This description of what Mohammed suffered from in his early life and adulthood was taught in Islamic studies classes that I took in school, but the way his symptoms were explained to us was different from how a psychiatrist would diagnose them today. What we learned was similar to what Mohammed's wife told him: that he was communicating with the angel Gabriel, who brought him the words of the Koran from Allah. Muslims all around the world today still believe this to be the truth behind Mohammed's symptoms, fears, and anxiety.
Incredibly, Mohammed himself was not at peace with his own message. He was not optimistic about the future of Islam and Muslims: “the Messenger of Allah [Mohammed] observed: Verily Islam started as something strange and it would again revert [to its old position] of being strange just as it started, and it would recede between the two mosques just as the serpent crawls back into its hole” (Sahih Muslim B1 N0270).
In this hadith, Mohammed foretold that the end of Islam would be strange, just as its beginning had been, because it would shrink back to the limited area it had come from—between the two mosques of Mecca and Medina. Could that prediction by Muhammad be a sign of the inevitable demise of Islam? Will Muslims ever understand that Islam and sharia should not be a part of government? Will the Tahrir Square revolutionaries and their counterparts in other Middle Eastern countries finally learn that their enemies are not the Mubaraks, the Assads, or the Gaddafis, but the seventh-century political system that still rules them today? Will Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia reject sharia and send it back to where it came from, to the two mosques in Mecca and Medina? Only time will tell.
Mohammed's predictions of Islam crawling back like a snake to where it came from were repeated extensively in several other of his hadiths:
“Belief returns and goes back to Medina like a snake.” (Sahih Bukhari V3B30 N100)
“Muslims will be the scum and the rubbish even though their numbers may increase; the enemy will not fear Muslims anymore. This will be because the Muslims will love world and dislike death.” (Sunaan Abu Dawud, 37.4284)
“Muhammad's contemporaries were the best Muslims; after three generations, the Muslims will be mainly treacherous and untrustworthy.” (Sahih Bukhari V5B57N2, 3)
“There will be much killing during the last days of the Muslim.”(Bukhari V9B88N183)
“Verily, Belief returns and goes back to Medina as a snake returns and goes back to its hole [when in danger].” (Bukhari V3B30N100)
Mohammed also predicted a large movement of apostates out of Islam:
“Muslims will diminish in number and they will go back to where they started [before Islam].” (Sunaan Abu Dawud, 2.19.3029)
“There will be no trace of Islam in some believers.” (Bukhari V9B84N65)
“There will appear in this nation . . . a group of people so pious apparently that you will consider your prayers inferior to their prayers, but they will recite the Quran, the teachings of which will not go beyond their throats and will go out of their religion as an arrow darts through the game, whereupon the archer may look at his arrow, its Nasl at its Risaf and its Fuqa to see whether it is blood-stained or not [that is, they will have not even a trace of Islam in them].” (Bukhari V9B84N65)
Mohammed was so consumed with the survival and legitimacy of Islam that he expressed extreme feelings of fear that Muslims would abandon Islam. Such fears caused him to severely punish anyone who rejected or abandoned him, which drove him into a life of never-ending battle and mass murder. As a result, he did not present a coherent ideology that could produce a stable and peaceful society. Although he demanded unity from Muslims, his actions did not support unity, especially when he destroyed the mosque of his rivals. Even while telling Muslims that Islam would survive to rule the world under a caliphate, he also said that Islam would end after three generations and would eventually crawl back to where it came from. No functioning system can be based on such confusion and conflicting messages, which are rife in the Koran, the Hadith, and, as I have described, the example of Mohammed himself.
