ISLAM : What it is

By
Hassan S. Karmi

Islam - what it is

The idea of pious fraud is something most discreditable to any religion. It is abhorent in Islam. Its sanction in the Catholic Church has unfortunately led to the deliberate falsification of history through forgery, interpolation and lies. The holy scriptures were not immune. Suppression of facts comes under the same category, together with misappropriation of literary, religious or scientific heritage of other nations or peoples. For instance, the Arabs developed a philosophy of their own during their rule in Spain. This was known as the Islamic philosophy in Spain. This Islamic philosophy was called later the Islamic-Jewish philosophy, and finally the Jewish philosophy. Perhaps it is worth mentioning by the way that, according to Joseph Cample in his Creative Mythology, the Arab philosopher Averroes (1125-1198) influenced Maimonides (1155-1204), the Jewish philosopher and physician, who in his turn influenced Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).

The Troubadours in Province and in Europe, from the 11th to the 13th century, were singers, minstrels and lyric poets in the Arabic romantic poetry. Even the name is Arabic: terrab ad-door or ad-dar, domestic singer, originally a version of a style of singing in Baghdad know as: ghina ad-daar, later domestic singing, which was exported to Spain, and there they changed the word ghina to tarab, tarab being singing with accompaniment of musical instruments.

This kind of lyric poetry is one of the main divisions of Arabic poetry from antiquity. Therefore, the troubadoor poetry in its style and theme is modelled on the Arabic lyric poetry. But Prof. Stern, a Jew at Oxford, claims that it is an offshoot of Hebrew lyric poetry.

Another form of falsification has the aim of depriving a nation of its cultural achievement by denying it. The Arabic numerals have been known by this name so far in the West for many centuries. They were known in Spain by their Arabic name: The ghubari numerals. An author, a Jew, whose name escapes me now, called these numerals in his book. Higher Algebra, the Indian-Arabic numerals.

Another book by a Jew, “Names of Stars,” had the only objective of claiming that the names of stars and constellations, which are in fact mostly Arabic, are not necessarily Arabic. A similar falsification is represented by the attempt of a Jew, or a Jewess, to refute the well-known fact that the horse in Europe, especially in Britain, descended from the Arab horse.

A notorious example of the pious fraud is the presumed grant by the Emperor Constantine I (306-337) to Pope Sylvester and his successors in perpetuity, consequent upon the baptism of Constantine in 326, of the temporal jurisdiction over Rome and Italy. The document is now accepted as an 8th century forgery.

There is also the false or forged decretals issued by the Pope on matters relating to decisions in ecclesiastical law. These were aimed at enhancing the position of bishops and papacy and strengthening the Church against inroads by the temporal power. The collection contains many spurious letters and documents ranging from the 1st to the 7th century including the pretended Donations of Constentine. They appeared in the mid 9th century and were issued under the name of Isidore Mercator. They were seriously challenged in the 15th century and finally discredited by the Protestant minister David Blondel in 1620. They are also known as the Isidorian Decretals. They were probably compiled in France and accepted by Pope Nicholas I. Since their forgery became manifest they commonly came to be called pseudo Isidorian Decretals. Many dictionaries and encyclopaedias  avoid mentioning them and even mentioning “pious fraud,” and the reason is obvious.

One curious instance of deliberate fraud is what a 7-volume English encyclopaedia, published in the United States fifty years ago, said about the Prophet Muhammad. The encyclopaedia, as far as I remember, said that Muhammad managed with force to establish a vast empire which on his death, splintered into small states as a result of the quarrels that erupted among his many children by his many wives.

In a dictionary, Readers Digest Great Illustrated Dictionary, under the entry Armenia, there is a sentence, added at the end, which says: “Between 1894 and 1914 the Turks massacred most of their Armenians because they were Christians.” This is of course a lie. What has this got to do with a dictionary? I mentioned this before.

Another lie was that of Mr. Runciman in his book on the Crusades in which he says that the first Crusaders massacred the Muslim population in Jerusalem to match the fanaticism of Muslims. The author, as a Christian, failed to remember that when Saladin reconquered Jerusalem, the Muslims did not kill a single Jew or a single Christian. Nevertheless, Muslims must be accused of fanaticism.

