Al Ghazali: The Venom For Which We Still Have No Antidote
Hypothesis:
Al Ghazali is a necessary, though not sufficient reason why most Muslims kill and die for Islam today.
Premise:
1. ‘Ideas’ are born out of human minds, as a response to the ‘natural world around them’ (henceforth called ‘reality’).
2. Ideas can thus, reasonably be called ‘explanations of reality’.
3. Some ideas are ‘good’ enough (i.e., seemingly correct enough explanations of reality) in a given situation, to become popular with the originator(s) and followers.
4. When the situation changes, those very same ideas become less seemingly correct (i.e., go ‘bad’).
5. The followers [and originator(s), if still alive] of those ideas find it difficult to discard them because they have got too heavily invested in those, and find it extremely difficult to accept / originate new explanations of reality.
6. Popular, good ideas spawn a whole system of dependent ideas around them, sometimes over generations, centuries and even millennia.
7. Such a system of ideas can thus, reasonably, be called ‘ideologies’.
8. Ideologies exist in all spheres of collective human experience.
9. Specific examples in the economic sphere, from whence they become motivating factors in socio-political spheres are Capitalism, Liberalism, Socialism, Communism etc.
10. Specific examples in the personal spiritual or philosophical sphere, from whence they become moral, social and even political motivating factors are the various religions.
11. Religions are unique amongst ideologies, in that, at this point in human development, they are seen, incorrectly, as absolute and heritable realities.
12. All ideologies, including all religious, political, social, economic, moral, philosophical, spiritual etc. ideologies, are good sometimes (i.e., seemingly correct explanations and responses to the natural individual and group stimuli in a given situation).
13. All ideologies go bad after the situation changes.
14. The quantum of ‘badness’ depends upon how much the situation has changed.
15. As an example, communism / trade-unionism can be seen as a good in an unequal world, when the feudal landlords, or later, mill-owners could be extremely exploitative of the labour force.
16. In a Liberal world where human rights are taken for granted, Communism becomes only a new tool for exploitation.
17. In a Liberal world, Capitalism or unbridled exploitation of natural resources to foster a hoped-for, but impossible interminable economic growth, through a linear economic production paradigm is considered a good, indeed the only good idea.
18. In a world where Limits to Growth kick in, due to the natural limitation of a spherical planet, whether from the perspective of originating resources (hydrocarbons, water, land, rich deposits etc.) or terminating resources (sinks, including those for heat, waste, by-products etc.), the ideology of Capitalism / Free-Market / Unlimited Economic Growth / Linear Production paradigm will go ‘bad’.
19. Similarly, all religions, including Islam were a good idea in a given situation, but have now gone bad, and need modification / rejection.
20. What has changed? We now have Science.
21. Scientific and technological progress, i.e., explanations and exploitation of nature have reached a point where the older, less informed explanations are now largely obsolete.
22. As with all ideologies, the old guard is finding it difficult to let go of their erstwhile explanations of reality. They are, very naturally, opposing the more informed worldviews of the younger people less invested in the more inaccurate explanations of yesteryear, decade, century or even millennium.
23. Where does Islam figure in this scenario, vis-à-vis other religious ideologies? Modern Islam, driven by the now extremely bad idea of Occasionalist Ash’ari ideology, established and institutionalized in the Sunni clergy by Al Ghazali is taking Muslims and thereby the rest of us to the relatively ignorant world of the year 1111 CE.
Development:
1. Islam, like all ideologies, including religious ideologies, has problems when seen from the modern-day perspective.
2. These span the beliefs and actions of the founder, the developers, the foundational books and so forth.
3. These make life miserable for the modern-day Muslim.
4. Why, then, is the modern Muslim uniquely intent on taking himself, and thereby many other Muslims, to the year 1111 CE (or worse 630 CE).
5. This does not end only with the Muslims. Those non-Muslims who live with and are at the receiving end of Muslim misbehaviour also react inappropriately and want to return to their own 1111 CE.
6. The key is the unique stagnation in Muslim thought since 1111 CE.
7. What happened in 1111 CE? The purported Mujaddid, the murderer of the Rational Interpretation of Islam, the killer of all Spirit of Inquiry and Learning, the Prime Institutor of Jihalat (Ignorance) amongst Muslims for almost a millennium, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad aṭ-Ṭūsiyy al-Ġaz(z)ālīy; Latinized Algazelus or Algazel, (otherwise, ‘Al Ghazali’), after a lifetime of fulminations, died.
