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Wahi: the Supernatural
Basis of Islam
Dr. Koenraad Elst
1. The yogic view of the Quranic trance
In discussing Islam, most non-Muslims and ex-Muslims
tend to focus on the negative achievements of Islam, such as
Islamic mistreatment of women and unbelievers. However, we should
realize that in its essence, Islam is only secondarily an ethical
system with a characteristic record of conduct. In the first
place it is a belief system, a truth claim. The Islamic religion
stands or falls with the truth or untruth of two assertions:
(1) there is no God but Allah, the Creator of the universe;
and (2) Mohammed is the final spokesman of Allah, who through
him passed on to mankind a series of messages assembled in the
Quran. This Quranic communication is understood to have been
a constant process of "revelation" from AD 610, when
Mohammed was 40, until his death in AD 632.
The first belief is a theological claim which Islam has in common
with some other monotheistic religions, and which, if subjected
to cunning interpretation, could even be reconciled with some
schools of polymorphous-theistic Hinduism ("the wise call
the one True One by many names"). The second belief, by
contrast, is the truly defining truth claim of Islam, setting
it apart from every other religion: the prophethood of Mohammed.
In this essay, we will discuss some non-Islamic views of this
core assertion of Islam.
1. The modern view of the
Quranic trance
Some modern Western and even some Muslim-born
scholars have diagnosed the process of Quranic revelation to
Mohammed as a case of paranoid delusion. For now we shall discuss
the analysis offered by the Marxist scholar Maxime Rodinson.
In his Penguin monograph Mohammed, p.76-79, he starts out by
rejecting the allegation that Mohammed's claim to receiving
visions in a state of trance (wahi) was fraudulent. This allegation
has of course been made by Christian polemicists against Islam,
but also by modern leftist sympathizers of Islam seeking to
recast Mohammed in the mould of a social progressive. In order
to further his purported programme of social reform, Mohammed
is said to have enacted the role of conveyor of God's injunctions
merely to carry more conviction with an audience steeped in
religion. Against this line of thought, Rodinson argues:
"Modern advances in psychology and psychiatry have made
short work of such simplistic explanations of fraud, whether
justifiable or otherwise. The reaction may even have gone too
far in the other direction, for there have been, and still are,
cases of real fraud. But their number is limited. At all events,
it is now generally understood and admitted that certain individuals
can sincerely believe that they are the recipients of visual,
auditory and mental messages from the Beyond; and also that
their sincerity is no proof that these messages really come
from where they are claimed to come."
So, where did the Quranic
messages come from?
"It is the concept of the unconscious that has enabled
us to understand these things. (…) One has only to dip into
psychology text-books to find a hundred perfectly bona fide
cases of people in a state of hallucination hearing things and
seeing visions which they claim quite genuinely never to have
seen or heard before. And yet an objective study of their cases
shows that these are simply fresh associations produced by the
unconscious working on things which have been seen or heard
but forgotten."
Just like a dream, a hallucination
recombines old sensory and mental impressions:
"It is therefore conceivable that what Muhammad saw and
heard may have been the beings described to him by the Jews
and Christians with whom he talked. It is understandable that,
in the words that came to him, elements of his actual experience,
the stuff of his thoughts, dreams and meditations, and memories
of the discussions that he had heard, should have re-emerged,
chopped, changed and transposed, with an appearance of immediate
reality that seemed to him proof of some external activity which,
although inaccessible to other men's minds, was yet wholly objective
in its nature."
Throughout his career as a Prophet
(except, as we shall see, at the very beginning), Mohammed genuinely
believed that the visions and spoken messages which he "received"
were of divine origin. His wahi or Quranic trance seemed to
make a far deeper impression on his mind than any ordinary human
experience could, and he therefore considered it supremely real.
Today, both in mental hospitals
and in the cult scene, you can find numerous people who likewise
believe to be regular recipients of messages from Above. In
some cases, these people manage to make others believe in their
claims, too. They then set themselves up as cult leaders, revered
by a group of followers as their direct telephone line to God
or the spirit world. It is not uncommon for people who regularly
hallucinate to function fairly normally in the world, sometimes
even highly successfully. Thus, Joan of Arc derived from her
visions the strength to lead an army against the British invaders
of France. Chengiz Khan transmuted the shamanic messages from
his god Il-Tengri into a trail of battlefield victories founding
a far-flung empire, which disintegrated a few generations later.
In terms of durability and ultimate geographical expansion of
his religio-political empire, Mohammed was the single most successful
voice-hearer in world history.
It is only in a very few cases
later on in his career that both contemporaries and later scholars
of Islam have found reason to cast doubt on the genuineness
of certain instances of his Quranic trance. These are the cases
where the divine messages received during wahi were just a little
too convenient not to look like Mohammed's self-serving fabrications.
The best-known instance is when Mohammed received permission
from Allah to marry Zaynab, the repudiated wife of his adopted
son Zayd. Under Arab customary law, this union was prohibited,
but in a timely revelation (Q.33:37, 33:50), Allah exempted
Mohammed from this law. Christian polemicists against Islam
have often cited the Zaynab episode as proof of Mohammed's insatiable
lust, but in fact its indication of self-serving manipulation
of the wahi by Mohammed is more damaging to the Islamic belief
system.
According to Rodinson: "It
is true that, later on, some disturbing characteristics did
appear. Muhammad had to take day-to-day decisions, decisions
of a political, practical and legislative nature, which could
not wait for some unspecified moment when the spirit might see
fit to breathe on him. He was constantly under fire, bombarded
with questions and requests for advice. The divinely inspired
nature of his replies gave them a solid basis of authority.
Did he yield to the temptation to nudge the truth a little?
Some of the revelations correspond a little too closely to what
might have been the Prophet's own human desires and calculations.
Or was it, once again, his unconscious at work? We shall never
know."
These few somewhat suspect instances
should at any rate not make us lose sight of the general case:
"When his soul was thus plunged into the void (…) Muhammad
then attained periodic states of ecstasy in which he felt that
he had been stripped of his own personality, submitting passively
to the invasion of a mysterious force, (…) he experienced the
phenomena described above - seeing and hearing things, either
inwardly or outwardly, in the mind or the imagination. We find
these ecstasies and sensory phenomena in a very similar form
among persons suffering from recognized mental conditions such
as hysteria, schizophrenia and uncontrolled verbalization."
If anything can dispel the lingering doubt about Mohammed's
genuine belief in the reality of his trance visions, it is the
description of his own reaction when these psychic phenomena
started. Rodinson: "A study of Muhammad's earliest messages,
coupled with a perusal of accounts of the crises of doubt or
despair which preceded or accompanied them, can only produce
a skeptical attitude towards the theories which see them as
evidence of a coolly calculated plan carried out ruthlessly
from motives of either ambition or philanthropy. And these accounts
do seem to be authentic. Tradition, concerned to stress the
supernatural affiliations of Muhammed's personality, would not
have invented from scratch such very human traits."
