Delusional Prophet
Unlike Jesus, for whose existence there is no historical evidence, Mohammad (Mohamet) actually existed, some 1400 years ago in what is now Saudi Arabia. His claim was that the words of the Quran (Koran) were dictated to him by the angel Gabriel on behalf of the god Allah. Of course they weren't, since neither the angel Gabriel nor Allah exist; they are mythological figures. So Mohammed was either making it up or hallucinating. Whether he realised it or not, it expressed his own thoughts.
The orthodox Muslim view of the Quran as the true word of God, perfect and inimitable in message, language, style, and form, is strikingly similar to the fundamentalist Christian notion of the Bible's "inerrancy." Many stories in the Quran are based on Jewish and Christian legends. The Quran is a product of its time. It is a product of a human being. Its scope is limited to what Mohammad knew and had been taught. It is not a revelation from God. The Quran is a nonsense made-up book like all religious books.
Like the Bible, the Quran is the “Word of God”. Also like the Bible, the Quran gives us a code of law, telling us how to live so that salvation will be ours, otherwise, we will spend eternity in Hell. Just like the Bible, the Quran is full of contradictions of a scriptural nature. Just like the Bible the Quran is full of scientific errors.
Allah says in Quran that, “I made Qur’an very clear, simple and easy...” and again he states “We have indeed made the Qur'an easy to understand and remember” and once more in cse we didn’t understand “We have made it a Qur'an in Arabic,that ye may be able to understand and learn wisdom.” Allah asked Muslims to believe Quran’s literal meaning and clearly forbade any interpretations of Allah’s eternal divine words. Quranic verse: 3:7—clearly prohibited to accept anybody’s interpretation of Allah’s eternal words. “He it is Who has revealed the Book to you; some of its verses are clear and decisive, they are the basis of the Book, and others are allegorical; then as for those in whose hearts there is perversity they follow the part of it which is allegorical, seeking to mislead and seeking to give it (their own) interpretation but none knows its interpretation except Allah...”
So where does that leave those Islamic scholars?
Some theologians argue that the Quran was not dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to Mohammad during the 7th century, but rather was redacted by later writers drawing on a variety of extant Christian and Jewish sources. It has long been known that variant copies of the Koran exist, including manuscripts as old as 700 AD found in 1972 at Sa'na in Yemen. The Qur'an was cobbled together from collections of sayings from the New and Old testament and traditional folk tales that people now attribute to Mohammed’s 'revelations'.
Christoph Luxenberg, author of The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran, asserts that the language of the early compositions of the Qur'an was not exclusively Arabic, as assumed by the classical commentators, but rather is rooted in the Syro-Aramaic dialect of the 7th century Meccan Quraysh tribe. Luxenberg argues that the Qur'an is based on earlier texts, namely lectionaries used in the Christian churches of Syria, and that it was the work of several generations to adapt these texts into the Qur'an we know today. Luxenberg tries to show that many obscurities of the Koran disappear if we read certain words as being Syriac and not Arabic. The virgins who are supposedly awaiting good Islamist martyrs as their reward in paradise are in reality "white raisins" of crystal clarity rather than fair maidens. The famous passage about the virgins is based on the word hur, which is an adjective in the feminine plural meaning simply "white." Islamic tradition insists the term hur stands for houri, which means "virgin," but Luxenberg insists that this is a forced misreading of the text. In both ancient Aramaic and in at last one respected dictionary of early Arabic hur means "white raisin." He argues that Muhammad was preaching concepts that were new to many of his Arab hearers, concepts that Muhammad had learned from his conversations with the Arabian Jews and Christians, or from the Christians of Syria where he is believed to have travelled as a merchant.
Religions have two alternative ways of ensuring compliance with their precepts in the interest of the dominant class, what might be called the Eastern and the Western ways.
1) Eastern religions go in for the doctrine of reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. What sort of bodily life you have after this one depends on how you behave this time. If you are bad, in your next life you'll be a worm, handicapped or a member of a lower caste. If you are good, you can expect a better life, for instance, to move up a caste or not be born blind or crippled. At least this gives people more than one chance.
