An Essay on Violence, Tradition and Modernity

Rafael Leyre ( Rafael_Leyre@yahoo.com)       Third Edition - February 2007

Islam

Mecca: a thriving metropolis blessed by three hundred gods

In the days of Muhammad, Mecca was the capital of Yemen and the most important city of Arabia. It was also a solemn place of pilgrimage, famous for its temple. Trade with India, the Middle East, Africa and the West flourished, and accordingly the city had become a meeting-place for merchants and thinkers from Persia, Byzantium, Rome and Abyssinia - a whirlpool of ideas and visions. Mecca was the abode of three hundred gods, worshipped by many coexisting faiths.

Yemen, and Mecca with it, had until recently been subjected to Christian Abyssinia, while in north-western Arabia, in Hijaz, Christianity still flourished. Christians and Jews lived all over Arabia, and many biblical stories and heroes belonged to Arabic popular tradition, some even since before they were written down. One of those stories was that Abraham had two sons: Isaac with his lawful wife, and Ishmael with his concubine. Now Yahweh had promised to make Ishmael a great nation second to Isaac, and many Arabs believed Ishmael was their ancestor as Isaac was the supposed ancestor of the Jews: Ishmael and Abraham had built the temple of Mecca together.

At the age of forty Muhammad was called in his sleep by the archangel Gabriel, the traditional envoy of Yahweh.568 This was in the year 611 CE. Gabriel showed him a message written on a silk cloth, and ordered to read it up three times. The message is preserved in the first verses of the Koran:

Read! In the name of thy Lord and Cherisher, Who created man out of a clot of congealed blood. Read! And thy Lord is most bountiful, he who taught the pen and taught man that which he knew not. 569

Muhammad awoke from his sleep, and the words were burned in his memory: there is only one god, without whom you would not even exist; without whom you would know nothing, not even how to write. The meaning of this message was very clear to someone familiar with Jews and Christians: the ancient gods of Arabia were dangerous demons, trying to lure their worshippers in hell fire by illusive trickery.

Prophets turned up all the time, and even more so since Halley’s comet had been visible as a sword in the night sky three years before, but they seldom lead to something durable. Muhammad was mocked and attacked. In reaction he received more messages, always when he was unconscious. Many of those messages slandered his harassers by name. The situation became grim when Muhammad insisted that the revered forefathers were forever burning in hell. He must seek shelter and, after rejections elsewhere, eventually arrived in Medina, which was at the time called Yathrib.

Mecca depended on nomadic caravans for its trade, while Medina was the centre of a vast agricultural region. The latter hosted a significant number of Jews, and as a result the city was more familiar with monotheism. The local aristocracy was entangled in tribal conflicts, and Muhammad for the first time showed his political qualities, and applied his prophetic skills to pacify the tribes under firm leadership.

Initially his followers of Medina prayed in Jewish style with their heads towards Jerusalem, and followed Jewish laws and celebrations. But the community of Muslims grew fast, the more so since Muhammad proclaimed that all converts had to migrate to Medina. While Muhammad established his political and religious power, his relation with the Jews worsened. When the latter branded verses of the Koran as fabrications conflicting with the Torah, a period of growing persecution and mass executions followed, and in the end the Jews were completely driven from Medina.

The community of Muslims became larger than supportable by regular trade and agriculture, and raiding caravans on the road of Mecca became an act of faith. Now many more Arabs joined out of greed. The word Islam, submission, meant at once ‘military surrender’ and ‘religious conversion’.570 Muhammad received a message from Allah that one fifth of the spoils of war must be handed over to himself.571 Direct confrontations between Mecca and Medina could no longer be avoided. After six years of fighting which set the whole of Arabia on fire, Mecca was submitted in 630 CE. It was the beginning of a holy massacre without end.

At the age of twenty-five Muhammad had married the wealthy Khadija, who was fifteen years older and his employer. When Khadija died, Muhammad took another wife, but was at the same time attracted to the six years old Aisha. Aisha’s father, Abu Bakr, gave her to the prophet and became his first Caliph (‘successor’). Later Muhammad was attracted to his own daughter-in-law, Zaynab. He fell in trance and received a message from Allah that ‘We have given her unto thee in marriage, so that there may be no sin for believers’. All of a sudden Zaynab had never been his daughter-in-law because ‘Muhammad is not the father of any among you, but he is the Messenger of Allah’.572 Muhammad had twenty-one wives in total. Some Muslims today take the stand that they were old and ugly, and that the marriages were rather a question of social support than of sex. The Koran nor the Hadith take this prudish point of view. Zaynab boasted that while the other wives were only given by their families, she was given by Allah. And the Sunnah, in trying to establish correct rules of behaviour, takes the prophet’s wives for useful informants about his sexual habits.

