E-0 Introduction to the topic of “Understanding Islam”

“Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”  – Anne Lemott.

“People are at their worst when they are least accountable for their actions.”  – M. Scott Peck, M. D.  “The People of the Lie, the Hope of Curing Human Evil”

“We are the Borg. Assimilate! Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. You will be assimilated! Resistance is futile.” – Star Trek First Contact (Paraphrased).

“See, I make all things new” – Revelations

 “To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”       – Robert Louis Stevenson

Introduction to the Topic of understanding Islam (for the Western non-Muslim): This is the level 0 essay – the essay that talks about the subsequent essays in this thread of topic. Once again each of these essays are intended to last the length of time of one bathroom break.

 

At the time of this writing, I teach comparative law overseas, including a section on Islamic law. This thread of essays aims to give you a quick, but thorough almost certainly unique but probably highly accurate understanding of Islam – from a non-muslim perspect, that is, outside looking in instead (which is radically different from inside looking out, i.e. the perspective of the Muslim). It’s important to realize that if you are a non-Muslim coming into this discussion and a non-muslim coming out, your understanding of Islam is likely to be different than any Muslim you talk to. But you will learn that most Muslims, themselves, have a limited understanding of Islam – as we all see what we want to see, and they are no different in that regard.

 

Also, it is important to acknowledge that the conceptualization of Islam is INCONSISTENT with the Western concept of religion and it is wrong to think of Islam as a just a religion. From the Western stand point, Islam is a comprehensive system that prescribes for its adherents how to think, bath, eat, sleep, pray, conduct sexual relations (how to make love versus), how to make war and so on. By definition, Islam conflates politics and religion (which immediately creates challenges to the Western concept of civics). All this is quite hard to hang on to conceptually speaking going in. One retired American general referred to Islam as a political movement/ideology masquerading as a religion. This is incorrect, but,…close enough for starters for you to hang your hat onto until you get to the bottom of it.

If we accept the traditional accounts on the beginning of Islam and Mohammed’s biography given to us by Islam itself, from the very beginning, right up until today, Islam has used the religious component to advance itself politically and the political component to advance itself religiously. This is why, to understand Islam, one must understand its initial motivations, and of the two aspects, religion and politics, which is its first and truest motivation of Islam? Why did Mohammed create Islam?  Muslim’s assume the motivation was religious, and the political created to protect that. But non-Muslims are free to consider the alternative: that Islam was created out of political motives, first and foremost.

This “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” does have analects in early Christianity. Christ specifically decoupled religion from politics, and for the first 300 years Christianity was decoupled from religion. Then Constantine fused them in an attempt to create ideological unity for the Roman Empire. So we know in Christianity religion did come before politics, and eventually, after the reformation, religion began to be decoupled from politics once again, beginning with the 1st Amendment to the American constitution 1791.

The tight and thorough conflation of politics and religion in Islam suggest otherwise. And in history, Islam initially, helped create a cohesive political entity that steam rolled over the less cohesive Christian components it ran into to its West as well as to its East.

The importance of politics to Islam is fairly evident from a cursory glance at Islam. It’s name can be translated to mean “surrender” an inherently political act. It’s calendar hallmarks a political event, Mohammed’s ascent into a political office of mediator in Medina (aka Yathribe), not his birth, nor one of his first religious apparitions. That apostasy is punished with a death sentence might reflect that, for Islam, apostasy is also a form of treason, a political crime that historically, until quite recently, the penalty had almost always been death. So having said so much so far, perhaps, for the purposes of these next few essays, its best to let go of the thoughts and understandings you have on both politics and religions to follow narratives based upon different logic, such as law, psychology and chronological occurrence.

 

I will give you a brief essay on “The ‘What’ of Islam.” That will give you a quick and powerful beachhead of understanding. You can’t really appreciate Islam until you understand “The ‘Why’ of Islam”, that is to say, the motivations for its creation by the person who started it. Okay, you know him as Mohammed. Islam makes no sense by the context of your life or world view, but it makes complete sense from the motivations and the context that were very specific to the person that was Mohammed (be he real or mythological).

How or what you think about God, how you convene with him, what you do to, with and about yourself in that regard, that is obviously the field of religion. External actions that impact others, such as an act of terrorism, an act of coercion, that is not an act of religion, it is an act of politics. So you can see the problem we have in regard to this topic. In between your internal thoughts, conversations and actions and your external political acts lies things like persuasive conversation and collective worship. This is the western frontier for religion: we tolerate it in moderation and generally, though not completely, a limited respect. Meanwhile, in Western politics, all political actors are subject to lampooning. Western politics does not work without lampooning political actors, by definition. Politicians and founders of political movements don’t get the reverence and respect that founders of religions do, and even the founders of religions are not immune. So a founder of a religion and a political movement can be a subject of lampooning. By now you know this is antithetical to Islam. So we have more problems.

