by Sujit Das
However pure Gandhi’s character may be, he must appear to me from the point of view of religion inferior to any Musalman, even though he is without character. Yes according to my religion and creed, I hold an adulterous and a fallen Musalman to be better than Mr. Gandhi. (Muhammad Ali, the Khilafat leader and a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi; cited Ralhan, 1998, p. 221).
Our Prophet gave to humanity a Charter of Human Rights fourteen centuries ago . (Muhammad Anwar in World Muslim Conference, 2004).
One of the most noticeable things about the Prophet Muhammad as described by the Koran is that he spoke of mercy for humankind . (Mohammad Ahmadullah Siddiqi, the founder of “Students Islamic Movement of India” after 2006 Mumbai bombing; cited Spencer, 2006, p. 183)
Don’t forget that killing [unbelievers] is also a form of mercy . (Khomeini; cited Bjorgo, 2005, p. 58)
All the above four speakers are looking at the outside world through the eyes of Muhammad. They simply do not realize how illogical their remarks are because they have lost their capacity to distinguish between reality and delusion. Like drug-addiction, they are addicted to Muhammad; they are codependent on Muhammad. While talking about the codependent-Narcissist relationship, Vaknin (cited Sina, 2008, p. 76) wrote, “ The inverted Narcissist can only truly FEEL anything when he is in relationship with another Narcissist. The inverted Narcissist is conditioned and programmed from the very beginning to be the perfect companion to the Narcissist – to feed their Ego, to be purely their extension, to seek only praise and adulation if it brings greater praise and adulation to the Narcissist .”
The inverted Narcissist makes excuses for his dependency on the Narcissist and fills in for him as necessary. Rappoport (2009) wrote, “ The Narcissist is on stage, performing, and needing attention, appreciation, support, praise, reassurance, and encouragement, and the co-Narcissist’s [inverted Narcissist] role is to provide these things … the co-Narcissist serves as the audience ”.
It explains perfectly why Muslims are addicted to Muhammad. They are all inverted Narcissists; they are so much dependent on Muhammad that they are ready to give any excuse to remain with him. Muslims feel insecure because they have not been valued for themselves, and have been valued by a malignant Narcissist only to the extent that they meet their Prophet’s needs. They develop their self concepts based on their Prophet’s treatment of them and therefore often have highly inaccurate ideas about who they are. Vaknin (2003) wrote,
To “qualify” as an inverted Narcissist, you must CRAVE to be in a relationship with a Narcissist, regardless of any abuse inflicted on you by him/her. You must ACTIVELY seek relationships with Narcissists and ONLY with Narcissists, no matter what your (bitter and traumatic) past experience has been. You must feel EMPTY and UNHAPPY in relationships with ANY OTHER kind of person. Only then, and if you satisfy the other diagnostic criteria of a Dependent Personality Disorder, can you be safely labeled an “inverted Narcissist”… This is a Narcissist who, in many respects, is the mirror image of the “classical” Narcissist .”
This is why a Muslim can neither confront the truth about Muhammad nor admit it to even himself. He needs Muhammad for his emotional gratification and the performance of his own false self or his daily function. Muslims are not only needy and submissive, but fear abandonment, cling and display immature behaviors in their effort to maintain the “relationship” with their Prophet. Islam had made the Muslims’ lives miserable, but no matter what abuse is inflicted upon them, they prefer to remain in the good-book of Muhammad. Without Muhammad they feel empty and unhappy. This is Stockholm syndrome – the hostages express empathy and have positive feelings towards the captors. It is really that painful to practice Islam. Vaknin continued,
These Narcissists [inverted Narcissists] are self-effacing, sensitive, emotionally fragile, sometimes socially phobic. They derive all their self-esteem and sense of self-worth from the outside, are pathologically envious (a transformation of aggression), are likely to intermittently engage in aggressive/violent behaviors .
The Inverted Narcissist is liable to react with rage whenever threatened, or when envious of other people’s achievements, their ability to feel wholeness, happiness, rewards and successes, when his sense of self-worthlessness is diminished by a behavior, a comment, an event, when his lack of self-worth and voided self-esteem is threatened. Thus, this type of Narcissist might surprisingly react violently or wrathfully to good things .
