A contemporary Muslim is an anguished being preoccupied with mediaeval concerns. Never before in the history of Islam has it faced a danger such as this. For the first time, Muslims en masse are reclaiming their place in humanity and rejoining history. Islam has always relied on Muslims being unequivocally Muslim in clear contradistinction to the kafir, the unbeliever, treating the values and mores of the infidel with utter disgust and contempt. But history has played a trick on Islam and increasing numbers of Muslims find the values and mores of the infidels growing within their own hearts, gradually forcing out the Qur’an so firmly lodged there during their early childhood. This drama plays out as Islam struggling against Muslims and Muslims struggling against themselves, leaving an ummah in meltdown. This short series explores aspects of that complex struggle. Here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 and Part 7. The series concludes with Part 8.
Part 8: The Final Delusion
The second decade of the twenty-first century was but a week old when the contradiction that is Islam put itself on tragic display before the eyes of the world. ISIS having been driven into occultation, the Islamic Republic of Iran stood as the purest manifestation on earth of the will of Allah and the emulation of Muhammad. The theocratic leaders of Iran, sitting upon the greatest global oil reserves and commanding the ferocious Revolutionary Guard with its notorious jihad terrorist Quds Force reinforced by thousands of Allah’s finest angels, had been goading, threatening and provoking Israel and the United States in particular, and the West in general, for forty years in their unshakeable faith that in the cataclysmic confrontation they so crave, the righteous, i.e., themselves, are certain to prevail.
In the early morning of Wednesday 8 January 2020, the Iranian military, in its widely-anticipated and feared Wrath-of-Allah-red-flag-and-all response to the United States killing the Quds Force leader Qasim Suleimani in Iraq with a single surgical strike six days earlier, fired off sixteen missiles at two bases in Iraq housing American soldiers. Two of these missiles landed in Iran, i.e., it managed to bomb itself, twice, while none of the rest caused a single injury or death, destroying only some buildings.
Two hours after the end of the attack, Iran’s Russian-made air defense system, still primed for a counter-attack, picked up just such a counter-attack from within Iran itself, to be precise, from no less a source of incessant enemy hostility than Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport and, naturally, they shot it down. What else? It has not been disclosed whether the direct hit elicited the customary triumphant outbursts of “Allahu akbar!” However, what could not be concealed was that the Iranian hi-tech missile defense system had just managed to shoot down a low-speed, low-altitude, lumbering passenger jet at close range. At least the Great Satan and Little Satan now know that Iran has that capability. 176 dead people fell from the sky, of whom eighty-two were Iranian.
“’To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Takatun! How to ever smile again, if first you won’t cry? How to win the darling’s love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again…’ Just before dawn one winter’s morning, New Year’s Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without the benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky.”
Thus spake Salman Rushdie in the opening lines of The Satanic Verses, in a prophesy chillingly consummated over Tehran, where an ancient high priest, whose name is now forever linked to spectacular Islamic incompetence, once commanded Rushdie’s death for writing that very book. “I tell you, you must die. I tell you. I tell you.”
Then came the lies, and more lies, and more lies, and clearing-away of evidence, and a mounting crescendo of international outrage, until the one who had been corrupted by Western education, the country’s President Hassan Rouhani, could take it no more, and the regime admitted its “mistake”, sort of — “American adventurism,” they managed to slip in there somewhere. But the prophesy already covered that:
“Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning. A miniature echo of the birth of time. The jumbo jet Bostan, Flight A I-420, blew apart without any warning, right above the great, rotting, beautiful, snow-white, illuminated city.”
Just one day before this catastrophe, the Great Martyr was buried, the occasion for the ummahric hero to be joined in the Afterlife by a further 56 mourners who were trampled to death in a crushing stampede, the regime apparently unaware that such crowds need to be managed. But then, management has always been a profane concern beneath the Islamic Republic’s rulers.
At the end of it all, 138 Iranians were dead, all at the hands or feet of Iranians. It was a revenge cock-up of staggering extravagance. The irony is that the Iranian regime had gone out of its way to avoid another American casualty, confirming what ex-Muslims and critics of Islam have been saying to deaf ears for decades: Muslims only respect force that they know can hurt them. This arrogant regime that had given the pointless IAEA inspectors the runaround for years was compelled by its own actions to invite in a swarm of infidel inspectors, including from the Great Satan itself, and stand humbly by as they pore over the wreckage and pass earthly judgment on their divinely-inspired deeds. It was a humiliation such as the Islamic Republic had not experienced since its inception forty-one years ago.