The powerful tradition of fratricide

Muhammad avoided questions about his succession. One time he answered that it would be the first by passer with mended shoes, but Aisha’s father eventually filled the position.

Disputes over power and booty led to incessant civil wars and assassinations, thereby continuing the only reliable monotheist tradition, already demonstrated above for Judaism and Christianity: fratricide. Analogous to what is said concerning Christians, it is legitimate to proclaim that more Muslims have been killed by Muslims than by any other group, despite the verse of the Koran:

Whoever kills a believer deliberately, his reward is Hell forever, and the Wrath of Allah is upon him, He cursed him and prepared a great punishment for him. 573

After Muhammad’s dead a raid on Byzantium was carried out as planned, but then several tribes refused to pay zakât to a central power without Muhammad, and soon the army returned from the frontline to fight the first civil war. Then Abu Bakr died and a new civil war for power erupted, bringing the Caliphate to Umar, who satisfied the voracious soldiers by expanding the empire from Persia to Egypt. (When asked what to do with the library of Alexandria, he answered that ‘if the books are in accordance with the Koran, they are unnecessary and may be burnt; if they are contrary to the Koran, they are dangerous and ought to be burnt.’) The booty was divided following affiliation with Muhammad, contribution to war or religion, and years of obeying Islam. Jews and Christians were expelled from the entire Arabian Peninsula. Then Umar was stabbed to death. His son Uthman, a very pious man, killed the murderer for revenge before assuming power, more or less following the words of the Koran:

Whoso is slain wrongfully, We have given power unto his heir, but let him not commit excess in slaying. 574

While Uthman tried to unify Islam by burning all coexisting versions of the Koran except one, the expansion slowed down. As a result the unsatisfied army, eager to plunder, started a new civil war in which Uthman was murdered while reciting the right copy of the Koran. In only one battle out of this civil war, remembered as the Battle of the Camel, Muslims killed ten thousand other Muslims. The defeated party escaped to Damascus and established the Umayyad dynasty. In Medina the new Caliph was Ali, a nephew of Muhammad, who engaged in battle with Damascus. In this war seventy thousand Muslims were killed by other Muslims. Then Ali himself was murdered by a man who had lost his whole family in the conflict. After a new clash in 680 CE, followers of Ali – the Shiites – surrendered but were all slaughtered. Somewhat later, the Umayyads pillaged Medina and Mecca in a bloody massacre, and set the ancient temple on fire.

The slaughter of the Shiites is remembered each year in Tehran by hysteric crowds of believers cutting themselves with razor blades to display the blood on their white clothes, sometimes carried away to gruesome mutilation of themselves or, more conveniently, their children.575

In the eight century CE a Shiite revolt against the Umayyad dynasty was lead by the pious Abu Muslim, an agent of the wealthy Abbasid family. Abu Muslim took control of Persia and part of Iraq; he massacred the Umayyad family and its officials, and became a hero. Now al-Mansur founded the Abbasid dynasty and had Abu Muslim executed; Abu Muslim became a Shiite saint.

Recent pinnacles in this endless fratricide are the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq of 1980 CE and the civil war in Irak following the fall of Saddam Hussain. In the war Muslims killed one million brothers and sisters, and as this is written down no one knowns where the civil war will end, while Muslims are killing Muslims in the streets by thousands.

Innocent death is a side effect of all warfare, but is the essence of the primitive ideology of martyrdom. During recent decades this insane ideology caused countless suffering of common people – at first mostly non-Muslims, then mostly Muslims from other denominatons, and then any accidental passer-by, maybe members of the murderer's own family, as long as there is still innocent blood around to be wasted.

Today Muslims are killed continually when the worst religious scum talks unstable Muslims into suicide, and again when a suicider kills unknown citizens, of which on the average on out of three called him his brother.576

The splendour of progress and the shame of tradition

One century after Muhammad subjugated Mecca, the get-together of warrior tribes turned into a world empire, and ancient Persia offered the Abbasid Caliphs a becoming past.

In 762 CE al-Mansur founded Baghdad, a court town worthy of the old myths of Persian splendour. In the course of one century, Baghdad grew into the largest city of the world, with a population of more than three hundred thousand. Shamanistic Turks, Nestorians, Buddhists, Zoroastrians and Manicheans found their way to its courts. Like Greek after Alexander and Latin in Medieval Europe, Arabic was promoted to the lingua franca of many different cultures and traditions.