Can we agree that the general Muslim attitude is well-reflected in the above quotes of Vaknin? What other proof is required to show that Muslims are suffering from a mass personality disorder, and their personality had been occupied by Muhammad? The final outcome of this is that the Muslims have not been able to develop healthy means of self-expression and self-directedness. They are fully immersed in their own affairs with the total exclusion of others. They are unable to empathize with other’s experience and insist that their opinions and values are “right”, and they have a tendency to be easily offended and take things personally. Vaknin has some advice for the inverted Narcissists, which are equally applicable to the Muslims, “ Finally, and most important of all for the Inverted Narcissist: get to know yourself. What are you getting from the relationship? Are you actually a masochist? Why is this relationship attractive and interesting? Define for yourself what good and beneficial things you believe you are receiving in this relationship. Define the things that you find harmful to you. Develop strategies to minimize the harm to yourself ”.
[“Masochism” means; the deriving of sexual gratification, or the tendency to derive sexual gratification, from being physically or emotionally abused, the deriving of pleasure, or the tendency to derive pleasure, from being humiliated or mistreated, by another or, a willingness or tendency to subject oneself to unpleasant or trying experiences – Author]
When there is a lack of logical thinking, it is difficult to distinguish between falsehood and truth. Since truth cannot be changed, Muslims have to change their mindset to remain in the “logic-tight” compartment of Islam. Thus lying becomes a second nature, and a false self soon takes over. Muslims make themselves what they want to be and not what they actually are. The typical Muslim mindset is, “ I do not seek to understand in order to believe. I believe in order to understand. We should not aim to understand what we have believed after we are confirmed of our Islamic faith .” (Durant, 1950, p. 932, quote modified by present Author). With this mindset, a Muslim cannot think anything beyond Allah, Qur’an and Muhammad. He lives in a constant dream-like state. Smith (1981, p. 291) commented,
Muslims do not read the Qur’an to understand whether it is divine; rather, they believe it to be divine, and then they read it. This makes a great deal of difference, and I urge upon Christian and secular students of the Qur’an that if they wish to understand it as a religious document, they must approach it in this spirit. If an outsider picks up the book and goes through it even asking himself, ‘What is there here that has led Muslims to suppose this from God?’ he will miss the reverberating impact. If, on the other hand, he picks up the book and asks himself, what would these sentences convey to me if I believe them to be God’s word? Then he can much more effectively understand what has been happening these many centuries in the Muslim world.
Hasan Al-Banna, founder of Muslim Brotherhood, wrote in The Message of the Teachings (cited Husain, 2007, p. 52),
Allah is our goal.
The Prophet Muhammad is our leader.
The Qur’an is our constitution.
Jihad is our way.
And death in the way of Allah is our promised end .
In this situation, even if he spends his entire life studying Qur’an, ahadith and Muhammad’s biography, he will never detect a single error in the Qur’an though he will easily find similar type of errors in other scriptures. He will never notice that Muhammad was a criminal, a liar, a pedophile, a shameless womanizer, a mass-murderer and a ruthless tyrant, though minor character flaws of some Catholic
priests and their sex-scandals will never go unnoticed.
Even if the contradictions of the Qur’an, or Muhammad’s flawed character is pointed out, his sick mind will try to camouflage them. All the contradictions and errors will appear as clear proofs of its divinity. He will deceive himself into believing that non-Muslims either know that Islam is the truth and reject it out of pure unreasonableness or else are simply ignorant of it (Schuon, 1980, p. 56). This is how Muslim minds are groomed to become lifelong zombies that they cannot apply minimum logic and reason to discover the true nature of Islam. Their definitions of good and bad, right and wrong, and logical and illogical are reversed.
