Had Orwell but known Islam. Part 5

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

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Editorial note: Important update to the discussion of dhimmitude, 8 April 2024.

A contemporary Muslim is an anguished being preoccupied with unshakeable mediaeval concerns. Never before in history has Islam faced a danger such as it faces today. For the first time, Muslims en masse are reclaiming their humanity and rejoining the flow of history. Islam has always relied on Muslims being unequivocally Muslim in clear contradistinction to the kufaar, the unbelievers, treating kufr values and mores with utter disgust and contempt. But history has played a trick on Islam, as increasing numbers of Muslims are finding that the values and mores of the infidels acknowledge their humanity, and naturally grow within their own hearts, gradually forcing out the Qur’an so unnaturally lodged there during their early childhood. This drama plays out as Islam struggles against Muslims and Muslims struggle both amongst and within themselves, leaving an ummah, the global Muslim community, in a great struggle of each against all, an ummah in meltdown.

There are many hadiths that have come from the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), as well as quotes from the Companions, which indicate that the Community [ummah, AP] is divinely protected from error.

Such confidence in divine protection appears to be slightly misplaced. Yet, there is a deeper point to be made: there might be more to "divine protection" than one might at first assume, because, to borrow a Christian phrase, the Lord works in mysterious ways. The mysterious way in question, is the lodging of the Qur'an in the hearts of Muslims, and in such a way that it is extremely difficult to dislodge.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, we read the torturer O'Brien assuring Winston Smith:

‘Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.’

Dear apostate, your leaving Islam does not set you free, because Islam has not yet left you. By that I do not mean that Muslims are still after you (of course they are), but that Islam still conditions your humanity. This should neither surprise nor alarm you. Islam got into your brain while it was still forming, and so is part of its wiring, its architecture, if you will. Islam is so integral to what you have become that you do not recognise some of its manifestations as not intrinsically part of you, but implanted into you when you were but a little child.

If you saw someone tearing pages from a copy of Middlemarch (apologies to Eliot fans) stuffing it in their mouth, chewing it and spitting it out, your strongest reaction might be to dismiss them as infantile. You might find the wilful destruction of books distasteful. You might wonder whether, if they hated the book so much, why they didn't just give it away, rather than destroy it. You might for a moment consider the possible toxicity of ink, or what the many fingers that had previously flicked those pages might have left behind on the paper. You might think that its their property to do with as they please. You could also be completely indifferent. Each of these would be a normal human reaction.

Now consider a different set of reactions. You are appalled that a great work of literature should be treated in this way. You would happily pay to salvage the book from further destruction. You are disgusted with and angry at people who think so little of books, any books, but especially great works, that they would behave in this way. You might condemn them as barbarians and not deserving of the culture that gave the world Middlemarch. Your thoughts might go quickly to book-burning, to the destruction of the library of Alexandria, to the Catholic Church, to the Nazis, and, if you were familiar with the glorious history of Islam, to Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khilji's burning down of Nalanda University, killing all the Hindus he found there, and building an enormous pyre of all the books in the university library. You may be moved to recall the aphorism spoken by Hassan in Heinrich Heine's play Almansor: "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen," ("It was but a prelude: where they burn books, they in the end also burn people."). The prelude in question was the burning of the Qur'an. It makes you shudder to think that in some small way, you might be "like them".

But suppose we substitute the Qur'an for Middlemarch, would your reaction be one or a combination of the above, or would a new set of reactions come into play? Would you be offended? Would you find the unfolding event difficult to take in? Would you manifest physiological reactions, such a change in your heart rate or breathing pattern? Would you feel hot, have clammy hands? Would you have ringing in your ears, slight tunnel vision, dryness in the mouth, and so forth? Would you experience a disturbance in your perception of time? Would you recoil and feel somehow tainted by having witnessed a copy of the Qur'an destroyed? This last set of reactions, purely emotional and physiological, suggest that the Qur'an is still "in your heart". It means that there is still the possibility that you could resubmit and return to Islam. This tenacity of the work done on you during your years in madrassa is what Orwell refers to above, and what ISIS relied on when they insisted:

