500 Pages of Intimidation.

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“Only a sense of duty could carry a European through the Qur’an” – Thomas Carlyle.

So, I finally got around to reading the Holy Qur’an (Dawood Translation, published by Penguin World Classics), having previously only browsed through it for selected passages about selected subjects. Given my political orientation, this was a necessary undertaking, and one I should have performed long before now. I can only plead laziness and lack of time as a defence.

So what’s my ‘review’?… In short, this book is 500 pages of intimidation. By that I mean that little can be gathered from the text beyond the fiery destinies of those who doubt it.

The Quran takes so long in telling us the penalty for doubting its claims that it forgets to tell us much about what is supposed to be believed. Sentences like “do not be like the unbelievers’ or ‘do not be like the doubters’ appear in every surah, sometimes 4 or 5 times a page. The descriptions of hell, the penalty, are primitive and cartoonish – lots of fire, despair and random agony (incidentally, why is it only fire that is used to torture the condemned? Why not ice, chili peppers or acid? It seems rather lazy).

Makkah is repeatedly advertised as a place worth visiting, something contradicted by most modern travel writers. The battles of Muhammad are relayed in obsessive detail. Women – those wicked, vagina-bearing sirens –  are rightly taken down a few notches, implored not to leave the house or fraternise with (male) friends.

A very brief and ambiguous passage outlaws (or seems to outlaw) gambling and the consumption of alcohol. I can understand how this has produced different interpretations over the centuries. It is far from clear and seems only to apply to getting drunk rather than drinking in moderation. Had its later interpreters been more liberal, I think this would have made for a very different Muslim culture, possibly a more philosophical one.

Violence is a strong theme in later chapters. The battles local Muslims fought in the years before the revelations are described (if they went well) as a proof of God’s mercy, or (if they went badly) as an indictment of the believers’ moral character.

Poetically, the text is not without merit. The descriptions of paradise are occasionally sublime. Epicurean promises of dark-eyed women serving opiating beverages in a celestial garden remain undeniably appealing and almost seem French in their worldly lust.

I felt no compulsion to reread any chapters. Fifty pages into the book is enough to get to the essence of it – a crowded circus of psychological bullying and desert superstition, lacking in moral nuance and philosophical depth.

I must emphasise how bafflingly repetitive the Qur’an is. This quality came as a real shock to me, even though I had developed a scattershot knowledge of the text many years before. After finishing a couple of Surahs, the paragraphs had me flicking back to past chapters to check if there had been a printing error. “Haven’t I just read this?” – “This is familiar” – “Move on to something new!”

500 pages (the penguin translation is just under) is rather short for a holy text. That – I suppose – is a positive. Good marks are also given for the fact there is no racism in the book, or at least beyond occasional anti-Semitic seeming phrases (in fact, these are plagiarisms from the Bible, so not ‘hateful’ in the modern sense).

All the way through the volume, I tried to keep in mind that this book dominates the thought of over a fifth of the human population. That is both staggering and unfortunate. When the words were originally scraped onto animal bones under a sweltering Arabian sun, the authors must have realised they were interfering with world history. As to their moral responsibility, that depends wholly on whether they believed in what they were inscribing or, like ancient Dan Browns, whether they merely wanted attention.

What will be the final destiny of the Qur’an? It seems possible that it will still be believed after people stop believing in the Bible (a grave literary injustice, but one that is backed by the unstoppable tide of demographics). As to the very distant future, the age of AIs and robots, I don’t believe it has the strength to withstand science indefinitely.

In the meanwhile, burning this book is stupid. The best way to undermine it is simply to expose its content.

D, LDN.

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Have You Read the Qur’an?

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Christianity and Islam, Civilisation, Counter-Jihad, Counterjihad, Defend the modern world, ISIS, Islam, Islamism, Islamists, Koran, Muslims, Quran, Terror, Terrorism, Women

Last week, a commenter on this blog stressed how important it was for those concerned with the resurgence of Islam to read the Qur’an in its complete form. He was correct to do so, and his recommendation is sound.

I bought a Qur’an many years ago – the Penguin translation by NJ Dawood – and read most of the Suras in a random order. This was before I started writing about Islam, and my only motivation in visiting the text was to see how intolerant it was against Women. As you’ll know, there is a notorious Sura titled ‘Women’, and this contains most of the references to sexual equality in the whole work. The most famous passage from this chapter is undoubtedly verse 4:34 –

“Men have authority over women because God has made one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them”.

