Allah is Dead

Why Islam is Not a Religion

Rebecca Bynum

• Publisher: World Encounter Institute/New English Review Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780985439415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Many analysts have worked on the problem of Islam's political aspects, but few have tackled Islam philosophically as a whole. Rebecca Bynum does that. She discusses Islam and its status in the modern world with a depth and precision missing in many modern accounts and sadly concludes that the great hope of secularizing the Muslim world is a pipe dream. It is much more likely, according to Bynum, that the secular world will be Islamized. Overall, however, her analysis is hopeful and provides an important ideological tool for dealing with Islam which is to reconsider its classification. Bynum maintains Islam's current status as a religion, along with all the other religions of the world, is in error. She refers to Islam as the duck-billed platypus of belief systems and proposes it should be classified accordingly; as the hybrid religio-socio-political belief system it is. She also reminds the Western world about what religion itself actually is, not the caricature modern analysts often mean when they refer to "religious fundamentalisms." Bynum has given policy-makers a powerful tool for dealing with Islam. Let us hope they understand, and grasp, and choose to make use of it.

1) Form and Fetish

Perhaps never before in the history of the world has there been such a need to dissever living spiritual values from the dead forms, doctrine and dogmas in which they are now imprisoned, dogmas which may have smothered whatever original spiritual thought they may once have contained, dogmas which mistake conformity for righteousness, and living faith for the intellectual consent to believe in a doctrine. Islam, for all its faults, is certainly not the only belief system to make this mistake.

Islam does, however, exhibit a consistent tendency to elevate the material over the spiritual and it reduces spiritual reality to a doctrine alone, creating a closed system based in materialism. This system in turn serves to separate the individual from the world of value (the pursuit of value is the purpose of religion) and focuses his mind on the material world alone. An illustration of this is revealed in the attitude of a would-be female suicide bomber’s family interviewed by Kevin Toolis for England’s Channel 4:

“'If I had known what Ayat was planning I would have told the Jews. I would have stopped her,' said Ahmed Kmeil, her father.

'In our religion it is forbidden for a girl's body to be uncovered even at home. How could a girl allow her body to be smashed to pieces and then collected up by Jews? This is absolutely forbidden.'

Even Manal's family insisted that female suicide bombing is wrong. [Manal was the female recruiter.]

'With a man it's different. For us, a girl can't show her leg or wear a short T-shirt. How can you then be a good Muslim woman and expose your body to the world? What Manal was doing recruiting those girls was wrong,' said her mother Nadia Saba'na.

But what was shocking was none of the families of the would-be female suicide bombers expressed outrage about the innocent civilians their daughters would have killed. They did not seem to be particularly concerned about their daughter's death. What they were worried about was pieces of their daughter's body being exposed to strangers, or worse still, to Jews. They saw everything through this false prism of 'honour'.” 1

And so morality is reduced to a question of material purity. Jews and other infidels are considered to be “unclean” on the same level as urine and feces. If Jews collect the body parts they are thought to “defile” them. The greater moral level, the question of mass murder and suicide, which Westerners perceive at once, is denied to these people whose world view is focused on the material, the world of halal and haram, alone. Islam drives a wedge of materialism between the believer and the greater world of value and morality. Its God is dead.

The tendency toward goodness which we may refer to in general terms as the “will of God” can never be fully contained within a book, holy or otherwise, or within a code, honorable or not, or even within reason itself, for this tendency is a living, changing reality. It is dynamic and adaptive; sought, but never captured; experienced, but never completely known. Traditionally, the independent and transcendent values of truth, beauty and goodness formed the inner yardstick by which value has been measured in the outer world. Truth was the measure of a man, not visa versa.

Radical secularism has also elevated the material above the spiritual and according to this doctrine, man himself has become the measure of all things, and his reasoning power alone is thought to be sufficient in determining good and evil. Religion, when it is considered at all, is assumed to consist of interchangeable, comforting fairy tales essentially based on man’s own inherent goodness. The transcendental, far from being independent, is thought to be completely dependant upon man’s own sensibilities and judgment. The only comfort derived from religion is the thought that few really believe in it anyway. Traditional morality is thought, at best, to be an expression of some underlying hypocrisy.

By the light of this secularist viewpoint, modern man draws comfort by imagining himself at the pinnacle of human striving and also by imagining that progress is inevitable. Thus, we feel under no obligation to protect civilization, much less to define it in terms of transcendent value. In the secular world, it has also been thought safe to proclaim, “It doesn’t matter what you believe in.” Yet what a man believes determines his intention and a man’s intention is arguably the most important thing for others to know about him.