Why, then, after Mohammed died, did Arabs hold onto Islam and strive to preserve it through horrific bloodshed? Why did various tribes compete for leadership and kill one another, especially those who abandoned Islam? The answer is simple: Islam gave enormous wealth and power to Mohammed's successors, the caliphs, who followed in his footsteps. Since its inception, Islam has been at war with civilization, bringing down one culture after another. Such civilizations were considered a threat to Arabia's identity and culture, and with Islam, it was the outside world that had to change and adapt to Arabia's language, culture, and religion. Islam became the perfect formula for totalitarian control and submission, which served the Arabian Peninsula well. Arab tribes no longer had to battle one another over scarce desert resources. Arabs no longer needed to travel far to trade in order to survive, because people throughout the Middle East flocked to Mecca to perform the Haj, bringing in wealth from all over the world. Under Islam, the extreme ethnocentric culture of Arabia became immune to the impact of alien religions and cultures when non-Muslims were forbidden from touching the holy grounds of Mecca and Medina. Keeping non-Muslims out is still a priority of Saudi Arabia. When united under Islam, once desert-poor Arabia was set forever.
As a result, Muslim rulers had to preserve the goose that laid the golden eggs: Islam. Yet they soon realized that they could not rely merely on the Koran, with its many contradictions, to rule the new conquered lands, which were not familiar with Arabian culture. To rule effectively, 150 years after Mohammed died, they created a holy decree, sacred laws called sharia. These laws were based on the Koran, Mohammed's lifestyle, and the Hadith, sayings that were still being gathered during that time by several Islamic authorities and sects, who provided both similar and different hadiths. Whenever the caliph needed a specific law, somehow a hadith was found to support it. Some Muslims claim that several hadiths were not correct or Sahih, but they remain in Islamic books because certain laws of sharia were based on them.
Islam's attraction was infectious. Some of the conquered nations found the Islamic legal system beneficial because its laws made it easier for tyrannies to survive if their legitimacy seemed to come from Allah's law itself. Consequently, for fourteen hundred years, both Muslims and non-Muslims in the Middle East have been governed by the most brutal religious, political, and legal system the world has ever seen. Today, the ultimate success or failure of Middle Eastern revolutions relies on accepting or rejecting sharia as the state legal system. So far, not one Muslim country has declared after its revolution that sharia will not be the state law. This means that Middle Eastern revolutions are sadly going to fail once again. Until today, no Muslim country has dared to reject the stranglehold of sharia, especially with Saudi petro-dollars in the equation.
From its inception, Islam could not survive without state enforcement. Islam became the state, and the state became Islam. It is the only system that Muslims and their leaders have ever known and lived under, century after century. The pain of sharia's tyranny was—and still is—regarded as an indisputable part of the life that God himself wants Muslims to live by. When the pressure of tyranny becomes intolerable and expresses itself in violent reprisals against the Islamic state, it has to be redirected toward the outside world. This is how Islam has survived for many centuries. As long as this formula worked with little interruption, things were tolerable.
When Islamic terrorism against the outside world was met with an international outcry, especially after 9/11, Muslim governments were forced to do the dangerous job of cracking down on the terrorists who ran amok all over the Muslim world. Much of this crackdown was superficial and only for show, but the terrorist activity did subside for a while, causing the pressure to build up internally. Internal uprising, violence, and terrorism against Muslim governments became inevitable. Now that the enemy outside of Islam is fighting back, the violence, as it always has, has returned to where it originated—within the tormented Muslim society. Yet this ti
me it has been given a pretty name: the Arab Spring. In reality, though, it is another aspect of the never-ending self-destructive Islamic cycle. If it does not express itself externally, then it will explode internally.
In a culture where the word peace has little value and violent jihad is everything, sooner or later the internal pressure must be dealt with. Soon after the January revolution, the interim Egyptian government, which had close ties with Islamist groups, started a new round of fearmongering propaganda, in an attempt to redirect the anger on the street back toward the outside world. As an example, in June 2011, a young American student at Emory University School of Law, Ilan Grapel, was arrested by the Egyptian authorities on charges of being a “highly trained” spy for Israel. The headlines, printed in red in all major Egyptian newspapers, including Al Ahram, stated, “An Israeli Officer Participated in the Revolution to Insert Division and Distrust between the People and the Military.” Other headlines claimed, “The Spy Participated in the Fitna between Muslims and Christians in Maspiro [a suburb in Cairo].” Such fabricated arrests of Westerners are a terrible game that Muslim governments often resort to when things get out of control. To the savvy Egyptian, such games are laughable fabrications, but unfortunately these tactics do work on the psyches of most Egyptians, who are told that the Israeli Mossad was part of the conspiracy against the Egyptian military in Tahrir Square.