2. Mohammed's reaction to the Quranic trance
The first person to doubt the genuineness
of the Quranic "revelations" was Mohammed himself.
This was at the very beginning of his career, when during his
Ramadhân retreat outside Mecca in AD 610, he had an audio-visual
experience in which he both heard and saw the archangel Gabriel,
calling upon him to "Recite!" (Iqrâ', from Qara'a,
whence Qur'ân). Upon receiving his first "revelation",
Mohammed thought he was going mad, or in the parlance of those
days, that he was getting possessed by an evil spirit.
He didn't want to spend the
rest of his life as Mecca's village idiot, and so, preferring
death to disgrace, he decided to throw himself from a high rock:
"Now none of God's creatures was more hateful to me than
an ecstatic poet or a man possessed: I could not even look at
them. I thought, Woe is me poet or possessed -- Never shall
Quraish [i.e. his fellow tribesmen of the Quraish tribe] say
this of me! I will go to the top of the mountain and throw myself
down that I may kill myself and gain rest." (Ibn Ishâq's
Sîrat Rasûl Allâh, tra. Alfred Guillaume:
The Life of Mohammed, p.106/153)
The history of Islam could have
ended there and then, with Mohammed escaping the spell of the
alleged evil spirit by jumping to his death. But the ghost himself
came to the rescue, as Mohammed testified: "So I went forth
to do so and then, when I was midway on the mountain, I heard
a voice from heaven saying, 'O Mohammed! Thou art the apostle
of God and I am Gabriel.'" (ibid.)
So, the vision repeated itself.
We don't know if that was sufficient to reassure Mohammed about
his sanity, but then another and more decisive factor intervened
to save him: "And I continued standing there, neither advancing
nor turning back, until Khadija sent her messengers in search
of me and they gained the high ground above Mecca and returned
to her while I was standing in the same place; and he [i.e.
Gabriel] parted from me and I from him, returning to my family."
(ibid.)
It was indeed his wife Khadija
who saved him and helped him to accept the trance states as
they became a recurring and then a regular feature of his life.
Later on, she supported him when others doubted his prophetic
claims: "By her, God lightened the burden of His prophet.
He never met with contradiction and charges of falsehood, which
saddened him, but God comforted him when he went home. She strengthened
him, lightened his burden, proclaimed his truth, and belittled
men's opposition." (Ishaq/Guillaume:111/155) But more importantly,
she supported and soothed Mohammed in the crucial phase when
he himself entertained the deepest doubts about his own sanity.
This is how she did it. When
Mohammed came home, he told her: "Woe is me poet or possessed."
But she replied: "I take refuge in God from that, o Abû'l
Qâsim [i.e. "father of Qâsim", after Mohammed's
first son Qâsim]. God would not treat you thus since he
knows your truthfulness, your great trustworthiness, your fine
character, and your kindness. This cannot be, my dear. Perhaps
you did see something." And Mohammed answered: "Yes,
I did." (Ishaq/Guillaume: 106/153)
Certainly Mohammed had seen
something, meaning that his sensory nerves had indeed produced
a visual sensation. But was it a false sensation, or in the
parlance of the day, the impact of ghost-possession? Khadija
and her Christian cousin Waraqa b. Naufal eagerly embraced the
idea that Mohammed had had a genuine vision and had been invested
with the mantle of prophethood, but Mohammed himself, with his
skeptical-Pagan background, still had his doubts. Fortunately,
his loving wife knew a way to decide the matter and convince
him of both his sanity and his new prophetic mission.
She asked him to notify her
when his visitor returned, so that they could verify whether
he really was the archangel Gabriel or an ordinary demon. "So
when Gabriel came to him, as he was wont, the apostle said to
Khadija, 'This is Gabriel who has just come to me.' 'Get up,
o son of my uncle', she said, 'and sit by my left thigh.' The
apostle did so, and she said, 'Can you see him?' 'Yes', he said.
She said, 'Then turn round and sit on my right thigh.' He did
so, and she said, 'Can you see him?' When he said that he could,
she asked him to move and sit in her lap. When he had done this,
she again asked if he could see him, and when he said yes, she
disclosed her form and cast aside her veil while the apostle
was sitting in her lap. Then she said, 'Can you see him?' And
he replied, 'No.' She said, 'O son of my uncle, rejoice and
be of good heart, by God he is an angel and not a Satan."
(Ishaq/Guillaume: 107/154)
In modern language, this account
relates how Mohammed's vision of the Archangel waned and disappeared
as his wife turned up the heat of sexual arousal. Narrator Ibn
Ishaq adds a second tradition (through Khadija's daughter Fatima,
her son Husayn, his daughter Fatima, her son Abdullah b. Hasan)
which is even more explicit in this regard, viz. that "she
made the apostle of God come inside her shift, and thereupon
Gabriel departed, and she said to the apostle of God, 'This
verily is an angel and not a satan.'" (ibid.) The underlying
assumption appears to be that a lustful demon, the kind who
might take possession of a man's soul, would have stayed around
to enjoy the sight of Mohammed and Khadija's sexual intercourse;
whereas an angel with his ethos of renunciation would politely
withdraw from the scene.
After his wife had provided
him with this experimental proof of the genuineness of his meeting
with the Archangel, Mohammed was cured of his doubts. He could
now safely embark upon his career as God's exclusive spokesman
and frequent recipient of Gabriel's messages, which were written
down by a secretary and later collected into a book, the Qur'ân.
Only on one occasion would the doubt briefly reappear, viz.
during the episode of the "Satanic verses".
Frustrated at the unyielding
skepticism of his Meccan townsfolk, the Prophet consciously
or subconsciously devised a way to win them over to the acceptance
of his prophetic claims. He would compromise on the central
item in his theology, viz. the falseness of the gods of the
Arabian pantheon as contrasted with the unique reality of Allah
alone. Modern apologists slanderously depict the Meccan heathens
as fanatics intolerant of Mohammed's innovative cult, but in
reality they were always eager for reconciliation. They were
pluralistic or what modern Indians would call "secular".
At a meeting outside their national shrine, the Ka'ba, they
proposed to Mohammed: "Come let us worship what you worship,
and you worship what we worship. You and we will combine in
the matter." (Ishaq/Guillaume: 165/239) They were even
willing to shed some of their religious practices if those of
Mohammed were to prove superior: "If what you worship is
better than what we worship, we will take a share of it, and
if what we worship is better than what you worship, you can
take a share of that." (ibid.)
It is at this point that Mohammed
received an anti-pluralistic and anti-compromise "revelation":
"Say, o disbelievers, I do not worship what you worship,
and you do not worship what I worship, and I will not worship
what you have been wont to worship, nor will you worship that
which I worship. To you your religion and to me my religion."