It is likewise a great mistake to interchange faith and religion semantically as is the current fashion. This leads to mistaking religious dogma for the living experience of faith and may compound the error by forcing uniformity in thought and action and, in the case of the Islamic creed, censoring and even seeking to erase individuality itself. Those who attempt to control faith by enclosing it in form and ritual, only succeed in stifling and eventually killing it, sometimes quickly, sometimes very slowly over centuries.

For example, we know that by the first century, after having existed for roughly two thousand years, Judaism had become moribund and its believers enslaved to tradition and ritual. In the intervening millennia, however, Judaism has evolved and adapted to modern society. Much of this flexibility is derived from a Rabbinic principle that has operated since roughly the year 226 AD known as Dina d’malchuta Dina: the law of the country is binding and, in cases of conflict, to be preferred to Jewish law. 2

Islam, though the youngest of the world’s major belief systems, is in much worse shape today. Islam is entirely regressive and is, in fact, steeped in fetishism and taboo, the oldest religious archetypes, as well as being dominated and defined by gross materialism.

Take for instance the Qur’an, which may well be considered a fetish book. It is revered not so much for any inspiration it may or may not contain, intended to ennoble the human heart and uplift human morality; rather, it is fetishized as an object. Its verses are considered sacred not on the basis of their power in leading men to goodness, for this outcome is debatable, but simply because they are part of a collective fetish. The value of the Qur’an is the Qur’an itself as a sacred object. Thus the notion of desecration becomes a sure cause for violence, while any expressed doubt by Muslims concerning the veracity of the Qur’an quickly rises to the notion of blasphemy, which under Islam is an offense punishable by death. Hope for reform of Islam in this situation is slender, not least because it would involve the destruction of the Qur’anic fetish, which is at the heart of the system of Islam. This is why the work of scholars like Ibn Warraq is so important; it aims at the de-sacralization of the Qur’an by placing it into its true historic context. The Bible, by contrast may be considered holy, but it is generally understood to be the product of history. It is not thought to contain all truth and has escaped crystallization as a fetish in the minds of believers, “word of God” appellation notwithstanding.

Consider also the black stone located in the Ka’aba in Mecca, which is another major focus of the Muslim religious impulse. This particular meteoric rock also rises to the status of fetish. Muslim prayers are directed toward it, and of course the prayers themselves are fixed forms. Individuality is quashed even during what in the West is considered that most personal of acts; the act of prayer. Neither can it be insignificant that Muslim prayers are literally directed toward a material object.

Islam is set squarely in opposition to living, changing, intangible reality and is also overwhelmingly hostile to natural human affections, for at bottom, it denies the value of love. For Muslims, Islam itself is the highest value, love is hardly considered; and much less consideration is given to the concepts of truth, beauty and goodness which, as transcendent values, are quite simply absent from the Islamic theological scene. By Islam, these values are either ignored or explicitly denied. Though, when pressed, Muslims will tell you all truth is contained within the Qur’an and even, incredibly, that there is no truth outside it. Therefore, it is accurate to say, Islam is a belief system that denies the reality of spirit for Islam recognizes no value higher than itself.

The focus of Islam is entirely upon the material world. It’s notions of pure and impure are expressly material as is its concept of religious sovereignty. Islamic sovereignty is territorial sovereignty, not the sovereignty of the spirit over the hearts of men. Islam is totally tied to territorial expansion – the spread of Islamic law – “God’s law” over God’s land and over the people inhabiting that land who are forced to submit to Islam in a purely material way. Islam is concerned only with the bodies, not the souls of human beings, with literal not spiritual bread. By controlling the minds of men, Islam gains control over their bodies and it does this in order to create the “perfect” society. Human souls are left to languish in this prison of mental bars. Skeptical inquiry is dampened because Islam surrounds and impinges on all subjects, thus, freedom of thought is gradually extinguished in order for Islamic righteousness, defined purely as conformity to Islam, to prevail. Individual self-expression, self-realization and self-awareness are bound on every side.

True righteousness, on the other hand, righteousness that is not coerced, naturally results from loving one’s neighbors, “as oneself” as the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches. Here, the emphasis is on the individual not the group, and the will of the individual to love God with all his heart and mind as prerequisite, makes the individual will, not a set of codes of conduct, the ultimate determining factor in what is considered to be righteous conduct. Furthermore, individual acceptance of divine love reorients the person as a “child of God” and thus he becomes obligated to love other men as his brothers in the spiritual sense. But always the onus is on the individual who is free to discover goodness, truth and beauty (God’s will) for himself, even if it contradicts the teachings of the dominant religious authority of the day.

If the supreme relationship is between the individual and a livin...