by Sujit Das
Poet Tagore dreamed of such a society which would be based on truth and knowledge. He inspired people through his poetry to create a freethinking, united and dynamic nation. Today not only many common Muslims, but preachers, mullahs, imams, scholars, missionaries and even terrorists have apostatized. All of them say that there is better life after apostasy. Many have taken it upon themselves to oppose the Islamic ideology and have become celebrities in their own right. They know the true nature and spiritual bankruptcy of Islam. These former Muslims from all parts of the Islamic world become a torch of guidance to their fellow brethren and give a courageous signal to other Muslims to speak out.
When non-Muslims speak their minds out about the fundamental questions of Islam, their influence on Muslim audiences will always be much more limited than the ex-Muslims because the Muslims spontaneously will bring up the subject of the relative superiority of one religion vis-à-vis another. But this scope is not there when ex-Muslims criticize Islam. Finally, these enlightened ex-Muslims will do the job of opening the exit gate from Islam for their Muslim-born brothers and sisters.
8.7: Conclusion
“ Sometimes doubts can do good in us. It can purify false beliefs that have crept into our faith. It can humble our arrogance. It can give us patience and compassion with other doubters. It can remind us how much truth matters ”.
John Ortberg (2008, p. 122)
“ There is a difference between yearning to find the truth and yearning to believe. The first is objective. You empty your mind from all preconceived ideas and prepare yourself to find things that may be contrary to your belief. The other is when you try desperately to validate what you already believe ”.
Ali Sina
Islam is an extremely defenseless religion and hence vulnerable to collapse. “Defenseless” in the sense, there is not a single atom of truth in it to support. This failed religion, originated from the grand delusion of a malignant Narcissist, is the biggest hoax humanity has ever seen. It is like a house of cards – looks tall, big, mighty and gigantic but the base is very weak. Sina (2008, pp. iv, 260) wrote,
Islam stands on a very shaky ground. It rests on nothing but lies. All we have to do to demolish it is to expose those lies and this gigantic edifice of terror and deception will collapse .
Islam is like a house of cards, sustained by lies. All it takes to demolish is to challenge one of those lies holding it together. It is a tall building, erected on quicksand; once you expose its foundation, the sand will wash away and this mighty edifice will fall under its own weight.
As Vaknin (1999, p. 316) wrote, “ Narcissism is an eggshell, apparently solid, really very fragile. It is fragile because it bases itself on falsehoods”. The day when criticism will have dismantled piece by piece this enormous falsehood of Islam, the whole edifice will come crumbling down. Then the Muslims will ask themselves how this enormous falsehood could have forced acceptance for such a long time. I can already see some cracks in this gigantic structure.
This is not a wishful thinking. If we look at the history we will find that Communist empire collapsed when the truths about the Bolsheviks were exposed. Bolsheviks first came to power in 1917. After the defeat of Nazism in 1945, the Soviet Union extended its reaches into Eastern Europe. Its revolutionary message appealed to China, and Mao led the Chinese Communist Party to victory in 1949. Communism spread rapidly to Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba and Ethiopia, and was also predicted to engulf Iran (Tudeh Party is an Iranian Communist Party) and India (Communist principles were institutionalized into Indian government and adopted in government policy). At one stage, say around 1960, communism looked like the future of the world as Islam looks today. The Soviet empire already ruled over the Eastern half of Europe and its friends ruled the largest country in Asia.
But in spite of such a promising growth, the unnoticing fall of communism started soon after 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev who had inherited Stalin’s post as general secretary of the Communist Party told the world how cruel and arbitrary Stalin’s rule had been, and how many people had perished. Most of the victims of Stalin were loyal citizens of the Soviet Union and many of them were Bolsheviks (Desai, 2007, p. 15). The destruction of the Berlin wall signaled the end, at least in Europe. In 1989, the Communist empire in Eastern Europe and in 1991, the USSR itself, collapsed.
