Author: Serge Trifkovic
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: December 9, 2002
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=4990
One in a series of articles adapted
by Robert Locke from Dr. Serge Trifkovic's new book The Sword of the Prophet:
A Politically-Incorrect Guide to Islam.
One of the silver linings of the
violent civilizational conflict in which we are spasmodically engaged is
that it is forcing us to return to first principles and re- acquaint ourselves
with the fundamental religious values of our own civilization. It is making
us see, if we will only throw off the politically-correct "all cultures
are equal" blinders, how the Judeo-Christian basis of our society is superior
to Islam as an organizing principle for the moral life of man. For the
ethical philosophy entailed by Islam is, upon examination, an astonishingly
crude and impoverished construct, from which many of the Islamic nations'
political problems derive.
The central weakness of Islam as
a moral philosophy lies in its eradication of the individual conscience
of Christianity and Judaism in favor of unthinking submission to the mere
letter of revealed law. The Koran and sunna (example of Mohammed) stand
above reason, conscience, or nature. A thing is right - including acts
and laws abhorrent to "superceded" Biblical or "irrelevant" natural morality
- simply because Allah says so, or because the prophet has thus said or
done. The lack of any pretense to a moral basis for sharia (Islamic law)
is open and explicit: there is no "spirit of the law" in Islam, no rationality
behind it for human reason to discover by exercising man's God- given intellect.
There is no discernment of the consequences of deeds, and revelation and
tradition must not be questioned. Nor may any other standard of good and
evil - least of all any notion of "natural" justice such as that assumed
by the founding documents of the United States - be invoked.
Sharia cannot be penetrated by reason
(its apparent inconsistencies notwithstanding) and the very attempt is
forbidden heresy. Every Moslem who is qualified to give a sound opinion
on matters of sharia, is entitled to interpret the application of sharia
when such interpretation becomes necessary, but where an explicit command
of Allah or his Prophet already exists, no Moslem leader or legislature
can form an independent judgment. Since Muhammad is the final prophet,
there can be no further development in any judicial matters where the Koran
and sunna provide guidance. This deeply undermines the possibility of rational
civic debate in Moslem nations and accounts for the distinctly medieval
flavor of their legal systems.
Sharia is not at all a "moral law"
that guides one's personal map of moral distinctions, but a blend of political
theory and penal law, requiring the punishment of violators by the state.
It presupposes and demands the existence of an Islamic state as an executor
to enforce that law. To be legitimate, all political power therefore must
rest with those who enjoy Allah's authority on the basis of his revealed
will sent down through his prophet. Islam assumes a basic pattern
of movement in the universe, within which,
"[p]olitics is in fact no
different from religion: truth comes from on high and on the way down is
met by responsibility moving up. Society is regulated by law and in the
Islamic state the source of law is divine."
Politics is not "part of Islam,"
as this would imply that in origin it is a separate sphere of existence
which is then eventually amalgamated with Islam. Rather, politics is the
inherent core of the Islamic imperative of Allah's sovereignty. Separation
of mosque and state is impossible within the intellectual framework of
Islam; it can only be imposed, as in Turkey, top-down by the armed force
of the state.
Islam's denigration of the individual
conscience derives fundamentally from its degraded view of man versus that
implied by the Judeo-Christian tradition. In Islam, God may have "breathed
His spirit into man", but He did not imbue him with godliness or fashion
him in His image. The Judeo-Christian belief in the Fall is inseparable
from the concept of salvation and the yearning for the Savior. In Islam,
by contrast, men are neither fallen nor saved and therefore can do no more
than avoid disbelief in Allah to be granted everlasting life - if, of course,
so be the will of Allah. There is no original sin in Islam, and man need
only follow the robotic straight and narrow of understanding God's will
and obeying it to obtain salvation. Salvation involves just obedience followed
by heaven and 72 virgins, not an existential redemption of man's soul.
The essential shallowness of this view is unmistakable.
The ultimate root cause of Islam's
ethical (and indeed spiritual, as we see in the fact that the most spiritual
forms of Islam, like Sufism, are unorthodox forms of the religion that
rebel against its mainstream) shallowness is its arid concept of God. Attributing
human characteristics to Allah is regarded as a sin, tashbih, but so is
its opposite, tatil, which means divesting Allah of all attributes. The
difficulty of dealing with the nature of the Creator in Islam arises from
seemingly contradictory views in the Koran, which describes Allah as unique,
yet also refers to him as having eyes, ears, hands, and face. Tashbih is
forbidden out of the fear that its practice will lead to paganism and idolatry;
tatil is feared to lead to atheism and agnosticism. In other words,
"[Islam] preserves a rigid unity
in God but only at the expense of real personality. It clings to a rigid
simplicity but only by sacrificing his relatability. In short, it leaves
us with an empty and barren concept of deity."
Allah keeps precise cont of the
good and bad deeds of every person and weighs all words and thoughts against
each other to present an error-free account on that great Day of Judgment,
the source of life-long anxiety for every Moslem. No one knows why He leads
some to paradise, or why hell is the destiny of others. A Moslem prostrates
himself on the ground before Allah like a slave before his master, who
does not know whether he will be apportioned life or death, grace or damnation.
He longs for mercy and his honest intent to worship the only true God earnestly
brings no assurance of everlasting life. Christianity worships God the
Father; Islam God the dictator, whose orders have no rational basis and
whose mercy is caprice. Again, the political consequences cannot be overlooked
for societies that learn their fundamental picture of what authority is
from this image.
Sinners are as predestined as the
virtuous believers, and will suffer eternally in Gehena, Hell. But even
this lamentable destination of "the heedless ones" has been willed by their
Creator, who naturally had the capacity to make all virtuous, but "We have
set a barrier in front of them and a barrier behind them" instead.
Any notion of freedom distinct from
that implicit in the complete submission to the will of Allah is not an
ideal but a perilous trap. To paraphrase Marx, freedom is the realized
necessity of submission. In the conventional, non- Islamic sense familiar
to Western nations and our political imitators, it is both impossible and
undesirable. Only Allah creates our acts and enables us to act, while we
are but transmission belts with a preordained balance of debit or credit
that determines our destiny in the hereafter.
"He knoweth what (appeareth to His
creatures as) Before or After or Behind them. Nor shall they compass aught
of his knowledge except as he willeth."
Our only purpose is the service
of Allah. "Freedom" is no part of that purpose, not any more than to "know
God" or to become more like God. Men can strive no higher than obeying
Allah's will as revealed by his prophet. Human imperfection is not subject
to improvement in the direction of God, and any such notion is blasphemous.
Political progress of the kind that transpired in 1776 is not just impossible,
it is irrelevant.
In the end Allah the unknowable
and unpersonable is served out of fear, obedience, "submission," and hope
of bountiful heavenly reward. Islam explicitly rejects the notion that
"he who has my commandments and keeps them, he is it who loves me." The
Koran states the opposite: "Say, If ye love Allah, follow me; Allah will
love you and forgive you your sins." This "love" is merely a means of winning
love and forgiveness. Ultimately it is the love of the self, coupled with
the hope of posthumous forgiveness as the reward for obedience. It is pure
self-interest, i.e. not ethics at all.
(Serge Trifkovic received his PhD
from the University of Southampton in England and pursued postdoctoral
research at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. His past journalistic outlets
have included the BBC World Service, the Voice of America, CNN International,
MSNBC, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Times, the Philadelphia
Inquirer, The Times of London, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He is foreign
affairs editor of Chronicles.)