8. Very little is known about early Islam:
a. HAZRAT MUHAMMAD SALLALLAHU-ALAYHI-WAAALIHEE-WA-SALLAM (henceforth, ‘HMS’) did not get the Quran compiled during the 23 years of Quranic revelation.
b. Despite the Quran claiming to have ‘completed’ / ‘perfected’ Islam and HMS being the ‘seal’ / ‘last’ of prophets, it never instructed HMS to get itself compiled, as any document meant for posterity must.
c. The first compilation of Quran is believed, by Muslims, to have been done by a committee under the leadership of a scribe of HMS by the name Zayd ibn Thabit on the orders of the 1st Rashidun Caliph Abu Bakr, at the behest of the later 2nd Rashidun Caliph Umar.
d. When Zayd had completed his task, he left the prepared suhuf (sheets) with Abu Bakr. Before he died, Abu Bakr left the suhuf with Umar who in turn left it with his daughter Hafsah. Hafsah, Umm Salamah, and Aishah were wives of HMS who memorized the Qur'an.
e. During the reign of Uthman, 3rd Rashidun Caliph, Islam had spread far and wide. Differences in (text / reading the) Quran in different dialects of Arabic language had become painfully obvious. At the behest of some companions, Uthman obtained the manuscript of the Quran from Hafsah and again Zayd was put in charge of the task of standardizing the Quran, and that, in the style of Quraysh Arabic dialect only.
f. Zayd and his committee prepared five (to eleven) copies. One of these was sent to every Muslim province with the order that all other Quranic materials, whether fragmentary or complete copies, be burnt.
g. None of these (or earlier) manuscripts survive (in their completed form) today.
h. Even the name ‘Muhammad’ does not find mention in any non-Muslim historical records until long after the passing of HMS.
i. In Quran the name / title ‘Muhammad’ finds mention only four times. An alternative, ‘Ahmed’ finds one mention. By comparison, Moses (Moosa) finds mention 136 times and Jesus (Isa) 78 times.
j. The word ‘Muhammad’ as written in Arabic today, looks very similar to the name ‘Yesu’’ written in Syriac / Aramaic, the first scripts that were used to write Arabic.
k. The word ‘Makkah’ (Mecca) appears in the Quran only once. A similar looking word ‘Bakkah’ (‘Makkah’ with an additional dot) appears in the Quran one more time. There no archaeological record of anything pertaining to the time of HMS (or earlier) in Mecca. Environs and environment mentioned in Quran are not found near the modern day Mecca. If anything, more evidence points to Petra being the original ‘Mother of Cities’ as mentioned in Quran.
l. The first surviving accounts of the biography (Seerah) of HMS date about a hundred years after his death.
m. The first Sahih Ahadith of HMS date about two hundred years after his death.
n. Several Ahadith point towards the incompleteness of the compiled Quran.
o. The earliest manuscripts available today did not include short vowels, diacritical, punctuation and other marks in the verses of Quran. This leads to several critical confusions, such as whether Quran 33:40 refers to khatam (seal) or khatim (last) unnabiyyeen (of prophets). Even in khatam being accepted as the standard version, it is not clear if the meaning is whether HMS is the ‘seal’, as in the ‘end’ of the prophets, or merely the ‘attestator’ of other prophets, for a seal can mean either.
p. The sentences as read in modern Quran often seem to be carried over or continued and not complete, casting doubt about the later, correct placement of sentence-ending marks. Again, this leads to confusion in very critical matters.
i. A case in point it Quran 5:3.
ii. In the same sentence, the beginning of the sentence talks about the kind of meat a Muslim can & cannot eat, and the end of the sentence talks about the situation (extreme hunger) in which that same prohibited meat can be eaten.
iii. So far so good, however, the middle of this same sentence talks about God perfecting / completing / approving the religion of Islam.
iv. This is that critical part of Quran which political Muslims have used to justify their fanaticism.
v. And all it is, is merely the in-between patty of the approved-food bun, in this sandwich of a sentence!
vi. God must have known how much havoc Muslims will rain on the world using this particular part of a sentence.