Islam maintained itself for over fourteen centuries because the basic tenets of Islam were not critically analyzed. Whoever tried had lost his life or imprisoned. But the recent developments in communications technology, particularly satellite television and the Internet in even the remotest harems of Islamic Nations, is profoundly altering the mental climate in the Muslim world. These criticisms are working and will continue to work as therapy for them. Islam is going to face the same fate like communism unless there is a Third World War. In this case Islam will be wiped out like Hitler and his Nazi party. But it is a mathematical certainty that Islam will collapse. Its days are numbered.
Chapter 9: Final Assessment of Muhammad
“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important.”
T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)
“The way [in order] to see by faith, one has to shut the eye of reason.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)
Every society produces evil people who look for opportunities in religious sentiments of the mass by posing as god-man or so-called Prophets. These god-men use religion to control men’s lives so that they can attain power and prosper. For this, they create perverse and deceitful doctrines to force their authority on others in the name of a God suitable to their purpose. These Prophets are the real devils, who use religion to deceive humankind. They separate us from the real God of human race, our real Creator. The deception, death, and damnation of men are these devils’ life ambition. Muhammad was such a vulgar imposter in a divine robe.
Muhammad had a totally upside down worldview. He equated love with weakness and feared intimacy. In fact, narcissism and intimacy problems are practically synonymous (Masterson, 1990, p. 122). He inflicted pain and abuse on others as his second nature. He was unable to give his followers a reason to live, so he gave them enough reasons to die – die in Allah’s name to enter paradise. He could not convince the Arabs to choose his religion based upon its merits, so he threatened them with damnation. And the religion he preached was more about fantasy less about proof. Any person who, among other atrocities, orders and watches 800 innocent people beheaded and beds the wife of a man whom he had tortured to death that very night cannot be considered psychologically normal. Common sense alone tells us that a fifty-one years old man, who marries a six year old girl, is abnormal. The notion that a godly revelation would focus on the sexual desires of a lecherous man is really disgusting. No religion in the world has ever destroyed family ties as Muhammad has done in Islam. Since the leader was a fake, his promises were also not genuine. If we remove all the immoral, illogical, hateful, and violent verses from the Qur’an, we will be left with an odd collection of plagiarized and twisted Bible stories and meaningless gibberish of a mentally deranged person.
Religion was just a cause for Muhammad. Like Narcissus of Greek mythology, Muhammad actually worshipped his own image – not God. He created a God in his own image and attributed to that God the qualities of his own self. Allah was a plastic entity that Muhammad shaped to meet his needs. That is why Allah seems a multidimensional entity in the Qur’an, an obedient servant that Muhammad used for any occasion from managing the harem affairs of his wives to swearing to punish mercilessly whosoever disagrees with His beloved messenger. For a Narcissist, the cause of God is not really that important. It is an excuse, a tool for domination to extract narcissistic supplies. For Stalin the excuse was communism, for Mussolini it was fascism, for Hitler National Socialism and for Muhammad it was religion. The more they glorify these causes, the more they get power for themselves. In his religious endeavor, Muhammad made mistakes and was defeated many times, but he did not
give up. He corrected himself and moved ahead by abrogating verses with suitable additions. No one can deny that on several occasions he intentionally did harm knowing perfectly well that he was obeying his own will and not an inspiration from God. He talked much about paradise, hell, virtue and sin; but his actions did not show that he had really believed whatever he was saying. He lied on several occasions and encouraged lying to propagate his religion. No doubt, Muhammad had mastered the art of deception. He never gave a second thought to compromise morality for political gain. In his mind there was no other determinant. So he raged when confronted with disagreement or opposition, or, anything that threatened his worldview.
He valued people when he found that they could advance his religion but devalued them at the next moment if they did not comply with his whims and wishes. He treated people around him as lifeless objects, and manipulated his followers so cunningly as if he had conquered them, “chained” them, conditioned them and moulded them. He exploited people as if he “knew” that he could do anything he wanted them to do. This magical thinking made him extremely reckless, violent and adventurous. He was so convinced of his mission that he was genuinely surprised and devastated when he failed. When he failed he felt empty and worthless. And every minor success in his cause elevated him from the low of misery to the heights of extreme joy. Throughout his prophetic endeavor, he derived his self-worth from people around him, as if he would collapse and self-annihilate without them.
