by Sujit Das
Muhammad had used the same method of projection on his followers to secure their confidence. He was illiterate. To hide his own inferiority and to inflate his false self, Muhammad declared himself the guardian of illiterates sent by Allah (Bukhari: 3.34.335). According to him, Allah loves illiterate people and hates educated people and Allah had promised the first entry to paradise to the illiterate Muslims and the last entry to the educated Muslims (Sunaan Ibn Majah: 5.4290). By this way Muhammad not only glorified his shortcoming but projected it towards his followers. Qur’an says,
Those who follow the Apostle, the unlettered Prophet, whom they find mentioned in their own (Scriptures), in the Law and the Gospel … so believe in God and his Apostle, the unlettered Prophet. (Q: 7.157, 158).
The message of holy illiteracy served three purposes for Muhammad. First; since Muhammad was a fraud and he could prosper only through deception, he had encouraged Muslims to hate and have contempt for knowledge, which in turn secured the survival of Islam. Illiterate people can be fooled more easily. Second; when Muhammad declared himself a guardian of the illiterates, his followers felt a better emotional bond with him. Muhammad became the “dearest” of his followers as if all Muslims were his own people and Muhammad was one of them. Allah has sent an illiterate man to guide the illiterates. It boosted up the confidence of the slaves and stray youth who were his early followers. Third; since Allah likes illiteracy, therefore illiteracy must be godly. In simple words, Muhammad used his shortcoming as an advantage. This is a manipulation through projection.
Muhammad’s declaration of holy illiteracy as Allah’s preference had a terrible influence on the Muslims. As example; Akbar, the Mughal emperor of India was an illiterate, and surprisingly, it was not a shame for him but a pride. This stupid Muslim emperor, in his own eyes, had one qualification to be a Prophet. “The Prophets were all illiterates”, he used to point out frequently and sincerely believed that, in order to honor their Prophet, it is the essential duty for every faithful Muslim to keep one of their sons illiterate (Eraly, 1997, p. 909). This shows how much Muhammad’s method of projection had worked on the Muslims.
Muhammad used method of projection to impose Arab supremacy on the non-Arab Muslims. It should be rightly termed as racism. Few quotes from Islamic sources (cited Shaikh, 1995, pp. 29, 30, 32) are as below,
1. He, who aggresses against Arabia, shall not win Muhammad’s love, nor will he intercede for him.
2. Muhammad told Suleiman Farsi, a freed Persian slave who fought for Islam, “ If you bear a grudge against Arabia, you bear grudge against me”.
3. The Quraysh are the rulers of men in vice and virtue until the Day of Judgment.
4. The right to rule (Caliphate) shall belong to Quraysh, even if two men existed.
Muhammad even wanted his followers to look culturally different from the nonbelievers.
1. When the Prophet saw Abdullah bin Amr as wearing clothes dyed in saffron (during that time, a significant number of Hindus settled in Mecca), he forbade them to wear that on the ground that such cloths were worn by the nonbelievers.
2. The Prophet said, “The Jews and the Christians do not dye (grey) their hair, so you should do the opposite what they do.”
3. Arabic is the most sacred language for a Muslim, more than his own mother-tongue.
Muhammad projected Mecca, his home place.
O Mecca, by Allah, you are better than any part of the earth and dearer to me than the rest of the world. The Mecca is the best place and dearer than any other place. Had my Nation not driven me out, I would not have lived in another place.
And, ultimately Muhammad declared,
No person attains faith till I am dear to him than the persons of his household, his wealth and the whole of his mankind . (Muslim: 1.70)
Now let us see what the outcome of these deceitful manipulative games is. Since none can enter paradise without Muhammad’s intercession, the believers find it absolutely necessary to follow the Prophet in every detail with utmost sincerity. As Shaikh (1995, pp. 43-4) wrote, “ The faith has come to mean, not only to pray, fast and perform Hajj, the way the Prophet used to do, but also look like him, that is cut hair like him, wear cloths like him, walk like him, talk like him, sleep like him, eat like him, adopt his manners and above all, love and hate what he loved and hated ”. Imitation is the worst kind of flattery.
