"Islam is not a religion," Answer to Lloyd de Jongh

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Very few Muslims actually read the Qur’an, most of those who do, do not do so for comprehension. They keep a Qur’an in the house because it is holy and they can revere it through various rituals. Their sheikh tells them what the Qur’an says, and they hear and obey. Children are endlessly told that the nabi (Muhammad) did this and the nabi said that, while adults show off their piety by quoting whatever hadiths they can dredge up from their memories or make up on the spot, at least until they’ve sized up one another enough to be able to drop the pretence.

It is hard to be Muslim because that is completely unnatural. It is easier to be human because that is, after all, what we are. From the moment we submit to beings, reals or imagined, and imbue them with the power of life and death over us, we have taken our first step towards inhumanity. The rest is simply a matter of degree, with Islam currently the most destructive from worship of a supernatural being, and Juche currently the most destructive form of worship of a natural being.[1]

Lloyd de Jongh dismisses the value of the Qur'an as a source: “Why would I read a vague Qur’anic verse, which has some contradictory verse, so they always all have contradictory verses somewhere else in the book, when I can go to Shari’a, which is black and white and unambiguous.” So it is a bit odd that De Jongh, without explanation, turned to this vague document renowned for its contradictory verses, to unambiguously set forth the two purposes of Islam from verses 4:157 and 3:104.

Without agreeing with De Jongh on the purpose of the verse, it is hard to see how the statement, "Islam is not a religion," can stand in light of such an unambiguously religious purpose as that which De Jongh ascribes to verse 4:157, an unambiguously religious verse. Verse 3:104 does suggest that Islam is totalitarian system, but to find Islam's political purpose, we need to turn to the Shari'a manual, Reliance of the Traveller. As we have seen in Part 3, De Jongh has done this and located the political heart of Islam, albeit unwittingly. The strict stratification of the ummah into the scholars ("the elect") and lay Muslims ("the masses"), the former ordained to study the laws of Allah and "guide" the latter, while the latter is ordained to hear and obey the former without question, and to fight and die in jihad warfare, thus making Islam a totalitarian system. Verse 3:104 only describes one of the mechanisms that make totalitarianism feasible.

De Jongh's inconsistency in providing evidence that Islam is a religion, while insisting that it is not, does not in and of itself prove either that Islam is a religion, or that De Jongh's evidence is sound. As it happens, Christians are marginal to Qur'anic concerns, while the Qur'an is obsessed with Jews. According to Islam, although Jesus will return on the Last Day, the "Last Hour" will not come until the Muslims have killed all the Jews. In other words, according to Islam, the Muslims and the Jews are involved in bringing about the consummation of all things, after which Jesus returns to kill all the Christians.

Zeroing in on 4:157 as the religious purpose of Islam gets around the marginal role of Christians in the consummation of all things, and serves one or two other mendacious purposes. That it is incumbent on every Muslim to command the right and forbid the wrong (3:104) turns the entire Muslim population into the eyes and ears of Shari’a, a non-territorial jurisdiction. This is exactly what defines a police state; everyone is the police, one of the prerequisites for totalitarianism.

For Shari’a to exercise power over all Muslims, “the wrong” has to be located in what is most human, in what comes most naturally to us all, i.e., the pursuit of human pleasures, desires, predilections and preferences, in short, happiness. In other words, Islam's totalitarian power consists in, firstly, depriving Muslims of that which makes them human, and secondly, regulating, or more accurately, perverting, Muslims' access to their own humanity. All totalitarian systems achieve this as the outcome of a system that strictly segregates society into a relatively small stratum at the top with monopoly power to give and to take away, a very large disengaged mass whole entire universe is confined to matters that affect them directly, and a substantial coercive stratum in the middle, whose members are susceptible to relegation to the bottom stratum at any moment.

To make the object of natural human needs and desires “the wrong,” makes those desires themselves “the wrong,” and therefore necessary to control, taking us into the realm of both emotional and thought policing. It is the Holy Grail of every totalitarian system to be able to control the thoughts and feelings of everyone at every moment of the day. Islam goes a long way towards accomplishing this with its rules for everything, and by stipulating what Muslims must love and what they must hate (rage and jealousy being the only other permitted emotions). In other words, to be a good Muslims requires the Muslim to have no control over his or her own thoughts, or his or her own emotions, and to live only to please Allah, which only the scholars can tell them how to do. According to the ideological inspiration of the Iranian regime, Ayatollah Khomeini,