 

These essays are meant to appear as an adjunct to a website created to explain and simplify civics. The assumption is this specific essay is to explain Islam to non-muslims. The thrust of the interest in this essay is not theology specifically but how Islam affects non-islamic civics, that is, generic civics. The extent to which Islam’s theology is addressed is philosophical from the stand point of civics and not meant to be theistic: again the concern is how ideas in a theology affects civics, not whether or not it is true or accurate. It is a given that one can either believe what a religion purports to be and say or not. If you believe what Islam purports to say and is then you are a Muslim and are subject to the entire complexity of Islam: politics, religion, law, and everything else. If you do not subscribe to Islam, then you still are subject, from time to time to its politics, because Islam wants to convert you to it, and as said earlier, Islam uses politics and political acts, including acts of coercion and terror, to advance its religion.

 

From the outside looking in Islam looks entirely different than from the inside looking out. Most Muslims see Islam from the standpoint of its religiosity first and foremost. Muslims view Islam as a perfected system. They are taught it is perfect, and so intrinsically superior to everything else. If contempt exist within a Muslim it is for the non-islamic systems and structures of the world. From the outside looking in the view is quite the opposite: in the present Islam (as a whole, not the religion specifically) is a political movement and presents the single greatest problem on the body of civics worldwide today. As a result the content here, to the astonishment of most Muslims, is not particularly favorable to Islam. They don’t understand how a perfect system, as they are taught that Islam is by their imams,  is not viewed as perfect, divine and revered. If you were to tell a Muslim that “Islam is the problem child of the world’s religions”, their head, or rather the thought processes inside their head, literally explode: it is diametrically antithetical to what they are taught and are not allowed to think or consider otherwise.

 

Islam, for reasons you will eventually learn, looks upon the world hierarchically, and if it does so, you can bet it doesn’t do that for purpose of placing Islam on the bottom, it therefore must be on the top.  That’s how Muslims see themselves and the world.  You the non-Muslim live in a dark world. So, the dichotomy between the way Muslims and non-Muslims view Islam cannot be overstated. It is so extreme that it is beyond what either a Muslim or non-Muslim can conceptualize. As one anonymous commenter has stated, in looking at Islam -as a collection of ideas -, a Muslim (and its apologist) sees “Jessica Rabbit” where as non-Muslims, if they see anything at all, see “Miss Piggy.” If you subscribe to Islam, then you are sure to be subject to the religion of Islam. If you do not subscribe to Islam, then there is only the political aspect of Islam to consider. But you should know what ideas Muslims believe, what motivates the political movement and why. You should learn that here.

 

The essays here are explanations of ideas embodied in Islam. It is not intended as a description of Muslims or adherents of Islam. Probably by the end of reading this series of essays, you might begin to think of Muslims as perhaps the true victims of Islam’s systems and ideas (and to be sure, they, for the most part, do not [though I did hear of one Sunni Muslim co-worker tell an Ishmaeli co-worker, that he was the ‘lucky one’ – because the Ishmaeli’s follow the Aga Khan who is a very reasonable compassionate modern progressive person – which suggested that this person realized that she was trapped in a system she found, at the very least, stifling. ]).  Arguably the greatest person on the planet today is a Muslim, Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani girl who advocates for education, women’s education specifically. She was shot in the face at point blank range by a jihadist Muslim and miraculously survived, and just as miraculously continues to advocate for women’s education. She is an arch type representation of a Muslim who is a victim of the ideas inherent in Islam. By the end of this series of short essays you will understand why Islam operates the way it does.

 

Understanding Islam is like peeling away the layers of an onion. You peel a layer, and your confronted with something else. You peel another layer, learn something more, then are comfronted with something else again. It’s as if it was purposely designed to not be understood. One wonders what purpose that serves. Anyway, you won’t truly understand Islam until you get to the bottom of it, layer by layer. Here I hope to reduce the number of layer’s you have to peel to get to the bottom of it, to save you from running down blind alleys and empty corridors, and so get there in fairly short order.

The next essay will give you a quick understanding of the “What of Islam.”  That will be followed by essay(s) that will try to provide you with tools and understandings of the context of Islam and most specifically that faced by Mohammed. The final essay will provide attempt to explore the motivations, with a brief acknowledgement of the motivations as understood from the stand point of an adherent to Islam and a subsequent motivation from a non-believer perspective.

There is always that choice to consider: that Islam is everything it purports to be, and that everything it espouses is true, or otherwise. These essays deal with the otherwise. You can go to an Islamic site for the ‘non-otherwise.’

