Political Exegesis: Jesus, Satan, Muhammad, Jihad
October 14th 2008 02:53
Though an agnostic, my Catholic upbringing compels me often to think in religious terms and, surveying the ranks and philosophy of our enemies today, I feel that urge more than ever. What drives this phenomenon called Islam? – To what and to whom do these pious submitters truly submit? - well, perhaps the answer can be found by examining one of the beautiful tales of the New Testament and comparing it with the material in the Qur’an and Hadith.
In Luke, Chapter 4, Jesus goes to the desert to face the tests and lures of Satan, from a high and desolate mountain Jesus surveys all the kingdoms the Devil might give him, spreading over the earth in a single flash of temptation. As a child I always imagined rivers of gold and jewels bursting through the sands beneath the Saviour’s feet and was disturbed and inspired by the otherworldly ferocity of his reply: “Get thee behind me Satan: for it is written; Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God.”
Get thee behind me Satan. Jesus rejected all the kingdoms of earth, and all the riches, power and glory that would accompany them because the price paid for them by a prophet would be defection to the forces of evil. For to follow God is not to seek riches and earthly power but communion with the divinity through the consecration of ourselves and the world, even at the expense of riches, property and our lives. That is the essence of the Christian message, the beating heart of a creed of such beauty and power that - despite what the radical secularists might say - our civilisation grows from it like a tree, for which Christ’s words and deeds are both the deep roots and the rich earth that feeds them.
But, enough of my raptures, let us turn to the Qur’an and the Hadith. In these we find many passages in which doing Allah’s work, particularly engaging in Jihad against unbelievers, is explicitly linked to the attainment of worldly possessions. For example, in Sura xlviii: 20 we read, “Allah promised you many acquisitions which you will take” in reference to booty from war and raids. And from the Hadith we learn that Muhammad made his early living at Medina by raiding caravans and, later, by making war to expand his sphere of power and to gain greater income though Jizya (poll tax) and Kharaj (land tax). Indeed, in Sura ix: 29 this is commanded –
By the end of his life, Muhammad ruled over a miniature empire, which was extended at an incredible rate after his death by the four “rightly guided” Caliphs, subsuming two thirds of the Christian world by the 8th Century.
An even more telling example of the divergence between Christian cultural and moral norms and those of Islam is the way in which God and Allah deal with their representatives’ hardships and trials. The God of the Bible is stern with Jesus: even in that most heart-rending moment when he falls on his face in the garden and asks that the cup of death might pass from him, God’s will is given priority. In the New Testament, God’s will is never convenient but always hard – for the path of the righteous is narrow and hard to master. Allah, on the other hand, seems full of convenient revelations to suit whatever earthly lusts Muhammad might have. For example, when Muhammad is troubled by his desire for a woman who is forbidden to him, he receives this revelation:
Now, surveying such a prophetic career and such a god, one cannot help but be struck by sinister echoes of Luke’s Devil:
I shall now give into my own temptations and venture that, perhaps, Muhammad failed this most important of tests. Faced with the Devil’s offer of grandeur, riches and power in this life (not to mention concubines and wives) at the expense of Holiness, it would appear that the Prophet of Islam proclaimed “Get thee before me Satan”.
Controversial though I know it is, I feel forced to this conclusion – that, whether conceived in metaphysical or earthly terms, Muhammad represents something inimical to the moral foundations of our society; he is a partisan of darkness. This thought, painfully arrived at, should cast new and stark light on the ever-widening rivers of blood amassing at the borders between “the religion of peace” and the rest of us. The terrorists are not some rogue strain, an abrogation from a peaceful and tolerant religious tradition founded by a Christ-like, if somewhat more down-to-earth, “prophet for our time”. Rather, they are the legitimate inheritors of a tradition founded by a bandit and warlord (1), with a legacy of aggressive warfare from the conquest of the old Christian world to the siege of Vienna to the resurgence of Jihad today, made so shatteringly explicit in that haunted image of our time: two towers sailing toward earth, filled with screams and fire.
