Had Orwell but known Islam. Part 1

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Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

In George Orwell’s famous 1948 dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the following scene, involving the torturer, O’Brien, and his victim, Winston Smith, plays out:

O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
‘Four.’
‘And if the Party says that it is not four but five—then how many?’
‘Four.’
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston’s body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O’Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Four.’
The needle went up to sixty.
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!’
The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!’
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Five! Five! Five!’
‘No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?’
‘Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!’

To acknowledge what we observe is natural. “I saw it with my own eyes”; “I heard it with my own ears”, are universally-accepted evidence. “I witnessed…”, etc. It takes severe trauma of some kind to get an otherwise healthy adult to the point where they will see oranges when told they see oranges, despite there being only apples. The scene above plays out over the span of a minute, two minutes, perhaps. It can also play out over years or even a decade, in which case it might be achieved without pain; the mere fear of pain suffices. All emotions become servants to the singular object of averting pain. In the manipulated mind, especially that of a child, averting pain equates to pleasing the source of pain. In the manipulated adult, pain generalises into privation. The adult lives to avoid displeasing the source of his privations, always praising, always eulogising, always thanking, even when he is kicked. The greatest pleasing is to love, to give yourself over to another. Thus is the torturer's work done.

Loving Muslim parents place their children in madrassas, where men the like of O’Brien break their young minds and remake them into eyes that do not see until they are told what they see, ears that do not hear until they are told what they hear, and minds that do not think until they are told what they think. Later, they will be told to rush into minefields, whereupon with great eagerness, they will knowingly blow their own young bodies to pieces. They will be told to strap on a vest of explosives, even as children, and all their mental faculties will be applied to where, when and how, blowing themselves up will cause the most death, changing location or delaying the moment according to careful calculus. They will be told to acquire the highly-specialised skill of piloting aeroplanes so as to fly a fully-laden passenger jet just once, straight into a skyscraper full of people.

Not every child sent to madrassa is going to end up a mass murdering, but without the breaking of the mind that takes place in madrassa, recruits for suicidal mass-murder missions will not be that readily available. So well does this system work that “martyrdom” is the highest aspiration, proudly and openly acknowledged as such.

“By the One in Whose hand is my soul, I wish that I could be killed in the cause of Allah, then brought back to life, then be killed, then be brought back to life, then be killed, then be brought back to life, then be killed.” (Sahih Sunan an-Nasa’i 3098)

Carefully augmented with other experiences and indoctrination, fear of pain or privation can abstract to simply fear. Fear of saying the wrong thing becomes fear of seeing the wrong thing or hearing the wrong thing. The victim of such indoctrination comes to recoil from the very notion of displeasing the source of pain or privation, the permitter or prohibiter of what is seen and heard, culminating in the victim instinctively not knowing what they see or hear until told what they see or what they hear. The Muslim does not know what he has just read in the Qur’an, even in his own language, plain and straightforward, until a sheikh or “scholar” has explained to him what he has just read. If the sheikh says he read “orange” when he read orange, only then will he know that he has read orange.

To understand the broken mind, we need to understand that approved reality does not mean that you see A, but are told that you see B, which you accept despite having seen A. In this case the mind is not yet broken; it chooses what is in its best interest at that moment. The broken mind does not know what it sees until it is told what it sees. Even looking at A, you do not know that you see A until you are told that you see A. This is the condition of the Muslim.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

“I love Allah”, declared folksy “moderate Muslim” Irshad Manji. Love is the emotion in which the human being makes him- or herself most vulnerable to another, gives themselves over to the absolute trust of another. It is also the mind manipulator’s mother lode. Soviet citizens wept, genuinely wept, when Stalin died.

Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization.

When Irshad Manji says, "I love Allah," she is lying. Like all Muslims, she loves Muhammad. Allah is the guise in which Muhammad chooses to exhibit himself to the world.

Abruptly he was sitting up with O’Brien’s arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O’Brien who would save him from it.
‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.
‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’
‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’

Up till recently, it was generally a sign of severe intellectual impairment to hold that two plus two equals anything other than four. Fortunately, we have a mathematics professor to thank for the arrival of sanity. On 3 August 2020, Brooklyn College’s esteemed Professor Laurie H. Rubel, tweeted the following social good:

‘of course math is neutral because 2+2=4.’ Rely on that supposed axiom to then target ppl (& especially women) for coordinated ridicule/harassment. …reeks of white supremacist patriarchy. i'd rather think on nurturing people & protecting the planet.