In extreme cases, Islam sucks away the brain of the Muslims. Two best examples are the well-known “flat earth” and “earth is motionless and sun revolves around the earth” fatwas from Ibn Baz, a noted Islamic scholar from Arabia. Also, another one is “Muslim woman to breast-feed her male colleague” fatwa by Izzat Attya from Al-Azhar. In 1993, Ibn Baaz declared “ The earth is flat. Whoever claims it is round is an atheist deserving of punishment.” (Reyes, 2010, p. 564). Ibn Baz disbelieved the news of the landing on the moon, and even suspected conspiracies behind the propagation of such falsehoods (AbuKhalil, 2002, p. 64). Previously, in 1966, this cleric wrote another quirky fatwa, “Sun goes around the earth and earth is motionless”. (Weston, 2008, p. 329). According to Izzat Attya (Olson, 2009, p. 97), it is legitimate for a working Muslim woman to breast-feed her male colleague to avoid the sin of khulwa (staying with a stranger in one room). We have seen the crippled thought patterns of Muslims in several other instances as well.
Muslim Ummah is such a sick society where parents celebrate publicly if their child had killed himself in a suicide mission along with many innocents. Often the death celebration is like a wedding ceremony where many friends and neighbors flock to the home. The parents of the deceased child distribute sweets with broad smile on their faces. The guests congratulate the joyful parents on the death of their child. Often the mother would ululate in joy over the death of her child (Hassan, 2001, p. 8; Farmer, 2007, p. 56). Parents and siblings often speak of their pride and honored by the society. As example, Umm Nidal, a Muslim mother whose only claim to fame was that she proudly sent three of her sons to die for Allah in terrorist attacks against Israeli targets. Umm is reported to have said (Spencer, 2005, p. 102), “ Because I love my son, I encouraged him to die a martyr’s death for the sake of Allah … jihad is a religious obligation incumbent upon us, and we must carry it out .” And elsewhere, “ I prayed from the depths of my heart that Allah would cause the success of his operation… I encouraged all my sons to die a martyr’s death, and I wish this even for myself ”. When the operation was over, the media broadcast the news and Umm Nidal was informed of her son’s death, she began to cry. Tears of joy rolled down from her eyes on her son’s death (MEMRI, 2002). In non-Muslim society, death celebration of own children is even reprehensible to think, because our society consists of highly protective child-centered households.
In Islam we see a totally different kind of guardianship that upsets us. A TV clip repeatedly calls on children, “Drop your toys, pick up rocks.” In a children’s club, a child singer sings “ When I wonder into Jerusalem, I will become a suicide bomber”. In one Islamic school, the words to a children’s song go (Pipes, 2004, p. 86), “ How pleasant is the smell of martyrs, how pleasant is the smell of land, the land enriched by the blood, the blood pouring out of a fresh body ”.
To find the root cause of Muslim’s death worshipping we must look at Hurd’s and Durkheim’s sociological theory. Hurd (1986, p. 202) agreed that there is a wide variety of ways of treating children in a society, ranging from neglect and selective infanticide in some societies, to the highly protective, child-centered households of modern Western societies. Though there is a physical dependence between a mother and her offspring, according to Hurd, maternal behavior is largely learnt from the customs, values and beliefs of the society. As this differs, the relations between mother and child also changes. It means; the customs, beliefs and ethical values of the Muslim society have a deep impact on how they treat their children.
Now let us look at Durkheim’s theory of “social integration” for further analysis of the matter. Social integration is the nature of social links which attach individuals to social groups outside themselves. As social animals, we cannot survive without social integration. According to Durkheim (1897, p. 209), the three groups that have the qualities of social integration are the family group, the religious group, and the political or national group. Out of these three groups, family is the basic unit of society and the most important primary group to humankind (Jayaram & Saberwal, 1996, p. 29). It is also the strongest one amongst all. The second is religious group. Durkheim’s take on religion and its origins was social, rather than divine. He explained religion as a structure that served the needs of society and thus the needs of people (cited Slutzky, 2006, p. 21). According to Durkheim, religious practices reinforce societal values. Religion serves as parts of an integrated whole to support each other, thereby strengthening the structure of society.
