Boreal

FADE TO BLACK

Triumph of the Irrational

Afterword -  Hope Springs Eternal

On May 22, 2017, a young man detonated a shrapnel-laden homemade bomb as people were leaving the Manchester Arena following a concert by Ariana Grande, killing twenty-three people, including the attacker, and wounding 139, more than half of them children. In the wake of the massacre, Australia’s Channel Seven hosted a debate between Muslim clerics Dr. Jamal Rifi and Sheikh Mohammad Tawhidi on the role religion played in the attack.

Basically, we need to be very realistic when dealing with this matter. You have a twenty-two-year-old who gets radicalised over two, three sermons in a Friday mosque gathering.

This age is an age when someone would expect people to be going out, having fun. But no, we have a large number of youth that are being radicalised. This happens because of the books that we have, the Islamic scriptures that we have; they push the Muslim youth to believe that if you go out there and kill the infidels, that's how you will gain Paradise.

For the past one thousand four hundred years we have had a religion of war – that is exactly what we have had. This is not something I am imagining, these are facts. We’ve had many wars. How did Islam spread from Saudi Arabia down to Indonesia and Bosnia? All spread by the sword. We had many wars. For someone to come and say that Islamic scriptures have nothing to do with it, I mean, that’s against the facts; that’s not true.

Islamic scriptures are what is pushing these people to behead the infidels. Let me tell you something: the people that are beheading, that mister (sic), the person that killed the young girls in Manchester did so believing he was going to dine with the Prophet Muhammad that very night that is what the Islamic scriptures tell them.

Sheikh Mohammad Tawhidi

The killer and those he slaughtered on a grateful god’s behalf, courtesy of the BBC.

The world desperately needs an honest discussion about Islamic scriptures, starting with an unfettered dialogue on the Koran, if we hope to diminish, if not stop the horrific violence they inspire and perhaps save ourselves from an irrational future.

We have to engage in as profound a conversation as the one initiated by courageous individuals who dared to challenge dogma after being exposed to the works of the great Greek philosophers that Islam’s expansion made inevitable. 

Mu’tazilism

Between the 8th and 10th century, when Islam was in its infancy, there emerged an Islamic school of thought largely influence by Plato and Aristotle that became known as Mu’tazilism or Philosophy of Rationalism, or simply Islamic Philosophy. It started with the translation of Greek scientific and philosophical writings into Arabic.

The motives of the translators [of Greek works in science and philosophy into Arabic] and their patrons, the [Abbasid] caliphs, may have been partially practical; medical skill was in demand, and control over natural forces could bring power and success. There was also, however, a wide intellectual curiosity, such as is expressed in the words of al-Kindi (c. 801-66), the thinker with whom the history of Islamic philosophy virtually begins:

We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign people. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself.

A History of the Arab People, Albert Hourani, Harvard University Press 1991, p. 76

Mu'tazilites argued that verses of the Koran should not be taken literally and that human reason was more reliable than scriptures. The leaders of the believers of the time, the most noteworthy being Caliphs al-Ma'mun, Mu'tasim Billah and Wathiq, actively supported this sensible, open-minded interpretation, allowing it to thrive until dogma reasserted itself with a vengeance and revelation again smothered reason.

It is not a coincidence that much of Islam’s substantial contribution in the field of astronomy and mathematics, for example, was from this period when Mu’tazilism was accepted by the Caliphate as a legitimate Islamic school of thought.

How could it have been otherwise, with the Koran’s insistence that the Earth is a raft floating on a sea of mud, with Paradise above the clouds held up by invisible pillars anchored on this raft, and the Sun and Moon above it all, in the same orbit, with roles reversed, sinking and emerging from this mucky sea thereby causing night and day, and nothing beyond?

This period of intense scientific inquiry ended somewhat abruptly towards the end of the 10th century when The Book of Hadith was closed and orthodoxy reasserted itself in the form of a comprehensive, suffocating Islamic Theology from which Islamic Philosophy never recovered.

If a dialogue is to foster trust, non-believers must have a meaningful role. This will only be possible if more of you get to know what is in the Koran by reading the actual book, or books like this one. Translations of the Koran are usually called interpretations because of the spurious claim that only the Arabic version can convey the true meaning of Allah’s words as He wrote it in Arabic.

43:2 By the Manifest Book.

43:3 We have made it an Arabic Qur’an that perchance you may understand.

If you can’t read an Arabic version of the Koran (modern Arabic is assumed), say the imams, you are bound to misinterpret God’s words, in spite of Allah’s claim that His writing may be somewhat ornate, but not obtuse.

[This is] a Book with Verses which are elaborately formulated and clearly expounded from the Wise, the All-Aware.

Allah is not bragging, and any good translation will render Him justice. You seldom here a Christian minister say that unless you read the Bible in the original Hebrew, Greek or Latin you will misunderstand the message. Yet, this is the argument made by clerics to discourage non-Muslims from reading a translation of the Koran whose message they expect children to grasp.

Should an honest, transformative Mu’tazilism-like dialogue, not unlike what Irshad Manji called for at the beginning this century in her evocatively titled The Trouble With Islam: A Wake-up Call for Honesty and Change, prove impossible, then, the example of the women of Sumer will remain our only hope of stemming, if not defeating the encroaching darkness.

Women of Sumer

Islam is all about looking back. Perhaps we should do the same, but much further back in the hope of understanding how a world of wonder, discovery, imagination and fun got all screwed up and getting it unscrewed, to use a poor choice of words.

The Epic of Gilgamesh predates the Hebrew Bible by at least 2000 years, the Koran by an additional 1500 years, more or less. It was carved into clay tablets at the dawn of written history in ancient Sumeria (Sumer). In it you will find a story about the great flood and the Garden of Eden.

