed them to sow dissension among the Muslims by every imaginable means, giving rise to hostility and dispute among brothers in faith who share the belief in tauhid [unity], so that nothing will stand in the way of complete domination and plunder. Fearing that the Islamic Revolution of Iran will spread to other countries, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, and thus compel it to remove its foul hands from the lands it dominates, the Great Satan is resorting to another stratagem now, after the failure of both the economic boycott and the military attack. It is attempting to distort the nature of our Islamic Revolution in the eyes of Muslims throughout the world in order set the Muslims at each others’ throats while it continues its exploitation of Muslim countries. Thus it is that precisely at the time Iran is waging a determined struggle to ensure the unity of all Muslims in the world on the basis of tauhid and true Islam, the Great Satan gives its orders to one of its pawns in the region, one of the dead Shah’s friends, to obtain decrees from Sunni fuqaha and muftis to the effect that the Iranians are unbelievers. These pawns of America say that the Islam the Iranians talk about is different from their Islam. Certainly the Islam of Iran is different from the Islam of those who support the pawns of America, like Sadat and Begin, who extend the hand of friendship to the enemies of Islam and flaunt the commands of God Almighty, and who leave no lie and calumny unuttered in their efforts to create disunity among the Muslims. The Muslims of the world must be aware of these people who are attempting to spread dissension, and must frustrate their foul conspiracy.

  So, at the very moment he invoked Islamic unity, Khomeini was forced to concede that Islam was breaking up into two warring factions. The grand climactic battle of the anti-Communist crusade disguised this split for decades, but now, as intra-Islamic wars raged in Yemen and Iraq, Khomeini showed himself more of a prophet than a politician who could bring about Islamic unity. Either way, the Great Satan was exacerbating division as a means of achieving geo-political goals. Khomeini insisted that:

  The most important and painful problem confronting the subjugated nations of the world, both Muslim and non-Muslim, is the problem of America. In order to swallow up the material resources of the countries it has succeeded in dominating, America, the most powerful country in the world, will spare no effort. America is the number-one enemy of the deprived and oppressed people of the world. There is no crime America will not commit in order to maintain its political, economic, cultural, and military domination of those parts of the world where it predominates. It exploits the oppressed people of the world by means of the large-scale propaganda campaigns that are coordinated for it by international Zionism. By means of its hidden and treacherous agents, it sucks the blood of the defenseless people as if it alone, together with its satellites, had the right to live in this world. Iran has tried to sever all its relations with this Great Satan and it is for this reason that it now finds wars imposed upon it.

  Khomeini was here referring to Iraq, which had already launched a full-scale attack on Iran, as the proxy of America and Israel. Khomeini was hoping for Islamic unity, but he found neither sympathy nor allies in the Islamic world. Pakistan, which was a Saudi asset, had already been seduced by Saudi and American money and recruited into the final campaign of the anti-Communist crusade, when the ISI stepped forward as the exclusive arms broker for the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. Thirty-four years later, in a speech he gave in Tehran in May 2014, Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Khameini had given up looking for Islamic unity. The new crisis was defining Islam. Groups like ISIS in Iraq and Boko Haram in Nigeria, which Khameini described as “American” Islam, had created an identity crisis, which was a function of the ongoing civil war between the Wahhabis and the Shi’a. In order to distinguish true Islam from its “American” counterfeit, Khameini had to appeal to reason. In other words, the Zeitgeist had forced the hand of the Shi’a; they now had to return to the tradition of Islamic philosophy which had stalled when Ibn Rushd failed to reconcile Aristotle with the Koran. The Zeitgeist, in other words, had driven the Shi’a into the arms of Logos.