(Q.109; note that both fools and knaves sometimes quote the
latter sentence as proof of Mohammed's pluralism, when the context
actually shows it to mean the exact opposite.) On another occasion,
viz. around the deathbed of Mohammed's uncle Abû Tâlib,
the Meccans again pleaded reconciliation and pluralism with
the words: "Let him have his religion and we will have
ours". But once more Mohammed refused all compromise and
demanded that they accept his monotheism and his claim to prophethood,
nothing less. (Ishaq/Guillaume:191/278)
Yet, at one point he did give
in to the tempting idea of a quick way to bring the Meccans
into his fold, viz. by accepting the reality and auspicious
role of the three popular goddesses al-Lât, al-Uzzâ
and Manât. A revelation duly arrived from heaven, saying:
"Have you thought of al-Lât and al-Uzzâ and
Manât, the third, the other? These are the exalted cranes
whose intercession is approved." (Ishaq/Guillaume:165/239)
The Meccans were enthusiastic, prostrating along with the Muslims
at the mention of the goddesses in Allah's company, and word
even spread that they had converted to Islam.
But then another revelation
came down, telling Mohammed that he had been deceived by Satan,
who had smuggled these goddess-revering words into the channel
of the prophet's wahi or revelatory trance, falsely making it
look like a divine message on a par with all the others Quranic
verses. So Allah annulled the Satanic verses and sent down the
verse: "We have not sent a prophet or apostle before you
but when he longed [viz. for acceptance], Satan cast suggestions
into his longing. But God will annul what Satan has suggested.
The God will establish his verses, God being knowing and wise."
(Q.22:51/52; Ishaq/Guillaume:166/239) Since then, the Quran
gives a corrected reading, this one properly revealed by Gabriel
himself: "Have ye seen Lât, and Uzzâ, and another,
the third, Manât? (….) These are nothing but names which
ye have devised, ye and your fathers, for which Allah has sent
down no authority." (Q.53:19-23)
Mohammed got away with it, the
indignation among a few of his followers at this lapse from
orthodoxy remaining brief and inconsequential. But an objective
observer cannot avoid facing the question: if the prophet could
be thus deceived by Satan, how could he know on all the other
occasions that he hadn't been deceived? The only answer the
Islamic apologist can come up with, is the one given in the
above narrative: God or Gabriel told Mohammed which revelation
to believe and which one to reject as false. That way, the only
guarantee of revelation is another revelation.
But at least we can sympathize
with Mohammed's brief pang of conscience when he realized the
deception (he "was bitterly grieved and greatly in fear
of God", according to Ishaq/Guillaume:166/239). Clearly
he tried to be honest and bring only genuine revelations to
his audience. Unfortunately, the fullness of Mohammed's critical
sense vis-à-vis his revelations had been abandoned at
the very beginning, when, safe and warm between Khadija's thighs,
he had accepted the basic genuineness of the process of divine
revelation through the voice and vision of Gabriel.
3. The yogic view of Mohammed's
trance
In certain cultures, altered states of consciousness
enjoy a certain legitimacy as ways of knowledge. The most systematic
premodern exploration of consciousness was achieved in the Hindu-Buddhist
tradition. It is there, though mostly only in the past century,
that we do find a critique of Mohammed's Quranic trance.
Before the colonial age, there
was hardly any Hindu evaluation of Mohammed's prophetic claims,
nor even of Islamic doctrine in general. The first detailed
criticism of Islam, and in particular of the Quran, was written
by Swami Dayananda Saraswati, founder of the Vedic reform movement
Arya Samaj in 1875. He mainly lambasted the contradictions,
irrational beliefs and inhumane injunctions in Islamic scripture.
Later Arya Samaj criticism of the Prophet typically focused
on his dictatorial and immoral personal behaviour (e.g. Rajpal's
Rangîlâ Rasûl, about Mohammed's sex life),
not on the source of his "revelations". This was all
not unlike the Christian missionary criticisms of Hindu scripture
and of allegedly licentious Hindu heroes such as Krishna, and
it missed the point about the dubious source of the Quranic
revelations.
The basis of Islam is the belief that Mohammed regularly went
into a state of trance (wahi) and heard a voice dictating Allah's
own words. In recent years, Hindu students of Islam have invoked
the eyewitness testimony of Mohammed's contemporaries in support
of their own skeptical rejection of the Prophet's claim of receiving
divine messages: "The Meccans stood firm by their gods;
their faith in the gods was not at all shaken by Muhammad's
attacks. Allah reports: 'When it was said unto them, There is
no God save Allah, they were scornful, and said: Shall we forsake
our gods for a mad poet?' (Q.37:36/35) 'And they marvel that
a warner from among themselves had come. They say: This is a
wizard, a charlatan.' (Q.38:4/3) " (S.R. Goel: Hindu Temples,
vol.2, 2nd ed., Voice of India, Delhi 1993, p.334)
It was probably Swami Vivekananda
who first connected the questionable nature of Mohammed's leadership
with the nature of his prophethood. Mohammed had to be ruthless
in imposing adherence to his belief in his own divine mission
because this belief could not stand on its own, based as it
was on a delusion. If your neighbour, whom you have known for
years as an ordinary businessman, tells you one day that he
is hearing God's voice and that you have to obey his divine
instructions from now on, would you readily give in to his demand?
Rather, you would wonder what had happened to him. So, Vivekananda
offered one hypothesis of what had happened to Mohammed so as
to make him believe in his own selection as God's sole living
spokesman.
The specifically Hindu contribution
to our understanding of the Quranic revelation is to bring in
the yogic experience. As an example of how yogic practice can
go wrong, warning against the dangers of experimenting with
yoga without competent guidance, Vivekananda mentioned Mohammed:
"The yogi says there is a great danger in stumbling upon
this state. In a good many cases, there is the danger of the
brain being deranged, and, as a rule, you will find that all
those men, however great they were, who had stumbled upon this
superconscious state without understanding it, groped in the
dark, and generally had, along with their knowledge, some quaint
superstition. They opened themselves to hallucinations. Mohammed
claimed that the Angel Gabriel came to him in a cave one day
and took him on the heavenly horse, Burak, and he visited the
heavens.
"But with all that, Mohammed
spoke some wonderful truths. If you read the Koran, you find
the most wonderful truths mixed with superstitions. How will
you explain it? That man was inspired, no doubt, but that inspiration
was, as it were, stumbled upon. He was not a trained Yogi, and
did not know the reason of what he was doing. Think of the good
Mohammed did to the world, and think of the great evil that
has been done through his fanaticism! Think of the millions
massacred through his teachings, mothers bereft of their children,
children made orphans, whole countries destroyed, millions upon
millions of people killed! (...) So we see this danger by studying
the lives of great teachers like Mohammad and others. Yet we
find, at the same time, that they were all inspired. Whenever
a prophet got into the superconscious state by heightening his
emotional nature, he brought away from it not only some truths,
but some fanaticism also, some superstition which injured the
world as much as the greatness of the teaching helped."