This spirit is very evil. It has pervaded the whole history of the Jewish and Christian literature, not excluding the holy scriptures or semi-holy scriptures like the Talmud. What the Jews are doing in Palestine is the way of creating facts is motivated by this spirit.

The Jewish idea of chosenness infected Christianity. The word (testament) in the New Testament and the Old Testament means the same. It is a ‘covenant’, and as such it is analogous to the Jewish covenant with their god Jahveh, which emplies chosenness. Christian writers in speaking of the New Testament describe it as the second group of sacred writings in the Bible, the first group being the Jewish scripture. The religion of Israel is regarded as a covenant between Jahveh, the god of Israel, and his chosen people and in due time a new covenant was promised by the prophets. This promised covenant is a new chosenness to replace the old one, and hence the New Testament. The Christians are promised to be the new chosen people, and the promise is a confirmation of the Jewish divisiveness and a deepening of the split in human society.

The new covenant with the Christians was established by the life and death of Christ, and towards the end of the 2nd century a generally accepted collection of new scriptures, worthy of complemeting the Old Testament, was evolving. This merger was established by the Council of Carthage in 397, and Judeo-Christianity was thus confirmed.

The infection of chosenness spread in every direction in Christendom and in the church itself. The first Christian manifestation of chosenness was by dividing Christian society into clergy and laity, and dividing power or authority into spiritual and temporal, religious and secular. The split extended to those who were faithful and to those who were dissentours, especially the heretics. On the theological side, there arose heresies questioning the truth of certain assumptions in the creed about the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, notably the famous heresy of Arius (250 - 336) and the controversy about the Original Sin between St. Augustine (334-430) and Pelagius (360-420). The ecumenical councils, from the Council of Nicea (325), struggled to fix the creed and to create a new religion to be separated from Judaism and Judeo-Christianity. This aim was not achieved, for the new religion inherited the doctrine of chosenness. And when the papacy, the guardian of the new religion was firmly in the saddle by the end of the 5th century, the onslaught was turned against any group or individual who did not conform.

The Church itself was the first manifestation of the split inherent in the religious idea of “chosenness”. The Christian society was split into laity and clergy. The papacy was another split, dividing  allegiance between God and Mammon, and leading to the struggle between the Papacy on the one hand and kings, princes and emperors on the other. The Great Schism came to a head in 1054. The crusade now against the heretics, started about this time against the Waldensians, and against the infidels, Jews and Muslims. The Inquisition, to fight heresy, was established in 1232. The struggle between the Church and the Kings then followed, exemplified by the deposition of Henry I (1084) and the Papal captivity of Avignon (1309 - 1377). But in the meanwhile, reason which had been suppressed, reared its head, and intellectuals began to question the validity of many assumptions or creeds, by the Church. Even the Bible was not spared under the movement of modernism. The sixteenth century in Europe witnessed the intellectual revolution and the Protestant revolution, both of which started waves of unrest and series of bloody conflicts. The division was deepened along many lines.

Finally, Europe was falling apart in every way. There were splits in religion, culminating in the Protestant revolution which erupted in 1517.

It looked that the crumbling structures and the bitter conflicts had only one way out of the maelstrom, and that was to look for a common enemy, a gentile. The enemy was eventually found. It was in the newly discovered lands where there were gentile peoples to be conquered, despoiled of their property and proselytised. As gentiles, they were, as the Brobdingian said to the Lilliputian, fit only to be trampled on. The era of colonisation and systematic enslavement of gentile peoples began with a vengeance.

On the intellectual side. The divisive spirit continued to invade the human mind. Perhaps one or two examples might suffice. In philosophy, the question of Being and Becoming came to the fore with a new guise or, better, in two separate and sharply divided compartments. René Descartes (1596-1650), a churchman, came out with the dichotomy of mind and body on the human side and with the dichotomy of man (with a soul) and animal (without soul). This dualism was a new confirmation of the split, originated by Judaism, and was a distinct divisive mark of Western civilization. This was beneficial to science, but detrimental to human society. In this latter field there has been no room for hylozoism. The organic view of the universe, by the cyclic interplay of opposites, leading to unity, or of the principle that any pair of opposites is, in the last analysis, a unity. This is by the way, the Islamic unitive view, and as such it is, especially in the social context, diametrically opposed to the Judeo-Christian view.

