Had Orwell but known Islam. Part 3

Special Series on Apostasy: There's no better time than Ramadan

Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5

Charles Hamilton, the 18th-century English translator of the Shafi’i Shari’a manual, Al-Hidayah, observed about Shari’a generally:

We may there observe that, however sagaciously it might be formed for the sudden extension of dominion, during an age when mankind were involved in the darkest gloom of superstition and ignorance, the Mussulman system, civil and religious, is but wretchedly adapted to the purposes of public security or private virtue. We may observe with some degree of laudable exultation, its obvious inferiority, in every useful view, to that excellent system which we profess, and which is so admirably calculated to promote the temporal need of mankind, as well as their eternal happiness! (Preliminary Discourse, pp xxvi-xxvii). (My emphasis)

Islam, as religion, anaesthetises the lay Muslim to the monstrous project he is ordained to be the lesser part of. He will, with deeply-wounded heart, defend his faith as virtuous and just. Indeed, defending and expanding Islam is the only virtue he knows. All else is but a device to that end, including lying, stealing and killing, including his own children, his wife and himself. A Muslim’s emotions are not human emotions; they are Muslim emotions, a terrible abomination of the sublime gift of feeling. A Muslim is a human turned against himself, whose entire being has been hacked into for a specific, anti-human purpose.

A Muslim, by definition, is permanently at war with anyone and everyone who is not Muslim. Himself, the Muslim, is also permanently at war with himself, the human. Every single Muslim is a reservist for the great Muslim war machine, who can be called up at any moment to kill, conceal a killer, feed a killer, transport a killer, equip a killer, lie about a killer, deny knowledge of a killer, encourage a killer, even offer their offspring to become killers. All this, because Allah is closer to the Muslim than his own jugular vein.

In late antiquity, and for a very long time thereafter, Islam was by far the most horrible fate that could be visited upon an old-world people, and in many respects it remains so despite the rise of modern, technologically-advanced totalitarian systems. Some totalitarian systems have been famously short-lived (Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany), others are given to periodic catastrophic culling (China, Islam, Russia), even intermittently dropping out of existence, while others persist in grim, slow-motion annihilation (North Korea). Kokka-Shinto Japan shared Islam’s potential for longevity. The traits Islam shared with Kokka-Shinto are different to the traits it shares with Communism and Fascism.

All totalitarianisms negate humanity, and so are inherently given to cruelty, brutality, mass-murder and genocide. It is an arrangement of human affairs that eats itself. Yet Islam has persisted for 1400 years, making it the most robust totalitarian system in history. The key to this systemic success lies in Islam being a different thing to each of its defining social strata: to "the elect" (as the Shari'a refers the higher echelons of the Islamic hierarchy), Islam is a comprehensive totalitarian system, yet for "the masses" (a designation beloved of the sheikhs), that same Islam is a religion, plain and simple.

Moreover, Islam's totalitarianism functions through its being a religion, and that the two sides condition one another. Pre-industrial totalitarianism can function only through religion. Without Islam as religion, Islam as totalitarianism would succumb to the contradiction between being human and being Muslim. In this and the following part, will look at Islam as George Orwell looked at Fascism, look at Islam through Orwell’s eyes, so to speak.

Law and Faith: Two sides of the same coin

Understanding that Islam is a totalitarian system requires understanding of Shari’a, the law of Islam. But understanding how lay Muslims are kept ignorant of this fact requires familiarity with Islam as religion. Most Muslims who leave Islam do so long before they know that Islam is a totalitarian system, if, indeed, they ever come to that insight.

Exegesis is expressly forbidden to lay Muslims, who are confined to the Qur’an, Hadith, Seera and, most importantly, whatever their “scholars” tell them. Only the “people of knowledge” do exegesis, and they do it very thoroughly — after all, they designed Islam to be the "bastion of solidarity" that would preserve their power to the end of time — and precisely because what transpires within it is such an affront to reason, humanity and objective reality. This is why the now famous holes-in-the-narrative controversy erupted in the first place. The necessary doctrinal claim to perfection stands up to neither reason, nor evidence.

1400 years of exegesis has left the scholars with volumes of irreconcilables, giving them all the more reason to conceal from lay Muslims that, firstly, Shari’a is an affront to reason and humanity, and latterly, that Islam is anything but perfect, a task made impossible by widespread literacy, universal access to information and, above all, the rise of the autonomous individual in Muslim lands. The kind of person that a Muslim needs to be for Islam to be Islam still makes up the overwhelming majority of Muslims. But that the unthinkable, Muslims who reject Allah, should become common knowledge, as is now the case, is enough to “knock us over,” as Sheikh Bilal Phillips laments.

Long before Islam can impose itself on the world, it must first impose itself on Muslims. Islam is, therefor, in the first instance a totalitarian system for Muslims. This it must be before it can subjugate anybody else. Islam as a totalitarian system is all about dehumanising Muslims, alienating them from themselves, and making them ready to "slay and be slain" in the cause of Allah. This is how you get an army dying to kill itself on the orders of the "scholars."

“Allah knows who the next Salah ad-Din will be,” prods Sheikh Dr Yasir Qadhi in response to the affront of Israel refusing to capitulate in the wake of 7 October. Muslims understand from this "Who will rise to the challenge and do the ummah proud?" It all went right over the non-Muslims' heads.

Totalitarianism receives its driving force from a population with a supremacist identity and a global mission, their path to perfection blocked by lower creatures, who hate them, are unjust to them and want to lure them away from Islam. That supremacist identity is engendered and its global mission instilled in six-year-old children in madrassas across the world.

