Homo Sapiens:
Searching for Rationality and
Moral Consistency Part One: Boycotting the Fruit of the Infidel
Mind
by R.Y.
Alam
30
March, 2006
Just as the right
to free speech in Europe was the fruit of fierce political
struggles during the 18th Century, so the liberation of
human reason from superstitious thinking, arose from challenges to
the power of the Church. These challenges which questioned dogma
central to Catholicism such as the virgin birth, the concept of
transubstantiation, and the existence of free-floating angels,
demons and the devil, culminated in a plethora of books and
pamphlets, published by brave, freethinking individuals,
throughout Europe during the 17th Century.
Thus, in the West,
human reason, freed from the shackles of blind superstition and
autocratic authority, was at last able to begin the adventure of
exploring the social, moral and material Universe and its laws:
the Dark Age of Medieval Europe was brought to an end. It was out
of the vortex of social, political and philosophical challenge and
protest, that both free speech and science emerged for both, are
the fruit of the same basic impulse: to inquire into the nature of
reality, without fear or favour.
To the Muslims of
the world, who have participated in, or endorse by their silence,
the protests concerning the cartoons depicting Muhammed bin
Abdullah, and who are engaging in the boycott of Danish goods,
this is an appeal from the heart: please, please demonstrate your
rationality and capacity for logical consistency. After all, it is
this capacity for rationality, together with the refusal to fall
into the inconsistency of a double standard of morality, which
separates us humans both from animals, and your average bully,
despot, tyrant and psychopath.
For those Muslims
outraged about the cartoons of Mohammed bin Abdullah, who are
engaging in violent protest, calling for the murder of the Danish
artists, and the boycotting Danish goods, we wish to suggest -
your boycott is incomplete! Rejection of western secular and
aesthetic sensibilities is not enough. For moral and intellectual
consistency, secular scientific achievements must also be avoided
if not completely rejected.
So Muslims of the
world, unite. After all, it does seem that what you venerate and
pay homage to, is not the beauty of human reason discovering its
reflection and its resonance in the vast multiplicity of forms and
forces interplaying in our Universe, but an individual! Mohammed
bin Abdullah you say, as the founder of Islam, who you Muslims
wish to venerate as the perfect role model for all human beings,
for all time. Instead of each human soul, wrestling with the moral
and practical issues of the day, you Muslims believe your path to
the good life can be achieved by merely emulating Muhammad's
example in all matters. So please, boycott the cartoons, sick
product of the infidel mind, but don't forget to also, boycott
western goods invented and developed by the same, irreverent,
freely speculating, infidel mind.
So, for example, no
more flying in airplanes - try instead to locate that horse with
the face of a woman, which you believe, Muhammad bin Abdullah used
to visit his 7th layer of heaven. No more microwaves
and gas cookers and air conditioners - use the heat of firewood,
and hand held fans - they were good enough for your Prophet, and
his Allah in His infinite Wisdom, did not think otherwise. You
don't like images of the human form? No more TV, DVD's and
whatnots. No more phones and cameras too. Cars, motorbikes,
bicycles - why do you use them when your Allah's Prophet got by on
camels? Even in emergency situations, when he was raiding the
caravans of the infidels of that time, he did not call for a
Ferrari car to get him out of trouble, or machine guns to see to
the Kaffirs. Newspapers and the internet for the dissemination of
facts, ideas, and information and opinion? Well, your Prophet and
his God found writing on dried bones, leaves and bits of parchment
good enough. To the rich Muslim intellectuals and other such
elites, don't come to the West for medical treatments using the
latest infra scan and pharmaceutical developments - instead, stick
to black mustard seeds 9and prayer) as recommended for all
maladies by your esteemed Prophet.
But perhaps the
most significant sacrifice that moral and intellectual consistency
demands from Islam and Muslims is that they stop taking the
benefits of Western secular education. If the Muslim viewpoint is
that the entire God-less /Allah-less West is a heaving mass of
vile kaffir corruption, why, then do Muslim elites send their
offspring to Western universities? Universities comprise the
cornerstone of secular learning and freedom of expression; to
accept their benefits is to accept these core values. As the
protests about the Danish cartoons have culminated in calls by
Muslims that free speech is something to be ring-fenced or derided
in its totality well then, the entire edifice of Western education
must also be rejected.
So dear Muslims, in
the name not of beneficence or mercy but in the name of the
defining characteristic of Homo sapiens, demonstrate your
rationality and capacity for logical consistency.
