Islam Under Scrutiny by Ex-Muslims
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Golden Eggs of Rotten Islam: Freethinkers of IslamMuslim apologists always huff and puff, claiming the golden ages of Islam produced many great Muslim minds. It is partially true, there were numbers of scientists, doctors and philosophers in the era of powerful Islam but they were not real Muslims, by any stretch of the imagination. Imagine a ruthless Mullah father with many children! Every evening he returns from work, cranky and ready to beat the whole family. As soon as he steps in, everyone maintains pin drop silence and stay far away from him. Almost same thing happened when Muhammad established his kingdom. There was no trace of doctors, chemists, poets or philosophers while he was in power; they had to hide to save their lives. As soon as Mohammad died, scholars, academics and intellectuals came out of their shelter and flourished again.
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Muslim apologists claim that Jabir Ibn Haiyan was the father of chemistry though Chemistry was practiced from ancient ages. Egyptians used distillation process in 3000 years BC and the Greeks in 1000 BC. Zosimus of Panopolis wrote "The Divine Art of Making Gold and Silver", in the 4th century. Jabir Ibn Haiyan should not be called the founder of Chemistry, which is nothing but the usual deceiving technique of Muslim apologists. However, he did contribute a lot in this area of science and prepared varieties acids such as, nitric, hydrochloric, citric and tartaric acids. He practiced medicine and chemistry under the patronage of an Abbasid caliphate Harun al-Rashid. |
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Interestingly, Jabir Ibn Haiyan was not a very religious person. A Muslim apologist writes, "His religious views and philosophical concepts, embodied in the corpus have been criticized but, apart from the question of their authenticity, it is to be emphasized that the major contribution of Jabir lies in the field of chemistry and not in religion." Whenever Muslims are embarrassed with facts, they bring the question of authenticity, a known technique that they always use. As human beings, we surely are grateful to Jabir for his contribution to humankind. One logical question pops up; if Muslims disagree with Jabir's religious views then why are they proud of Jabir and claim him as a Muslim scientist?
Ibn Sina (980-1037)
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Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna was another prominent figure, who excelled in medicine but his contribution to science and philosophy is also greatly remembered. Muslims proudly call him the doctor of doctors and enjoy virtual pleasure, alleging him as a golden egg of golden Islam. Despite taking the credit, Muslim countries never benefited from his works, however many hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and hotels of Islamic countries are named after him. Ironically, European universities added Ibn Sina's medical and philosophical works to their curriculum but they remained unknown to the witch factories aka madrassas of the Muslim world. |
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Apparently, Avecinna believed in one god and accepted the authority of Muhammad as the lawgiver of Islam. Well, did he have any choice? A learned person like Ibn Sina was well aware of the punishment for apostasy. He surely did not want his head be chopped and play soccer with it. However, his freethinking mind did not accept the absurdities of Islam. He opined in his autobiography under the chapter of "THE AFTER LIFE". - "The after life is a notion received from religious teaching; there is no way of establishing it's truth save by way of religious dogma and acceptance of the prophet's report as true; there refers to what will befall the body at the resurrection and those corporal delights or torments which are too well-known to require restating here." (from "Avicenna on Theology" by Arthur J Arberry). Arthur J Arberry nicely explained Avecinna's conviction in his commentary, "And on one most important point of doctrine he was unquestionably, gloriously heretical; he rejected unreservedly the resurrection of the body, and with it the literal acceptance of those passages in the Koran describing in graphic physical terms the pleasure and the torture of the damned."
What a blasting blasphemous heresy! A major portion of "holey" Quran is stuffed with resurrection and/or judgment day business. Quran is all about killing kafirs in this life, establishing Islamic kingdom, and punishment or reward with strippers after life. Quran confirms in verse - 50.42, "The Day when they will hear a (mighty) Blast in (very) truth: that will be the Day of Resurrection." Not only in this verse but the same assertion was repeated in eighty four places in the Quran. How naively Ibn Sina rebuffed the central idea of Quran is an interesting approach that deserves to be contemplated.
Arberry made the most interesting assessment of Avecinna in the following commentary, "Even during his lifetime Avicenna was suspected of infidelity to Islam; after his death accusations of heresy, free thought and atheism were repeatedly leveled against him."
Abu Bakr Mohammed ibn Zakariya ar-Razi (841-926)
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Ar-Razi, another great physician wrote more than 200 books of which one half of them are about medicine and rest in physics, mathematics and astronomy. Like Ibn Sina, Ar-Razi's works had set milestones in medical science. The most controversial book "On Prophecy" has not survived for an obvious reason. Most likely embarrassed Muslims could not swallow the contents that humiliated the prophet of Islam. Somehow, a part of his second book slipped through the hand of ignorant. Ar-Razi quipped -"These billy goats (Prophets) pretend to come with a message from God, all the while exhausting themselves in spouting their lies, and imposing on the masses blind obedience to the "words of the master." |
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--- and Muslims are still proud of Ar-Razi!!!!
Abu 'L-ala Ahmad b. Abdallah al-Ma'arri (973-1057)
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Al Ma'arri, also known as the Eastern Lucretius was famous for poetry and grammar. He was born in Syria but traveled many places until he became blind. He lived in Baghdad for only eighteen months but within this short time he made a name for himself as a poet. After returning from Baghdad , he lived in his hometown Marra for another fifty years. Because of his fame, students from distant places went to Al-Marri to learn from him. Like Ibn Sina, al-Marri did not believe in resurrection and strongly condemned religious beliefs. One of his poems says it all: |
"Hanifs
(Muslims) are stumbling, Christians all astray
Jews wildered, Magians far on error's way.