Fear of the Basij militia melted away before the disgust and anger that Iranians feel towards their regime, the shame that they feel for the pathetic mess that their once-great country had been reduced to, and their determination to reclaim their own destinies. They are out on the streets again, the effects of the over fifteen hundred deaths that ended the fuel-hike protests just weeks earlier annulled. Masha-Allah.
“They know how to destroy buildings,” mused former Lebanese Civil War commander Ziad Saab about Hezbollah, “but they don’t know how to build a small house for their dog.” Not even the 1400-year long Sunni-Shi’a split could shield the world’s Muslims from the humiliation and embarrassment of such spectacular Islamic incompetence beamed around the globe just a few short months after Islam’s last attempt at a caliphate was ended by a dog.
This short series on the Muslim’s inner struggles was motivated by what I see as Islam’s dénouement and final crisis and the impact of that crisis on its votaries, brought so dramatically into sharp focus over the course of the first days of the new year. The American chapter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a gang of spoilt-brat wannabe Muslim tyrants, aspires to “revive the Islamic Ummah from the severe decline that it had reached, and to liberate it from the thoughts, systems and laws of Kufr [unbelief], as well as the domination and influence of the Kufr states.” Whether the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, the OIC, the Muslim World League, cry-baby Imran Khan, nonagenarian Mahathir Mohamad, puffed-up little Kalashnikov-totting jihadi outfits with world-conquering delusions, punch-drunk “scholars” or split-personality sheikhs, the lament of the “severe decline of the ummah” resounds everywhere, like an annoying adhan that no one can do anything about.
The decline of the ummah had exercised Abul A’la Maududi, Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna early in the 20th century as it does the likes of Yasir Qadhi and Bilal Philips today. What chance do these distraught revivalists have of “liberating” their ummah from “the thought systems of Kufr”, “the laws of Kufr”, “the influence of the Kufr states”, and “the domination of the Kufr states” when their beloved ummah has become such an embarrassment to so many unfortunate enough to have been born into it.
“It is a calamity!” says Sheikh Said Rageah. “It is an avalanche, a tsunami,” says imam Bilal Phillips. Yasir Qadhi has a whole string of adjectives for these times, all meaning “bad”. Mahathir Muhammad cannot face the prospect of dying leaving the ummah in the state it’s in. What are these fine gentlemen so alarmed about? They are spooked by Muslims leaving Islam, by Muslims abandoning the ummah. Why are so many leaving Islam? Because the thoughts of Kufr are already in them, they are part of the systems of Kufr, they respect the laws of Kufr and they admire the Kufr states. By invading the world of freedom and mixing amongst free people, far from their jihad mass murder terrorising Western people into submission, far from their da’wa seducing Western people to Islam, they discover, instead, their children fleeing Islam for Kufr in rising disquiet at the “scholar’s” inability to answer their straightforward questions in straightforward ways. They learn, to their deep disappointment, that their children had internalised those Kufr values. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
The smarter sheikhs, like Yasir Qadhi, engage in rather squalid rhetorical acrobatics in vain attempts to stem the haemorrhage, while idiots like Imran ibn Mansur, aka “Dawah Man”, can do little more than throw the Qur’an at them. The most interesting and sincere response is that of the pitiful fool, Saajid Lipham, whose exasperation leads him to plead with Muslims to homeschool their children so as to minimise their exposure to Kufr.
Most of them say Western education, Western ways, Western values, Western laws, are responsible for so many people leaving Islam. And in a superficial way they are right. They say such people are weak of faith. And again, in a superficial way, they are right. Many sheikhs blame one of their own, Yasir Qadhi, for trying to square the circle of being Muslim in the modern, free world, and of encouraging others to do the same. They don’t say that it cannot be done (that would be philosophically too complex to deal with), but that it shouldn’t be done, it shouldn’t even be attempted, or desired or contemplated. It shouldn’t even cross your mind. And if it does, then Shaitan put it there. There are places where that kind of logic carries weight. The free world isn’t one of them.
