Boreal
Remembering Uzza
If Islam Was Explained to Me in a Pub
More Slavers, Less Sinners
Bob:
I know the Prophet needed the promise of slave-girls and plenty of sex to entice
the young men he needed to do the killing until no one was left alive that did
not say Allah is the greatest. But why would Allah not have demanded that
slavery be abolished once He got everyone to kiss His ass?
Uzza: No, He could not do that, and touching the ground with your nose and forehead during prayer is not at all like kissing someone’s ass.
Bob: That is not what I meant, but okay.
Archie: Why could he not do that, get rid of slavery? I thought Allah could do whatever He wanted, that He has the power[308].
Uzza: Because Allah is the smartest god that has ever been imagined, which is why the other gods did not stand a chance.
Archie: Did you just say imagined?
Uzza: It is just an expression.
Archie: No, it isn’t.
Uzza: Whatever.
Bob: There are other gods? I thought Allah said there weren’t any.
Uzza: That is what He told Muhammad to say[309].
Bob: What do you mean?
Uzza: Often, Allah in His Koran tells Muhammad, as if Muhammad was responding to a question − which may actually have been what he was doing[310] − to say this or that.
Archie: He actually uses the word “say.”
Uzza: The actual word “say” was probably added during an early revision of the Book, to portray this back and forth between Allah and Muhammad in real time, to use a modern expression.
Bob: That would mean that…
Uzza: Do not go there. It would just lead to another pointless discussion. You either believe that every word is God’s or you do not and let us leave it at that.
Archie: So are there other gods or not?
Uzza: It is all very confusing. Allah rants and rages against those who worship lesser gods and associates that He claims are not gods at all while admitting to creating them[311]. In one instance He has them arrayed like troops ready to take Him on[312]. He will even have them participate in His Judgment Day extravaganza where they will denounce those who worshipped them[313]. His attack on other gods and those who believe in them are so pervasive and so vicious that the number one sin in Islam is that of Shirk, associating other gods with Allah. Do that and you are dead in this world and on fire in the next.
Archie: Many of these other gods allowed slaves; for example, those of the Greeks and Romans. How was Allah-approved slavery different from theirs?
Uzza: For these other gods, slavery is an end in itself; for Allah, slavery is a means to end.
Archie: As a reward for those who do His dirty work.
Uzza: It is more than that. Much more, and part of the inescapable logic of the Koran.
Bob: The Koran is logical!!!
Uzza: Do not believe those who say that Islam is the stupidest of all the religions. Some of the things you are asked to accept on faith, I will agree, are stupid from a rational person’s point of view, but they do not, by themselves, deny the logic of the Koran; logic that makes Islam a smart religion, a very, very smart religion, and slavery is at the core of that logic.
Bob: I’m confused.
Archie: This time, Bob, you’re not the only one.
Gerry: Same here.
Uzza: That is because you have not read the Koran or, like many who have, not looked beyond the contradictions and the tall tales. To have abolished slavery would have required Allah to send down another Koran, thereby denying the logic that made those who understood so successful. Logic also dictated that it was not enough to offer an incentive to do away with unbelievers. People being what they are, they would have to be kept in line until such a time that Allah decided to bring an end to His Creation. Slavery ensured victory, but it also diminished the threat of sedition once victory is achieved and the need to take more drastic measures, not only to stop individuals from leaving Islam but entire communities as well.
Gerry: Allah being Allah, that would be death.
Uzza: That would be death, yes. Muhammad told the believers to kill any Muslim who abandons their religion[314], say, for one which does not condone slavery or no religion at all. Allah, in the same murderous vein but on a much larger scale, decreed that a community who would leave Islam after embracing it should be slaughtered forthwith[315].
Bob: Did that ever happen, that a bunch of people were murdered all together for leaving Islam?