2) In the Western version you just get the one. If you sin and are bad, you go to Hell—for ever-lasting torment. If you are good, you go to Heaven for eternity. This of course is what the Christians teach. So do the Mohammedans. Like Christianity, the Quran teaches that life down here is not all that important; it's only temporary. Far more important is the life to come:
[3:185] Every person tastes death, then you receive your recompense on the Day of Resurrection. Whoever misses Hell, barely, and makes it to Paradise, has attained a great triumph. The life of this world is no more than an illusion.
This is one of the reasons why socialists oppose religion. It leads people to accept things down here as they are, since any suffering is seen as only going to be temporary and as nothing compared to eternity. Socialists insist that "the life of this world" is not an illusion; it is the only life we are going to get and so we should direct all our efforts to making it the best possible.
Islamic capitalism
“Socialism and Islam are very close, other than on the existence of God” (George Galloway, Sunday Times, 14 August, 2005).
We’ve heard of Jesus the Socialist. Now it’s Mohammed the Socialist.
Of course, ordinary Muslims don't really believe in everything in the Quran any more than Christians do everything in the bible, as they both show by their everyday, materialist practice which they share with the rest of us who are not religious. It's only the priests that do. In putting forward the views they do about what life "down here" should be like—for instance, in proposing that the so-called Sharia law should be adopted—they have entered the political fray with a political programme. We therefore will oppose them in the same way that we oppose all other reformist political parties and groups.
The French historian and orientalist, Maxime Rodinson, in his Islam and Capitalism written to refute the view that Islam was an impediment to the economic development of Muslim countries, wrote: “Economic activity, the search for profit, trade, and, consequently, production for the market, are looked upon with no less favour by Muslim tradition than by the Koran itself...The justice advocated by the ideology of the Koran is not that which socialist thought has established as the ideal of a large section of modern society. Muhammad was not a socialist....The alleged fundamental opposition of Islam to capitalism is a myth”
In the centuries leading up to the arrival of Islam, Mecca was a local pagan sanctuary of considerable antiquity. Religious rituals revolved around the Ka'ba—a shrine, still central in Islam today, that Muslims believe was originally built by Ibrahim (aka Old Testament Abraham) and his son Isma'il (Ishmael). As Mecca became increasingly prosperous in the sixth century pagan idols of varying sizes and shapes proliferated.
In Mohammed’s time (he was born about 571 and died in 632), the Arabian peninsula was, we can see now, in a process of transition from tribal society, which was breaking down, to a state, for which Mohammed was to be instrumental in laying the foundations. A mercantile economy was growing up in the chinks of the nomadic world. As well as barter, money transactions using dinars and dirhams were becoming commonplace. The Bedouin borrowed from the rich merchants of the towns, got into debt and were sold into slavery or at any rate reduced to dependent status. The disintegration of tribal society had begun. Large and prosperous markets grew up, like the one at Ukaz, attracting foreigners as well as Arabs from every tribe. The tribal limits had been overstepped. The Arab peoples at that time were divided and living in the shadows of the great Byzantine and Persian Empires (empires characterised by centralised monotheistic religious uniformity).
Such was the background against which the first installments of the Quran are said to have been revealed, in 610, to an affluent but disaffected merchant named Muhammad bin Abdullah. It was to Mohammed and his movement’s advantage to unite the Arab tribes into a power to spread their fledgling empire.
Mohammed himself, although from a modest background, had become one of the wealthy merchants that had emerged, but he realised that something needed to be done to keep Arab society from completely disintegrating under the impact of the unbridled spread of money-commodity relations. His solution was to create a new Arab community welded together by a new religion that would regulate the emerging money/trading economy by imposing some obligations on the rich and some relief for the poor. Of course as a mystic, Mohammed was not as rationally calculating as this but expressed himself in religious terms. Thus, in the Quran the greedy and selfish rich are denounced (it is Allah, the Zeus of the pre-islam Arabian pantheon who Mohammed makes dismiss his fellow gods as fakes, who is purportedly speaking):
“Who so is mean and bumptious on account of his wealth,
Who denies the most excellent reward,
We shall smooth his way to ultimate misery.