Your faith, being Muslim, is the most precious thing you have, they say. Subhan-Allah. The scholarly clique is united on this one point, alhamdulillah. But they fail to understand that when Muslims approach their sheikhs with all these previously-unheard-of questions, all conflicted, all distressed, some in tears, it is not because they want to leave Islam, but because they want to remain. They are struggling to remain Muslim. Sometimes I think that Yasir Qadhi gets this, while at other times I have to wonder. As for the rest, they don’t have a clue.
Islam requires obedience and allegiance, while all love must be for Allah and his rasool alone. These requirements cannot be met in a world of freely associating autonomous individuals. Islam is only possible in a world of subordinate dependents imbued with primal allegiance. The religion has sustained itself for 1400 years in the world where these conditions obtain, primal allegiances providing the necessary insulation from the encroachment of corroding social forms, in particular freedom, free thought and free individuals.
There are only two possible outcomes to Islam’s current predicament, especially in the West. Either the West becomes like the Islamic world, i.e., a world of monumental cock-ups where Muslims can feel at home, or Islam is progressively repelled from where it has encroached, until it is again safely confined to its original barren desert. Islam is unlikely to prevail, as Iran demonstrates, but it is likely to wreak a great deal of damage, again, as Iran demonstrates. This is partly because the West’s patience with these habitual abusers of its tolerance may finally be running out, but also because the autonomous individual has finally recognised itself as a self-conscious social force in the Islamic world.
Even the insane “Palestinian territories” are not immune from the autonomous individual. After Mahmoud Abbas is called unto Allah, the Palestinian civil war is likely to resume at which point we may well begin to see those wanting done with Islam become more visible and vociferous, as they are now in Egypt, Morocco, Iran and Saudi Arabia. How many people know that atheists make up a larger percentage of the Saudi population than they do in America?
The events of January 2020 might well prove the twilight of the god but for whom there would be no gods, and the undoing of the doddering mediaeval freak, latter-day High Priest Ali Khamenei. He will die a sad, bitter and broken old man, having given his all to create a nation aloof from human concerns in the material world. May Ayatollah Khomeini take pity on him when they meet and treat him kindly. The poor man had been fated to supremely guide the one country in the Islamic world least suited to Islam.
Iran is already a failed state, as the Suleimani fiasco so tragically showed, and the enforcement of Islam alone is responsible for reducing that country to such a pitiful condition. “Those bastards down there won’t know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby.” Being a society of autonomous individuals already under the Pahlavis, it has everything it needs to become a powerful, modern state free of religious influence very quickly, and it will find in Israel the best friend in the region it could possibly hope to have.
“Proclaims Xerxes, the Great King: By the favour of Ahura Mazda, Darius the king, my father, built much that is beautiful and ordered, and similarly, by the will of Ahura Mazda, I added to that work and built more. May Ahura Mazda, along with the divine beings, protect me and my kingdom.”
In Iran, the camel’s back has broken. Elsewhere else, the cracks spread and widen. Many people bringing their genuine concerns to the “scholars” and sheikhs are still without the inner resources necessary to deal with the ummah. They are traumatised all the more for the stupid and insulting replies they receive to their vexing questions. It is perfectly fine to beat your wife, they are told, because the Qur’an says so; it is a good thing to rape a nine-year-old girl because the Prophet-Peace-Be-Upon-Him did it. They only struggle with such things, they are told, because their faith is weak. They are told that they are the problem, not their barbaric scripture or their rapist prophet. The Qur’an is never to be questioned. The Prophet (saw) was the perfect man. What else is left to them, but to leave Islam?
The “scholars”, the sheikhs, the Islamic apologists simply do not get that they are not dealing with people who believe what they are told to believe, and think what they are permitted to think. These are not the stock from which the ummah had been bred for century after century, people who have known only darkness and fear and seek, above all else, to conform. The cannot take pride in barbarism and savagery just because they are told to be proud Sunna and that the Qur’an contains no mistakes. Question: “what do we say to our non-Muslim friends when they ask us whether the Qur’an really says that the sun sets in a muddy spring?” Answer: “Don’t have non-Muslim friends.” The sheikhs have no rhetoric other than what works on Friday khutbah congregations and Zakir Naik audiences. They cannot grasp that the people leaving Islam are not disobeying Islam, are not betraying the ummah. It is simply that they can no longer disobey themselves; they can no longer betray themselves. Muslims, being people who obey and conform inside an exaggerated tribal loyalty, have an impaired sense of self, and hence lack the basic psychological wherewithal to comprehend the free mind, let alone the apostate.