Islam and divine governments …have commandments for everybody, everywhere, at any place, in any condition. If a person were to commit an immoral dirty deed right next to his house, Islamic governments have business with him. …Islam has rules for every person, even before birth, before his marriage, until his marriages, pregnancy, birth, until upbringing of the child, the education of the adult, until puberty, youth, until old age, until death, into the grave, and beyond the grave.[2]

Every totalitarian system is, by definition, anti-human. The most basic pleasure is sex, which is why all religions seek to control its adherents through controlling sex, forbidding sex, making sex dirty, segregating the sexes, mystifying sex, imposing strict rules for sex and severe punishments for sexual transgressions, etc. Natural fighting over females lends itself readily to the first instrument of totalitarian control, control of fertility. Both Islam and Catholicism are notorious for their obsession with sex, with Nazism and Communism not far behind.

Yet, if all Muslims were constantly looking for and finding ways to do “the wrong,” no one would have time to watch their fellows and command “the right.” It would be a recipe for chaos and rapid societal disintegration. Far better be it to get everyone to police themselves. This is where Islam as religion comes in. All pleasures become guilty pleasures, a phrase with more meaning than is generally assumed. If Muslims can be brainwashed from an early age to feel guilty just for having a desire long before they’ve done anything about it, then other Muslims are saved a great deal of “commanding the right,” and they might actually get on with doing something productive with their lives. Religion makes totalitarianism viable,[3] nowhere more explicitly laid out than on De Jongh's slide, The Purpose of the Law, meaning Shari'a, on which he sets out to dissociate Islam from religion.

Lloyd de Jongh says “Islamic law deals with two broad aspects of regulation.” The first of these is “Laws dealing with man’s duty to Allah.” (Emphasis original). Given that Allah is the god of the Muslims, which they worship as their creator, it is very hard to see how one convincingly argues that Islam is not a religion, especially as this “duty to Allah” is expanded with terms like, “profession of faith”, “prayer”, and "fasting" (religious deferment of gratification, especially of food and water). “Duty to Allah” is English for the Arabic 'ibadat, for which De Jongh helpfully provides a dictionary definition:

Below I have highlighted all references to, or pertaining to, religion:

‘ibadat (A. s. ‘ibada) : submissive obedience to a master, and therefore religious practice, corresponding, in law, approximately to the ritual of Muslim law. III 647a; ‘the religious acts which bring the creature into contact with his creator', while its counterpart, MU'ĀMALĀT, signifies relations between individuals. VI 467a; acts of worship. IX 3236.

Curiously, De Jongh, instead, highlights the following:

‘ibadat (A. s. ‘ibada) : submissive obedience to a master, and therefore religious practice, corresponding, in law, approximately to the ritual of Muslim law. III 647a; ‘the religious acts which bring the creature into contact with his creator', while its counterpart, MU'ĀMALĀT, signifies relations between individuals. VI 467a; acts of worship. IX 3236.

De Jongh is keen to direct his viewers' attention as follows:

'ibadat is submissive obedience to a master. Notice the connotation of slavery. This is very different to accepting the Holy Spirit, accepting Jesus into your heart and wanting to be good, because you've been guided by the Holy Spirit.[4] This is submission, true submission, as a slave would, and notice: submissive obedience to a master and, therefore, religious practice corresponding, in law, approximately to the ritual of Muslim law.

In the explanation of the meaning of ‘ibadat, the word submissive appears once, and then as an adjective describing obedience. Religion, or words or phrases that pertain to religion, appear five times in this same explanation, always as nouns. Despite the rather obvious parallel between “master” and “creator” in "the religious acts which bring the creature into contact with his creator," repeated in "acts of worship," and the preponderance and greater substance of "religion" over "submission," De Jongh ignores 'ibadat meaning acts of worship, and turns “religious acts” into “acts,” thereby blurring the religious focus just enough to make room to reinforce submissive with slavery, and segue into: "This is submission, true submission, as a slave would," conditioning his audience to see only law and not religion, before continuing, "notice: submissive obedience to a master and, therefore, religious practice corresponding, in law, approximately to the ritual of Muslim law."

Since slavery has no intrinsic link to either religion or totalitarianism, we are no closer to Islam not being a religion, or, for that matter, being a totalitarian system, but we are closer to understanding the position of the worshipper in Islam, someone whose duty is to his god, Allah, which is akin to the duty of a slave to his master. If this is De Jongh's point, then there is no great revelation here. Islam has no problem at all with slavery and is quite open about it, even referring to Muslims as "slaves of Allah," as they do themselves.[5] It seems likely that De Jongh wants to highlight that Muslims lack the Christian duty to the Christian God. Since no Muslim has ever claimed to have either such a duty or such a god, De Jongh's contrasting the slave-master relationship with having Jesus and the Holy Spirit appears contrived to distance Islam from religion.

