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By Ali Sina
In a recent correspondence that I had with Rev.
Bassam Madany, an ardent critic of Islam, he blamed Secularism and the
weakening of religious belief of the Westerners for the conversion of some
Europeans and
America
ns to Islam.
I disagreed and said that the contrary is true. In
fact religious people are more vulnerable to fall into the trap of Islam
than secularists, rationalists and atheists. Generally, people who fall
prey to Islam have already been indoctrinated by other beliefs, have
lowered their critical shield and have embraced the irrationality of
faith.
Once that happen, once the defensive shield of reason
is lowered, all sorts of irrational beliefs slowly creep in the mind of
the believer and gradually render him vulnerable to dangerous beliefs,
including Islam. It is the belief in God and religion that lower one’s
intellectual immunity and make him more susceptible to Islam not rational
thinking or atheism.
People do not decide to become terrorists, hate and
kill others, commit mass suicides or become suicide bombers overnight. The
metamorphosis from rationality to irrationality is gradual and the
brainwashing is imperceptible and incremental.
It starts with accepting the notion of a god as a
loving and caring being that tries to reach out to humans and wants to
guide them. This seemingly harmless belief propels one into a never ending
quest for “divine” guidance and the "right" religion. Once
this unsubstantiated belief is accepted as fact, the believer steps into a
descending escalator of irrationality. From there on, he gradually
suppresses his critical-thinking and little by little, substitutes reason
with faith.
Faith is belief that does not rest on logical proof
or material evidence. Once faith is given credence as a valid mode for
attaining the truth, people become liable to succumb to any absurdity and
irrational beliefs including Islam.
Islam is the pinnacle of irrationality. Rational
people are not attracted to Islam. It is the people who have already
accepted the irrationality of faith and do not demand logical proof or
material evidence to accept the validity of a claim that are in danger of contracting
Islam.
Islam is an utterly asinine and distasteful belief
system. But it gradually becomes palatable to those who have been
indoctrinated in other religions and accept the basic elements of faith
that are common to all of them, such as the existence of a deity that
cares about us humans, tries to guide us, answers to our prayers, meddles
in our lives, rewards us and punishes us.
Rev. Madany was not pleased of my counter argument.
But the testimony of Never a Dhimmi vindicates my claim.
It wasn’t the secular, scientific and rational
upbringing of Never a Dhimmi that impelled him to embrace Islam. In fact
those were the foundation that eventually allowed him to get rid of Islam.
It was his flirting with Catholicism and his subsequent fascination with
religion and spirituality that led him into this tortuous path that
eventually ended in the cull-de-sack of Islam. Then again he was not
attracted to the real Islam but a camouflaged and sugarcoated version of
it called Sufism.
Many people who are drawn to Islam and fall into its
trap are at first attracted to Sufism and its mystical and relatively
tolerant teachings.
The fact is however that Sufism that was created
during the eighth and ninth century A.D. was a reaction against the
unenlightened, impersonal and draconian nature of Islam. It was then that
many Persian thinkers, dismayed with the inhumane nature of Islam, tried
to reform it by searching for deeper mystical meanings in apparently
asinine assertions made in the Quran.
The problem with Sufism is that it lacks legitimacy. As William
VanDoodewaard says: “For, if the Sufi spiritual quest is to be viewed as
legitimate, even within Islam itself, it must be rooted in the Quran and
the sunna of Muhammad.” [1]
Andrew Rippin, in his work Muslims: Their
Religious Beliefs and Practices, also states that “Sufis.. in their
search for legitimation of their spiritual quest [must show] whether Islam
as a religion contained within it a spiritual-ascetic tendency from the
very beginning.” [2]
But the Quran is a manual of terror and the sunna
depicts Muhammad as a terrorist. Islam is bereft of any spirituality.
Sufism is a borrowed ideology and invented by the catholically ingenious
but hopelessly sycophant bootlicking Persians who did not have the temerity
and the insight to denounce Islam as an idiotic cult of a crazed man and
reject it in its entirety as an stupid cult but instead sheepishly tried to
reinterpret this graceless doctrine of ignorance, dress it with
rationality and sugarcoat it with alien un-Islamic philosophies taken from
all kinds of sources, Zoroastrian, Christian, Jewish, Gnostic,
Neo-Platonism, Hinduism and even Buddhist to make it toothsome to their
own refined mystical palate.
What escaped the ken
of the benighted Sufi sages is that Islam cannot be reformed and the Quran
is a clear book of violence and hate that cannot be reinterpreted
differently from its obvious meaning. And that it is better to spill the poisonous
drink than try to sweeten it to mask its bitter taste.
What the Sufis did was a crime of foolishness. They
taught a different religion but fearing rejection, they claimed it to be
the inner message of Islam. Sufis claim that Sufism is the kernel of Islam
while the Sharia is its outer shell. The truth is the opposite. The kernel
and core of Islam is the Quran, which is poison of mind and spirit. Sufism
is only a gloss that masks it.
Far less people would have fallen into the trap of
Islam had it not been camouflaged with exotic Sufi interpretations. The
Sufis could not reform Islam or make it more humane. All they did is to
conceal its ugliness and thus make it even more dangerous trap for the
unwitting victims.
Religions take their followers through slippery paths
of faith. Because faith is belief that does not rest on logical proof or
material evidence, no matter how good and benign a religion is, and
notwithstanding how confrontational it is towards Islam, it legitimizes
Islam and provides justification for its irrationality, making the
acceptance of this most benighted of all the religions a little
easier.
1- William VanDoodewaard, Sufism:
The Mystical Side of Islam, unpublished article, The
University of Western Ontario,
London
,
Canada
: 1996
2- Andrew Rippin, Muslims: Their
Religious Beliefs and Practices (New York: Routledge, 1990), 118.
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