Muhammad’s method of projection works so much on the Muslims that they willingly and submissively self-denigrate to become a partner in his narcissistic game. It has a devastating effect on the national character of the non-Arab Muslims. When a non-Arab person accepts Islam, he is forced to love Arabia and its traditions at the expense of the culture, honor and pride of his own motherland. Mecca is now more favorite than his birthplace and Arabic more than his mother-tongue. Since Muhammad hated the infidels, a non-Arab Muslim must hate his own people of his own nation who are following the faith of their ancestors. In fact, the non-Arab Muslims have to hate their own forefathers to love and glorify the Arab heroes. The Pakistani, Afghan, Bangladeshi and Indian Muslims have immense hate for their Hindu counterpart. Can they deny the fact that their forefathers were forced to accept Islam under sword and through deception? Every Asian Muslim is a blood relative in the direct line of descent of Hindu parents. But they have to “sincerely” hate the Hindus to remain in the good-book of Muhammad. In Egypt, the glorious land of ancient Pharaohs, no one call themselves Egyptians any more. All of them had become Arabs. Muhammad’s deceptive game of projection worked on them and changed their worldview. Naipaul (1998, pp. 1, 72) wrote,
Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own: he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are.
The sacred Arab places have to be the sacred places of all the converted peoples. They have to strip themselves of their past; of converted peoples nothing is required but the purest faith (if such a thing can be arrived at), Islam, submission. It is the most uncompromising type of imperialism.
Slowly, a non-Arab Muslim becomes a cultural refugee in his own country because he does not have any real love, respect or loyalty for his own motherland and ancestors as we notice in almost all the Indian Muslims. After being completely devoid of National honor, slowly these rootless Muslims develop a strong slave mentality for the Arabs, because whatever they think or do must conform to the patterns of thinking and doing set by the Arabian soil and culture. This type of self-contradiction is not there in any other religion.
6.7.7: Alienation from an Individual’s Own Powers
Islam is an authoritative religion. In this religion, man is controlled by a higher power. Allah is entitled to obedience, reverence and worship. But the reason for worship, reverence and obedience lies not in the moral qualities of the deity, not in love or justice, but in the fact that the deity has control, i.e., has power over man. Allah, the higher power, has the right to force man to worship Him and that lack of reverence and obedience constitutes sin. Therefore Allah is the sole possessor of what was originally man’s. The more perfect Allah becomes, the more imperfect becomes the man. A Muslim projects the best he has unto Allah and thus impoverishes himself. Now, Allah has all love, all wisdom and all justice. Man is deprived of these qualities; he is now empty, poor, completely powerless and weak and pathetic. Ultimately the man is alienated from himself. His only access to himself is through Allah. Having lost his own he is completely at Allah’s mercy. This mechanism is the very same which can be observed in interpersonal relationships of a masochistic, submissive character where one person is awed by another and attributes his own powers and aspi
rations to the other person. The alienation from his own powers makes the Muslim slavishly dependent on Allah. Slowly he becomes a man without self-confidence. That is why everything is Insha’Allah (if Allah wills it – fatalism)for a Muslim. His religious experience is always authoritarian, never blissful.
Deprived of everything, such a person’s only hope is Muhammad. Only through Muhammad, a Muslim can beg Allah to return some of his humanity and for this the Muslim is ready to reserve his full life for Islam. He always feels himself to be a sinner (living without humanity is sinful). The more he praises Allah, the emptier he becomes. The emptier he becomes, the more sinful he feels. The more sinful he feels, the more he praises Allah – and less he is able to regain himself. The less he is able to regain himself, the more he comes within the evil grip of Muhammad. This is the same mechanism that makes people endow the leaders of even the most inhuman systems with qualities of super wisdom and kindness. Whether the people worship a punishing, awesome God or a similarly conceived leader makes little difference.
6.7.8: Introducing Errors in the Thought Process
Probably the most important cause humans differ from animals is that the humans are able to use information to reason and solve problems even when the information is partial or unavailable, as Descartes said, “Cogito ergo sum” – I think therefore I am (Evans, 1984, p. 18). Reasoning is the process by which we use the knowledge we have to draw conclusions or infer something we know about the domain of interest.