In China, 2+2 does not equal 4 or 5 or anything; it equals whatever the Communist Party says it equals. If it equals 4, then that is not because it objectively does, but because the Party says it does. This process begins with tainting reality with the mark of the condemned: “2+2=4 reeks of white supremacist patriarchy,” Professor Rubel informs us. From there it is but a small step to 2+2= whatever the architects of Rubel’s mind decide it is today. The same holds true for Islam. “We hear and we obey,” Qur’an 24:51. What your sheikh tells you is the absolute truth. If he tells you the exact opposite tomorrow, that will be the absolute truth. The sheikhs have always said that there is only one Qur'an across the world, identical "letter for letter". When this was publicly shown to not be the case, the Muslim mind fell into an acid bath. The same holds for Russia, where a war is not a war, and to say otherwise is to be insane.

No doubt, protecting a planet is an extremely time-consuming undertaking, which is a shame, because had Prof. Rubel managed to spare just two minutes here and two minutes there, she might have started with four minutes in which to read Dr Joseph Goebbels proclaim, “If the Führer wants it, two and two make five!” And with the extra Nazi minute, she might have had time to read the white supremacist patriarch George Orwell describe how 2+2=5 arises in a mind broken under torture. If Hamas says 30,000 Palestinians died, then 30,000 Palestinians died. If Hamas says Israel bombed a hospital, then Israel bombed a hospital.

Former Muslims, especially those from the Islamic world, for they have real Islam as their point of reference, have an intellectual responsibility to tell not only those who are still Muslim, but those who are not Muslim, what Islam is and what it has in store for them. They also have a moral responsibility to, firstly, make lay Muslims see the gross affront to life, humanity and civilisation that they perpetuate by remaining a part of, and secondly, to warm non-Muslims, especially Jews, especially Jews, of the insanity of giving Muslims the benefit of the doubt.

Western ex-Muslims, mostly sentimentalists who have never known Islam, are largely useless in this regard. The exceptions stand out as beacons and are generally shunned by the rest as “too extreme” (for their tastes). They even think that people apostatise from Islam “to join ex-Muslims”! For them, truth and loyalty remain identical, for loyalty to their "community" is truth, just as it was when they were Muslim.

Former Muslim Wafa Sultan wrote her autobiography A God who Hates, a modest but powerful book. Hatred drives everything in Islam and is perhaps its most prominent feature. But I would contend that it is in its manipulation of love that Islam is far more dangerous than in its urging of hatred. Allah hates those who do not love him, and to not love him (and his messenger) more than anyone or anything else is a sin. “We verily created man and We know what his soul whispereth to him, and We are nearer to him than his jugular vein.” (Qur’an 50:16).

While the modern equivalent would be a bugging device implanted inside your head, Orwell’s omniscient Big Brother could watch you only through hidden cameras and microphones, such as from inside a television screen. For the rest, the Party’s eyes and ears could only infer your thoughts, expert as they might have been at it. If the Muslim believes that Allah is watching him from between his jugular vein and himself, then it makes no difference whether Allah is truly there or not. It is a thought the Muslim dares not have.

But there is more to this “closer to you than your jugular vein” business. Allah is closer to you than you are to your own life. You must take your own life before you even think of harming Allah. Muslims are proud to declare just how much they love Allah. These are not fanatics, fundamentalists or extremists, these are regular Muslims. Love of Allah negates the self and inverts humanity. Muslims love what Allah loves and hate what Allah hates. Allah hates those who do not love him. Allah hates the kufaar; they do not submit to Allah, they are not Muslim. This has profound implications, such as subjecting the distinction between good and evil to the distinction between love and hatred.

The antithesis of Allah is, therefor, not the Devil, but the kufaar. Muslims hate the kufaar more than they hate Satan, a minor character in Islam. This says something about the relationship between Islam as religion and Islam as totalitarian system. The kufaar are filthy, najis, unclean, not just ritually, but physically, such that wearing their clothes and eating from their vessels are offensive to the Muslim. “Fight those who believe not in Allah,” The madrassa teacher tells the children so. Shari’a tells the adults so. Muslims learn from a very early age that they must fear Allah and love Allah, that they are the best of people, yet Allah can do anything he wants with them, including send them all to Hell.

While some Christian thinkers anguish over ultimate justice, the concept is meaningless in Islam, because it trespasses on the prerogative of the Almighty. It is only possible to reconcile with such a religion if you accept that you are a slave of Allah, for only in the mind of a slave, a self-negating being, can such a cauldron of contradictions keep bubbling.

The pain flowed into Winston’s body. The needle must be at seventy, seventy-five. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew that the fingers were still there, and still four. All that mattered was somehow to stay alive until the spasm was over. He had ceased to notice whether he was crying out or not. The pain lessened again. He opened his eyes. O’Brien had drawn back the lever.
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.’
‘Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?’
‘Really to see them.’

Picture credits:

Screenshots from "How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?" Higher Quality Uploads, YouTube, 20 Jan 2021 https://youtu.be/EoDOazaijYY

Screenshot from "Muslims Lose Their Minds When 26 Different ARABIC Qurans Return to Speakers' Corner!", Hatun Tash DCCI Ministries, YouTube, 4 Jul 2017 https://youtu.be/9y7eWEjBBw4