Uzza: Only a short time after Muhammad’s death when several tribes tried to leave Islam. Toward the end of what is known as the War of the Apostates, an estimated seven thousand men were surrounded, and none were spared by the believers. They were slaughtered to the last man as per Allah’s directive. There is no leaving Islam, not as a group, not as an individual.
Archie: Bunch of murderers. To believe in Allah is to believe in cold-blooded murder and be willing to carry it out.
Uzza: Mass executions have been very much a tactic of Islam since the beginning, both in its wars of conquest and equally bloody pitiless conflicts between believers over dogma and succession. The slaughter which took place towards the end of the War of the Apostates was the first documented methodical massacre of more than a thousand people at one time by the believers.
Bob: The apostates were obviously no match for the believers.
Uzza: The believers’ opponents were not into extermination and valued their lives and that of their adversaries, therefore Muslim casualties tended to be less. But still, at the battle of Yamama, 70 or so fanatics of the Koran, the professional reciters of the Book, were killed.
Archie: You would expect fanatics of the Koran to be in the thick of things. The damn book is an invitation to kill and be killed.
Uzza: Not always. The tradition was that whatever Allah told Gabriel to tell Muhammad to tell the believers was not to be written down but committed to memory.
Archie: Then and there, that’s ridiculous. Who remembers everything some preacher says, even the short-winded ones, especially when they’re spouting stuff you haven’t heard before?
Gerry: No, telling people not to write anything down, that’s smart. With nothing written down, the Prophet could deny anything he said from one day to the next if the message did not have the desired effect. And if he was making it up as he went along, well…
Uzza: Why the tradition of not writing down Allah’s revelations, I do not know, but the loss of the best memorizers worried Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s successor as leader of the believers. He broke with tradition and asked a scribe by the name of Zaid bin Thabit Al-Ansari to go around and ask people what they remembered about what Gabriel communicated to Muhammad from Allah and to write it down[316].
Bob: And that is how we got the first copy of the Koran?
Uzza: Not quite. Abu Bakr died before it was finished. His successor, Umar, perhaps not knowing what to do with it, gave it to his daughter Hafsa, who put it under what she slept on.
Archie: A mattress. She kept it where kids used to keep copies of dirty magazines before the internet. People are killed today for not showing the Koran the proper respect, and she slept on it, maybe even had sex on it.
Uzza: Maybe, but not for long. Umar’s successor, when informed that Muslims in battle were reciting from different versions of the Koran, remembered the copy in Hafsa’s possession and retrieved it. He then asked the ever dependable Thabit and a committee set up for the purpose to edit it and make copies[317], which were then distributed to the troops and all other versions of the Book burnt.
Gerry: Pierre Burton, in one of his last books, The Joy of Writing, said he owed his success to his editor; that it was difficult for any author to succeed without a good editor. Did God have a good editor?
Uzza: Thabit’s second effort remains a somewhat disjointed affair[318] and may not have been the final fruitless effort at bringing order to what many consider chaos, such as noted Western historians Thomas Carlyle, who damned it as “a confused, jumble, crude, endless iteration,” and Edward Gibbon: “as toilsome a reading as I ever undertook; a wearisome confused jumble.”
Bob: What is this endless iteration?
Uzza: Any anthology transcribed from what people remembered of the thousands of observations made by a person who died some years earlier will contain discrepancies. This difficulty for Thabit and his helpers, in deciding which recollection of an event or what was said at the time was the accurate one, may explain the duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates and even quintuplets recollections of the same event − Carlyle’s endless iteration. A decision was probably made to include even the conflicting accounts and leave it to future scholars to sort it out[319].
Archie: Gibbon − that is the guy who wrote The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, isn’t it?
Uzza: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, yes. As to his and Carlyle’s description of the Koran as a confused jumbled, that is not to say that Allah’s revelations, on their own, are not clear and easily understood.
Gerry: I agree. I don’t remember any significant variations in the clear and to the point revelations on slavery, which, from what I remember, are few, except for the many references to slave-girls or what your right hands possess.