At the time of its creation Islam was unique: a prophet delivering text from heaven by an angel, purportedly from God’s mouth. But in America that is not unique. Mormons have a prophet who delivered text that was served to him by an Angel too. The similarities are significant, but so are the differences: Islam presents a huge problem to western civics, Mormons are, for the most part, not engaged in terrorism but instead are consistently quiet, peaceful, model citizens to their neighbors – regardless as to what they believe. From the stand point of this set of essays, that’s all we care about: not what they may or may not believe religiously, but whether or not they are a nuisance or hazard imposed upon civil life of their neighbors and fellow citizens. But it is worth noting: it may well be that one of those prophets was telling the truth – but they both cannot be telling the truth as their messages are so different, so one (or both) must not be telling the truth or is lying. So  the question begins to concern the ability, motivation and endeavor to tell that big of a lie, that kind of lie, consistently, persistently over time with enough conviction as to have at least a gaggle of people come to believe it and submit to it. This represents an extraordinary undertaking and risk for the purpose of a constructed lie. I submit to you that in both cases, the motivations are extraordinary, if in the case of the truth or in the case of lie, but more so the lie. Since Mormons at this time don’t constitute a nuisance or hazard to the civic body, I’m currently not all that interested in trying to get an understanding of them. (The same could be said for most other religions, be it Sikh, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, or Spaghetti-Monsterism [aka – pastafarianism]). Of course that could change at a later time. (Muslims are more likely than not to take offence at comparing Islam with some or all of these religions). Indeed the story of both prophets are fascinating.

 

I have a personal belief that just about everything can be figured if you truly are interested in figuring it out, but that means prioritizing what you will figure out versus what you won’t figure out. Like many people beginning with 9/11 or some earlier or later act of terrorism, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure Islam out. I’m not an Islamic scholar, per se. My interest here is primarily civics, and more specifically developmental civics and economics for the purpose of making life better all around for everyone. I have an undergraduate degree where I studied both Information Systems and Geography, where one of my specializations was in Middle East areas studies. I have a Jurisdoctorate degree in Law where I studied international and comparative law and some directed research on Islamic law. I worked as an information systems professional where I modeled quite a few systems (automated and manual) and designed new ones. I take a systems bias towards my studies of civics. This has lead me to begin to identify mechanisms in civics. It’s often said that history repeats itself. That’s not true of course, time unfolds in one direction in a linear manner: but what does repeat itself in history are the mechanisms in civics, often in varying contexts and in varying combination of various mechanisms. So I would argue there is great profit in learning, studying and understanding the mechanisms in civics BEFORE studying history, which becomes the story of the context by which those mechanisms performed.  Because of Islam’s complexity, my background, and belief that everything can be figured out,  from time to time, I’ve attempted to write short essays that encapsulate a useful and insightful understanding of Islam for the non-muslim for no other reasons than to help people quickly get their (and my own) arms around the subject, which is necessitated by all the problems emerging related to terrorism in the present, so as to get back to the real business of civics, to create a more perfect public and private life for us all.

So, in regard to Islam, you can believe what it purports, or you can choose not to. But if you choose not to, then you have to ask yourself, what really happened and why?  How does this beast tick? What keeps it going? What’s it all about? Why is it unique. Why all the terrorism associated with it?  Is it a danger?

As it happened. The first essay: Understanding Islam in 1500 words or less (which took more than 1500 words) was another attempt to do the same. Usually I file these away and move on. But as it happened, I went to my office at my university in South Korea on Sunday afternoon of June 12, 2016 at about 12:30pm to work on writing final exams that were coming up shortly for the classes I teach. I decided to make another attempt at dabbling in creating a short essay describing Islam to the lay non-muslim person – just to jump start my faculties and get my mind going. I poked around on it from about 1 or 1:30 pm to about 4:30pm. It is precisely during these hours that a self anointed jihadist entered a nightclub in Orlando and proceeded to kill 49 innocent people who had been happily celebrating the joy of living their lives until he opened fired. Because of the timing of that event with my own efforts and the tangency of time, I have decided to publish this essay and move on to take the reader to the bottom of getting a grip on and understanding Islam. So as you are reading this essay, please realize that on the other side of the world while it was being written, the ideas of Islam was once again manifesting itself in an unpeaceful way that beguiles many Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

One further side note. The issue of understanding Islam has become a political football. Political conservatives wanting to emphasize Islam as a political movement that contains a lot of bad ideas. Liberals want to stick with the idea that Islam is merely a religion and should be classified in the same way all other religions in the West are classified, and that speaking out against Islam or the ideas inside of Islam is a form of racism against Muslims.  On the latter, it cannot be. Islam is not a race, it is a set of ideas that include politics and religion.  There are tons of Muslims from just about every race.  Not all liberals take this point of view. Lead by Bill Maher, some liberals like to point out that Islam is categorically against many of the most prized virtues of traditional liberalism: freedom of expression, freedom of thought, critical thinking, equality of gender and peoples etc… . On the other hand, one’s disdain of Islam can take on a form of hatred and that way leads to the dark side of a lot of things. So we have to be careful there. There is moral hazard in critiquing Islam even as it presents itself as a hazard to Western notion of civics. That suggests to me that we have to develop a discipline so we can engage in a critique without coming to a point of vice in the process.  So I want to end with a reminder that perhaps the most remarkable, perhaps the best example of person of incredible courage today is a Muslim, in the person of Malala Yousafzai. She is someone we can all admire. Still, while maybe Muslims are not permitted to take a critical eye towards Islam or its founder, Westerners who are not Muslims are not only permitted to critique Islam, they have a duty to obtain a better understanding of Islam and critique it, especially as long as it continues to pose a hazard to western civics.