On the animal side, Descartes was equally divisive. This is not to be wondered at. Judaism and Christianity, for instance, regard animals as mere things. Animal torture has been regarded by both Jews and Christians as something not to have qualms about. This is not what Islam says. Animals are creatures like us. Everything about animals flows from that. To see the contrast, one should read Salt’s book “Animals Rights”. In this book the Cartesian  doctrine on animals is stated to be that animals are devoid of consciousness and feeling, and that, in consequence, we have no duty towards them. This revolting, gross and barbarous doctrine is peculiar to the West and has its roots in Judaism. G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) said that “The man who breaks a cat’s back breaks a cat’s back; the man who breaks a man’s back breaks an implied treaty. The tyrant to animals is a tyrant. The tyrant to man is a traitor.” This saying is the root of all cruelty to animals, which is endemic to Western society. By the same token, perhaps, the negroes and the other gentile races may be regarded till now, along with cats, as mere things.

Cruelty to animals in the West has its roots in the Judaic attitude towards the gentiles who are regarded as next-door to animals. The persistence of cruelty to animals as well as to the gentiles, including negroes, Red Indians, Australian aborigines, Maoris and other colonial peoples is a blot on the so-called western civilization. The slave trade which extended from the 10th century to the beginning of the 19th is a worse blot. Slavery was a cruelty, and, in its present form is no less cruel. Neither this nor the other has abated, and even in these days cruelty to human beings and to animals is still in practice everywhere, and there are people who still die of hunger, of wars and disease. Animals are still being imprisoned in cages or zoological gardens, subjected to vivisection, shot at and killed, as pigeons in Spain, or hunted, as foxes in Britain, and fought, as bulls in Spain. The cult of cats as witches, and their association with black magic, brought butchery on them for centuries.

The history of Europe, roughly from the 4th century has been a scene of turmoil, characterised by a conflict of opposites, resulting from an undercurrent of divisiveness inherited from Judaism. Every movement, doctrine, creed or dogma had a counterpart, or an opposite. The Christian creed itself had many forms and heresies. There were schisms and splits, culminating first in the Great Schism. There were crusades, bloody struggle against secular rulers, and against free thought, together with conflict between religion and science, between the rich and the poor, between lords spiritual and lords temporal, between the aristocracy and the commonalty, between the intellectuals and the obscurantists, between the fundamentalists and the reformers, between the liberals and the conservatives, between the papacy and the emperial power, between the individual and the society, between conformity and nonconformity, between economic freedom and mercantalism, between credo and libido, between toleration and narrow-mindedness, between democracy and dictatorship, between liberty and colonization, between freedom and slavery, between the faithful and the infidels, between humanitarianism and inhumanity, between the chosen and the gentiles, etc. etc.

These pairs of opposites, characteristic of the Western civilization, based as it is on Judeo-Christianity, have had the effect of tearing the Judeo-Christian personality apart. The psychological tension in this personality throughout the years, has caused a split, a schezophrenia. This is why the West is schizophrenic, ambivalent, double-standarded, and discriminatory, even today, hypocrisy is the hallmark.

The policy of the West has been inspired with the spirit of divisiveness. It seems that the Western powers can only function within an atmosphere of tension. A tension to be relieved must need a discharge, either by war inside or by war outside, or above all by hypocrisy.

The war inside is that which is waged between parties of the same religion such as Catholic, Protestant or Greek Orthodox, or between parties of the same ethnic group. This has been the pattern of wars in the West. The wars outside has been between nations or peoples. This kind of war is made possible by the operation of the British system of divide and rule or by the United States system of creating hot spots all over the world, one of which is the Israeli-Arab hot spot.

What characterizes all these wars inside and outside is the brutal, general and wanton destruction of life, and the outspread devastation, with complete callousness and venomous disregard for mercy. The dropping of the atom bomb on Japan is a notorious and cold-blooded example. The West seems to be itching for such wars, egged on by the divisive spirit in their blood.

The Western powers do what is wrong, knowing it to be wrong and having no qualms about it, thinking that they will explain it away with their method of double-talk.