INSTILLING DOUBT

Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler

Friday, 10 February 2006

As we discussed last week in The Cartoon Religion, Moslems have made a colossal blunder in exposing a fatal weakness of their religion to the world: that it melts under the heat of ridicule. The ongoing crisis has now exposed an even graver weakness: that it crumbles under the scrutiny of doubt.

Islam is a mechanistic religion (an awful pun could be made here about it being Mecca-nistic, but let’s not go there). It is a shame religion. It is a religion of appearance rather than substance. Everything is about outward appearance, humiliation and shame, robotically and unthinkingly repeating the same exact word-for-word prayers five times a day at precisely the same times.

The Koran is not a book to be read, it is a chant to be robotically recited in order to put one into an unthinking trance.

As such it is an impersonal religion, an un-individual religion in which the Moslem believer has no personal relationship with God – as the Christian believer does.

This is the great gulf between Christianity and Islam. Christianity is based on individuality, upon an individual choice to request his personal salvation. Islam is based on tribal identity, with all members of the Moslem tribe as un-individual and indistinguishable as Coke bottles.

Islam is based on submission, not choice. As you know, that’s what the very word “Islam” means in Arabic: submission – the submission of one’s mind and capacity for choice to blind dogmatic belief.

Once you submit your mind this way, you are in a deadly trap. You cannot think anymore. You can only perform robotic rituals. You can have no reasoned confidence in your beliefs, so anything that might threaten them you can only respond with emotion, with fear and hate and violence.

There is a deadly fragility to any set of rigid dogmas fearful of change. Because they assert that the Koran is the actual and unalterable voice of God, rather than God speaking through a human interpreter subject to mistake and misinterpretation, Moslems are terrified that if any Koranic error is found the whole thing could be wrong.

So they’re stuck asserting complete total perfection – and they’re screwed thereby, since all you have to do then is show some Koranic screw-ups.

Besides being riddled with grammatical errors of classical Arabic and historical inaccuracies (you’d think Allah would know how to speak correctly and get his history straight), the most embarrassing screw-up is that of the famous Satanic Verses.

Writing a novel entitled Satanic Verses got Salmon Rusdie his death fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini – that’s how scared Moslems are about this. The saga of the Satanic Verses starts with the early accounts of Mohammed’s life written by accepted Islamic scholars such as Ibn Ishaq (died 767 AD) and al-Tabari (d. 923).

Remember that the word “Koran” means Recitation, Mohammed reciting the Word of God, so it is God Himself speaking. In Sura (chapter) 53, known as The Star, verses 19-20, God says:

Have you thought about al-Lat and al-Uzza and Manat the third, the other?

These are the “Daughters of Allah,” goddesses believed in by the Arabs to whom Mohammed was preaching, trying to convert them to his new religion.

Ibn Ishaq and al-Tabari – whose accounts form the official biography of Mohammed – then say the next verses, 21-22, were:

These are the exalted females whose intercession is to be hoped for.

Thus Allah acknowledges that he has three daughters who are gods like him. Ibn Ishaq and al Tabari (and other recognized early biographers, Ibn S’ad, d. 845, and al-Wakidi, d. 823) then explain Mohammed has made a mistake, that he was listening to Satan instead of Allah – for there is only One God and has no daughter gods.

Oops. Polytheism is The Big Islamic No-No. So Mohammed had to ask his scribes (as he was illiterate and couldn’t write) to cross out these “Satanic Verses” of Sura 53:21-22 and replace them with:

Are men’s children to be boys and Allah’s to be girls? That is an unfair division!

Men only want sons, you see, so it is an insult to Allah to claim he has daughters. How ridiculous. So there can only be One God. Allah may be unforgivably sexist but there’s only one of him.

The critical embarrassment comes with the admission that Old Mo was fooled by Beelzebub – and if he was fooled once, why maybe he was fooled in other Koranic verses, and then maybe, just maybe, the whole Koranic enterprise starts to crumble.

A deadlier embarrassment for modern-day Moslems is Allah’s advocacy of slavery. It is repeatedly clear in the Koran that Allah does so.

In Sura 4:25, Allah says it is forbidden to have sex with married women – except “those you own as slaves.”

In Sura 25:1-5, Allah says, “Blessed are the believers… who restrain their carnal desires, except for their wives and slaves.”

If Allah is perfect and never morally wrong, then historical context arguments are irrelevant, such as “slavery was accepted in those days.” There’s no way out of this. If slavery is morally wrong, then Allah is morally wrong in approving of it. Period.

(It also does no good here to respond with a juvenile tu quoque argument like, “Well, the Bible doesn’t condemn slavery either.” We’re not talking about the Bible, we’re talking about Allah and his perfection or lack thereof.)

The Cartoon Crisis thus provides an additional opportunity beyond further ridicule to weaken Islamism by making every effort to instill doubt in the rigid robotic unthinking Moslem mind.

In addition to casting doubt on Allah’s moral virtue, we need to focus attention on the serious historical analysis of Islam by professional scholars such as Professor Patricia Crone at Princeton University.

I discussed this in 2001 just after 9/11 in The Myth of Mecca. I really encourage you to read it, for it explains how Islam, the Koran, Mohammed, Mecca, et al were invented as a religious rationale to justify the Arab colonial conquest.

The whole thing is made up. There is not one – one! – shred of independent contemporary evidence that Mohammed lived or even that Mecca existed as an important trading center in the early 7^th century.

Moslems have set themselves up for an incredible fall. Once this serious research gets into public discourse, once the smallest toe of doubt gets in the door of their minds, they are going to psychologically disintegrate. It won’t be a pretty sight.

But no war is. We’re in a war, a street fight war, and the only way you win a street fight is not to fight fair. This war is often called a “War of Ideas.” Not exactly. That’s way too intellectual. This is fundamentally a psychological war, a Psy-Ops war, which means to win we must attack and destroy the enemies’ minds. We must infect their minds with the mental virus of doubt.

Once the infection has done its job, we can then urge upon them the inoculation – a form of Islam called Sufism. Sufism is the peaceful Islamic alternative to traditional orthodox Jihad Islam.

Sufism teaches that the path to Islamic enlightenment is not through compulsion of any kind, but through a personal ecstatic experience of the Divine. It thus renders Moslems individual human beings who see other people, non-Moslems, as fellow human beings, not alien things which can be killed or terrorized without remorse.

Sufism is the human form of Islam. I discussed it in Islam’s Anti-Osama. It’s Islam’s future. Jihad Islam is a lethal joke, and instilling doubt is the way to kill it off.