The Egyptian government, the media, and Islamists have played such games too many times to distract and frighten Egyptians into unity. Ilan, who was born in the United States, does have dual Israeli citizenship, but that is hardly evidence that he is a spy. Despite his mother's pleas that such charges are totally fabricated against her son, who traveled to Egypt to volunteer for a nonprofit organization that helped African refugees in Egypt, the U.S. media have shown little interest in his ordeal.
Whether before or after the revolution, Egyptian leaders resorted to the same old cycle of lies and violence, acts that are allowed under sharia. As a teenager during the 1967 war, I remember similar lies about the war and accusations of espionage against the few Egyptian Jews who were left in Egypt. One of them, a fellow student from 1967 to almost 1970 at the American University in Cairo, saw her male family members dragged to jail for three years. Those poor Egyptian Jews were put in Egyptian jails for nothing and suffered unspeakable torture and humiliation until they were expelled from Egypt. I met some of them in the United States many years later and asked them about their memories of the mistreatment. To my surprise, they have shown true grace and decency and have chosen to talk about the good memories they have of Egypt. I am honored to have some of them as my friends today.
Muslim governments have felt a need to lie at the highest levels, in order to bring Muslims closer together. Lying for the best interest of the Islamic state has become a semi-holy act that a good Muslim feels obliged to do, when in reality it has become an Islamic mental disease that must be exposed for what it is: spreading falsehoods against non-Muslims for the benefit of Islamic unity. Islamists' dysfunctional tactic of using any means to achieve their goals is out of control. The Islamic tools of the trade for problem solving are lies, hate propaganda, fearmongering, distortions, exaggerations, and slander, used in conjunction with threats, violence, and terrorist acts—all of which are allowed under the laws of Islam. Muslim sheikhs have never abandoned this Islamic legacy, which goes back to Mohammed, and it has become the default method of problem solving. It is the solution before Islamic revolutions and after Islamic revolutions; not much change in areas that desperately need change.
The truth is fiercely challenged and denied and is met with lies and fabrications. The day this dysfunctional cycle ends will be a day of true freedom that will liberate the Muslim people. The majority of them are poor victims who are unaware of the real problem. What the Muslim people really needed to accomplish when they revolted on January 2011, but they could not verbalize it, was to end the curse of lying that has infected Muslim society from top to bottom, especially Islamic clerics who have forgotten the value of truth telling. Success can only come to a society based on truth.
The question, then, is how can a religion that perpetuates lies and violence for the sake of its God end such a destructive cycle? We all know the quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.” Islam is probably the best example for this popular saying. Islam has managed to fool “some of the people” all of the time for more than fourteen hundred years because this deceptive characteristic of Islam is rooted so deeply that most Muslims keep falling for it, over and over. When Muslims immigrate to the United States, they often say of Americans, “They are so honest!” Muslims envy Americans for this, yet they live in denial of the fact that the Koran commands them to lie to promote Islam.
What is Islam afraid of? Of its documented bloody history? Of feeling deep shame because its prophet slaughtered both Arabs and Jews? Of the slaughter that continued afterward and up to this day? Of the lies and the cover-up? The answer is all of the above, plus even more hidden scandals yet to come that will strike at the heart and soul of Islam.
A major challenge to Islam has been building up. Muslims have always expressed their pride and superiority by claiming that their holy book, the Koran, has never been corrupted and that its words came directly from Allah, while criticizing the Bible for having been corrupted, reworded, and changed, without people having any proof of what the original words were. For centuries, Muslims have worn this as their badge of honor, even when non-Muslims didn't criticize their Koran.