Once Persia had inspired the beginning of Greek thought at the western coast of Asia. Now once more, the crossing of borders and exchange among differing societies stimulated progress. In zoology, anthropology, alchemy, as well as in mathematics and astronomy, the tradition of Indian and Persian sciences was dominant. The early Abbasid Caliphs of Persia chose their viziers among converts from Buddhism, the Barmak. Those viziers commanded the translation of numerous Indian scientific and philosophic works into Arabic. Nestorians carried out many of those translations, much because Muslims did not want to learn any other language than the Arabic of the Koran. Nestorians contributed ideas from Africa and the Middle East, from Mongols and Tatars, and from Siberia through China. The Nestorians of Gondeshapur delivered court astrologers and medicines for two centuries, and founded the first hospital and observatory in Baghdad. Many medical works were translated. Astronomy was for an important part based on the Indian Siddhanta. Al-Razi claimed that his views were inspired by Harran, by Syrian science and by Indian Brahmins, and studied the atomist physics adapted by Indian Buddhist and Jain sects as Vaibhashika, Nyaya and others. Harran had a library, an observatory and a university, influenced by shamanism and by Chinese alchemy and philosophy. From China came also the fabrication of more affordable paper. Al-Khwarizmi used late antique and Indian concepts in his foundation of algebra.

Al-Iransahri wrote a complete work on Indian philosophy, and Ibn-Sina (Latin Avicenna), who had access to ancient Persian court libraries, wrote an Oriental Philosophy. Both works have disappeared.

Sharia

The ancient antagonism between clergy and sovereign smouldered all the time in the background. Pious Muslims feared that the Abbasid rulers went ever further in emulating ancient Persian splendour, associated with Zoroastrianism and scientific research, rather than with Islam.

Ibn al-Muqaffa, a secretary of state, was even during his life the most famous author and translator of his time. Already before the foundation of Baghdad he advised Caliph al-Mansur to organize legal power in one common code of law for the whole empire. At the time jurisdiction was still dispersed over local qadis and various schools bearing uncertain and mostly primitive renditions. The Caliph hesitated, and Islamists started a slandering campaign against Ibn al-Muqaffa. The rumour was spread that he had boasted he could write a book as good as the Koran in just one night. It was told that he had been locked up an evening with a pen and a stack of paper, but in the morning had still not been able to write one word. He was accused of polytheism and Manicheism. Al-Mansur had him tortured and his limbs severed, and thrown in a furnace while still alife. This happened at Basra in 757 CE, when Al-Muqaffa was thirty-six years of age. Subsequent Abbasid Caliphs firmly supported Islamism, encouraged conversion and initiated persecutions and purifications. By the time of Caliph al-Mahdi (775 CE) the absorption of Manichean elements in Shiism allowed that even Manicheans were persecuted not as heathens, but as heretics.

Eventually the fears of al-Muqaffa were confirmed when the Sharia emerged as a religious body of law, that could even be deployed against the sponsoring Caliphate.

Fanatic Islam is complete submission to the will of Allah, which is sufficiently known by the directives he conveyed through Muhammad. Therefore oracles received by Muhammad under trance, written down in the Koran, as well as the life and words of Muhammad, testified in the Sunnah, are the only sources for knowledge about Allah’s will, and as always in monotheism, gods will is mandatory for the entire world. Islam theologists, the ulema, have poured the will of Allah in a set of laws. This set of religious laws, the Sharia, is the essential core of Islam.

Below only the crime law aspects of Sharia are addressed.

In general, Sharia jurisdiction does not distinguish between intentional and non-intentional crimes: killing by accident is the same as killing purposely. For the major crimes a judge can only establish guilt or non-guilt: the punishment is fixed beforehand. Because the Sharia is the expression of the will of Allah it is difficult to alter. It was the only form of justice in Islam states until the nineteenth century, and makes his revival since mid twentieth century. Today Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Sudan, part of Nigeria and Malaysia apply the most severe Sharia jurisdiction, but no country is really safe since punishments like stoning and killing rely upon hateful human trash anywhere – the verdict can be proclaimed by any religious leader, and the executioner can be anyone who is around, feels like it and can get away. While cases of punishments are reported regularly, the full number of victims will never be known since Sharia jurisdiction is typical for retarded area’s lacking modern communication. It should not remain unnoticed that recently Islamists in some Western countries have demanded ‘equal rights’ for both Muslim religious law and existing law.