Though the word “family” has its origin in a Latin word which could be roughly equated a domestic group, for sociological purposes, family and domestic groups are sharply distinguished. A domestic group may be made of individuals between whom no kinship ties exist; but in a family, the members are either related by biological or legal kinship, or lawful sexual intercourse (Seals, 1968, p. 302). In a family, each member is expected to play a certain role which might change according to age. Here each member has some expectations from other members and from the family as a whole. Also the family itself has some expectations from each member. When everyone is playing their roles and all these expectations are fulfilled to a reasonable extent, the members are happy and this is what we call a happy family which is basic minimum requirement for a healthy society. Such a society is generally free from any religious fanaticism.
Now, let us look at Muslim societies. Throughout the history of Islam, Muslim families are often unhealthy and unhappy due to various reasons. Lack of education, poor work ethics, polygamy, concubinage, lack of finance, domestic violence, large families, slavery of women folks, child marriage, etc, make the families backward, unproductive and unhealthy. Since a family is the basic unit of society, conflict within the family has far reaching consequences for the wider social fabric.
A Muslim family is dominated by the male authority as prescribed and supported by Sharia law. It really develops a device where a family is under the private ownership of property of a male member. Even a modern individual Muslim family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife. An educated Muslim wife is nothing but a “darling little slave” and the married status permits the man to benefit from the fruits of woman’s work. Often coercion and domestic violence (psychological and physical) remain a method of resolving husband-wife differences (Jayaram & Saberwal, 1996, p. 101). Domestic violence is always directed towards women, sadly, not only by the husband (as prescribed in Qur’an 4.34) but by the son also. As example, in the poor Bangladeshi families, the wife is not allowed to eat unless her husband and son had full stomach food. If there is no food left, the wife does not eat. If there is not enough food, the woman is beaten up by her husband and even by her son (Allen & Thomas, 2000, p. 69). A report (Goodwin, 1994, p. 44) regarding the status of women in Pakistan concluded, “ The average women is born into near slavery, leads a life of drudgery, and dies invariably in oblivion.” The wife and mother definitely deserve a better respect.
Since the family group is at complete chaos, Muslims tend to be over-absorbed into the web of religious society. By this way they come within the strong grip of Islam. The Sharia law is the only guidance for them from cradle to grave. Through this unhealthy Sharia law Muhammad commands them from his grave in Allah’s name. It is like a mental slavery; the life of a Muslim is same as that of a prisoner. Islam had made Muslims’
lives so wretched that sometimes death becomes a blessed escape from Allah’s prison.
Under Sharia law, the individual Muslim ego is overwhelmed by the religious ego; own individual expression is not permitted. Muslims live in such a close proximity that their social customs and beliefs tend to be unified. When there is an over indulgence in religious beliefs (of any religion), the individual either becomes a saint or a Satan. Since Muhammad was a criminal and terrorist; incidents related to crime and terrorism are more common in Islamic society than any other society.
Pilon (cited Copi & Cohen, 1994, p. v) concluded, “ Civilized life depends upon the success of reason in social intercourse, the prevalence of logic over violence in interpersonal conflict”. We cannot see much success of reason in Muslim societies. Had we seen any success of reason in Muhammad and his early companions? They had resorted to violence even for a small conflict resolution. A Narcissist must appear flawless and always correct. To appear to have a fault would be unacceptable to his self-image. At any cost he cannot exhibit any weakness. For Muhammad any healthy criticism was highly upsetting.
For Muslims, everything is about this “grandiose self-image”. Muslim Ummah is a shame-based society whereas Western societies are guilt-based. In a guilt-based society children are taught to act rightly but in shame-based society children are taught to act honorably, and if they do not, feelings of shame are the proper response. There is no guilt in Muslims but a huge amount of shame. Shame and honor are positions in society, just as being right (and justified) is a position in the Western culture. Muslims live in a worldview where the predominant paradigm is shame versus honor. If the young people of Muslim society act shamefully, then the family or tribe will react against them. Shameful deeds are either covered up, and if they cannot be covered up, they are revenged.