vii. Could he not have granted this fundamental pillar of Political Islam, for fourteen hundred years, a proper chapter, verse, or even a whole sentence, if not some explanation of what it means?
viii. Did God plan on making Islam, Muslims and the rest of the world dependent on violent politically activist scholars to explain what he meant, despite having myriads of angels, prophets and 23 years of revelation to HMS himself?
q. The Quran is not in chronological order because the members of Zayd’s committees did not agree on the chronology.
r. This makes for great difficulty in inferencing the real intent of Quran, since many later verses (effectively) abrogate the earlier verses. For example, there are three different instructions about wine in Quran. And we do not know the actual chronological sequence from Quran. We have to use our own / scholars’ / Ahadith (which is really only scholars’) logic to order them properly. But can we actually say, with documentary proof in Quran itself, which verse abrogated the other two? No, we cannot.
s. The same doubt persists on whether the pacifist Meccan verses were abrogated by the aggressive Medinan verses.
t. Similarly, Quran relates twice, God Himself addressing the prophet Moses in two narrations of the same incidence; and the sentence is different (though similar) in both those instances. Can God forget what He actually told Moses?
u. All this requires personal interpretations of various scholars, who are obviously neither prophets, nor as exalted as the members of the Zayd committee.
v. Even that interpretation is an interpretation by believing Muslim scholars who belong to a myriad different sects. No non-sectarian-Muslim (i.e., neutral) scholar worked in / wrote on early Islamic history for almost the whole of the first millennium of Islam. The later neutral scholars were hobbled by the absence of any outside evidence.
9. Such and other problems with the documentary evidence of Early Islam confused common Muslims and scholars alike in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries, leading to a lot of bad blood between different scholars and their followers.
10. This problem persists to this day, where rival scholars calling those they do not like, Kaafir – one who hides the Truth, i.e., non-Muslim.
11. During all of the ‘Islamic Golden Age of Science’, the school of Islamic philosophy that was supported by most of the rulers, the educated and the elite was Mu’tazila. It gave primacy to rational thought over and above tradition and literalist interpretation of Quran.
12. That resulted in a largely secular administration and enlightened outlook during the reign of Harun al-Rashid and Al-Mamun. Scientific, philosophical, technical and innovative pursuits were given precedence over literalist and puritanical ones. Various other cultures and their knowledge was brought into Islamic lands; several books translated. Religious dogma was reigned in, even though, regrettably, sometimes through force.
13. Such was the Islamic world till the 25th Abbasid, Al-Qadir took over. For his political reasons (Fatimid Caliphate rivalry, and for that reason appealing to the lowest common denominator), he instituted a retrograde interpretation of Islam through his decree, the Risāla al-Qādiriyya. In his long 40 years’ of reign and that of his successors, the Sunni creed slipped from the Rationalist to the Occasionalist explanation of reality.
14. This Ash’ari Occasionalism stated that a piece of cotton does not burn because of the rules God has made (as believed by Mu’tazilites), but because in every instant God reinvents the Cosmos anew, choosing what He will. Of course, the ‘size’ of ‘instance’ as well as spatial granularity remains undefined.
15. The result of adherence to this belief was that it became unimportant, even sinful for Muslims (especially Sunni Muslims) to try and understand the physical and other natural laws of the Cosmos. Only derivative technology was an acceptable pursuit, not Philosophy, Logic, Science, Mathematics etc.
a. One of the terrorist / jihadist groups from Africa calls itself ‘Boko Haram’ – literally, ‘Books are Forbidden’, meaning they, as flag-bearers of Islam consider scientific books haram!
b. None of the Muslim countries have produced any great scientific breakthrough in the last eight hundred years or so.
16. Because of certain systemic necessities, it became important for Ash’ari Occasionalists to believe that the Quran was coterminous with Allah, i.e., Allah did not create Quran for a specific people at a specific time (as believed Mu’tazilites, who followed the spirit of Quran, rather than believe that Quran is the literal / eternal word of God). Ashari Occasionalists believed and believe that Quran always existed on a Lauh Mehfooz, even before time started. Thus not a word, not a letter, not a symbol can be altered. And that everything has to be followed literally.