Muhammad obsessively believed in his own infallibility, brilliance, heroism, and perfection. He gave the Qur’an as the only evidence of his prophethood. At the same time deep inside in his mind he knew that unlike the Biblical Prophets he could not perform miracles. He knew that his Qur’an could not stand criticism. He knew that his religion could not be morally and spiritually at par with other established religions of Arabia, like, Christianity and Judaism; but he did not dare confront the truth. In fact he even could not admit the truth to himself. He only imagined that he was on a divine mission, a messenger of Allah. This is how he failed the “reality test” – he was simply unable to distinguish the actual (external world) from the imagined (the internal world of thoughts and feelings) by making logical analysis of the religion he was preaching or allowing others to do this. For him the reality became shadow and the shadow became reality.
Muhammad was not capable of introspection, i.e., he was not capable to judge his actions from the outside. His critics made him realize that there was a “grandiosity gap” (between his self-image and reality) which made him helpless. Since he could not win in a scholarly debate with the critics, he deceitfully got them assassinated. This was his only way to deal with all his intellectual opponents.
Muhammad considered himself entitled to special amenities and benefits. Though he was the founder of Islam, he exempted himself from the rules that he himself established; he felt that he was above any kind of law. His sense of entitlement coupled with the incredible belief of his own superiority lead him to believe in his invincibility, invulnerability, immunity, and divinity. He dared to hold human edicts, rules, and regulations and human penalties in disdain, and regarded human needs and emotions as weaknesses to be predatorily exploited.
Critics often ask one question; was Muhammad a knowing fraud or he genuinely believed that the revelations were coming from a God? No matter whatever is the truth, it simply does not make much sense. Even if he was sincere, it does not relieve him from the criminal charges that are put on him. If a racially prejudiced white man “sincerely” believes that blacks should not get equal rights in the civilized society, his “sincerity” does not affect our moral condemnation of his belief. For the same reason we condemn those Hindus who still believe in untouchability. In the same way, Muhammad cannot get away in any case. If he was not a knowing fraud, then we can say that he was capable of self-deception. He used to bring messages freely from his God to justify political murders, assassinations, raid, booty, pedophilia, abundant sex even to solve his domestic problems which are clear evidences that he was an absolute fake; his sincerity means nothing. Secondly, he was perfectly capable of distinguishing right from wrong and anticipating the results of his actions and their influence on the society. Though he caused great misery to others, he hardly felt responsible for them. Therefore, he should be held liable for his deeds and exploits. As Vaknin (1999, p. 67) commented, “ A person suffering from NPD must be subjected to the same moral treatment and judgment as the rest of us, the less privileged, are. The courts do not recognize NPD to be a mitigating circumstance – why should we? ”
Muhammad never asked anyone to compile Allah’s revelations in a book. Literally, thousand times he said “fear me, obey me, fear Allah, obey Allah”, but there was not one “write for me” or “write for Allah”. He knew if revelations were written down, it would be a bit difficult to abrogate them in the future, if required. Secondly, Qur’an was revealed to serve his selfish interests and that it would be of no value once he is no more.
Muhammad’s actions and commands in Allah’s name are immortalized in Qur’an and Hadith collections. These are not only shocking in the standard of our time, but many Meccans during those days were equally shocked by seeing his brutal performance in the name of God. Muhammad succeeded in his prophetic mission because there was no powerful Government to stop him. If Muhammad had been living under Roman rule, surely his mission would have resulted in losing his life and his religion would have been stamped out by strong military action.
A short before the coming of Muhammad, Arabia had become permeated with new ideas of religion, both from Jewish and Christian sources, but mostly from the Christian sources. Paganism was slowly decaying out. A group of people rejected paganism and to fulfill their spiritual needs they looked for an alternative religion. They were known as Hanifites or simply as Hanifs. So Arabia was a fertile ground for a new religion to born. Muhammad was deeply influenced by these Hanifs. If Muhammad had never been born or never had been successful to establish his religion, then perhaps a different Prophet would have taken his place. Probably the new Prophet might have consolidated the Byzantine kingdom and would have fought off the desert Arab tribes successfully. In that case Arabia would have been converted to Christianity.