His fortune shall not profit him when he falls into the abyss”
(Koran xcii, 8-11)
Some of the regulations that Mohammed brought in when in 627 when he became the ruler of Medina were that a number of articles laying down fairly strict rules about inheritances. This was apparently necessary in the unsettled situation which resulted from the disintegration of the tribal structure. The stronger must have found it easier to lay hands on the family or tribal possessions of the weaker. The rule of the Quran guaranteed everyone his share, which was worked out in a somewhat complicated fashion. Women were allowed a share in the property. (This seems to have been the custom in Mecca, although not in Medina.). Admittedly their share was only half that of the men. Slavery, naturally, persisted. People were urged to treat slaves well and encourage them to gain their freedom. Loans at interest or, more probably, some form of them, were forbidden. This prescription seems in practice to have been aimed chiefly at those who, in the early days of the move to Medina, refused to make loans to the needy without interest. There seems to have been no intention of prohibiting the normal practices of Meccan trade.
The Quran prohibits something called riba, loosely translated as interest and this has hindered the development of capitalism. Something similar happened in medieval times when the christians banned usury, but the theologists soon found a way around that and now we have thriving banks in the Vatican. Islam may have taken a little longer but now they have joined the capitalist bandwagon. Under Sharia law, the charging or paying of interest is prohibited. But, since Sharia-compliant Islamic banking do business by borrowing money at one rate of interest and re-lending it a higher rate, how can a bank which does not pay or charge interest exist? It is to underestimate the subtlety of Islamic theologians:
"Islamic banking scholars have found ways of accommodating their philosophical abhorrence of money as a commodity with the need to create financing tools. Typically, this involves converting interest into a rent or a profit share" (Times, 30 September 2006).
No man may charge money for a loan. He may, of course, take the profits of partnership, provided that he takes the partner’s risks. He may buy a rent-charge; for the fruits of the earth are produced by nature, not wrung from men. He may demand compensation - interesse - if he is not repaid the principal at the time stipulated. He may ask payments corresponding to any loss he incurs or forgoes. He may purchase an annuity, for the payment is contingent and speculative, not certain. What was banned, then, was only the certainty of being paid a pre-fixed sum of money for the loan. Islam allows partnerships as well as a number of other arrangements which allow the payment of a pre-fixed sum of money for advancing money for example salaam (“sale contract with deferred delivery”), arboum (“sale contract with a non-refundable deposit”) and murabaha (“deferred sale financing”).
So, while Islamic banks do not borrow money on the money market, they can still make what are in effect loans which bring in money for them. In any event, Islam is not opposed to profits and profit-making since these are regarded as non-certain rewards for advancing money. The Quran may hold sway in the mosque, but outside in the real world capitalism dictates.
Mohammed’s “socialism” amount to certain rules to prevent the excesses of the rich from leading to the decomposition of society in 7th century Arabia, but which still accepted the basis of the money/trading economy that had emerged and was spreading. The economic precepts of the Quran laid down a framework for the less disruptive functioning of such an economy, placing some obligations on the rich to help the poor while still accepting the division of society into rich and poor.
War
Conclusion
The Mohammedan preachers call their religion "islam" which means "submission" and their followers "muslims", i.e. those who submit. As the names of religions go this must be by far the worst one, but at least it is honest in bringing out the essence of all religions: humans attributing their potential collective power to a figment of their imagination which they then bow down to and worship. Just as muslims prostrate themselves before their god saying "Allah is Great", so Christians kneel before theirs singing "Oh God, How Great Thou Art". What in fact both are saying is "How Weak We Are".
Religion is the ultimate in human self-denigration and self-abasement. Which is why socialists reject it entirely. Humans are not weak. We can change the world to make life here better, much better. The resurgence of the old authoritarian religions is a growing problem. People in politically marginalised and powerless communities are turning to religious fundamentalism in the face of their own lack of control over their own and their communities’ lives. Politicians do not want to challenge the presuppositions and premises of these religions, but instead try to incorporate them so as not to challenge the structure of existing society. Socialists oppose religion for its anachronistic premises, for the barrier it presents to scientifically examining and controlling our own lives and destinies. Argument alone will not suffice to remove religion and religious strife from the world, it will take the material interest of a common cause and a common struggle to build a democratic society where people stand in real relation to each other, not seeing each other reflected in the eyes of some delusional or self-deluded man’s dream.
Socialism in Arabic
http://www.worldsocialism.org/othlang.php#arabic
1 comment:
Atheists, bruh.
Post a Comment