While neither of the verses 4:157 and 3:104 are critical, De Jongh also presents what they are meant to encapsulate the wrong way round: Islam is a totalitarian system first, and a religion second, as discussed in Part 3. Because De Jong denies Islam is a religion, he precludes himself from accepting the role of Islam as religion within Islam as totalitarian system, and so fails to understand how Islam, a particular totalitarian system, works.

De Jongh erroneously understands totalitarianism to mean "bearing humiliation under the power and subjugation of others, those others being the Muslims. The obedient tribe is called qawmun dayyinun." Subjugation is what the Nazis did to the Jews, in order to exterminate them, and to the Slavs, in order to enslave them. Totalitarianism is what the Nazis imposed on the wider German population inside Germany, ruled over by the Nazi Party. Subjugation is what the Russian kleptocracy is trying to do to the Ukrainian people, while it reimposes totalitarianism on the Russian population inside Russia. The "obedient tribe" reference is a misunderstanding of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism requires no qawmun dayyinun. If it did, then North Korea would not be totalitarian.

My point is that lay Muslims also impose commanding right and forbidding wrong on themselves by: (i), checking their own behaviour, sometimes through strict religious observance, sometimes through fear and guilt; (ii), differentiating themselves from the kufaar through the superficial trapping of their religion, through worship and through those “conditions and integrals;” and (iii), as far as they can get away with, avoiding imitating or having contact with the kufaar. They also distinguish themselves from the kufaar by Islam’s prohibitions and punishments, i.e., Shari’a, as told to them by “the elect,” and by observance of distinctive customs and traditions, a category of deen that De Jongh ignores (see Part 1).

According to De Jongh’s thinking, since Islam is not a religion, it should not be possible for a Muslim to feel any sense of religious fulfilment or sense of “closeness to God.” On such a premise it would be hard to explain why otherwise lax Muslims spend whole days in the mosque during the last week of Ramadan, or why people scrape together all they can to go on hajj, even though they are exempted from the obligation (they do not do this only out of vanity), or why Muslims find affirmation in a mu'adhin waking them before dawn, even if the have no intention of getting up to pray. The hijab is a compulsory means of identification that allows any other Muslim to impose "the right" on any woman who so identifies herself as a Muslim, the equivalent of the yellow star the Nazis forced Jews to wear, identifying them as subject to arbitrary abuse. The same cannot be said for the wading trousers that men are free to wear or not to wear. Muslim men in the West adopt such attire not because the law forces them to, but because they find religious affirmation in doing so, despite their ridiculous appearance. It is not possible to understand Islam as a totalitarian system, without also understanding it as a religion.

Devoting so much of my energies to answering Lloyd de Jongh on whether Islam is a religion, the reader would be entitled to wonder where I stand on this profound world-historical question. I shall start at the same point De Jongh starts: with one of the categories of deen, Ownership (see Part 1). De Jongh uses deen in the sense of ownership to be able to slip in the aphorism "possession is nine-tenths of the law," thereby to put his stake in the ground: deen means law. But, instead of narrowing down the meanings of deen so as to marginalise religion, I shall take the dictionaries at their word — no pun intended.

The concept of deen as ownership casts a much wider net than De Jongh lets on. Ownership includes owning someone's life, hence the inclusion of to be a slave. Deen is also related to to be indebted, to owe, in this case, "to owe someone your life."[6] De Jongh limits slavery to, "submission, true submission, submissive obedience to a master, obey without question, just do it," which, of course, is not particular to slavery.

Muslims do want a return of slavery, and not only because it is haram to adopt the ways of the infidel. Manumitting your slaves is one way of expiating your sins (is sin a religious concept?). More relevant for our purposes here, deen in connection with being owned as a slave, is also something positive in Islam, and underlies Muslims being "slaves of Allah," because they owe Allah their lives according to a bargain Allah had struck with them, as Qur'an 9:111 stipulates:

Lo! Allah hath bought from the believers their lives and their wealth because the Garden will be theirs: they shall fight in the way of Allah and shall slay and be slain. It is a promise which is binding on Him in the Torah and the Gospel and the Qur'an. Who fulfilleth His covenant better than Allah? Rejoice then in your bargain that ye have made, for that is the supreme triumph. (My emphasis).