Probably, the most terrible legacy of Muhammad was his rigid firmness that the Qur’anic revelations were the literal word of God and the significance of these verses are eternal. The irony is that in the entire history of Islam, Qur’an fails to give one solid argument at its favor that cannot be successfully refuted. A nation might read the Qur’an and explain minutely every word for centuries without advancing one step on the road to progress. In the tiresome repetition of the mindless blabbering of a mentally deranged illiterate person; the human mind loses its elasticity, its sagacity, its constructivism and its curiosity. Through Freudian analysis, it can be shown that the prohibition of critical thinking at one point leads to an impoverishment of a person’s critical ability in other spheres of thought and thereby obstructs the power of reason (Fromm, 1978, p. 12). Consequently, the intellect becomes atrophied and incapable of an original effort. This is the cause of intellectual bankruptcy of the Muslim nations. As O’Brien (cited Armstrong, 2006, p. 43) concluded, “ Muslim society looks profoundly repulsive … It looks repulsive because it is repulsive … A Westerner who claims to admire Muslim society, while still adhering to Western values, is either a hypocrite or an ignoramus or a bit of both … Arab society is sick, and has been sick for a long time. In the last century, the Arab thinker Jamal al-Afghani wrote, ‘Every Muslim is sick, and his only remedy is the Koran’. Unfortunately, the sickness gets worse the more the remedy is taken. ” Also, Muhammad declared that he was the last Prophet of God. This way, Muhammad not only closed all the possibilities of new intellectual thoughts and freedom of ideas, but practically eliminated any chance of reformation of Islam.
The self-serving messages of an illiterate seventh century malignant Narcissist passed down to the Mu
slims generation after generation as unquestionable word of Allah, and as time passed, men were found to take up these words and make them into weapons to cause injustice, oppression, domination, and for conversion by force. Islam is a bankrupt ideology from the standpoint of humanism. The early Arab invaders were no way better than controlled mass-murderers. They were hard-wired to cheat, kill and loot, and had transformed Islam from a religion into an organized crime. In general, they were brainwashed by Muhammad’s teaching to inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse. The formula of the spread of Islam is simple,
1. Use lies and brainwashing to create an army of controlled, highly motivated mass-murderers.
2. Use that army to enslave large numbers of people (i.e., seize control of their labor power and its fruits).
3. Use that slave labor power to improve the brainwashing process (by using the economic surplus to employ scribes, preachers and missionaries). Then go back to step one and repeat the process.
By the year 750, Arabs subdued many fortified cities and took control from sea to sea, and from east to west – Egypt, and from Crete to Cappadocia, from Yemen to the Gates of Alan (in the Caucasus), Armenians, Byzantines, Egyptians, Persians, Syrians and all the areas in between (Kennedy, 2008, p. 1). However the prodigious success of the Arab conquest proves nothing. Attila the Hun, Genseric the Vandal king, Gengis Khan and Alexander the Great brought many nations into subjection; yet civilization owes them absolutely nothing. A conquering people only exercise a civilizing influence when it itself is more civilized than the people conquered.
Muhammad had isolated the Muslims from the rest of the human society by dividing the humankind into two perpetually hostile groups dar-ul-Islam (the house of Islam), and dar-ul-harb (the house of war), i.e., Muslims and Kafirs. It is not that a Muslim merely thinks that he is superior to the infidels. This unhealthy perception of his superiority is embedded in him which is a part of his every mental cell. He feels that he is entitled to special treatment and to outstanding consideration because he is such a unique specimen. Deprived of contact with others and starved for human interactions, the Muslims bond with their predator. The more helpless a Muslim is, the more he is dependent on Muhammad. The more backward a Muslim nation is, the more it clings to Islam. Today, in this era of scientific development, Muslims must educate themselves to face the reality. If a man knows that he has nothing to rely on except his own powers, he will learn to use them properly. Only a free Muslim, who has ejected Muhammad from his life and liberated himself from Allah’s authority – authority that punishes, entices, threatens and demands – can make use of his power of reason.