Reason and freedom are interdependent. If everything is Insha’Allah or God willing, then why we need to use our thinking capability? If there is no drive for progress in a human, mind stagnates. Once the mind rebels at stagnation, the man loses the capacity to make sense of things, to establish and verify facts and to change or justify practices, institutions and beliefs. This is the time various thinking errors creep in the mind and ultimately the mind becomes dysfunctional.
Muhammad infused this Insha’Allah very skillfully in the thought process of his followers to make it dysfunctional. He taught his followers that they should shun everything that is opposed to Islam. Islam is the only belief system where the followers do not aspire for freedom because the clerics tell their victims that it is the will of Allah. This is why there will never be true democracy in the Muslim world. Muslims’ mental slavery to their Narcissist Prophet starts from this dysfunctional thinking process. Few examples of dysfunctional thinking are as below,
1. Polarized or all-or-nothing thinking (seeing things in black-and-white categories) – dar-ul-Islam and dar-ul-harb, believers and nonbelievers, Muslims and non-Muslims, paradise and hell.
2. Catastrophic thinking (delusional anxieties by thinking about irrational worst-case outcomes) – Jews and Christians are secretly conspiring to destroy Islam, Jews are controlling the world economy.
3. Discounting the positive, accentuate the negative – all the non-Muslims are enemies of Muslims, no infidel can be trusted as a friend.
4. Overgeneralization (making sweeping negative conclusions) – vilest creatures in Allah’s sight are Jews and Christians.
5. Labeling (An extreme form of over generalization) – Jews are pigs, Christians are rats, put a global label on nonbelievers as Kafirs.
6. Mind reading – Muslims know that the non-Muslims are always opposing Islam and behaving negatively because of Islam, Allah is the best plotter.
7. The Fortune Teller Error (you anticipate something will happen and are convinced your prediction is already sealed) – Allah will destroy all the infidels, paradise for Muslims and hellfire for nonbelievers.
8. Mental filter and Tunnel vision (only see things in the Islamic way) – Qur’an is the only truth, Islam is the only perfect religion and all other religions and competing philosophies are false, Islam has perfect answers for science, politics, government, economics, psychosocial problems and human life.
9. Personalization (see oneself as the cause of some negative event when in reality he had little connection with it) – Israel exists on one tiny piece of land surrounded by much larger Arab nations such as Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt. In spite of this, the Arabs were repeatedly defeated by the Israeli Jews. Because of this many non-Arab countries have made Jew-bashing as the cornerstone of their foreign policy with a view to winning the Arab sympathy.
When the thought process is dysfunctional, the followers are ready to believe anything what their leader would say. Without realizing, the victims just give up their own rights and allow themselves to be directed by the Narcissist leader.
6.8: Who Benefited from Islam?
Muslim scholars and sympathizers often portray Muhammad as a poor man who led a very simplistic life and dedicated his life for the service of God and society. But this is an absolute falsehood; during his prophetic career, Muhammad gathered a vast wealth for himself and at the time of his death he was one richest man in Arabia. He was not shy to admit that he loved money,
Narrated by Abu Huraira; Allah’s Apostle said; I have been made victorious with terror (cast in the hearts of the enemy). The treasures of the world were brought to me and put in my hand. (Bukhari: 4.52.220)
Terror was Muhammad’s legacy and one of his strongest motivations was money. Another motivation was sex with captured women.
Narrated by ‘Adi bin Hatim; …. the Prophet further said, ‘If you live long enough the treasures of Khosrau will be opened and taken as spoils. You will carry out handfuls of gold and silver’ . (Bukhari: 4.56.793)
Narrated by ‘Uqba bin ‘Amr; the Prophet said, ‘I have been given the keys of the treasures of the world by Allah’. (Bukhari: 4.56.795)
Ali [Muhammad’s adopted son, son-in-law, and future Caliph] said, ‘Prophet, women are plentiful. You can get a replacement, easily changing one for another. ‘ (Tabari: VIII.62; Ishaq: 496).