17. Logically, of course, this is non-sense.
a. Firstly, as we already know, and which perhaps Ash’ari Occasionalists did not want to accept despite evidence in the Quran itself, that it was a work of humans, perhaps, Zayd and his committee, at least in its book form.
b. Further, many of Quran’s pronouncements clearly carry the stamp of limited human experience:
i. Say, for example, the flatness of Earth, or the revolution of Sun around the Earth, or the permission of God that the Sun needs after every night to rise again, or the existence of a solid sky, or mountains being like nails hammered in, and so on.
ii. Or, say, the emotions of a frustrated human being such as Surah Al Masad.
c. If the Quran was created before the beginning of time, why does it contain a verse such as Surah Al Masad (Al Lahab), which determines the actions of Abu Lahab since before the beginning of time?
d. And if Abu Lahab’s behaviour was already fixed before time began, how can he ever be punished for the same?
e. Ash’ari Occasionalism and Uncreatedness of Quran became the cornerstone of Islam, though those principles completed negated everything that Islam stood for, including the whole concept of freedom of choice, thus, heaven and hell, and by extension, Allah Himself.
18. During and after Al Qadir’s reign, his powerful vizier, Nizam-ul-Mulk pushed ahead with Al Qadir’s politico-religious innovation. Nizam-ul-Mulk realized that he needed to brainwash the scholars to tow the official line. Since this is difficult to do with those who have studied under other scholars, he established a system of schools and universities, starting with the Baghdad Madrasa, who would churn out scholars of the type he wanted.
19. Before he was assassinated, he appointed a young, aggressive and ambitious scholar, Al Ghazali as the Professor / Dean / Head of the Baghdad Madrasa. A very restrictive courseware was created for all these madrasas which allowed only the official line, made necessary by political reasons of fighting the Fatimid Caliphate. All questioning was discouraged, since the Qadiri system (Ash’ari Occasionalism, Quran’s Uncreatedness plus several other specifics such as a standardized official Sunni version of the history of Early Islam).
20. Al Ghazali through his polemics and scholarly writings, backed by the full might of the Abbasid Caliphate succeeded in killing Mu’tazila. With that went all rational thought, all logic, all spirit of enquiry, all freedom to question from the world of Islam. All problematic matters were swept under the carpet and all persistent questioners were thrown out of the fold of Islam, with Capital Punishment as the reward for those who questioned too much.
21. With every generation of scholars brainwashed into that very restrictive worldview, which increasing became untenable, the only way out that remained for these scholars was to threaten all persistent questioners with death.
22. No other madrasa system took hold, because everyone was brainwashed by these scholars who had studied the very same courseware, Dars-e-Nizami. Darul Uloom Deoband and all other Islamic seminaries of note still follow the Dars-e-Nizami established by Nizam-ul-Mulk and his protégé Al Ghazali.
23. Thus, even today, even in non-Islamic-majority lands, you hear the chants of “gustakhe rasool ki sazaa, sar tan se judaa, sar tan se judaa”. The moment you ask a question these Nizami / Ghazalist scholars are uncomfortable with, they raise the bogie of blasphemy and threaten to kill you. Some or the other foolish Muslim then, (believing the worldview so assiduously promoted by these Nizami / Ghazalist scholars in the name of Islam), goes and kills people. People who question their Ash’ari / Qadiri / Nizami / Ghazalist belief. That belief is increasingly becoming untenable in this world of commonalized rational knowledge. Thus, these conflicts will only increase.
Conclusion:
1. While it can be said that there are several issues with Islam (as with any ideology, religious, or otherwise), and with Quran, Sirah, Ahadith etc., these same issues also existed during the enlightened time of Abbasid Islam prior to Al Qadir. Why has it become a greater problem since Al Qadir / Nizam-ul-Mulk / Al Ghazali?
2. It is because of the Nizami madrasas, on the turbocharge of Ghazali’s courseware.
3. Muslims will never get out of the chakravyuh created by this evil twelfth century troika, until the madrasah system is dismantled or Ash’ari Occasionalism / Quranic Uncreatedness filled Dars-e-Nizami rejected, and a progressive, rational version of Islam adopted by the madrasahs.
4. Which one of these three was the real evil here? Certainly, Al Ghazali. For he alone, amongst all three guys, must have known that he was peddling bullshit.
Al Ghazali canNOT have been unaware of his own intellectual dishonesty.
Future:
Find an anti-dote to the Al Ghazali venom, or face the increasingly greater disaster that Muslims’ lives will be.
-
owais / June 2nd, 2022
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