Yet this badge of honor will soon be questioned by the 1972 discovery of the oldest Koran in Sanaa, Yemen. While making repairs to a very old mosque, workers found a huge number of Islamic manuscripts, and the Yemeni government sought the help of German scholars in uncovering the mystery of their origin. What the Germans discovered was that the present Koran was different from these early manuscripts, casting doubt on Islam's long-held claims about the Koran. The Yemeni government, interestingly, instead of welcoming the discovery, started a process of cover-up and quickly withdrew the project, ending the research in 1985.
Microfilms and copies of documents are available, even though not yet released to the public. Will the Germans soon write a book about their discovery? Or will they fear the Islamic fatwa of death that will certainly follow anyone who exposes the weak points in Islam? Incidentally, there is a law in sharia that states that non-Muslims who expose the weaknesses of Islam have committed a serious crime “called enormity,” which could carry the death penalty. This is another layer to the Islamic fear of the truth. The discovery disproves Islamic claims that the Koran is infallible and that it is Allah's original revelation, word for word. Will this shocking discovery cause the downfall of Islam that Mohammed predicted? Only time will tell.2
My prediction is that Muslims will accuse the Germans of falsifying the documents and will call non-Muslim Germans Islamophobes and racists. The world will see yet another enormous Islamic cover-up of the Sanaa Koran, proving that Muslims, not only Mohammed, are active participants in, and promoters of, a certain reality about Islam. Islam has met a deep need in the psyche of many cultures in the Middle East that has made Muslims eager to protect and preserve it. Right after Mohammed's death, that process was initiated by the caliph Uthman, when he standardized the Koran and produced one copy and burned all of the others.
Islam is probably the only religion on earth today that hates any new discovery about its origin. Only God knows what secrets have been hidden, omitted, or inserted by Arabs to make Islam a perfect fit for their needs. The enormous number of contradictions in the Koran does not reflect well on Allah, who is supposed to be the author. In order to resolve its contradictions, Muslims and Allah himself in the Koran suggested the concept of abrogation, which means that if there is a contradiction, the earlier verses should be abrogated. Yet ho
w could Allah decide that what he said earlier was wrong and must be changed?
The Sanaa discovery is not known to the majority of Muslims. Most of the Muslims I communicate with have no idea about that important find in Yemen. You would think that Muslims would be happy to uncover the ancient manuscript, debating it and discussing it everywhere in the halls of their educational institutions, but it is just the opposite. No one is eager to teach Muslims about it. That can only prove one thing: Muslim leaders are actively participating in a cover-up for fear of mass apostasy, because the discovery makes the present Koran illegitimate.
This is just one of the many secrets, lies, and cover-ups behind Islam's raging anger and worldwide terrorism, secrets that must be protected by any means. Since its inception, Islam has been extremely vulnerable and has built a formidable image on shaky grounds. Islam's decay is partly caused by the acts of those who are protecting its image from the truth. The Sanaa Koran could end up being the last straw that will push Islam to crumble like a house of cards.
Muslim countries will not experience internal or external peace as long as their top priority is to cover up the truth from an increasingly angry, poor, and desperate Muslim population, while using violence against anyone who dares uncover such a truth. The cycle of lies, cover-up, and violence must be exposed and stopped.
The reason Muslims cannot forgive and forget their disputes with the outside world is because they espouse a religion that does not allow self-forgiveness. That is why Muslim borders with non-Muslim countries are excessively bloody and hostile. Poverty-stricken Muslim countries have developed extreme envy of the prosperity of their non-Muslim neighbors. That is how Mohammed felt toward his Jewish neighbor tribes. Today Islamic leaders are seeing a good portion of their population running away toward enemy land, non-Muslim land, instead of joining the fight. Muslims are pouring into Europe and the United States for work, as well as into India from Bangladesh and Pakistan, again for a better life in countries that Islamic jihadists aim to conquer and terrorize to turn Islamic. For Muslim leadership, the cycle of envy and Islamic immigration due to dissatisfaction with life in the Muslim state has become an opportunity to spread both violent and stealthy jihad in the new countries that Muslims migrate to. The last thing on the minds of Islamic leaders is to learn from others and reform themselves; instead, they send jihadists and Islamists to follow Muslim immigrants into their new homes.
The Devil We Don't Know Page 18