  The Ayatollah Khomeini dealt with the issue obliquely when he issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses. Khomeini rightly understood Rushdie’s book as an attack on monotheism because it is an attack on “the unitary human subject” which has been created by “an ultimate transcendent unitary logos. The disintegration of that subject thus obscures, or demonstrates the obsolescence of, the logos.” Rushdie saw “the dispersed and plural subject of post-modernity” as “an opportunity for toleration and certainly preferable to the unified subject posited by monotheism," but Khomeini was of a different opinion, and now his successor has been forced to embrace Logos, forced not so much by the Great Satan, which was Khomeini's term for America, but by the satanic nature of "American" Islam. The Zeitgeist was forcing everyone to take sides. It's either Logos or Satan.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Faust Myth

  In his book on the Faust myth, The Faust Myth: Religion and the Rise of Representation, Professor David Hawkes wrote that “St. Athanasius established the principle that being against Logos is synonymous with being Satanic.” Athanasius

  established the fundamental role of the logos within Christianity, explicitly identifying the concept with the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth, and arguing that it was the only means of overcoming the alienation caused by sin. The incarnation of the logos was made necessary by the Fall, the seminal act of alienation, which rendered the human mind “carnal” and therefore mortal, as Athanasius explains in On the Incarnation: “It was our sinfulness that caused the Word to come down.” As a result of Athanasius’s identification of logos with the Messiah, anti-logocentrism becomes opposition to Christ, and by the early modern period, such opposition was deemed to involve an active allegiance to Satan.

  Hawkes begins his book with a survey of the main stream of anti-logocentrism in our day, namely, the postmodern or deconstructive view of language proposed by theorists like Jacques Derrida, whose followers have taken over academe in the United States, and by extension the rest of the world.

  Academe is satanic for precisely the reason Athanasius articulated almost two millennia ago: it is, as R. V. Young put it in his book on postmodernist literary theory, “at war with the word” (At War with the Word: Literary Theory and Liberal Education (1999)). The Long March which led to the establishment of Satanism as the official philosophy of academe in our day began with Friedrich Nietzsche. Jacques Derrida — like Michel Foucault, the other pillar of post-modernity — is a follower of Nietzsche, who proclaimed the Will to Power as the alternative to the West’s traditional docility to the truth. In a moment of uncanny clarity, Nietzsche hinted at the role that Capitalism would play in the promotion of his philosophy when he claimed that the complete dominance of money would be accompanied by a relativistic, pragmatic turn in philosophy. This prophecy has been fulfilled in the anti-logocentric, post-foundational modes of thought collectively known as “post-modernism.” “These ideas have had a long gestation, bursting forth into philosophy with Nietzsche, but before that developing in subterranean fashion, as the doctrines and beliefs conventionally attributed to Satan.”

  Post-modernism is Satanic because it is based on what John Searle and Derrida would call performative speech, which is another word for magic. As Hawkes points out, performative speech does not establish the relationship between the mind and the thing which the ancients called the truth; it creates the realities which the will conceives.

  Michel Foucault, another pillar of post-modern thought, also inherited his Satanism from Nietzsche, but it had French progenitors as well. One was the Marquis de Sade. Another was Sade’s disciple, Georges Bataille. In his “Preface to Transgression,” a commemorative piece written in 1963, one year after Bataille’s death, Foucault thanked his mentor for murdering the transcendent God and thereby enabling everyone to share “an
experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of Being and consequently ... an experience that is interior and sovereign.” Foucault was, of course, referring to conscience here and the witness which conscience inevitably bore to an objective moral order written on the heart of man by the Being we know as God but whom the post-modernists derisively referred to as the “Transcendental Signifier.”

  Foucault, who was baptized and raised a Catholic, fought a losing battle with his own conscience for his entire life. It was a battle which only intensified as the West capitulated to his sexual demands and tacitly acceded to the creation of gay liberation as an internal front to divide the parties of the Left. Bataille, along with the Marquis de Sade, exerted a major influence over Foucault’s philosophy, which was in many ways nothing more than a rationalization of his sexual behavior of the sort I sketched out in my book Degenerate Moderns (1993). Foucault, even more than a sinister modern figure like E. M. Forster, was a degenerate post-modern, which meant that he took his homosexuality as the launching pad from which he would mount an attack, not just on social mores, as Forster had, but on Being itself. The post-modernist project is an exercise in ontological subversion, but its roots, as always in cases like this, are personal. Confronted with a conflict between his conscience and his behavior, or between the truth and his desires, Foucault spent his entire life trying to make the former conform to the latter, or as James Miller, Foucault’s Boswell, put it:

  For Foucault in 1983, the key to appraising the values held dear by any philosopher was therefore “not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced from them, but rather in his philosophy-as-life, in his philosophical life, his ethos.”