Uzza: That is because Allah is truly the smartest of gods. He did not want anyone disputing what He meant when He made slavery not only a tenet of the faith, but a rule that could not be removed without bringing his religion into disrepute by making it illogical.
Archie: How did Allah make slavery a hard-and-fast unbreakable rule, when rules are meant to broken?
Uzza: In your world, perhaps.
Archie: Please, Uzza, I thought we were past that. Didn’t you say that in the Koran, Allah changed his mind at least 200 times?
Uzza: Sorry. One way Allah made slavery an unbreakable rule of Islam was by making freeing a slave part of a blood-money payment[320]; you have to free a slave if you have insulted your wife by comparing her to your mother’s back and now wish to touch her in that special way[321]; part of the penance for breaking an oath is the freeing of a slave[322]. In making freeing a slave the solution to a variety of transgressions, He cut down on the number of sinners, an acceptable compromise for a god for whom sinners are an obsession.
Bob: How does more slavery cut down on the number of sinners when slavery is a sin?
Uzza: In Islam it is not. And when Islam is triumphant everywhere, everywhere slavery will become the norm again for it is part of Allah’s unchanging natural order of things[323]. A brave new world where you will think twice about committing some sins if it means losing a valuable slave.
Bob: I get it: more slave owners, less sinners.
Archie: No, three Hail Marys and back to sinning until your next confession. And let us not forget the one about losing the limb that committed the sin[324]. That limb will sin no more and neither will the guy killed for trying to leave the faith. It’s enough to make sinners an endangered species. Allah will have succeeded where so many other gods have failed.
Gerry: Imagine taking what we consider a sin, making it into a virtue, then using it to combat sin. Did I get that right?
Uzza: Yes, sort of, and if you are going to make freeing a slave an incentive not to sin, logic dictates that you must be allowed to keep slaves in the first place.
Bob: Can’t argue with that.
Archie: Sure you can. Just remove slaves as part of the equation, make slavery a sin and cut down on the number of sins against gods where no human is harmed, and, I will bet you anything, you will have a greater reduction in the number of sinners than Allah’s slave-driven solution.
Gerry: What are you going to do, Archie, rewrite the Koran?
Archie: If I could, I would.
Uzza: But you cannot, nobody can, even the so-called moderates. Inevitably they too must accept the logic of Allah, a logic that they will find so much easier to live with as the extremists make gains everywhere. An acceptance they may live to regret.
Archie: How’s that?
Uzza: You think about it. Even if everyone is a believer, you will still need slaves to satisfy a blood payment obligation, for instance, or to be set free as penance. And if you cannot get them from unbelievers because they have all converted or been killed, where will you get them?
Archie: That is where the whole thing becomes illogical, doesn’t it? Allah is not to be the smartest of them all. I knew it.
Uzza: You do not know anything, and I say that with all due respect, Archie. Allah said that you must believe with certainty[325]. Do you think it is possible for everyone to believe with certainty in even the little I have told you so far about what is in the Koran?
Archie: Only fools.
Uzza: It is these fools that still kill more Muslims than believers every year.
Bob: Why is that?
Uzza: Because these fools are still concentrated in Muslim majority countries. But that is changing and, in places, rapidly because of the number of fools we have let in. And when the fools have finished with you and the world is a glorious fascist pitiless caliphate, a super super-sized Islamic State, the true unbelievers, heretics, reformers and hypocrites will be the slavers’ salvation. Allah’s logic will not be denied.
Footnotes
5:40 Did you not know that to Allah belongs the kingdom of the heavens and the earth? He punishes whom He wills; and Allah has power over everything.
6:19 Say: “What has the greatest testimony?” Say: “Allah is Witness between you and me, and He has revealed this Qur’an to me so that I may warn you and whomever it may reach. Do you indeed testify that there are gods besides Allah?” Say: “I do not testify.” Say: “He is indeed One God and I am innocent of the association of idols [with Him].”