That tribal loyalty is deeply ingrained, and by the point Muslims leave Islam, many have been tormented by their struggle to remain Muslim in the face of not only an increasing awareness of the barbarism, savagery and irrationality of their perfect religion, and of the never-ending fitna within their ummah, tearing themselves apart even as they bluster their bombastic threats at the world of kufr. Who hasn’t noticed the OIC, “the sole legitimate representative of the ummah,” snarl at the Muslim leaders who dared unite in Kuala Lumpur without the OIC having ordered them to do so? Allahu-akbar. And this against a background of headlines such as “Blast inside Quetta mosque claims 15 lives, injures 19,” of Muslims killing Muslims (readers unaware of this event should not blame themselves for not having heard of it. The worshippers in the mosque were not massacred by a kafir).
To expect anyone with more ethics than a seventh-century barbarian to feel at home in such an ummah is to fail to understand civilised human beings. To those struggling to remain Muslim, it becomes clearer by the day that they are trapped inside a scam of epic proportions. Why should it even be a struggle? Are they not the best of people? Has Allah not perfected their religion for them? Were they not schooled and sent on their lying, plundering, beheading, raping, enslaving, mass-murdering way by the perfect man to be emulated by all? What is the problem? Increasingly, though nor yet overwhelmingly, Muslims know exactly what the problem is. It is Islam and the ummah, and while they cannot solve Islam, they can solve being part of it.
Those who end up leaving Islam start out from the same point as those who remain, and while they are driven to fulfil a need for honesty towards themselves, they are not necessarily psychologically equipped for the brutal completeness of the severance that awaits them, especially if the significant parts of their lives up to their apostasy had been Muslim, Muslim and nothing but Muslim. Many leave Islam still with delusions of things remaining the same between them and “the community”, or at least their families, and are hence in for a long period of further trauma. Others have made their peace with themselves and leave Islam, the ummah, family and friends, and put that entire part of their lives behind them. It is a heavy price to pay (I am one of the millions who paid it). There is nothing that Islam can give you that is uniquely good, but there is a huge amount of good that Islam withholds from you, even forbids to you. This much becomes obvious to the apostate soon after leaving Islam. It helps to ease the mourning.
Islam’s calamity, its avalanche, its tsunami of apostasy is a problem of its own making: it took it upon itself to take its jihad and da’wa to free people in a free society, something that is alien and incomprehensible to those schooled on a book of seventh-century knowledge about which there is no doubt. The ummah and its “scholars” were simply blindsided. But Islam’s existential crisis is not entirely of its own making either, as human social evolution can also lay claim to that credit. The social being responsible for rationalism, freedom and human rights, the autonomous individual, has finally generalised across the centuries-old, insular, paranoid, superstitious, claustrophobic and cruel Dar al-Islam where in its most sophisticated corner, one missile finding its target in the early hours of Friday 8 January in a blinding wake-up call, brought home to those below that they had had enough. It was time to get out.
So it is for millions still under the yoke of Islam. More significant than that their parents rejecting them, the “scholars” patronising them, their former friends despising them, mobs terrorising them and the authorities persecuting them, is that those who remain behind in Islam find them incomprehensible. Just as the Qur’an is not equipped for modern thought, the ummah is not equipped for the modern world and the Muslim parent is not equipped for the modern child, who is not only of another generation, but of another epoch, of another reality — an utterly different kind of being.
Islam’s attribute of being future-proof, that has sustained it for fourteen centuries, has finally encountered a force it is helpless against, and that is eroding it from within, which, ironically, is precisely what da’wa is meant to achieve in the West. Poor Yasir Qadhi is even driven to publicly lament, “Why don’t people embrace Islam immediately?” That’s how it’s supposed to work. Perhaps, instead of people embracing Islam, Muslims are again embracing humanity, and in so doing, re-joining the flow of history. The struggle to remain Muslim, to remain frozen in time, is a futile one. The final delusion is that of the remaining Muslim.