Good and Evil in Islam.

This is an excerpt from a very good post by IoshkaFutz:

It is in response to this post by CuteCoot.

Surely God created, among all other things, Islam. Was that not done as an act of love? What does your own living conscience say of God’s revelation through Mohammad? What could be God’s purpose in this? If God was not revealed through Mohammad, what was? What else is there?

IoshkaFutz’s response, while written in a rather “robust” manner, takes the critique of Islam beyond it’s often low-level baiting and prejudice in its instantly recognisable truth of feeling:

Mohammad, a murderer, a head-chopper, a child-ravisher, created Islam. There is nothing good or godly about Islam and the proof is in how it has degraded men and women around the world.

If you want to unite good and evil into some superior manichean philosophy, by all means help yourself, but nothing will come of it. God is revealed through love and virtue, through letting go and hanging on, through living here and now and in all times; through patience and courage to change; through defense and forgiveness, the whole guided by Corinthian love.

The Islamic way is antithetical to a good and godly life. It is not a way, but a set of edicts written in stone; it is about practices and not ideals.

Sufism is just the polite and ear-candyish and mind-satisfying entrance to the moral misery of a faith based on violence and fear, one that has created measurably dysfunctional societies. Islam is not the work of God, but the work of a power-hungry man pretending to be a prophet. A clever heresy, incorporating “useful” elements of Judaism and Christianity, that survives on tu quoque, accepted lusts, and the ability to give sinners a sense of satisfaction.

All the pillars of Islam are hollow. Faith is a statement; zakat is a help-Muslim-only tithe, Hajj is an only-if-you-can jaunt to celebrate a brotherhood without brothers in a locked out city, Ramadan is a weight-gaining, late-evening pantagruelian extravaganza that merely makes the participants more ravenous, and prayer is a public, all-together-now display of strength. Jihad, enjoined by the Koran, is an anybody-can-be-an-Islamic-leader license to wage war and engage in perpetual strife.

All this is a taunt towards genuine religions and philosophies and most certainly an insult to the potential of man. It is the tangled way of Islam, not a result of poor interpretation. There are no heresies in Islam, there are no right or wrong interpretations. Every Muslim has his “right” Islam. There is never anyone to blame or opportunities to collectively address issues or correct ways.

Naturally, if you put a pink filter around the Koran and pick and choose what YOU like, there’s more than enough material for great mystical experiences. But the same goes for my WINDOWS XP manual. “Where do you want to go today?”

The ultimate evil of the Koran is that there is good in it mixed with evil. There is “let there be non constriction in faith” WITH “fight ‘em high and low until there is no other Faith.” It is precisely the pick-and-choose chaos of a tangled Casbah as opposed to a broad path, a “WAY,” that makes the all-religious “God is Great” statement into the purely Islamic “I am Great, I am nothing” chaotic reality. By surrendering ALL to God they become either gods or worthless nothings (depending on mood, whim or the ability of the latest orator).

Losing conscience is necessary. Ultra-Awareness makes for bad dancing and poor tennis. At times one MUST give in, yield, let go… but unguided by the spirit of Corinthian Love, such yielding can easily degenerate into self-worship. Sleep, dream away, be trusting, but there ARE wake-up calls to full conscience and active awareness.

Such calls are being heard now by the west and by degrees, easy tolerance is becoming awareness that we have been giving slack to a CULT OF MADNESS that follows a war manual.

Therein lies the diabolical cleverness of Mohammad, for despite the madness, chaos and confusion, such Evil (lack of active conscience practiced in separating good and evil) is a tremendously unifying force. Despite all the bickering, the Muslims have an UMMAH. They have no common markets, they respect no conventions or charters for human rights, they are liable to kill each other egregiously, yet they have an Ummah. This is in all ways similar to the ethos of metropolitan gangs and mafias. (United, strongly united, but only against the cops, the public “good”).

Judeo-Christian values have - as a process - bred acceptance, tolerance. We and not others are at the forefront of racial tolerance and mutual understanding. We, guided by the wisdom of our books and LIVING faiths, though perhaps taking 20 steps back for every 21 steps forward, have a sense of progress while at the same time guarding over timeless values.

Islam breeds passivity. All progress either scientific or moral, must be somehow forced on or spoon-fed to them (whereas most vices they eagerly accept).

God might be revealed through Mohammad, but only in a negative sense; and the same goes for man. What it means to be a man can be revealed by what it means to be a muslim: unthinking, passive, conspiracy-oriented, tribal, morally lost.

Surely if Islam had redeeming values, they’d have been seen. Instead we see well traveled MIT graduates, and Imams with high speed internet and satellite phones, and third generation “Europeans” still blaming everything on the Jews, still defending SUICIDAL TERRORISM, still bent on turning countries that have achieved peace, prosperity and fellowship among ancient enemies with histories of untold mutual violence into Sharia run Islamic states.

What are you defending? Nothing? A mind game? You should know by now that no matter how high-sounding or emotionally satisfying, it is a mind game to end all mind games.

Certainly it is not positively stating that “God was revealed through Mohammad” that can address any of the urgent issues of the day. Nothing short of Moral Clarity and focused and aware consciences can. The rest is pure rot, the type of sophistry that can explain away everything, even easily and trippingly on the tongue, but of no value and ultimately debasing.

Before defending the rosy back Sufi door of Islam, check what’s being preached at the Main Gates. Explain the mindset of the faithful crowding the biggest mosque in Europe and passively listening to the Imam, hailing from Al Azhar, considered Islam’s most prestigious “seminary” defending the use of children as ordinance delivery systems. Why is no one upset, worried, rebellious? Why is so much CLEAR AND WANTON EVIL passively accepted as if the man were urging them to love their neighbors?