If the complete
boycott of the fruits of the infidel mind, proves impossible, then
Muslims must cease their pious, self-righteous protests and
threats directed at the rest of the world's moral, spiritual and
aesthetic sensibilities. The energy thus wasted should be used
more wisely to thoroughly untangle how we have come to arrive at
the present lamentable lack of moral and intellectual consistency
in the Muslim nations and cultures. In this exploration, the
West's crucial role in forging the present-day reality - the
growing popularity of suicidal bombing, along with the impending
spectre of civil war in countries with large Muslim minorities,
must also be acknowledged.
-------------------------------------------
Part Two: The Importance of Avoiding Essentialist Arguments
Concerning Muslim Mind and Culture.
It is being argued in some circles that it is
impossible to engage with Muslims - as if there were something
permanent, unalterable and eternal about this creed and its hold
on the human mind. This is a most dangerous fallacy. At this
juncture in human history, the only hope we have against falling
into the tyranny of competing autocracies (even if some of these
autocracies, maintain a veneer of democracy) is to live, work and
communicate in the faith and the hope that all human beings have
the faculty for reason as well as a moral conscience. To say, as
Mark does (librabunda.blogspot.com) that one cannot reason with Muslims
is a very dangerous statement. None of us choose the circumstances
of our birth - I myself was born into a Muslim family, and if,
from childhood, I could question this faith, so can and do,
others.
To those falling into essentialist conceptions
about Muslims, I must ask, which Muslims exactly, are we to deem,
impossible to reason with? What of those individuals from Muslim
families, communities and lands, whose reason and moral
conscience, persuades them to risk life and limb questioning
Islamic dogma? Are they still not to be trusted? What of those
Muslims who for reasons of love and affection, cannot sever links
with the relationships that form the very ground of their being?
Are we to say they are beyond the pale? What about the silent
majority, too busy just trying to survive, and lacking the most
basic amenities of life, - are they to be condemned because they
found no time to think and to challenge those mullahs and other
elites whose feet are on their necks?
It is surely vital that we do not fall into
essentialist pronouncements - most of us are indeed formed by our
circumstances - and also, the breadth of our experiences... this
is cause for hope, becoming as it must, the basis for dialogue and
the consequent opening up of our mental horizons.
Even as we acknowledge the growing confidence
of Muslim fascism and the urgent need to expose and oppose it, we
must at the same time, not lose sight of the fact that, both in
Muhammad's day and after his death, there were individuals, groups
of people and huge military offensives, that opposed and protested
Islamic ideology in the Muslim-controlled regions of the
Middle-East.
In the process of this exploration of
present-day Muslim sensibilities and how they have been formed, a
worthwhile starting point for collaboration between both
Western/Secular and Muslim/Middle-Eastern thinkers and concerned
citizens, would be to ponder on the discoveries and inventions
which might have been made in the Muslim-controlled lands, had
grassroot social movements for gender equality and social justice,
been allowed to permeate the sensibilities of the androcentric
Muslim elites who inherited Muhammad's mantle.
It is a deeply buried fact of history, that the
human capacity for reason and love of justice burned brightly, not
only in Europe during the latter centuries of the second millenium
of Christianity, the 17th and 18th
centuries, but equally brightly, during the centuries immediately
after the death of Muhammad. Middle-Eastern peoples risked their
all in opposing Muslim tyranny, arbitrary, unjust rulings and
oppressive social norms by organising numerous uprisings and
protests that led to battles and extensive periods of outright
war. For example, the bravery in battle of peoples such as the
Babakis, the Isma'ilis, and the Mu'tazilis who all dared to face
up to the unprovoked violence of the land-grabbing,
empire-building Arabs was noted, if obliquely by Muslim historians
of the time. The tragedy for humanity is that the core of such
resistance movements was decimated and the remnants of protestors,
enslaved or otherwise assimilated into the Muslim social/political
empire. Virtually no other records exist but the biased references
by Muslim scholars of those times.