[310] Muhammad’s attempt to convince his audience that Allah is the only god was not initially well-received, judging from some of Allah’s responses which He asked Muhammad to convey to an obviously rancorous assembly.
39:62 Allah is the Creator of everything and He is the Guardian of everything.
39:63 His are the keys of the heavens and the earth; and those who have disbelieved in Allah’s Signs are the losers.
39:64 Say: “Do you, then, command me to worship anyone other than Allah, O ignorant ones?”
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4:22 Say: “Call upon those you allege, apart from Allah. They do not possess the weight of a speck of dust in the heavens or on earth, and they have no partnership in either of them; nor is any of them a helper to him."
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17:42 Say: “If there were other gods with Him, as they say, then surely they would have sought access to the Lord of the Throne.”
7:191 Do they associate with Allah those who can create nothing, while they, themselves, are created?
7:192 And they can neither help them nor help themselves. 7:193 And if you call them to guidance, they do not follow you. It is the same, for you, whether you call them or you remain silent.
7:194 Indeed those you call, apart from Allah, are servants like you; so call them and let them answer you, if you are truthful.
36:74 Yet, they have taken, apart from Allah, other gods that they might receive support.
36:75 But they cannot support them, although they are arrayed as troops for them.
10:28 On the Day We will muster them all together; then We will say to those who set up associates with Allah: “Stay in your places, you and your associates.“ Then We shall separate them, and their associates will say: “You were not worshipping us.
10:29 “Allah is a sufficient witness between us and you; for we were unaware of your worshipping us.”
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16:86 And when those who associated other gods with Allah see their associates they shall say: “Our Lord, these are our associates whom we used to call upon besides you.” But their associates will retort: “Surely you are liars.”
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19:81 And they took, besides Allah, other gods, to be for them a source of strength.
19:82 No, they shall repudiate their worship and turn against them.
[314] Narrated Ikrima:
Ali burnt some people and this news reached Ibn 'Abbas, who said, "Had I been in his place I would not have burnt them, as the Prophet said, 'Don't punish (anybody) with Allah's Punishment.' No doubt, I would have killed them, for the Prophet said, 'If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him.'"
Bukhari 52.260
2:191 Kill them wherever you find them and drive them out from wherever they drove you out (from Mecca). Sedition is worse than slaughter. Do not fight them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight you at it. If they fight you there, kill them. Such is the reward of the unbelievers.
Abu Bakr sent for me after the (heavy) casualties among the warriors (of the battle) of Yamama (where a great number of Qurra' (reciters of the Koran) were killed). Umar was present with Abu Bakr who said, “Umar has come to me and said, ‘The people have suffered heavy casualties on the day of (the battle of) Yamama, and I am afraid that there will be more casualties among the Qurra' (those who know the Qur'an by heart) at other battle-fields, whereby a large part of the Qur'an may be lost, unless you collect it. And I am of the opinion that you should collect the Qur'an.’"
"You are a wise young man and we do not suspect you (of telling lies or of forgetfulness): and you used to write the Divine Inspiration for Allah's Apostle. Therefore, look for the Qur'an and collect it (in one manuscript)."
By Allah, if he (Abu Bakr) had ordered me to shift one of the mountains (from its place) it would not have been harder for me than what he had ordered me concerning the collection of the Qur'an. I said to both of them, "How dare you do a thing which the Prophet has not done?"
Abu Bakr said, "By Allah, it is (really) a good thing." So I kept on arguing with him about it till Allah opened my bosom for that which He had opened the bosoms of Abu Bakr and Umar. So I started locating Quranic material and collecting it from parchments, scapula, leaf-stalks of date palms and from the memories of men (who knew it by heart).
The manuscript on which the Quran was collected, remained with Abu Bakr till Allah took him unto Him, and then with 'Umar till Allah took him unto Him, and finally it remained with Hafsa, Umar's daughter.