O America, would we be defeated and you victorious if you were to take Mosul or Sirte or Raqqa? ...Certainly not! We would be defeated and you victorious only only if you were able to remove the Qur'an from Muslims' hearts.[1]

The Qur'an still in your heart makes you think twice before doing what comes naturally to those who were never Muslim. When you leave that horrible religion, you are far from free. You still bear the psychic damage from your life as a Muslim, and still carry the poison of its ideology coursing through your veins, ready to seep into your wounds and throw you back to the gibbering, fearing Muslim you thought you no longer were. The arrival of the autonomous individual in the Islamic universe overcomes this “never escape”, puts an end to “for ever”. The true human comes back from “no coming back”. All that remains for the apostate from Islam to accomplish, is to recover from “you could not recover”. This website, Murtadd to Human, is dedicated to help you do exactly that.

I have argued in this series that the emotions of a Muslim are a perversion of human emotions[2]. Upon a superficial or biased reading, one might find that the Qur'an mentions "love" (in all forms of the word) 2,174 times and "hate" 81 times, and conclude that the Book of Allah is overwhelmingly about love. Upon closer inspection it becomes clear that what is indeed overwhelming is the number of times that Allah commands Muslims to love him, how he hates those who do not love him, how they have to love what he loves, and how he loves the Muslims who fear him. None is to be loved more than him. That goes even for the Muslim's love of himself. Muslims have to hate what Allah hates. Children must turn against their parents if those parents do not love Allah. Parents must kill their children, if those children do not love Allah. It goes on an on in this way.

It should therefor come as no surprise that for a Muslim to love as a human loves is an act of rebellion. It is, in fact, apostasy. We return to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemplations of Winston Smith.

In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

As shown in Part 4, reality denial is not confined to the victims of Islam; it is part of all totalitarianism. Wokeness, political correctness, multiculturalism, diversity-equity-inclusion and all their upstream and downstream variations amount to an entire universe of alt-real. That Islam is what the nice Muslims practise, while the horrible things are done under "Islamism" by "Islamists" is another reality-denying scam. This Western mass-illusion is totalitarianism in the making. The danger this poses for the apostate is that such people, non-Muslims and Western ex-Muslims alike, are desperate to anaesthetise him or her to the horrors of Islam.

Keep in mind, dear apostate, that the bar against which the kafir supporters of Islam measure the deeds of Muslims is set ever lower, until one level of barbarism will be lauded as preferable to another. That "moderate" Muslims and their acolytes should even find it necessary to point out that “not all Muslims take advantage”, “not all Muslims deceive”, “not all Muslims are violent”, “not all Muslims rape”, “not all Muslims murder”, etc., is, of course, itself a devastating indictment of Muslims. It is an admission that the Muslims who do not do these things are the exception. Yet, "not all Muslims, etc.," is proffered as a defence, a virtue signal, and is expected to be taken as such. No Christian, Buddhist or Jew, or any of their supporters, ever leaps to defend the group when one of them is accused of an iniquity. Similarly, in the English taqiyya translation of Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller), we find that where the editors had redacted four entire sections on slavery, they inserted the following:

(Titus Burckhardt[3]:) Slavery within Islamic culture is not to be confused with Roman slavery or with the American variety of the nineteenth century; in Islam the slave was never a mere "thing." If his master treated him badly, he could appeal to a judge and procure his freedom. His dignity as a Muslim was inviolable. Originally the status of slave was simply the outcome of having been taken as a prisoner of war. A captive who could not buy his own freedom by means of ransom remained in the possession of the captor until he had earned his freedom by work or until he was granted liberty by his master (Moorish Culture in Spain (y32) , 30). (Book w13.1)

Their humanity has to be corrupted if they see slavery in Islam as something "better than" Roman or American slavery, almost noble. Why would you, with your beautiful Islamic culture, want to leave Islam? These ever-lowering benchmarks will trap your straining humanity in Islamic barbarism. No, but barbarism is what the Islamists do and you're not an Islamist. You're a Muslim. We all get along so well.

The perils you face come not only from Muslims who want to kill you, but from liberal non-Muslims who strangle your humanity by trying to convince you that Islam is something other than you know it to be. The last thing on earth they want is for you to leave Islam, because it will make their kumbaya illusions untenable.