(Vivekananda: Complete Works, vol.1, p.184, from his book Raja
Yoga, Ch.7: "Dhyana and Samadhi")
Mental disturbance as a consequence
of meditative experiments had already been named as the cause
of the Quranic revelations by Gisbertus Voetius, a 17th-century
Dutch Calvinist theologian who trained missionaries for conversion
work in Indonesia (discussed in Karel Steenbrink: Dutch Colonialism
and Indonesian Islam. Contacts and Conflicts 1595-1950, Rodopi,
Amsterdam/Atlanta 1993). Protestants who had abolished monastic
institutions and were scornful of the ascetic practices of Catholic
and Orthodox monks, liked to point out such dangers, and their
warning seemed to apply to the case of Mohammed as well.
Most yoga manuals emphatically
warn against wrongly practising the techniques of Hatha Yoga,
which are very powerful whether used properly or in disregard
of the concomitant rules. Yogic masters can relate anecdotes
of pupils or colleagues who spurned the precautions and practised
dangerous forms of prânâyâma ("breath
control" or "control of the vital energies")
till they impaired their nerve systems. One well-known written
testimony of the painful and lasting effects of erratic yogic
practice is given by Gopi Krishna in his well-known book Kundalini,
the Evolutionary Energy in Man. (1967, still available in many
Indian and overseas editions). Arya Samaj leader Vandematharam
Ramachandra Rao told me of one case involving a friend of his
who inflicted brain damage on himself and died of a stroke as
a consequence of improper prânâyâma practice.
Likewise, the Taoist energy-steering system of Qigong comes
with the same warning and similar anecdotes. Many mystic phenomena
the world over come about as cases of stumbling upon certain
states of consciousness, which may lead to some kind of "enlightenment"
but also to serious delusions. The most typical among these
is megalomania, witness the self-importance of the assorted
gurus and messiahs in the modern cult scene.
Hindu yogis claim to have left
these dangerous mind games behind because their forebears have
developed a safe and sound method laid down in such classics
as Patanjali's Yoga Sutra. Ram Swarup (Hindu View of Christianity
and Islam, Voice of India, Delhi 1993, p.45-46) argues that
the methodical and systematic "science of yoga" has
a substantial qualitative edge over other forms of mysticism
or mediumism. From this angle, it is unfair -- even if fashionably
in tune with the "equal truth of all religions" doctrine
-- to put yoga in one class with the experiments of Shamans
taking hallucinogenic plants, or with the uninvited voice-hearing
experiences of Mohammed.
In recent years, Ram Swarup
and Sita Ram Goel have further developed Swami Vivekananda's
position on the nature of Quranic revelation. Ram Swarup has
elaborated on the yogic theory of samadhi (enstasis) states
of different levels of purity, which allows for states of high
concentration tainted by delusion (Hindu View of Christianity
and Islam, p.107). S.R. Goel has pointed out the similarity
between Mohammed's experiences and that of other men who combined
a susceptibility to convulsive trance states with a great charisma
and strategic ability, most notably Chengiz Khan (Goel, ed.:
The Calcutta Quran Petition, 3rd ed., Voice of India, Delhi
1999, p.238-249; with reference to Ibn Ishâq: Sîrat
Rasûl Allâh, tra. Alfred Guillaume:
The Life of Mohammed, OUP Karachi,
p.104/150-107/154).
They conclude that the Pagan Arabs had every right to reject
Mohammed's claims, born from a deluded consciousness and then
propagated on a war footing, but that they made the one mistake
which history does not forgive, viz. the mistake of being defeated.
However, "the fact that they failed to understand the ways
of Mohammed and could not match his mailed fist in the final
round, should not be held against them. It was neither the first
nor the last time that a democratic society succumbed in the
face of determined gangsterism. We know how Lenin, Hitler and
Mao Tse-tung succeeded in our own times." (Goel: Hindu
Temples, vol.2, 2nd ed., p.272)
As far as I can see, the foregoing
constitutes the single most radical criticism of Islam available
in the world. Christian critics, no matter how fierce, usually
appreciate at least Mohammed's monotheism, which does not impress
these Hindu authors. They are also inhibited in criticizing
the deluded nature of Mohammed's "revelations", as
they profess a belief in the divine revelations to the Old Testament
prophets. Though "irreverent" and "demythologizing"
are among the most specious words of praise in the review columns
of modern newspapers, few people have the stomach for something
as irreverent and demythologizing as the Hindu revivalist analysis
of the Prophet's mission.
4. Cultural relativism comes
to the defence of Mohammed's wahi
There is a school in psychiatry, now well past
its prime but quite strong in the 1960s and 70s, which rejects
the whole notion that we can arrive at a diagnosis of mental
disturbance for people from other climes and cultures. If you
tell that crowd about a psychopathological diagnosis of a 7th-century
Arab, they will dismiss it as cultural imperialism, as projection
of modern notions onto radically different premodern cultures.
In non-specialist circles, this cultural relativism is now probably
stronger than ever before: postmodern intellectuals refuse to
be "judgmental" about characters from other cultures,
including the Prophet of Islam.
Thus, it is argued that more
or less controlled and ritualized forms of ghost-possession
were an established part of many cultures since thousands of
years. This way, Mohammed's Quranic trance (wahi) could be justified
as a form of Shamanic contact with the spirit world. To be sure,
classifying Mohammed as a kind of Shamanic medium would still
undermine his claim to a unique status as the final prophet,
but it does sound better than labels like "hallucination"
or "sensory delusion". Georg Feuerstein (Holy Madness,
Arkana Books 1992, a book on the interface between religion
and altered mental states, p.15) does Mohammed the honour of
describing him as a "mystic".
And yet, the relativistic position
is refuted by spokesmen of those premodern cultures themselves.
It is simply not true that where we see pathological symptoms,
the ancients merely saw a state of divine intervention. Some
of the terms still in common use as names of specific psychopathological
syndromes, such as mania and paranoia, originate with the ancient
Greeks. Manuals of Ayurvedic and Tibetan medicine already try
to classify and treat mental problems. Indeed, it is hard to
find any culture which doesn't have a notion of "madness",
however vague and general. In this particular case, we cannot
say that the 7th-century Arabs already had an embryonic knowledge
of psychiatry, but at least they were clearly of the view that
there was something wrong with Mohammed's mind.
In our latest chapter, we saw
that Mohammed himself initially evinced a healthy skepticism
vis-à-vis the visions and revelations which he had started
receiving from AD 610 onwards. It was mainly his first wife
Khadija who helped him in getting accustomed to this recurring
psychic phenomenon and in accepting his status of prophet. Meanwhile,
most of his townsfolk in Mecca remained unconvinced. It is not
modern neo-colonial Western psychologists who imposed this skepticism
on them, it is clearly they themselves who, within the framework
of their own culture, saw sufficient reason to reject Mohammed's
belief in his status of recipient of divine revelation.