This defines the fundamental relationship between Muslims and their god, Islam's religious purpose. Allah says to Muslims, you owe me your lives and everything you own, which I paid for by reserving a place in Heaven for you. Make sure you deliver. For details of contract expiry, see the small print in 2:193.

According to 2:193, the deal expires when all religion is for Allah: "And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah." According to De Jongh, Muslims have had 1400 to do exegesis, and have failed to come up with anything that clears up the Qur'an. I don't know about that, because I find Tafseer Ibn Kathir to throw at least as much light on the religious purpose of Islam as Lloyd de Jongh does:

And fight them until there is no more Fitnah,

meaning, Shirk.

This is the opinion of Ibn Abbas, Abu Al-Aliyah, Mujahid, Al-Hasan, Qatadah, Ar-Rabi, Muqatil bin Hayyan, As-Suddi and Zayd bin Aslam.

Allah's statement;

and the religion (all and every kind of worship) is for Allah (Alone).

means, `So that the religion of Allah becomes dominant above all other religions.' (Emphasis original. 'Religion' is translated from 'deen' in the original, AP)[7]

Ibn Kathir seems to think that deen means "religion (all and every kind of worship)." The reason I cannot fault this is that 9:111 demonstrates the inherent unity of totalitarianism and religion in Islam. All of you, believe X and nothing else; so go forth and do Y. 9:111, the verse that lays out the religious purpose of Islam, also explains verse 4:157, that De Jongh puts forward as Islam's religious purpose, which he quotes as:

...they said (in boast), "We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah":- but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not. (Emphasis LdJ)

From 4:157 De Jongh concludes: "Islam rejects and seeks to 'correct' the Gospel, i.e., the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus, replacing Jesus with Mohammed." It might offend Lloyd de Jongh to learn that for Islam, his religion is not important enough to warrant "correcting" its errors. The Christians' transgression is much more spectacular than that, as 9:111 explains: "It is a promise which is binding on Him in the Torah and the Gospel and the Qur'an." (My emphasis)

The Jews and the Christians, by refusing to return to being Muslims, i.e., to revert to being slaves of Allah, have reneged on the deal, triggering what De Jongh lists as "the fourth meaning of deen," comprising "reward, repayment, justice and accountability." When the Muslims come to kill Jews and Christians, they are restoring to Allah what rightfully belongs to him: runaway slaves.

This is how I currently understand these issues, and look forward to enriching this understanding with deeper insights.

[Part 5, Wednesday 2 November, concludes]

Notes:

'Personality cult' is a term that assumes the worship of a supernatural being to be natural (and good), while the worship of a human being is unnatural (and bad). Juche is much more destructive of the faithful's humanity than the worship of Hitler, Stalin or Mao. It seems otherwise on the face of it. Because North Korea had not demonstrated destruction on the scale of the more prominent totalitarian systems, Juche is hardly known about outside that society. How the Juche faithful compare to Muslims under full-blown Islam, such as ISIS or the Taliban, is a question I am unable to answer.
Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in Georgy Gounev, The Dark Side of the Crescent Moon: The Islamization of Europe and its Impact on American/Russian Relations, Transaction Publishers, 2014, p176.
Later in history, other instruments become available, such as personality cults, addiction, electronic surveillance, etc.
De Jongh does not see the circular reasoning in "accepting the Holy Spirit, ...and wanting to be good, because you've been guided by the Holy Spirit." It is not clear why you would accept the Holy Spirit if you did not want to be good in the first place. What purpose does the Holy Spirit serve if it merely guides you be as you were before you accepted it?
Muslims, who are not permitted to speak ill of Islam, have a growing PR problem as the secrets of Islam are increasingly exposed. They have been engaged in substantial damage limitation on account of the Islamic practise of slavery, that the West, first through colonialism and then through the United Nations Charter, has interrupted. Article XI of the so-called Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam is one of the stepping stones towards reintroducing slavery.
Hans Wehr, 4th ed. https://www.ejtaal.net/aa/#hw4=366,ll=985,ls=5,la=1467,sg=400,ha=235,br=345,pr=59,aan=196,mgf=314,vi=152,kz=767,mr=239,mn=437,uqw=563,umr=379,ums=312,umj=262,ulq=737,uqa=137,uqq=109,bdw=h334,amr=h232,asb=h304,auh=h586,dhq=h186,mht=h306,msb=h85,tla=h50,amj=h253,ens=h1,mis=h685
In order to keep the focus of this answer on Lloyd de Jongh's claims, I am ignoring the significance of Qur'an verses 9:111 and 2:193, and other more significant verses, for the political economy of Islam.