…
The religious element in modern terrorism is, by now, too obvious to be ignored – even a number of staunch leftists, like Christopher Hitchens, have come around to the fact that terrorism is not some revolt of the oppressed masses, but an expansionist religious movement inherently at odds with free and civilised societies. However, there are still bastions of what can only be called wilful ignorance in our intellectual culture whose hatred of the West seems to be so great that even terrorist actions against us are, for them, merely an outgrowth of our own sinful nature. The persistence and apparently unshakeable nature of such views was crystallised for me by an exchange I had recently with Kevin Childs, the editor of the Australian Rationalist. In June of this year, Childs wrote an article (Australian Rationalist, June 2008, No. 80) giving warm endorsement to Robert Fisk’s claim that “[t]here is no connection between Islam and “terror”. But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and “terror.”’ Naturally, I found that all a little too much to swallow and so I wrote a detailed letter in response outlining the continuity of Jihad throughout Muslim history, starting with Muhammad, and pointing out that the Mujahideen today speak of their goals not in terms of ending Western military operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, but of re-establishing the Caliphate and extending Islamic rule over the entire globe. In responding to my letter, Childs conceded that there is an Islamic element in terrorist thinking, but he quickly retreated to a more comfortable place by asserting that the Mujahideen represent a “perversion” of Islam that, you guessed it, came about as a response to Western actions in the Middle East. This implies a mind boggling reverse causation, by which Western actions today somehow forced Muhammad to declare war on all non-Muslims and coerced the four major schools of Islamic jurisprudence into agreeing that war was legitimate against all peoples who refused to convert to Islam or accept its political dominion over them.(2) It also reveals the irrational, quasi-religious nature of the kind of anti-Western sentiments held by people like Fisk, Chomsky and, it would seem, Kevin Childs. For them, it is not enough to make reasoned criticisms of Western policies or call for genuine reforms in areas where these might be appropriate. No, for them the West - and especially America - is, in fact, the root of all evil - the “Great Satan”, as a prominent promoter of Islamic “peace” might put it.
Now, the reason for my veering off from the exegetical imaginings with which I began into the sniping character assassination above is that I feel there is a real danger that the views of Childs and his ilk might lead us into a false sense of security. A feeling that the enemies we face aren’t really a threat to our civilisation – Edward Said would say that there is no real difference between our civilisations anyway – but rather, something like our own shadow, a Hyde to our Jekyll. A feeling that the real conflict is not a basic cultural one in which we must be resolute and strong, both culturally and militarily, but rather a conflict with our own “Islamophobia”, in which our basic cultural and biological survival instincts should be subsumed to a blurry multicultural “story” about the world, in which the West’s right to assert and defend it’s sovereignty and culture have no coherent place.
The relevance of my comparison of Jesus with Muhammad to all this is that it illuminates a fact that we forget at our own peril: Islam and Western culture are not interchangeable systems just as good or bad as one another. The emancipation of women, the abolition of slavery, universal human rights, democracy, capitalism, modern science and scores of other incredible advances in human life and society which we take for granted are not just ghostly entities that will attach themselves to whatever culture happens to set itself up on our shores. Rather, they are the products of a long and rich cultural tradition, Judeo-Christian in origin, which is quite unmatched in human history. The kind of hypersensitive, self-critical and tolerant frame of mind taken to such extremes by Kevin Childs is made possible by the very inheritance he and others seem so keen to disparage. If our society falls to Islam – and if you think that is impossible, cast your eye to Europe – that which replaces it will not just be Western democracy plus a few hijabs, but a completely foreign and deeply totalitarian system of government. A system of government and culture that, unlike ours, would reward people like Fisk and Chomsky not with praise and awards, but with beheading.
There are legitimate debates to be had about what our tactics should be in this war against radical Islam – the suggestion going around some websites that we should nuke Mecca is a little beyond the pale, in my view – but there is simply no debate that we are at war with a global ideological movement based on the Qur’an, the Hadith and Islamic imperialist tradition. There should also be no debate that, faced with this threat, even radicals would be insane not to realise that now is the time to hop on board with the Great Satan, or else start saving their pennies for the Jizya
(1) I must point out that I am not trying to reduce Islam to a simple “religion of terrorism”. There is much of value in the varied and long history of Islam – in poetry, philosophy, music, art, architecture etc. What I am trying to point out is that within this rich history there is a strain of violent Jihad and that modern day Islamic terrorists can justifiably be seen as the inheritors of this tradition, even if they have perhaps failed to absorb the more noble and humane aspects of Islamic civilization.