Bandali Jawzi in his book, 'Islamic
Intellectual History' (translated by Tamara Sonn, OUP, 1996) has
done an admirable job piecing together and interpreting a variety
of accounts by writers of the day. The movement Babak inspired,
(whose social code, we would define in modern day terms as
'socialist') declared war on the Abbasid social order. This
movement to overthrow the Islamists of the day, was joined by 300,
000 Khurramis from Azerbaijan and Daylam, as well as sheaves of
landless peasants from Iran and Iraq. Together, they fought
valiantly over two decades, beginning in the year 816 AD. A
central tenet of the Babakis was their belief that , '-all the
prophets, regardless of their religion and codes, are inspired by
one spirit and that revelation never stops.' (Sonn, 96:115)
Concerning the Isma 'ilis, Jawzi concludes from
the evidence, ' the Isma'ilis spurned literal interpretation. They
sought to interpret the law according to its internal sense, based
on reason alone. Thus they were the first sect (bid'a) in Islam to
which we can apply the name, 'rationalists' in the contemporary
meaning of the word '. (Sonn, 1996:130). Jawzi's research further
established that while the Isma' ilis interpreted religion and its
rulings in a way that led to its denial, the Mut'azilis tried to
reconcile religion and reason in order to avoid abandoning one for
the other.
What is the significance of these
long-suppressed facts for us today? Where are the researchers to
guide us? Should we be surprised that present-day inheritors of
the past orthodoxy of Islam, such as Saudi-funded higher Education
institutions and departments in both West and East, are not
racing to unearth such buried realities of Islam's
history/heritage of rationalist/socialist/feminist/animal
rights' dissidents?
We who do not wish to repeat history, must on
the one hand, draw a parallel with Arabic empire-building
activities, which include the enslaving of others, and on the
other hand, the recent history of Europeans escaping disease and
want in Europe, for the New World of the Americas, Australasia
etc. They too, for subsequent centuries taught a distorted version
of historical reality, denying the inhumanity of their
empire-building activities. These activities included, enslaving
other humans (whose defining difference eg skin colour,
conveniently rendered them less than human) and, the massive and
greedy exploitation of nature.
In the face of the current threat from a
revived Islam, it is absolutely vital that we rational humanists
of whatever political creed, or spiritual belief, avoid falling
into an essentialist posturing regarding Muslims. At this juncture
of world history, it must be acknowledged that the male fixation
with the moral-military modus operandus that, 'Might makes Right'
and its subsequent 'history according to the conquerors', is the
shameful history of Western and Eastern patriarchal societies
alike.
Furthermore, it is vital to recognise that
despite the West's Renaissance, despite the framing of human
rights legislation and international laws, the Western nations'
oppressive, exploitative activities in Third World countries, have
continued largely unabated. The way this has been achieved is no
longer by Western armies themselves overrunning a nation whose
resources they are thirsting for. Instead, the Western elites have
struck Faustian deals - for example, elevating to positions of
power any obscure, self-seeking, amoral Sheikhs of the Arabic
world, in return for the draining of that people's resources. This
must be understood to have contributed hugely to suppressing the
democratic impulses of those peoples and pushing them back into
the medieval mindset of Islamic fatalism and the mania for control
over 'their women', if they can have no control over anything else
in the Universe.
It is the West's (well-hidden) disgrace and a
tragedy of international proportions, that such principled leaders
as Mehdi Ben Burka of Morrocco and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo,
were assassinated under the direction of US, UK, Belgium and
French governments. Why? Why did our apparently democracy-loving
leaders eg, President Dwight Eisenhower of the USA and Lord Home,
the UK's Foreign Secretary order the killing of these secular,
principled leaders and install puppet leaders who cared nothing
for the progress of their people? Because Lumumba, Barka and other
Third World leaders of their stature were seen to be interested in
the welfare of their own peoples and not easily persuaded to sell
out in return for the West's access to mining, mineral and oil
rights. So, when we call for moral and intellectual consistency of
Muslims, we call for these qualities to be equally manifest
in the foreign policies of the West. To date, this has not
occurred.
The current Islamic lands can only be
transformed in the direction of developing political cultures
based on equality, freedom and rights for all, without regard to
religion, if the West acknowledges its centuries of 'speaking with
forked tongue', its many inhumanities, which extend to its
present-day moral vacuity and political opportunism. If the Muslim
world's dehumanisation of 'Unbelievers' is wrong, the West's
support of military dictators in those countries, against all its
much-vaunted philosophies of democracy and human rights, is
equally reprehensible.
Tyranny must be challenged wherever it occurs,
not just when it suits our interests to do so. Meanwhile, the
humanity of people, treated as pawns and playthings and
indoctrinated by powerful elites, must never be doubted. Instead,
we who happen to be born into circumstances of greater freedom, we
who are blessed with resources of time, energy and education
must... enter into dialogue, engage with, and educate those less
endowed with such advantages whether - in the West or the East.
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