A long list of crimes is punished by lashes: thirty-five whippings for kissing a boy lustfully; eighty whippings for drinking wine; seventy-five for sodomy.577 Other possible punishments are the sword, tying hands and feet and ‘hurl him down from a high place’, shaving the head and taking round in the streets and the bazaars, and so on. Muslim scholars have called burning alive the ‘punishment of Allah’ (i.e. the hell fire) not allowed to Muslim courts, while Catholic scholars in medieval times meant that the bible does not allow bloodshed, and thus concluded that burning heretics alive was lending a hand to God’s work of justice.

In Medina, when a few Camel thieves were arrested, Muhammad ordered that their legs and arms were cut off and their eyes put out. Ironically, only after the sentence was carried out Allah sent down a message restraining punishment for theft to cutting off hands only. The Sunnah says:

If a person who is adult and sane steals 3 3/5 grains of coined gold or anything of equivalent value, and he satisfies the conditions prescribed for it in law, four fingers of his right hand should be cut from their root on his first offence, and the palm of his hand and the thumb should be allowed to remain in tact. If he repeats the offence his left foot should be cut off from the middle and if he steals for the third time, he should be imprisoned for life and his expenses should be paid from the public treasury and in case he commits theft for the fourth time, whether in the prison or outside it, he should be killed.578

The Medina story, together with the sensible consideration that ‘the thumb should remain in tact’, almost gives the horrific punishment a twist of thoughtfulness, because it looks like a tempering of the original. Several amputations have been sentenced or carried out in Sudan in 2002 CE, mostly on Christians short of a fair trial. A representative of the Sudanese Embassy in Nairobi declared: ‘Amputation as a punishment occurs throughout the Islamic world, so why single out Sudan?’

Some Muslims argument that physical punishment endorsed by Muhammad and the Koran was rather the easing of more cruel practices existing before that time. This line of reasoning is often taken with amputation, beating of women and tribal raids and warfare. The stoning to death of married adulterers, as ordered by Muhammad on different occasions mentioned in the Sunnah, can hardly be presented as the easing of a still worse tradition. Modernist Muslims have attempted to blame Jewish law as the root of stoning, but in reality, Jews and Muslims inherited the custom of stoning from an even more primitive society, while Judaism has at least abolished the practice today. The gospel of John has a scene in which the public abandons its dreadful intend after Jesus said that - more in Roman than in ancient Jewish spirit - ‘he that is without sin among you let him first cast a stone at her.’ People were recently stoned to death in Iran, in Yemen and in Afghanistan (where couples are often stoned together).

The most abhorrent crime is apostasy - quitting Islam. Although the Koran reads ‘there is no compulsion in religion’579, Sharia jurisdiction follows the Sunnah saying ‘if a Muslim changes his religion, kill him’580. Ethnicity or even birthplace is sufficient to make someone a Muslim, and conversion to Islam in order to circumvent economic discrimination or to facilitate male divorce or polygamy backfires when the convert discovers that Islam has no emergency exit.

Intellectuals are especially vulnerable to prosecution for apostasy, because expressing any unwelcome idea can cause indictment by an occasional Imam from any retarded hamlet. Over twenty apostates have recently been convicted or executed in Iran; in Egypt, over one hundred and fifty intellectuals have been detained in maximum-security prisons for apostasy; also in Egypt Professor Abu Zaid was found guilty of heresy for writing that Islam should evolve with society, and was convicted to divorce his wife, also an academic. 581 This professor, his wife, the Indian writer Rushdie, his publishers worldwide, the Kemerovo (Siberia) governor Tuleyev, the Libyan judge al-Mahdawi all risk to be killed in the streets ‘at the first possible opportunity’. Finally, a British Pakistani father murdered his daughter for her conversion to Jehovah’s Witness.

It is inevitable that most prophets attract people frightened by a widening world, desperately grasping for stability in their petty, primitive, covert and cruel society. But also, modern people in countries with a Muslim majority seldom dissociate themselves from religious atrocities. Intellectuals who fear for their lives if they should only create an appearance of apostasy, seek shelter in undecided discourses, and are entangled in hazy apologies. It has become a common practice to avoid the discussion by pointing at other cruelties in other communities, thus answering critique on one malice with toleration of malice in general.

Sharia is said to be applicable only to Muslims. This argument has been used to attract Western Investors, reassuring them in a revoltin way that Muslims only injure their own people (for example by Richard U. Moench in the work of Don Peretz). Yet it is demonstrated constantly that Sharia jurisdiction is frequently used to harass non-Muslim minorities.

At the occasion of the conviction of an unmarried mother to stoning, a spokesman of the London-based Islamic human rights Commission was brave enough to protest the ‘inhumane brand of Islamic law that will take root in Nigeria’, but like many Muslim modernists inherently accepted the gruesome practice when he added that ‘amputations and stoning are supposed to be used only as a last resort’.