The Quran itself gives more
than a dozen instances where Mohammed, or the "voice"
he heard, puts him on guard against the Meccans' view that his
revelations are merely the effect of ghost-possession. This
is very explicit in the ten verses 15:6, 23:70/72, 34:8, 34:46/45,
37:36/35, 44:14/13, 52:29, 68:2, 68:51, 81:22. Thus: "They
say; 'He suffers of ghost-possession'? No, he came to them with
truth but most of them abhor truth." (23:70/72)
To this list, Mohammed himself
adds several references to Biblical prophets likewise accused
of ghost-possession: earlier prophets in general 51:52, Noah
23:25, Moses 26:27/26 and 51:39. It is to be noted that the
Bible nowhere mentions such an allegation against Noah, Moses
or most other prophets. The one exception is verse 9:7 of Hosea,
a prophet apparently unknown to Mohammed: "They call the
man of the spirit a madman: so great is their guilt that their
resistance is likewise great". Undoubtedly, Mohammed, whose
knowledge of the Bible was only sketchy, was merely projecting
his own plight onto Noah and Moses.
To be sure, the Arabs were not
modern psychiatrists, they had no clear-cut diagnosis though
they were in no doubt that something was wrong. In a few instances,
they gave the alternative explanation that Mohammed was an ambitious
but fanciful poet who had merely invented it all: Q.21:5, 36:69,
37:36/35, 52:30, e.g.: "But no, they say: 'A web of dreams.
He must have invented them. He must be a poet.'" (21:5)
They also opined that he was "enchanted": 17:47/50,
25:8/9. Mohammed counters this by calling the unbelievers themselves
enchanted (23:89/91), but mostly, we again see Mohammed defending
himself with the plea that the same allegation had been made
against earlier prophets: Moses 17:107/108, Shu'aib 26:185,
Salih 26:153.
The argument that "I am
a prophet but am not acknowledged as such by my narrow-minded
contemporaries, just as the ancient prophets were not given
due recognition either" somehow manages to make non-recognition
into an indication of genuine prophethood. Ordinary people would
start doubting themselves when confronted with general skepticism
of their beliefs. But not Mohammed, whose reasoning went like
this: because I have these revelations from above, because I
have the exceptional status of prophet, people reject me or
laugh at me, but far from shaking my belief in the divine origin
of these visions, this merely proves the weightiness and genuineness
of my prophetic mission, for it puts me up there in the top
league with prophets like Noah and Moses. For people of the
scientific temper, this subjective and self-centred rationalization
of the negative feedback that Mohammed encountered, can be put
aside as just that: a fallacious rationalization of a private
belief easily recognized as irrational.
5. Herman Somers' diagnosis of Mohammed
Ever since Mohammed's first preachings,
people have tried to pinpoint the psychic ailment accounting
for his prophetic self-delusion. Thus, some Christian polemicists
described him as an epileptic, citing episodes in which he foamed
at the mouth and rolled on the floor. This was a meritorious
guess, but its explanatory power was limited because the neurological
disorder of epilepsy need not be accompanied by hallucinations
and an enduring self-delusion. However, now that psychopathology
has matured into a scientific discipline, a more accurate diagnosis
is available.
The Flemish psychologist, Dr.
Herman Somers, formerly a Jesuit who became a religious skeptic
after discovering psychopathological elements in the utterances
of some Biblical prophets, has elaborated the first technical
diagnosis of Mohammed's behaviour. So far, it is only available
in Dutch: Een andere Mohammed ("A different Mohammed",
Hadewych, Antwerp 1993), but I will give its general outline
in English. The basis of this diagnosis is the elaborate description
of Mohammed's personality and conduct provided by the Quran
and by the Hadîth (traditions of the prophet, grouped
by theme) and Sîra (chronological biography) literature.
As for the nature of these sources,
it is worth noting the contrast between Jesus and Mohammed.
Jesus is a composite literary character made up of essentially
historical reports on a wandering healer-preacher combined with
religious stereotypes, partly borrowed from other traditions,
and with deliberate interpolations made by the evangelists in
compliance with the developing political and theological needs
of the budding Church. Mohammed, on the other hand, is a fully
historical character.
To be sure, we are aware of
unconventional theories questioning the historicity of the entire
Mohammed narrative including the Quran (vide e.g. Ibn Warraq:
The Origins of the Koran, Prometheus, New York 1998). If these
were to be accepted, Islam is in very deep trouble, for the
whole edifice of Islamic belief and jurisprudence is based on
the assumption of the historicity of the traditions concerning
Mohammed. It is not our job to save Islam from these skeptics,
but we think they are going too far.
One of the reasons why the tradition
should be given the benefit of the doubt is that it contains
too many admissions against interest, accounts of less than
flattering data about Mohammed and his companions (even about
Mohammed being derided as a madman), clearly included because
they happened to be known as factual to contemporaneous audiences
and not because they served anyone's political or hagiographical
interests. Another reason is that there is simply no motive
for inventing most of it. In the case of certain political rules
laid down by the Prophet, one could still assume strong motives
on the part of later contenders for leadership to attribute
this or that position to the Prophet,-- though in that case,
it is strange that he was allowed to remain silent on so many
contentious issues, e.g. that before his death, he wasn't made
to speak out on the question of how his succession was to proceed
(a matter leading to a fratricidal war, the murder of caliph
Ali and his son Hussein, and the Shiite schism). But the tradition
contains many uncontroversial judgments and regulations and
plenty of humdrum information devoid of implications for later
inter-Muslim power struggles or theological system-building;
it is unlikely that this was all interpolated. This is especially
true when it comes to the description of the Prophet: the Ummayad-
or Abbasid-age traditionists had nothing to gain from describing
Mohammed's complexion, hygienic habits, sex life etc. with the
information they gave rather than with any other.
Even if a lot has been added
to or changed in the historical data during the editing of the
core Islamic text corpus, many correct data must have been preserved.
In particular, if the tradition describes a pathological syndrome
entirely in conformity with modern medical knowledge unavailable
to the authors, it is clear that the latter cannot have invented
the description but must have been describing a real case to
which they or their informants had been witnesses. Dr. Somers
explains:
"The reader be warned against a strange type of reasoning
by certain doctores, whether historians or medics. They assume
that the preserved traditions have been written down belatedly,
that they are hard to control, and that some clearly belong
to mythology. Preparing a diagnosis on the basis of such uncertain
data is clearly nonsense. (…) They forget that they are proceeding
from an unproven and dubious supposition, viz. that all data
in the sources are untrue and unreliable. (…) First of all,
the tradition undeniably preserves a number of more or less
reliable data. Secondly, modern science disposes of detailed
information about all kinds of diseases. These information elements
are called symptoms; they are bundled into syndromes. (…) What
we now find, to our amazement, is that the facts passed on to
us by the tradition correspond with the symptoms and syndromes
known to modern science. Now, if these traditions describe the
facts with such exactitude, they must be reliable." (p.18)
It is one thing if someone makes
a general claim that Mister X is "mad" (as in jokes
about a stereotypical madcap's hilarious behaviour), but quite
another when he describes in detail the typical development
of the paranoia syndrome. In the latter case, either he is a
student of modern psychopathology quoting a textbook description,
or he is describing an actual case to which he was a witness.