The simple reason Muhammad could not be poor is that he maintained a large family. We cannot say exactly, how many times he married, but it is generally agreed that at one stage he had at least nine wives. Marriages were costly social activities during those days as it is today. When Muhammad married his daughter-in-law, Zaynab, it is recorded that he celebrated for a week; hundreds of goats were slaughtered to provide lavish meals for the residents of Medina (Bukhari: 6.60.314-7; 7.62.84, 92, 95, 97, 99, 100). Throwing such a lavish party for a week for the entire population of Medina can hardly be called a simplistic life style. Today only millionaires can provide such party.
Secondly, marrying multiple wives was a sign of wealth in Saudi Arabia and still so in these days. As example, king ‘Abd al-‘Aziz of Arabia had 300 wives. (Pipes, 1983, p. 180). Each of Muhammad’s wives had her own house independent of another, maids and slaves to look after them. This is one example of his “simplistic” life style. Also, he had a good number of slaves, servants, slave girls, personal assistants, and bodyguards. Then there were many mules, horses, donkeys, goats and camels stolen and looted from others. Such a man could be anything but a poor or simple man.
Muhammad used to take one-fifth share of the booty in Allah’s name which obviously became his wealth at the end. The amount of wealth he gathered from his raids was not small. After the battle of Hunayn (February 1, 630), Muslims captured 24,000 camels, 40,000 sheep and goats, 4,000 ounces of silver and 6,000 prisoners. They were removed to the neighboring valley of Al-jirana and sheltered there (Shaikh, 1999, p. 20). Ishaq recorded,
The Apostle held a large number of captives. There were 6,000 women and children prisoners. He had captured so many sheep and camels they could not be counted . (Ishaq: 592)
In another expedition, Muhammad suddenly attacked Banu Mustaliq without warning while they were heedless and their cattle were being watered at nearby places. Their fighting men were killed and their women and children were taken as captives (Bukhari: 3.46.717). In this war (cited Sina, 2008, p. 34), “600 were taken prisoners by the Muslims. Among the booty there were 2,000 camels and 5,000 goats”. Now, one-fifth of this amount Muhammad
earned from this battle alone. Considering the number of battles he fought in his lifetime and countless number of women and children he captured as slaves; no doubt he died as one of the richest man of Arabia.
After the Khaybar massacre, Muhammad subdued the Jews of Fadak and took half of their land. This half land of the entire city was his personal property. But the sad part is that, even after earning so much by plundering, Muhammad was not satisfied. His greed increased with his age. When he became de facto ruler of Arabia, many Muslim noblemen used to visit him for advice. Muhammad found a good opportunity to make a profit. Allah, through a timely revelation, prescribed certain amount of money to be paid to the Prophet by anyone who wanted to meet and talk to him and the payment should be made before the consultation.
O you who believe! When you consult the Messenger, then offer something in charity before your consultation; that is better for you and purer; but if you do not find, then surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful . (Q: 58.12)
By seeing the greed of Muhammad, the visitors preferred to stay away from him. This frustrated Muhammad and the next verse was revealed.
Is it that ye are afraid of spending sums in charity before your private consultation (with him)? If, then, ye do not so, and Allah forgives you, then (at least) establish regular prayer; practice regular charity; and obey Allah and His Messenger. And Allah is well-acquainted with all that ye do . (Q: 58.13)
In another verse Allah addresses His messenger directly and orders him to take alms from the wealthy Muslims, in order to purify and pardon them.
Take alms out of their property, you would cleanse them and purify them thereby, and pray for them; surely your prayer is a relief to them; and Allah is Hearing, Knowing. (Q: 9.103)
Narcissists are “interpersonally exploitative”, i.e., they use others to achieve their own ends. Muhammad never put his life in danger by fighting a battle. But when it was time for collecting booty or women, he was well ahead of others. His followers died happily for his cause. They thought they were fighting for Allah’s cause, but actually they laid down their lives to fulfill the narcissistic desires of Muhammad. They buried their intelligence in Muhammad’s cult and allowed the bloodthirsty Muhammad to have the last laugh.