(2) See Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani, Ibn Taymiyya, al-Mawardi, Ibn Khaldun, al-Ghazali etc.
In Luke, Chapter 4, Jesus goes to the desert to face the tests and lures of Satan, from a high and desolate mountain Jesus surveys all the kingdoms the Devil might give him, spreading over the earth in a single flash of temptation. As a child I always imagined rivers of gold and jewels bursting through the sands beneath the Saviour’s feet and was disturbed and inspired by the otherworldly ferocity of his reply: “Get thee behind me Satan: for it is written; Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God.”
But, enough of my raptures, let us turn to the Qur’an and the Hadith. In these we find many passages in which doing Allah’s work, particularly engaging in Jihad against unbelievers, is explicitly linked to the attainment of worldly possessions. For example, in Sura xlviii: 20 we read, “Allah promised you many acquisitions which you will take” in reference to booty from war and raids. And from the Hadith we learn that Muhammad made his early living at Medina by raiding caravans and, later, by making war to expand his sphere of power and to gain greater income though Jizya (poll tax) and Kharaj (land tax). Indeed, in Sura ix: 29 this is commanded –
Fight against…those who acknowledge not the religion of truth (i.e. Islam) among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.
By the end of his life, Muhammad ruled over a miniature empire, which was extended at an incredible rate after his death by the four “rightly guided” Caliphs, subsuming two thirds of the Christian world by the 8th Century.
An even more telling example of the divergence between Christian cultural and moral norms and those of Islam is the way in which God and Allah deal with their representatives’ hardships and trials. The God of the Bible is stern with Jesus: even in that most heart-rending moment when he falls on his face in the garden and asks that the cup of death might pass from him, God’s will is given priority. In the New Testament, God’s will is never convenient but always hard – for the path of the righteous is narrow and hard to master. Allah, on the other hand, seems full of convenient revelations to suit whatever earthly lusts Muhammad might have. For example, when Muhammad is troubled by his desire for a woman who is forbidden to him, he receives this revelation:
You may put off whom you please of them, and you may take to you whom you please, and whom you desire of those whom you had separated provisionally; no blame attaches to you; this is most proper… (Sura xxxiii: 51)
Now, surveying such a prophetic career and such a god, one cannot help but be struck by sinister echoes of Luke’s Devil:
And the Devil, taking him up into a high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.
And the Devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will give it. (Luke 4: 5-6)
And the Devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will give it. (Luke 4: 5-6)
I shall now give into my own temptations and venture that, perhaps, Muhammad failed this most important of tests. Faced with the Devil’s offer of grandeur, riches and power in this life (not to mention concubines and wives) at the expense of Holiness, it would appear that the Prophet of Islam proclaimed “Get thee before me Satan”.
Controversial though I know it is, I feel forced to this conclusion – that, whether conceived in metaphysical or earthly terms, Muhammad represents something inimical to the moral foundations of our society; he is a partisan of darkness. This thought, painfully arrived at, should cast new and stark light on the ever-widening rivers of blood amassing at the borders between “the religion of peace” and the rest of us. The terrorists are not some rogue strain, an abrogation from a peaceful and tolerant religious tradition founded by a Christ-like, if somewhat more down-to-earth, “prophet for our time”. Rather, they are the legitimate inheritors of a tradition founded by a bandit and warlord (1), with a legacy of aggressive warfare from the conquest of the old Christian world to the siege of Vienna to the resurgence of Jihad today, made so shatteringly explicit in that haunted image of our time: two towers sailing toward earth, filled with screams and fire.