There you see EVIL, moral passivity, tribality, hopelessness, at work… and it is at work in all mosques… as it is at work at the Mecca where friends cannot go, where the Dalai Lama and the Pope and a Medicins sans Frontiere worker who has spent years the best of his boogie years spoon-feeding starvelings are not allowed entry.

Islam is EVIL and EVIL is fascinating, alluring, tempting and sometimes even logical.

Perhaps it’s precisely the “logic” that makes it evil. There is nothing quite so logical as Taqqya and Hudna as opposed to hard truth and real, honest-to-goodness compromise. Paradoxically, it is wisdom and love that “let go” and give peace a chance, whereas Islam, never really submits… not even in its mystical manifestations. There’s always a mundane, earthly purpose behind it’s every action or thought. There is always an element of Jihad, of power. That is the trouble with Sufi mysticism: it’s logical. Better a tarantella with kids, parents, relatives, real and adopted uncles, neighbors and strangers than an only-men dervish prayer whirl. The former is submission, the latter is logical dizziness.

CuteCoot replies:

I can see no entry for discussion in your long reply wherein Islam, and everything associated with it, is EVIL. In my experience, that is a fortress mentality with no way in or out.

Listen only to what drunken lovers say,
And loosen passion’s ties to mean and low.
Each tribe draws you into its own circle;
The parrot sings of sugar; of ruins, the crow.
– Rumi

I want neither your sugar nor your ruins, my friend.

To which IoshkaFutz replies:

I understand, and normally I am more than happy to dwell in the gray areas where matters aren’t so cut and dry. I came to FFI years ago telling Ali Sina and his pals to cool off, to be more understanding… but then the enormity of the EVIL - let me repeat - EVIL - of Islam dawned on me.

Apostasy punished by death - actual physical death in the “capitals” of Islam or by social death! What’s there to defend when everything that you might see as good, right, proper, logical, reasonable, beautiful, will get you killed in Anno Domini 2005?

I came to FFI wondering why Germans and Poles were headed to a situation of no borders and the same loot in their pockets whereas nothing of the sort seemed possible or even distantly thinkable wherever Muslims were involved.

I discovered that this religion called “submission” NEVER lets go. Never submits to God. In other words, it’s just the opposite of what it’s called. Muslims are CLINGERS, tooth and nail; they are the ones who don’t have the spiritual dimension (or call it what you will) to open up, to imagine a better day for all involved, to at least leave a crack in the door open. Instead they must either triumph or be beaten down to the same sort of submission they would wish to impose on others. And look at what they cling to! Pedophilia, terrorism, wife-beating, anti-semitism, perpetual war.

Forget the drunken lover stuff. The world is not the dream it could be. The world is a place where kids hanging out at a disco get blown up by a religion. Not an opinion, a certified fact. Go to any Muslim site and you will see what simply must be refused for civilization to survive, either openly advocated, or worse, obliquely defended by the so-called reasonable.

I realized that by defending the indefensible, I was a useful idiot. Some things ARE black and white. Evil is not an easy concept and in today’s world it’s practically banished because it doesn’t fit into a logical, “detached” way of seeing things. It is apparently too charged up with come-and-go emotions. Today we must be cool-headed as we might be while trying to develop a new and better air conditioner. I refuse that. As I refuse your hokey Rumian poem. Tribes drawing one into circles is fine, but it’s not the question. Here we have a tribe LOCKING their people into circles under pain of death. In case you’ve forgotten (and it’s easy to forget, or to become jaded), Mr. Ali Sina would go the same way as Theo van Gogh were he to show his face in public. That’s MURDER. And on such a wide scale, It’s Murder Inc. just like the Mafia. Not worth a fight? Is your answer a 13th Century Persian Poem?

Loosening passion’s ties to the mean and low is wonderful… but what could be meaner, lower and tighter than the Dalai Lama, a peaceful spiritual leader in exile not being allowed to set foot in the Mecca? The time has come for answers, dear Cutefoot, not hokey la-di-da poems. Bruises, sores and welts on women’s faces… scattered entrails… never ending battles in Thailand, India, Philippines, Indonesia, France, Australia, Israel…

If you can walk through the main portals of a religion and still come out a mystic by the time you reach the back door, you might have a religion worth considering and certainly one worthy of merit. If you can walk through the murderous Quttbas, the tribality, the Taqqya and Hudna, the wife beating, the curses on entire nations, the monkeys and swine, the pedophilia, the arranged marriages, etc… and still come out reciting hokey poems, then please inform us about what you have seen when you closed your eyes and what you have heard when you plugged your ears.

Theirs is the fortess mentality. Look at any Judeo-Christian country and you can build temples, ashrams, churches, mosques and suchlike to your heart’s content. Try building an ashram where the Dervishes whirl to the glory of Allah. Somehow despite all the universe-embracing giddiness and silliness of their whirls and swirls, they’ll remember that fortress of theirs. Be a Jewish man and try marrying a Muslim woman… suddenly love is no longer full of Rumi-style la-di-da. Eat a potato chip on the street during Ramadan. Why are you anathema? You the poetess, the open-hearted humanist ready to embrace all of humanity? Why are those looking at you so full of insane contempt and intolerance? What have you done?

The Muslims and not we, need to make the mind and heart efforts to fit in and join the rest of humanity.

You ask “If God was not revealed through Mohammad, what was? What else is there?”

Again I ask you in return: Why cannot an unislamic worker for Medicins sans Frontiere who’s spent the best years of his life taking care of children Aids victims, set foot in the Mecca or Medina. Why is such a saint, such a good person unfit to tread the same ground as an Egyptian car salesman? What kind of faith, outlook, mentality, perspective is that? We open our churches to sinners, they lock out their holy cities to saints. That’s something to get both very mystical and very, very, excruciatingly here-and-now real about.

Tags: Islam, Religion