Mohammed, according to Dr. Somers,
was a classic case of paranoia. The syndrome of paranoia is
essentially characterized by a delusion about oneself nourished
by recurring hallucinations. These hallucinations may be auditory
(hearing voices), visual (seeing visions or apparitions), or
purely mental (being struck with sudden "insights"
of enormous and unshakable certainty, not susceptible to falsification
by reality). The delusion typically puts the affected person
in the centre of events: either he is the target of a ubiquitous
and all-powerful conspiracy (delusion of persecution); or he
is the privileged witness to a cosmic event, esp. the imminent
end of the world; or he has been selected for a unique mission.
Mohammed's life-story offers
only a hint at a delusion of persecution. He (and later his
apologists) liked to see himself as persecuted by the Meccans,
which is usually given as the reason for his migration to Yathrib/Medina.
While this might have been true, the reality of his interaction
with the Meccans after his migration suggests otherwise. Thus,
a few months later, he lets his followers invite their families
from Mecca to join them in Medina. However, if the Meccans had
really been serious about confronting and "persecuting"
Mohammed, it is unlikely that they would have allowed these
relatives to leave, as they made perfect hostages of great strategic
value in a grim confrontation.
The delusion of being privy
to esoteric information about the approaching end of the world
(though not about its exact timing, a prediction that would
have been uncomfortably testable), also announced by some Biblical
prophets, is already much more pronounced. The verses Q.15:85,
44:10/9 and 78:40 assure us that the end is nigh (as Jesus'
apostles had also been made to believe). The description of
the Final Judgment is one of the main recurring themes of the
Quran. While partly based on Mohammed's hearsay knowledge of
Jewish and Christian theology, it is charged with a strong personal
involvement based on his deeply impressing visions of how the
Judgment would arrive, what the fate of the different categories
of men would be, and what the roles of major religious beings
in it would be: that of a gloriously returning Jesus, but also
that of Mohammed himself.
Mohammed's central delusion,
however, was his belief, first hesitant but soon becoming unshakable,
that he had been selected for a unique mission of cosmic proportions.
He is God's spokesman, and not just one among many, but in his
age the only spokesman, and for the remaining interval before
Judgment Day also the final spokesman, the "Seal of the
Prophets". This unique mission forms the contents of his
second "revelation" on that fateful day in the month
of Ramadhân, AD 610. In the first "revelation",
the archangel Gabriel had ordered him: "Read!" (or
"Recite!", or "Proclaim aloud!"), and Mohammed
had been left confused and incomprehending. Thinking that he
was becoming "a man possessed", he made up his mind
to go and commit suicide, but then Gabriel appeared again, this
time with a very clear message: "O Mohammed, thou art the
apostle of God and I am Gabriel." (Ishaq/Guillaume, p.106/153
; Q.96:1)
This self-delusion turned the
businessman Mohammed into a prophet, then a cult leader for
a small secret circle, next a prominent religious leader with
political ambitions, and finally the first emperor of all Arabia
and founder of a conquering world religion. It forms the core
of the creed pronounced by all Muslims: "There is no God
but God and Mohammed is God's prophet." (At this point
I won't go into a theologico-linguistic discussion of the name
Allâh, analysable as "the God", "the deity",
sometimes used by the Pagan Arabs as a generic term for any
deity, sometimes as a title for a kind of deus otiosus at the
top of their pantheon, then singled out by Mohammed as the only
genuine deity.) Whereas monotheism, the belief in a single God,
is espoused by several other religions beside Islam, the belief
in Mohammed's prophethood, which implies the belief in the divine
origin of the Quran and hence the commitment to revere and obey
the Quran, is the unique and defining doctrine of Islam. Sad
to say, this world religion espoused by more than a billion
contemporary human beings, is based on a private delusion entertained
by its founder.
6. Further symptoms
Of all the founders of religions, none
has left a more detailed biography than the Prophet of Islam.
So, what useful information about Mohammed's psyche can be distilled
from the core texts of Islam in order to give more body to our
suspicion of a paranoid condition?
About his childhood, admittedly
the less public part of his life and hence less likely to yield
information that was widely remembered, a few strange data emerge
which can be interpreted as prodromes or pre-symptoms. As a
three-year-old, he was found lying on the ground, pale and in
shock, and he complained to his foster-parents (townspeople
often put their children in the care of poor country folk) that
two white-clad men had come and opened his belly, looking for
something. His foster-mother Halima even considered returning
him to his real mother, not wanting to bear the responsibility
if something went wrong with the boy, and she opined to her
that the boy might "have a jinn" or ghost. As indications
of a latent mental problem, this is still pretty vague, but
this much is clear that even as a boy, Mohammed was noticed
as a special case.
When he became a young man and
his vital powers were strong, these strange traits were not
in evidence, but as he entered middle age, they returned. In
the years preceding the start of the Quranic revelations, we
know that his wife Khadija thought he had the "evil eye".
For this reason, she sent him to exorcists for treatment. This
again we only know in very general terms, but it corroborates
the suspicion that Mohammed was predisposed to developing a
mental problem, and that his contemporaries were aware of his
unusual psychic complexion. When the prophetic trances became
really serious, involving the vision of the archangel Gabriel,
Khadija took him to the Christian godman Waraqa ibn Naufal,
who certified the genuineness of Mohammed's visions. From that
point onwards, her supportive attitude to her husband's initially
desperate attempts to come to terms with his trances took on
the character of a folie à deux: though not afflicted
herself, she went along with his self-delusion. She became the
first believer, the first one to surrender (islâm) her
common-sense judgment and take his claims as true.
More than these corroborative
indications, however, it is the contents of Mohammed's hallucinations
which clearly mark him as a paranoia patient. A loud voice localized
in heaven or in a gigantic heavenly person speaks to him in
the second person: you are the prophet, chosen to convey the
words of the Creator of the Universe. He is given a uniquely
central role in the cosmic scheme of things: God's final spokesman,
the rightful ruler of mankind as God's vice-regent on earth,
mediator for sinful mortals on the impending Day of Judgment.
The disproportion between his
new self-perception and his actual social status as an ordinary
businessman and later as a derided cult leader was unbearable.
In fact, intolerance of others' skepticism, along with vengefulness,
is a typical trait of paranoia patients. And so, we find Mohammed
singling out each of his critics for assassination or execution.
