The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (18 page)

Muhammad vs. Jesus

“No one is good but God alone.”

Jesus (Mark 10:18)

“The Jews say: ‘Allah’s hand is chained.’ May their own hands be chained! May they be cursed for what they say! By no means. His hands are both outstretched: He bestows as He will”

Qur’an 5:64

The idea that Allah’s hand is “not chained” is a reflection of his absolute freedom and sov ereignty. If God is good, as Jesus says, His goodness may be discernable in the consistency of creation; but in Islam, even to call Allah good would be to bind him.

Much of the responsibility for this must be laid at the feet of the Sufi Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1128). Although he was a great thinker, he nevertheless became the chief spokesman for a streak of anti-intellectualism that stifled much Islamic philosophical and scientific thought. Some philosophers, al-Ghazali noted, were a bit too hesitant to embrace the revealed truths of the Qur’an: Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Sabbah al-Kindi (801–873), for example, had suggested that religion and philosophy were two separate but equal paths to truth.
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In other words, philosophers need not pay attention or homage to the Qur’an, with its self-serving prophet and bordello Paradise. Abu Bakr ar-Razi (864–930), known in the West as Rhazes, even went so far as to say that
only
philosophy leads to the highest truth.
¹¹
Other Muslim philosophers pursued similarly dangerous lines of inquiry. In his
Incoherence of the Philosophers,
al-Ghazali accordingly accused Muslim philosophers of “denial of revealed laws and religious confessions” and “rejection of the details of religious and sectarian [teaching], believing them to be man-made laws and embellished tricks.”
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He accused the Muslim philosophers al-Farabi and Avicenna of challenging “the [very] principles of religion.”
¹³

At the end of
The Incoherence of the Philosophers,
al-Ghazali asks a rhetorical question about the philosophers: “Do you then say conclusively that they are infidels and
that the killing of those who uphold their beliefs is obligatory?
”
¹⁴
He answers: “Pronouncing them infidels is necessary in three questions”: their teachings that the world existed eternally, that Allah does not know particular things, but only universals, and that there is no resurrection of the body. Thus, by the dictates of Islamic law, killing them was “obligatory.” This is hardly the way to encourage a healthy philosophical tradition. There were Muslim philosophers after al-Ghazali, but they never achieved the stature of Avicenna. Averroes, (also called Abul-Waleed Muhammad Ibn Rushd) answered al-Ghazali in a book called
Incoherence of the Incoherence,
insisting that philosophers need not kowtow to theologians, but the damage was done. The Golden Age of Islamic philosophy, such as it were, was over.

Al-Ghazali’s attack on the philosophers was a sophisticated manifestation of a tendency that has always hindered intellectual development in the Islamic world:

There is a prevailing assumption that the Qur’an is the perfect book, and no other book is needed. With the Qur’an the perfect book and Islamic society the perfect civilization, too many Muslims didn’t think they needed knowledge that came from any other source—certainly not from infidels.

Allah kills science

But the main
coup de grace
to Islamic scientific and philosophical inquiry may have come from the Qur’an itself. The holy book of Islam portrays Allah as absolutely sovereign and bound by nothing. This sovereignty was so absolute that it precluded a key assumption that helped foster the development of science in Europe: Jews and Christians believe that God is good, and that His goodness is consistent. Therefore, He created the universe according to rational laws that can be discovered, making scientific investigation worthwhile. Saint Thomas Aquinas explains:

Since the principles of certain sciences—of logic, geometry, and arithmetic, for instance—are derived exclusively from the formal principals of things, upon which their essence depends, it follows that God cannot make the contraries of these principles; He cannot make the genus not to be predicable of the species, nor lines drawn from a circle’s center to its circumference not to be equal, nor the three angles of a rectilinear triangle not to be equal to two right angles.
¹⁵

But in Islam, Allah is absolutely free. Al-Ghazali and others took issue with the very idea that there were laws of nature; that would be blasphemy, a denial of Allah’s freedom.
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To say that he created the universe according to consistent, rational laws, or that he “cannot” do something—as Aquinas affirms here—would be to bind his absolute sovereignty. His will controls all, but it is inscrutable.

Thus modern science developed in Christian Europe rather than in the House of Islam. In the Islamic world, Allah killed science.

But all is not lost: Some things for which we can thank Islam

All this doesn’t mean, however, that Islam cannot be given some credit for intellectual, scientific, or artistic attainment. In fact, we can credit the House of Islam with two landmark achievements: the opening of the New World and the Renaissance in Europe.

Every schoolchild knows, or used to know, that in 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America while searching for a new, westward sea route to Asia. And why was he searching for a new route to Asia? Because the fall of Constantinople to the Muslims in 1453 closed the trade routes to the East. This was devastating for European tradesmen, who had until then traveled to Asia for spices and other goods by land. Columbus’s voyage was trying to ease the plight of these merchants by bypassing the Muslims altogether and making it possible for Europeans to reach India by sea. So the bellicosity and intransigence of Islam ultimately opened the Americas for Europe.