How would Islam reconcile variations of the same stories as can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh?

The Koran contains references to twenty-five prophets who came before Muhammad—and there may  have been many more—before God got fed up with His Message being badly transmitted or misunderstood and decided to send an illiterate merchant as His last and greatest emissary.

An argument could be made that the author of Gilgamesh was an early prophet sent by Allah who was misquoted or misunderstood. For instance, how could someone possibly write that it was a woman, the original Eve, to whom we are indebted for the wisdom with which she endowed man and which allowed civilization to blossom.

From a translation by Stephanie Dalley:

Shambat loosened her undergarments, opened

     her legs and he took in her attractions.

She did not pull away. She took wind of him.

Spread open her garments, and he lay upon her.

She did for him, the primitive man, as women

     do.

His love-making he lavished upon her.

For six days and seven nights Enkidu was

     aroused and poured himself into

     Shambat.

When he was sated with her charms,

He set his face towards the open country of his

    cattle.

The gazelles saw Enkidu and scattered.

The cattle of open country kept away from his

     body.

For Enkidu had become smooth; his body was

     too clean.

His legs, which used to keep pace with his

     cattle, were at a standstill.

Enkidu had been diminished, he could not run

    as before.

Yet he had acquired judgment, had become

    wiser.

(from a translation by Stephanie Dalley)

For the Sumerians, it was the goddess Aruru, the mother goddess, who created Enkidu from clay. For desert tribesmen—Jews then Arabs—who would usurp her role in favour of a male progenitor in their creation accounts, she became the seductress, the harlot who caused mankind to be expelled from Paradise.

For the people of Sumer, their cities were Paradise. For the confident men of Sumer it was women as partners, homemakers and lovers who made this sedentary, civilized lifestyle possible, desirable and enjoyable. 

For the tribesmen of the desert, trapped and fighting for survival beneath a monotonous, unchanging blue sky and a blaring scorching sun on a sea of dust and sand, the cities of Sumer would also have been seen as Paradise. Allah’s description of Paradise, as an oasis with buildings and women as pleasure providers, almost fits the description of Sumerian cities and their female citizens, with the exception that in Sumer, women were not second-class citizens.

Why would desert tribesmen, who would adapt, if not pervert, many of the events described in Gilgamesh—including the story of the meeting between Shambat and Enkidu—blame women for mankind’s exile from Paradise?

The seduction of Enkidu by Shambat was seen as a good thing by the people of Sumer; a wild, roving man is civilized by being intimate with a woman. For the people of Sumer, being “civilized” meant acquiring wisdom; becoming capable of exercising judgement, of assessing situations or circumstances shrewdly and logically and drawing your own reasonable conclusions.

For the illiterate, fatalistic tribesmen of the deserts of the Middle East, whose very existence was constantly being tested by elements over which they had no control, that they believed was God’s way of trying their faith, this had to be blasphemy. Paradise was to be denied mankind because a woman was foolish enough to endow a man with god-like qualities.

It was the Sumerians who, more than five millennia ago, first carved the written word on clay tablets. According to Thomas Cahill, the period before the invention of writing saw an “explosion of technological creativity on a scale that would not be matched until the nineteenth and twentieth century of our era.”

Writing may have been a result of mankind’s need to record this leap of knowledge, upon which memory could no longer be counted to chronicle or manage. Civilization could not progress any further without the means of recording it’s accomplishments for future generations to build upon.

The society that invented writing worshipped many goddesses. The greatest goddess of all, Ishtar, goddess of love and war, was worshipped by the people of the city of Uruk, perhaps the earliest settlement to deserve the name of city. It was in this ancient Mesopotamian city, on the shore of the Euphrates River, that the first words written five thousand years ago on clay tablets were found. If it was not a woman who imagined those first words then it was her civilizing influence that allowed the written word to be imagined in the first place.

Muhammad had an illiterate’s fascination with the written word which he saw as God’s way of establishing immutable limits on mankind’s imagination and free will, not expanding it. This is reflected in the Koran’s meticulous, incontrovertible instructions as to what a believer may or may not do; what a believer may think or say. If you followed God’s written instruction to the letter He would let you back into Sumer, back into Paradise.

Writing, as Allah revealed in Surah 96, The Clot, made man arrogant, thinking “himself self-sufficient.” This was not why He taught man—but not Muhammad for some reason—to write. He taught man how to write, not to make him more self-sufficient, but less.

96:3 Read by your Most Generous Lord,

96:4 Who taught by the pen.

96:5 He thought man what he did not know.

96:6 Yet, man will, indeed wax arrogant;

96:7 For he thinks himself self-sufficient.

The Koran is not so much a philosophy as a set of rules that could have been formulated by a child-like mind in the way they embody a child’s certainty in having absolute knowledge of the world around them and a child’s intolerance of others who won’t play the game by their rules. This child-like perception of an unchanging world has been competing with the grownup evolving world view of Sumer ever since Muhammad got his marching orders.

Narrated Abu Huraira:

Allah's Apostle said, "I have been ordered to fight with the people till they say, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah', and whoever says, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah,' his life and property will be saved by me except for Islamic law, and his accounts will be with Allah, (either to punish him or to forgive him.)"

Bukhari 52.196

This child-like unschooled understanding of what the written word is all about is the antithesis of the grown-up view of the people of Sumer who invented writing as a means to expand the capabilities of the human mind; who invented writing so as to allow future generations to build upon, to progress beyond, to question the limits of what their ancestors had ever imagined. The Koran, taken literally, kills the imagination allowing insanity, irrationality’s bridesmaid, to settle in.

We need the example of the women of Sumer today more than ever.

Bernard Payeur