Not that other, more regular tyrants haven't executed critics,
but it fits Mohammed's paranoid personality, and only the non-occurrence
of his campaign of vengeance against his doubters would have
given us reason to doubt the diagnosis of paranoia. Incidentally,
not a few of these other tyrants may also have exhibited traces
of paranoia, a condition which (unlike schizophrenia and some
more psychopathological syndromes) is not incompatible with
worldly success. Megalomania, in particular, often provides
a strong motivation for the climb to centrality and power.
7. The physical basis of
a mental problem
Mohammed's megalomania may partly have been an
overcompensation for the misery he had suffered, the early death
of his parents and of his little sons. Yet, this purely psychological
explanation of the Freudian type cannot fully explain the strange
phenomena surrounding the development of his delusion: the hallucinations
and their neurological infrastructure. The denial of physical
determinants in favour of purely socio-psychological explanations
(for problems ranging from poor school performance to impotence),
so popular from Freud down to the 1970s, has given way to a
restored respect for the materiality of the human being: as
a conscious subject, he may establish his freedom by skilfully
sailing on the sea of his material being, but he is affected
by its storms, which are not of his own mind's making. The immediate
impact of psychotropic drugs on one's mental condition, for
better or for worse, provides experimental proof for the relative
materiality of our minds. Less sensationally, it has now been
established that the sufficient or insufficient presence of
certain hormones and even of certain minerals and vitamins in
the body may cause good or poor concentration, aggressiveness
or passivity, euphoria or depression, or other mental states.
Therefore, it may be apt to
search for physical problems underlying the Prophet's mental
troubles, and this is what Dr. Somers has tried to do in his
book Een Andere Mohammed. Of Mohammed's physical traits, one
which draws the attention is that he suffered of chronic headaches,
which he tried to remedy by bleeding himself in two veins in
his neck. While in itself not enough to indicate a brain problem,
it certainly will fit that picture as soon as more indications
are found.
The mention of his falling on
the ground once during a trance was earlier interpreted as an
indication of epilepsy, e.g. by the Byzantine author Theophanes
in his Chronographia (AD 814). But this is clearly unsatisfactory,
not only because epilepsy is not typically accompanied by a
permanent self-delusion, but mainly because one of its typical
symptoms is the complete forgetfulness about even the occurrence
of an epileptic fit after the recovery. Paranoid (or similar)
hallucinations, by contrast, leave a very strong impression
on the mind.
Closer to an explicit symptomatology
is Mohammed's own description of the physical sensations accompanying
his trance, as Somers explains. During the initial revelations,
the Prophet felt the angel's presence exerting an enormous,
suffocating pressure on him. To Abdullah ibn Umar he once described
the sensations typically accompanying the trance: loud noise,
being hit by a mighty blow, feeling outside himself. The intensity
of the sound was unbearable to his oversensitive ears (or rather
his auditory brain centre), which is also why he disliked live
music, a dislike later emulated by Padeshah (Moghul emperor)
Aurangzeb in the late 17th century and by Ayatollah Khomeini
in the 1980s as a matter of piety. Somers also quotes Ibn Sa'd
recording the Prophet's words: "Revelation comes to me
in two ways. Sometimes Gabriel comes and speaks to me from man
to man, but I forget what he says then. But sometimes he comes
to me with the sound of a bell, like the roaring of many waters,
so that I get into confusion. But what is revealed to me in
this manner never lets go of me again."
This indicates an identifiable
neuropathological basis for Mohammed's hallucinations. As a
hypothetical physiological explanation of Mohammed's mental
problems, Dr. Somers suggests that very near the main sensory
(auditive and visual) nerves in the mid-brain and on the front
part of his pituitary gland, Mohammed may have developed a tumour.
The descriptions of Mohammed's physical characteristics may
indicate traces of acromegaly, a disorder involving a belatedly
over-active growth hormone and leading to roughness of the extremities
and a strong body odour (suggested by Mohammed's well-attested
abundant use of perfumes), and that would only confirm this
hypothesis. But this, of course, is more speculative than the
well-established psychopathological diagnosis of Mohammed's
paranoia condition. As both Arabic scholarship and neuropathological
science continue to progress, future researchers may determine
more definitely what we must leave as merely an interesting
hypothesis for now. Mohammed's paranoia, by contrast, is an
obvious, scripturally well-attested and diagnostically articulate
fact.
8. Dealing with a mistaken religion
Now that science has spoken out on
the true nature of Mohammed's revelations, we should explore
the practical implications of this new and more enlightened
understanding of Islam. How to deal with our Muslim neighbours
now that we realize they are the prisoners of a gigantic centuries-spanning
delusion?
(1) Distinctions within Islam
The first thing to do is to cultivate
a correct understanding of Islam among ourselves. Whenever something
critical is said about Islam, non-Muslims are always the first
to come to its defence and to lambast the critics as "prejudiced
hate-mongers" or some such unthinking hate-filled smear.
Just as the so-called "anti-anti-Communists" provided
the first line of defence to Communism by countering or ridiculing
every serious anti-Communist argument, we are now faced with
anti-anti-Islamism as the first major roadblock on the way to
a candid analysis of the Islamist problem. Many non-Muslims
have a romanticized view of Islam centred on Sufi poetry and
vague reminiscences of civilizational successes during the bygone
Golden Age of Islam. For the sake of argument, we may concede
for now that these are indeed meritorious contributions of Islam.
The point is then to distinguish within Islam its different
components.
Charming achievements such as
algebra, Arabic calligraphy or the basic and most attractive
ideas of Sufi mysticism are all external to Islam. Arabic calligraphy,
geometrical ornamentation on mosque walls and other non-figurative
aesthetic developments were stimulated by the Islamic prohibition
on the depiction of human or animal life; but they were no more
than variants on art forms which have existed outside and before
Islam as well. Algebra and other sciences were borrowed from
India, China or Greece, as the Arab conquerors readily admitted,
witness their name for the so-called Arabic numerals, viz. rakmû'l-Hindî,
"Indian numerals" (written from left to right, like
the Indian and unlike the Arabic scripts). The belief that they
were in possession of the true religion was enough to bolster
their pride, so they could honestly concede other achievements
to other nations. The central aim of Sufism, the self-extinction
in the merger with God, is obviously borrowed from Buddhist
and Vedantic sources. Initially the orthodox clergy persecuted
outspoken Sufis like Mansûr al-Hallâj who said blasphemous
things like "anâ'l Haqq" ("I am the True
One", Arabic translation of the Upanishadic dictum "Aham
Brahmâsmi") and was tortured to death for it in AD
922, because they saw through its un-Islamic inspiration; but
later they adapted and domesticated Sufism into an acceptable
Islamic form of devotion for both the spiritual eccentrics and
the sentimental illiterate masses.