Another consequence of the fall of Constantinople, and the long, slow death of the Byzantine Empire that preceded it, was the emigration of Greek intellectuals to Western Europe. Muslim territorial expansion at Byzantine expense led so many Greeks to seek refuge in the West that Western universities were filled with Platonists and Aristotelians to an unprecedented extent. This led to the rediscovery of classical philosophy and literature, and to an intellectual and cultural flowering the like of which the world had never seen (and hasn’t again). It may be that the decline and fall of Byzantium was a greater Muslim contribution to the history of philosophy and intellectual life in the Western world than the Arabic preservation of Aristotle.

Of course, both of these aren’t really Islamic “achievements.” They are consequences of the applications of the violent doctrines of Islam we explored earlier. But in terms of their real effects upon the world at large, they amount to more than a whole stack of Islamic philosophical treatises and a boatload of calligraphy.

A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read

The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West
, by Toby E. Huff; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 2003. Huff explains why it was not by accident that modern science didn’t develop in the Islamic world or China, but in the West.

Chapter 8

THE LURE OF ISLAMIC PARADISE

H
owever strange it may seem to Westerners, the much-publicized virgins promised to Islamic martyrs in Paradise is no myth or distortion of Islamic theology. Muhammad painted a picture of a frankly material and lushly sensual Paradise for his followers—containing everything a seventh-century Arabian desert-dweller could possibly dream of: gold and fine material things, fruits, wine, water, women…and boys.

Of course, not everyone was buying into this, even during the Prophet’s salad days. During one engagement against the Quraysh (the Battle of the Trench), Muhammad asked his followers: “Who is a man who will go up and see for us how the enemy is doing and then come back?” He promised to ask Allah that that spy “may be my companion in paradise.” Yet he found no volunteers, requiring him finally to assign the mission to one of his men.
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Guess what?

• The Qur’an describes Paradise in terms that make it clear that it is a place merely to indulge one’s physical appetites.
  
• September 11 hijacker Muhammad Atta packed a “paradise wedding suit” into his luggage on that fateful day.
  
• Paradise is guaranteed only to those who “slay and are slain” for Allah.
  

Still, the promise of Paradise was one of the principal means by which Muhammad motivated his followers. It made fighting in jihads a win-win proposition: If a Muslim warrior was victorious, he enjoyed booty on earth; if he was killed, he enjoyed virtually identical rewards in the after-life—on a much grander scale. During the Battle of Badr, Muhammad urged on the Muslims with promises of Paradise: “By God in whose hand is the soul of Muhammad, no man will be slain this day fighting against them with steadfast courage advancing not retreating but God will cause him to enter Paradise.”

One of his warriors, ‘Umayr bin al-Humam, who had been sitting near by munching on dates, was excited by this. “Fine, fine!” he exclaimed. “Is there nothing between me and my entering Paradise save to be killed by these men?” He flung away his dates, rushed into battle, and quickly met the death he had been seeking.
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What’s behind Door Number One

In Paradise, ‘Umayr bin al-Humam expected to be adorned “with bracelets of gold and pearls” (Qur’an 22:23) and “dressed in fine silk and in rich brocade” (Qur’an 44:53). Then he would recline “on green cushions and rich carpets of beauty” (Qur’an 55:76), sit on “thrones encrusted with gold and precious stones” (Qur’an 56:15), and share in “dishes and goblets of gold”—on which would be “all that the souls could desire, all that their eyes could delight in,” including an “abundance of fruit” (Qur’an 43:71, 73) including “dates and pomegranates” (Qur’an 55:68). For the carnivorous, there would be “the flesh of fowls, any that they may desire” (Qur’an 56:21).

To those who lived their entire lives in the desert, water was a precious commodity—and the Qur’an promises it in abundance in Paradise. Paradise itself consists of “gardens, with rivers flowing beneath” (Qur’an 3:198; cf. 3:136; 13:35; 15:45; 22:23). In it are “two springs pouring forth water in continuous abundance” (Qur’an 55:66).

And not only water: Paradise would offer a variety of beverages. Besides “rivers of water incorruptible,” there would be “rivers of milk of which the taste never changes; rivers of wine, a joy to those who drink; and rivers of honey pure and clear” (Qur’an 47:15).

Wine? But aren’t alcoholic drinks forbidden to Muslims? Doesn’t the Qur’an say that “strong drink” is “Satan’s handiwork” (5:90)? How, then, can Satan’s handiwork be found in Paradise?

Well, the wine in Paradise is different, you see. It is “free from headiness,” so that those who drink it will not “suffer intoxication therefrom” (Qur’an 37:47).

All this would be presented to those blessed of Allah in a perfect climate-controlled environment: “Reclining in the Garden on raised thrones, they will see there neither the sun’s excessive heat nor the moon’s excessive cold. And the shades of the Garden will come low over them, and the bunches of fruit, there, will hang low in humility” (Qur’an 76:13-14).