We mortals are composed of two great schools:
Enlightened knaves or else religious fools....."
Abu Raihan Mohammed Ibn Ahmad Al-Biruni (973-1048)
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Al-Biruni was multitalented; he contributed in physics, metaphysics, mathematics, geography and history. His famous book Kitab al-Hind gives a vivid account of the historical and social conditions of Indian sub-continent. Al-Biruni's astronomical achievements were in the line of Ptolemy. In mathematics, he dealt with algebraic definitions, Trigonometry, and Archimedes' theorems. Archimedes gave birth to the calculus of the 'infinite conceived', Al-Biruni nurtured this concept and finally perfected by Kepler, Cavalieri, Fermat, Leibniz and Newton. "In religion he was a Shi'ite Muslim, but with agnostic tendencies." - Encyclopedia Britannica 2000. |
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Al-Nisaburi al-Khayyam (1048-1131 AD)
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Omar Khayyam is best known for his Rubaiyats or poems but he was an outstanding mathematician and astronomer. He also wrote a book of music, an un-Islamic act that may throw him in a burning hell. His calculation of 365.24219858156 days making a year is so close to accurate that modern scientists respectfully remember his name. Omar Khayyam also found a geometric solution of cubic equations. Islam strictly prohibits Martini and bikini. According to Quran, Muslim women are not allowed to reveal their beauty and drinking wine gives you a one-way ticket to hell. But Omar Khayyam was an admirer of beauty and wine. |
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"Drinking
wine is my travail
Till my body is dead and stale
At my grave site all shall hail
Odor of wine shall prevail."
Another piece of gem--
"Heaven
is incomplete without a heavenly romance
Let a glass of wine be my present circumstance
Take what is here now, let go of a promised chance
A drumbeat is best heard from a distance."
Bravo! This guy is my hero. Check out the last two lines, he is encouraging to enjoy the earthly life and discard the idea of promised hereafter. Mullahs and suicide bombers may learn a thing or two from Omar Khayyam's rubayat. In 17th century, another great thinker Voltaire, oscillated between optimism and pessimism but Omar Khayyam was the master of optimism. He was surrounded by Islam, a hopeless doctrine that promotes hatred, destruction and murder, yet Omar Khayyam found the meaning of a cheerful life.
Summary
Contradiction of Islamic teachings and inconsistency of the Quran has created many sects. Muslims are divided in many groups with strong opposing views against each other. Sunni Muslims are the majority with 85% of total number and Shi'ites make up about 10%. Sunnis disapprove the ideology and the rituals of Shi'ite Muslims and hate them as much as they detest Jews. Some of the scholars, belonged to Shi'ite section but modern Sunni Muslim intellectuals shamelessly take the credit for these great minds despite hating Shi'ite section.
Scientific Quran is fairly a new concept, launched and marketed by Muslim intellectuals. They believe that ingredients of Viagra can be found in the Quran, NASA had to use Quran to build the shuttles and the 'coronary artery bypass graft surgery', a process of detouring blood vessel of the heart, came straight from the Quran, just because Quran said, "And We should certainly then cut off the artery of his heart:" (69.46)
Sadly, Muslim intellectuals do not understand that those golden eggs of the rotten Islam did not care for the Quran neither they discovered anything out of that book. Even though they had the chance of discovering from relatively fresh Quran but they followed the trend of Pythagoras (569-475 BC), Aristotle (384-322 BC), Euclid (325-265 BC), Archimedes (287-212 BC), Ptolemy (85-165 AD). Jabir Ibn Haiyan, born unknown and died in 803, probably saw the earliest Quran, served hot from the oven. Interestingly he called Socrates 'the father and mother of all philosophers' and considered him as the prototype of the real chemist instead of finding any chemical formula from the Quran. Pythagoras has often been mentioned in various works of those scholars but failed to discover the speed, velocity or acceleration of Mohammad's unicorn, the mythical horse called Buraque. Bernard Lewis has rightly concluded in his book "What Went Wrong?- The Islamic Empire inherited "the knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle east, of Greece and of Persia, it added to them new and important innovations from outside, such as the manufacture of paper from China and decimal positional numbering from India."
Liberal Abbasid Caliphates such as Harun-al-Rashid and Mamun sponsored those great scholars of the middle age. They were tolerant enough to allow Aristotelian logic, adopted as a framework upon which to build science and philosophy but contrary to Quranic teachings. Eventually, some Muslims understood the threat of real knowledge and how this movement was undermining Islam. At the end of 10th century, famous theologian and a perfect Muslim al-Ghazali brought back the madness of Islam, the real Islam that was practiced by the founder of the religion. In his book, "The destruction of philosophy" - al-Ghazali challenged the process of reasoning because it cannot prove the reality of Allah. Philosophical thoughts and scientific investigations were pushed aside and by the time of his death in 1111, the glorious days of medieval age became a story of the past.
Most of the works of these great people have been destroyed. We can only see a glimpse of their enlightened mind through a few evidences. Scholars like Socrates, Plato, Ibn Sina, ar-Razi, Voltaire and Einstein do not belong to any religion. They live in a higher plane where no religious scripture can influence them. Actually these great scholars flourished not because of Islam but they thrived because they abandoned Islam. When Muslim intellectuals desperately try to brand those great people with Islamic marker, it becomes obvious that they are suffering from inferiority complex and abusing those scholars in the name of Islam.