At any rate, all these attractive
sideshows of Islam can be evaluated separately without judging
the defining beliefs of Islam. Even within Islamic theology
proper, a distinction must be made. Firstly, there is a distinction
between general religiosity or ethics and the specifically Islamic
innovations. Partly in order to gain respectability, Mohammed
included in the Quran and in his own sayings many elements of
traditional morality, injunctions against stealing, slander,
child abuse or marital infidelity. This can be compared with
Moses' Ten Commandments, where his own theological innovations
(monotheism, taboo on idolatry, taboo on uttering the God-name,
keeping a weekly day of rest) are coupled with age-old moral
rules against lying, stealing, disrespect to parents, adultery
etc. In both Moses' and Mohammed's case, the intention seemed
to be, to confer the authority of age-old morality upon the
prophet's own innovative religious ideas. The net result is
at any rate that a believer in the Bible or the Quran can truthfully
say that his Holy Book has taught him morality. That much in
the Quran deserves respect: elements of universal ethics which
are not specifically Islamic but which nonetheless have come
to form a part of Islam.
Even in the theological core
which defines Islam as distinct from other religions, a further
distinction must be made, one which practically coincides with
the two assertions of the Islamic creed: monotheism ("there
is no God but Allah") and the belief in Mohammed's prophethood
("and Mohammed is the prophet of Allah"). Monotheism,
the belief in the oneness of the Divine, can be deduced from
different sources of inspiration, not merely the Bible or the
Quran. One can discern a kind of monotheism in Aristotle's philosophy
or in Stoicism, it has been claimed for Zarathushtra's religion
of Ahura Mazda, and even Hindu devotionalism to Vishnu or Shiva
is sometimes conceived as monotheistic. Within the monotheistic
framework, Medieval and Renaissance philosophers (al-Arabi,
Cusanus, Bruno, Galilei, Leibniz et al.) have developed profound
conceptions of consciousness and the universe. In principle,
it is possible to subscribe to monotheism without developing
the allegedly typical problematic features of the major monotheistic
religions, viz. their intolerance. So, if your Muslim neighbour
says "Alhamdulillâh" (Praise be to Allah) or
some other Allah invocation, please don't jump to jihadic conclusions.
He may well mean the exact same thing intended by a Hindu who
invokes Bhagwân, or by the agnostic who utters: "Only
God knows…"
The real problem arises when
he understands God/Allah as exclusively the character revealed
in the Quran, the collection of sayings which Mohammed claimed
to have heard from a supernatural source identified as the Archangel
Gabriel. The ultimate core of Islam is not Allah and monotheism,
but Mohammed and prophethood. Monotheism is a fairly widespread
idea, but Mohammed and his Quran are truly the defining elements
of Islam. If the oneness of God can conditionally be accepted
as a valid manner of speaking about the Divine, there can be
no compromise with Mohammed's deluded belief in his exclusive
telephone line with Heaven. Here, we hit the radically irrational
and unacceptable core of Islam. Here, there is no room for sweet-talk,
even if only metaphorically or figuratively intended, of a "basic
unity" or "equal truth" of all religions. The
defining core belief of Islam is wrong. It is nothing but the
paranoid delusion of an ordinary early-medieval Arab businessman.
Putting such vain self-delusion on a par with the profound insights
of a Yajñavalkya, a Buddha, a Confucius, a Laozi or a
Socrates, is plainly absurd.
(2) Speaking out
Speaking with Muslims about the deluded
basis of Islam may initially prove to be difficult, both for
non-Muslims and for ex-Muslims. Believers will not like to hear
criticism of Islam from anyone, but in a paradoxical way, they
will tolerate more of it from non-Muslims who enjoy the benefit
of their unbeliever status. In the present world, Muslims have
had to accept at least the existence of unbelievers, and an
unbeliever is by definition one who doesn't believe in Mohammed's
prophetic claims. After all, if he believed in Mohammed's claim
to prophethood, he would accept the validity of the Quran and
hence the whole contents of the Quran, and by accepting all
that, he would by definition be a Muslim. So, in private conversation,
subject to rules of politeness and diplomacy, a non-Muslim has
a certain freedom to express his doubts about the core belief
of Islam. There is no need to be intrusive with your message,
as most Muslims spontaneously bring up the subject of the relative
superiority of one religion vis-à-vis another once in
a while.
For born Muslims, introducing
critical questions about Islam is more difficult, as it amounts
to a statement of apostasy, a crime punishable by death under
Islamic law. Yet, it is mainly these enlightened ex-Muslims
who will do the job of opening the exit gate from Islam for
their Muslim-born brothers and sisters. It is helpful and meritorious
if we non-Muslims speak our minds about the fundamental questions
of religion, but our influence on Muslim audiences will always
be much more limited. We may work for the inclusion of properly
scientific information in all general textbooks of religious
history, so that Muslim children in state-funded schools will
be exposed to a more enlightened view of Mohammed's prophecies;
but we should expect many Muslims to distrust and reject all
such information emanating from unbeliever sources. By contrast,
born and bred Muslims who have shaken off the veil of the faith
and exposed themselves to the light of Reason may have more
impact on the Muslim masses,-- which is why it is also much
more dangerous for them to speak their minds.
However, I am confident that
recent developments in communications technology, particularly
the entry of satellite television and the internet in even the
remotest harems of Arabia, will profoundly alter the mental
climate in the Muslim world. So far, a lot of the authority
wielded by the orthodox clergy over their flock was purely the
result of the latter's ignorance about the world outside Islam.
Most Muslims have grown up with caricatured enemy-images of
Western and Asian cultures, which made it that much easier for
them to identify civilization and morality with their own familiar
Islam. In the next decade, their mental horizon is bound to
widen dramatically.
Already, websites hosted by
ex-Muslims centralize all the information about the dark side
of Islam, about persecutions of non-Muslims and injustices to
women, and more consequentially, about the irrationality and
unsustainability of the core beliefs defining Islam. Books can
be burned and speeches interrupted by the police, but the newer
forms of communication are very discrete and can penetrate into
the private rooms of every inquisitive Muslim.
(3) The alternative
Experience in the secularized West has shown that apostasy
from religion can have unpleasant side-effects. On the one hand,
people are better informed and more open and honest about touchy
subjects. On the other hand, many people flush out ethics and
self-restraint along with the religion which they have come
to see as irrational and obsolete. In this sense, one can sympathize
with those Muslims who fear that a weakening of Islam will lead
to immorality, hedonism, crass consumerism, flaky quasi-religions
(whether political, sex-centred or occultist) and a general
lowering of cultural standards. If the world of non-Islam gets
identified with Hollywood, McDonalds and Playboy, it is understandable
that Muslims will cling to the devil they know rather than expose
themselves to the intruding devils from the West.
This is where non-credal or
post-credal spiritual traditions have a key role to play. They
have to show the Muslims that there is life after apostasy from
an irrational belief system. They have to prove that religion
can be something else than a silly acceptance of some prophet's
vainglorious claims about himself.
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