Knowledge of Shari’a helps in understanding why Islam is the vast iniquity that it is. Yet, knowledge of Shari’a alone does not suffice to show that Islam is a totalitarian system. One needs to understand what a totalitarian system is in order to see that Islam is such a system. The superficial traits of a system, however grotesque they might be, are no indication of whether such a system is totalitarian. Any system, even a totalitarian one, is a self-replicating set of interactions between discrete dynamic elements. Should those interactions break down, the system breaks down. To understand what makes the system a system, it is necessary to understand why its elements are dynamic, and what makes their interactions result in the system self-replicating.

Islam might be a religion of lawyers, but it is also a religion of priests. The “scholars”, the lawyers, determine which parts of Shari’a, which laws, “it is wise” for lay Muslims to know, and the imams and teachers bring them to those “masses”. And it is the priests that run the madrassas, where they hardwire the minds of little children. It is priests, not lawyers, who instil the fear of God into those destroyed minds and it is priests who reconstruct those young minds so they never question and always only hear and obey. It is also the priests who send Muslims forth after Friday prayers to make the world aware of the presence of Islam in ways they have earned notoriety for, because Muslims are permanently at war with the kufaar. It is therefore also a religion of soldiers. The clue is in the pride with which Muslims say, "We hear and we obey," and in the punctilious regimentation of their prayer, the most primitive form of adulation.

Every Muslim is a soldier ready to be mobilised, it is simply a matter of the extent of jihad, war against infidels, that their training allows, some use a hijab to beautify your head, others use a five-shekel knife to cut off your head. None of them are "radical." Many in the West are shocked at PEW reports showing that overwhelming percentages of Muslims around the world want Shari'a. It is the priests serving as teachers who create that want while the child is in madrassa learning the faith, the regimental five daily prayers, and every other regimentation that makes up this religion of war. Shari'a texts are military secrets.

They are also the basis of right and wrong in Islam. Right or wrong in Islam has nothing to do with harming or not harming others, and everything to do with harming or not harming Islam, the deen. In other totalitarian systems, the equivalent might be harming or not harming the Motherland, harming or not harming the Race, harming or not harming the Party, etc.

Nazism is dead, Communism is collapsing in stages, and Islam is ascending in political power because religion had sustained it during its political dormancy, its "century of humiliation," when it was too weak to subjugate any "obedient tribes" and had to settle for only the most miserable Sikhs, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists, while Jews came to wield complete power over Muslims in the Middle East and the kufaar in general over Muslims in the world at large. But during all this time, it has been religion that kept lay Muslims, those already inside Islam, in check. Islam has eclipsed Catholicism as the world's premier force for evil and is in the process of eclipsing Communism.

Shari’a is sacred law; the very concept of Shari'a is grounded in religion. The law-giver is Allah/Muhammad. Shari'a is, God's Law. If Shari's is God's Law, then it is the law that God wills. It is even forbidden to study Shari'a for reasons other than to the glory of Allah. This totalitarian system is steeped in religion through and through, the basis of its social division into “scholars” and lay Muslims. According to the Shari’a manual Reliance of the Traveller, “The perfection of faith (ihsan) is “to adore Allah as if you see Him, and if you see Him not, He nevertheless sees you." (Reliance of the Traveller, Book U4.1) (My emphasis) Whether you see him or not, know that Islam’s Big Brother is inside your head. Of course, a similar observation can be made about any omniscient god, but this is more sinister. The text goes on to list three “stations” on the way to the perfection of faith:

(1) to worship in a way that fulfills (sic) its obligations, by observing all its conditions and integrals;

(2) to do this while immersed in the sea of gnostic inspiration (mukashafa) until it is as if the worshipper actually beholds Allah Most High, this being the station of contemplative spiritual vision (mushahada);

(3) and to worship as mentioned above, though mainly aware that Allah sees one, this being the station of vigilance (muraqaba).

This is an ingenious trap in which Big Brother virtually watches you. Of course, no one is going to actually see Allah, which means that no one will ever attain to the perfection of faith.

Three spiritual stations a servant [of Allah, a Muslim] may have in his worship: (1) to worship in a way that fulfils its obligations, by observing all its conditions and integrals; …All three of these are the perfection of faith (ihsan), but the perfection required for the validity of worship is only the first, while perfection in the latter senses is the mark of the elect, and not possible for many. (U4.2) (My emphasis)

The first station, the station of "worship that fulfils its obligations," i.e., mindless rituals, is “Islam for the masses,” who must strive for “the perfection of faith,” the perfection of religion, but by their defined nature, know that they will never attain it. The simple believer must cling to the meagre faith that has been ordained for his inadequate station, grateful for the little he has been favoured with. At the end of the day, the closest thing to a guarantee that a lay Muslim has of reaching Paradise, is to kill and be killed in the cause of Allah.

The “scholar” and the sheikh, each failing to see Allah in the privacy of his own mind, can give enough outward sign that he sees Allah at least as well as the next pretender. The bigger the camel hoof-print on his forehead, the better. No one will ever question his perfection of faith: neither the lay Muslims, who hold such people in high reverence; nor his fellow “scholars”, whose own scams are as vulnerable as his. They all play the game and the show stays on the road.

Picture credits:

Branch of the National Union of Journalists (BNUJ). - https://web.archive.org/web/20080608013945/http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/pics/orwell-unioncard.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2001660

Ali Esfandiari at the Persian language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12047217