Dhimmitude takes this process of emotional negation to its logical conclusion, making the human practically irrecoverable. Whereas the Muslim child's psyche is dismantled, that of the dhimmi is pulverised. The psyche of the Muslim child is reassembled to build an adult impervious to the massacre of 7 October, yet hypersensitive to the slightest infraction against a Muslim, real or perceived. The adult Muslim at the same time both celebrates 7 October and denies it ever happened. Even the genius of George Orwell could not dream up such a monstrosity.

The dhimmi, by contrast, is left terrified of not being a dhimmi, of not being a shattered, helpless thing. Listen to the way many rabbis speak about Islam and you quickly realise that Judaism comes wrapped-up in dhimmitude. It manifests especially in the pathetic readiness of Israeli Jews to compromise with those who would see them dead. Not only does the Israeli government pump endless resources into "the Arab sector", which means that now the extortion money is paid before the Jew is beaten, but Israel allows Shari'a to be practised on Israeli soil. If there is to be one denial of the Jewish state, this has to be it. “The right to defend ourselves,” so thumpingly insisted on by “strong” Israeli leaders, already concedes the right of everyone else to attack the Jew. That is the dhimmi, still alive and well in the modern Jew. It is forbidden for the dhimmi to defend himself. Now that the Jews have a state and an army, all they can do with them is rebel against this one dhimmi restriction, as if on the inside, they are still dhimmis. Most Jews deny that they have ever been dhimmis. Of course, they are unable to explain their inability to move beyond their obsession with defending themselves, to asserting their right to not be attacked, as does anyone who has never been a dhimmi.

Every single day Muslims talk about their desire to kill all the Jews. Every single day Muslim governments, terrorist gangs and international organisations openly plot and prepare to kill all the Jews. Every single day a Muslim somewhere tries to do just that. Yet Jews everywhere recoil from the very thought that Muslims are their enemy. Islam has done to dhimmis what it does to lay Muslims: conditioned them to apprehend only such reality as is positive towards Islam, as Shari'a demands of all Muslims and all dhimmis. The contrary will simply not compute.

‘Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men who had been condemned to death for treachery. You pretended that you had seen a piece of paper which proved them innocent. No such piece of paper ever existed. You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it. You remember now the very moment at which you first invented it. Do you remember that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?’
‘Yes.’
O’Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.
‘There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?’
‘Yes.’
And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back again. But there had been a moment — he did not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps — of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O’Brien’s had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed. It had faded but before O’Brien had dropped his hand; but though he could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers a vivid experience at some period of one’s life when one was in effect a different person.

In the case of Islam, O’Brien, or more precisely, O’Brien’s masters, are Malik ibn Anas, Ahmad ibn Hanbal and especially Abu Hanifa, Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi‘i and Muhammad al-Ghazali, the architects of Islamic totalitarianism, who dotted the i-s and crossed the t-s of both Islam, and of the language in which it was to be propagated. Islam’s Winston Smith is the lay Muslim and the dhimmi. The actual existence of Muhammad is as questionable as the actual existence of Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1200 years ago, Imam Al-Shafi‘i had this to say about keeping lay Muslims in line:

It is fitter for them [the common people] to confine themselves to contentment with the above-mentioned absolute certainly [to believe in everything brought by the Messenger of Allah …and to credit it with absolute conviction free of any doubt].

The Qur’an and the hadith not only contradict and abrogate one another, they also reinforce one another. Qur’an 24:51, “We hear and we obey,” is reinforced with hadith, Sahih Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 2679:

Narrated Abu Hurairah: that the Messenger of Allah said: “Leave me with what I left you. When I narrated a Hadith to you, then take it from me. The people before you were only destroyed by their excessive questioning and disagreeing with their Prophets.

A Muslim has no opinion until his sheikh tells him what his opinion is.

‘There are three stages in your reintegration,’ said O’Brien. ‘There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for you to enter upon the second stage.’

[...]

‘In the end we broke them down. I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw them gradually worn down, whimpering, grovelling, weeping — and in the end it was not with pain or fear, only with penitence. By the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die while their minds were still clean.’