It’s strange to think that it was 1400 years ago that some gentleman in the Arabian desert wrote these words, and yet every detail in his articulation now affects over a billion living citizens of the world. The sentence “They guard their unseen parts…” has by-itself chosen the dress for a massive portion of female humanity. That person in the desert, scraping these words onto the bones of an animal, or onto papyrus or stone tablets, decided then what a Muslim woman in Leicester will wear today. Such are the giddying quantum mechanics of history.

As for examples of the promotion of violence, we are rather spoilt for choice. The anti-Islam writer Daniel Pipes collected the following excerpts:

“Regarding infidels (unbelievers), they are the Muslim’s “inveterate enemies” (Sura 4:101). Muslims are to “arrest them, besiege them and lie in ambush everywhere” (Sura 9:5) for them. They are to “seize them and put them to death wherever you find them, kill them wherever you find them, seek out the enemies of Islam relentlessly” (Sura 4:90). “Fight them until Islam reigns supreme” (Sura 2:193). “Cut off their heads, and cut off the tips of their fingers” (Sura 8:12).

I’ve no longer got my copy of the Penguin translation. I think I gave it to Age Concern just before I left for University. I will re-order the same volume and would strongly advise anyone concerned about Islam to order a copy too. It is hugely irritating to have one’s Islamophobia returned with the remark “You don’t know anything about Islam”. That was never true. I discovered as much as I need to about the Islamic religious system many years ago.

Nevertheless, a good knowledge of Qur’anic quotation is vital to successfully conduct a live argument with the faithful. A Muslim does not consider this text as Christians consider the New Testament. Muslims devoutly believe that God wrote the Qur’an and that every sentence must be the absolute truth. Given its purported author, Muslims also hold that it cannot be argued with or re-interpreted. It must be followed without question. This makes Qur’anic criticism by far the most effective means of confronting Islam as a manner of life and thought.

D, LDN.

Latent Vs Active: A Replacement Typology of Muslims.

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I’ve mentioned elsewhere that the often proposed division of Muslims into ‘Fundamentalists’ and ‘Moderates’ is unconvincing to me. The distinction is obviously political in origin and obscures more than it enlightens.

I would like therefore to propose a replacement theory, or rather definition, to explain the real difference between the believers who merely pray, and the believers who hijack airliners.

There are, I propose, two distinct types of Muslim in the world; Those who are Latent, and those who are Active. (*There will always be a minority who elude definition).

The Latent Muslim is in the clear majority, accounting perhaps for three quarters of the World Muslim population.

This kind of believer is typically serene and apolitical. He is opiated by his beliefs, rather than stimulated by them. Devout though they may be (and unlike Christians) they often have little curiosity for the battle of ideas.

The Active Muslim – by contrast – is someone whose experience has engaged the less sedating aspects of his faith. He is inclined towards the excitement of violence, death, punishment, procreation and conquest.

These Muslims will fight you until you believe exactly as they do, and possibly even afterward.

Crucially, (unlike with the false Fundamentalist/Moderate antonymy) the Latent Muslim can become an Active believer at any given time. The two conditions are not opposed, merely different, and the Active state is always quiescent in the Latent.

The signature fallacy of EU/US leaders has been to assume that extremism and moderation are real elements of Muslim self-identification; that they are innate, unchangeable and permanent. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

As Daniel Greenfield wrote:

“Politicians… wall off that vast majority of Muslims who did not actually come down to Woolwich and hack at a soldier with a machete and did not fly two planes into the World Trade Center from those who actually did. The hackers and pilots are extremists. The couch potatoes watching at home and cheering them on are moderates. That might be fine if we were discussing a gas station robbery in Cleveland. But to Muslims, Jihad isn’t an act of violence; it’s an act of faith.”

The Latent Muslim, as the name I have chosen implies, is not a moderate. He is unactivated. He lives quietly and habitually, enlivened only by foreign stimulus. It is this Foreign stimulus that tends to change the Latent into the Active. This explains for example, why those Muslims in 99% Muslim countries (Turkey, Saudi Arabia etc..) are largely Latent, whereas those in religiously divided lands (Lebanon, Egypt, Serbia/Kosovo, Britain, France) are more Active.

A more frivolous illustration would involve the mythology of Zombies.

Zombies (in some depictions) are unaggressive and docile among each other, but faced with a thinking human, become drones of monstrous conquest.

In the logic of Zombies, there is no ‘friend or foe’, but simply ‘fellow or food’. And as wrong-headed as we would be to negotiate with the undead, perhaps we’d do better to reconsider our approach with Muslims based on the criteria described.

D, LDN.