Bukhari 60.201
[317] Narrated Anas bin Malik:
Hudhaifa bin Al-Yaman came to Uthman at the time when the people of Sham and the people of Iraq were waging war to conquer Arminya and Adharbijan. Hudhaifa was afraid of their (the people of Sham and Iraq) differences in the recitation of the Qur'an, so he said to Uthman, "O chief of the Believers! Save this nation before they differ about the Book (Quran) as Jews and the Christians did before."
So Uthman sent a message to Hafsa saying, "Send us the manuscripts of the Qur'an so that we may compile the Qur'anic materials in perfect copies and return the manuscripts to you."
Hafsa sent it to Uthman. Uthman then ordered Zaid bin Thabit, Abdullah bin AzZubair, Said bin Al-As and Abdur Rahman bin Harith bin Hisham to rewrite the manuscripts in perfect copies. Uthman said to the three Quraishi men, "In case you disagree with Zaid bin Thabit on any point in the Qur'an, then write it in the dialect of Quraish, the Qur'an was revealed in their tongue."
They did so, and when they had written many copies, Uthman returned the original manuscripts to Hafsa.
Uthman sent to every Muslim province one copy of what they had copied, and ordered that all the other Qur'anic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt.
Bukhari 61.510
[318] The finished product appears to have been put together in a haphazard manner. There is little scholarship evident in its production. There is no timeline. The only allowance given to any kind of order is the sequencing of most of the 114 chapters from longest to shortest. Because no attention seems to have been given to arranging the chapters and verses in some kind of chronological order, you often get answers to questions that have yet to be asked. And duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates and even quintuplets abound.
[319] The same reasoning may have been used during the compilation of the first books of the Hebrew Bible, which has two versions of Creation: Genesis I and II. In Genesis I, God creates plants before animals and humans; in Genesis II, God creates Adam, then plants and animals and last but perhaps not least, Eve.
4:92 It is not given to a believer to kill another believer except by mistake; and he who kills a believer by mistake should free a slave who is a believer and pay blood-money to his relatives, unless they remit it as alms. If he happens to belong to a people who are your enemies, but he is a believer, then you should free a believing slave. If he belongs to a people bound with you by a compact, then blood-money should be paid to his relatives and a believing slave should be freed. As for him who has not the means, he should fast for two consecutive months, as a penance from Allah. Allah is All-Knowing, Wise!
58:2 Those of you who ignore their wives saying: “You are like our mother’s back”, should know that they are not really their mothers. Their mothers are only those women who gave them birth, and they are certainly making a reprehensible statement and a lie. But Allah is indeed Al-Pardoning, All-Forgiving.
58:3 And those who say of their wives: “You are like our mother’s back”, then retract what they said, have to free a slave before touching each other. That is what you are admonished, and Allah is Fully Aware of what you do.
5:89 Allah will not take you to task for what is unintentional in your oaths, but will take you to task for the oaths you intentionally take. Expiation for it, is feeding ten poor people with such average food as you would feed your own families, clothing them or freeing one slave. But he who cannot find [the means] should fast three days. That is the expiation for your oaths when you have sworn (those oaths which you have not kept). Keep your oaths; that is how Allah makes clear His Revelations to you, that you may be thankful.
30:29 Yet, the wrongdoers have followed their fancies without knowledge. Who, then, will guide those whom Allah has led astray and who have no supporters?
30:30 So, set your face towards religion uprightly. It is the original nature according to which Allah fashioned mankind. There is no altering Allah’s Creation. That is the true religion; but most men do not know.
5:38 As for the thieves, whether male or female, cut off their hands in punishment for what they did, as an exemplary punishment from Allah. Allah is Mighty and Wise.
45:20 This (Qur’an) is an illumination for mankind, a guidance and mercy unto a people who believe with certainty.
5:50 Now, is it the judgement of the “period of ignorance” that they desire? Yet who is a better judge than Allah for a people who believe with certainty?