This description sprang from George Orwell’s imagination. The reality is as follows:

[The dhimmi] is commanded to put his soul, good fortune and desires to death. Above all he should kill the love of life, leadership and honour. [The dhimmi] is to invert the longings of his soul, he is to load it down more heavily than it can bear until it is completely submissive. Thereafter nothing will be unbearable for him. He will be indifferent to subjugation or might. Poverty and wealth will be the same to him; praise and insult will be the same; preventing and yielding will be the same; lost and found will be the same. Then, when all things are the same, it [the soul] will be submissive and yield willingly what it should give.[4] (Emphasis original)

The totalitarian nightmare that is Islam is laid out most clearly in the Hanafi Shari’a manual, Al-Hidayah (The Guidance). Its English translation, published in India during British rule in 1791, is free of the sanitising redactions made to the revised English translation of the predominantly Shafi’i Shari’a manual Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller), published in the United States in 1991. Islam might not be the world’s first fully-fledged totalitarian system, but the concept predates the arrival of the word by 1400 years. Orwell again:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

It is not granted.

Dear Muslim, the question is very simple, how many future generations of children do you want to condemn to this?

Notes:

1. Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, ISIS 2nd-in-Command, audio message quoted in Robin Wright, "After the Islamic State", The New Yorker, 12 December 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/12/after-the-islamic-state
2. Readers may be interested to know what a Muslim therapist has established after five years of researching "emotions in the Qur'an". https://muslimmatters.org/2024/04/06/5-years-of-studying-emotions-in-the-quran-a-therapists-findings/
3. In using Titus Burckhardt to sell slavery to non-Muslims by elevating it above "Roman slavery... or the American variety," the editors of Reliance of the Traveller are aware that a "revert", especially an academic one, can be a double-edged sword. They thought it prudent to take the precaution of adding the following disclaimer:
   
   "His [Titus Burckhardt's] books on Sufism have a wide readership, both Muslim and non-Muslim, for which reason it is worth mentioning here two points of departure in them that occasionally obscure the spirit of what they are intended to explain.
   
   [...]
   
   "The second point of departure is a comparative religions approach to Islam and Sufism which understands them according to the "essential unity" (and universal validity) of all religions. On this point, Islam dearly teaches that all true religions, as originally revealed, were identical in fundamentals of belief (usuI) such as the oneness of God, the Final Judgement, and heaven and hell, in which sense "we make no distinction between any of His messengers" (Koran 2:285), though each prophetic messenger brought particular rules and rites (furu') that differed to some extent from those of previous messengers, and "to every nation We appointed a worship" (Koran 22:67). So while the anciently revealed religions that are found today naturally show some similarities to Islam, this fact does not prove their "essential unity" with it as they presently exist, for the One who revealed the religions informs us not only that their beliefs and scriptures have since been altered by the hands of men, who "changed the words from their places and forgot a share of what they were reminded of' (Koran 5:13), but also that their rites and laws have been abrogated by those revealed to the Final Messenger (Allah bless him and give him peace), which is why "whoever seeks other than Islam as a religion will never have it accepted from him" (Koran 3:85). This is how Allah Most High has explained the similarities and differences between religions, and any comparative approach beyond this can never lay claim to the truth.
   
   "Aside from such ideas, which are far from Islam, the works of Titus Burckhardt contain many original discussions of the meaning of Islamic art, a field which few westerners have equalled his depth in and appreciation of, and for which he is likely to be remembered. He died in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1984.
   
   That the editors of English translation of Reliance of the Traveller found it necessary to craft such a careful and lengthy disclaimer says something about the difficulty of non-violently defending Islam.
4. Andrew Bostom, "Losing Our Soul to the Islamintern", Dr Andrew Bostom https://www.andrewbostom.org/2008/03/losing-our-soul-to-the-islamintern/

Picture credits:

http://www.sajed.ir/pe/components/com_joomgallery/img_originals/_9/Razmandegan-012.jpg

Zawaj.com https://www.zawaj.com/askbilqis/foster-a-child-as-per-shareeah/cute-little-muslim-baby-holing-holy-quran/

https://saturday-october-seven.com/#/civilsettlements/photos/civil_photos_c13