…
The religious element in modern terrorism is, by now, too obvious to be ignored – even a number of staunch leftists, like Christopher Hitchens, have come around to the fact that terrorism is not some revolt of the oppressed masses, but an expansionist religious movement inherently at odds with free and civilised societies. However, there are still bastions of what can only be called wilful ignorance in our intellectual culture whose hatred of the West seems to be so great that even terrorist actions against us are, for them, merely an outgrowth of our own sinful nature. The persistence and apparently unshakeable nature of such views was crystallised for me by an exchange I had recently with Kevin Childs, the editor of the Australian Rationalist. In June of this year, Childs wrote an article (Australian Rationalist, June 2008, No. 80) giving warm endorsement to Robert Fisk’s claim that “[t]here is no connection between Islam and “terror”. But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and “terror.”’ Naturally, I found that all a little too much to swallow and so I wrote a detailed letter in response outlining the continuity of Jihad throughout Muslim history, starting with Muhammad, and pointing out that the Mujahideen today speak of their goals not in terms of ending Western military operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, but of re-establishing the Caliphate and extending Islamic rule over the entire globe. In responding to my letter, Childs conceded that there is an Islamic element in terrorist thinking, but he quickly retreated to a more comfortable place by asserting that the Mujahideen represent a “perversion” of Islam that, you guessed it, came about as a response to Western actions in the Middle East. This implies a mind boggling reverse causation, by which Western actions today somehow forced Muhammad to declare war on all non-Muslims and coerced the four major schools of Islamic jurisprudence into agreeing that war was legitimate against all peoples who refused to convert to Islam or accept its political dominion over them.(2) It also reveals the irrational, quasi-religious nature of the kind of anti-Western sentiments held by people like Fisk, Chomsky and, it would seem, Kevin Childs. For them, it is not enough to make reasoned criticisms of Western policies or call for genuine reforms in areas where these might be appropriate. No, for them the West - and especially America - is, in fact, the root of all evil - the “Great Satan”, as a prominent promoter of Islamic “peace” might put it.
Now, the reason for my veering off from the exegetical imaginings with which I began into the sniping character assassination above is that I feel there is a real danger that the views of Childs and his ilk might lead us into a false sense of security. A feeling that the enemies we face aren’t really a threat to our civilisation – Edward Said would say that there is no real difference between our civilisations anyway – but rather, something like our own shadow, a Hyde to our Jekyll. A feeling that the real conflict is not a basic cultural one in which we must be resolute and strong, both culturally and militarily, but rather a conflict with our own “Islamophobia”, in which our basic cultural and biological survival instincts should be subsumed to a blurry multicultural “story” about the world, in which the West’s right to assert and defend it’s sovereignty and culture have no coherent place.
The relevance of my comparison of Jesus with Muhammad to all this is that it illuminates a fact that we forget at our own peril: Islam and Western culture are not interchangeable systems just as good or bad as one another. The emancipation of women, the abolition of slavery, universal human rights, democracy, capitalism, modern science and scores of other incredible advances in human life and society which we take for granted are not just ghostly entities that will attach themselves to whatever culture happens to set itself up on our shores. Rather, they are the products of a long and rich cultural tradition, Judeo-Christian in origin, which is quite unmatched in human history. The kind of hypersensitive, self-critical and tolerant frame of mind taken to such extremes by Kevin Childs is made possible by the very inheritance he and others seem so keen to disparage. If our society falls to Islam – and if you think that is impossible, cast your eye to Europe – that which replaces it will not just be Western democracy plus a few hijabs, but a completely foreign and deeply totalitarian system of government. A system of government and culture that, unlike ours, would reward people like Fisk and Chomsky not with praise and awards, but with beheading.
There are legitimate debates to be had about what our tactics should be in this war against radical Islam – the suggestion going around some websites that we should nuke Mecca is a little beyond the pale, in my view – but there is simply no debate that we are at war with a global ideological movement based on the Qur’an, the Hadith and Islamic imperialist tradition. There should also be no debate that, faced with this threat, even radicals would be insane not to realise that now is the time to hop on board with the Great Satan, or else start saving their pennies for the Jizya
(1) I must point out that I am not trying to reduce Islam to a simple “religion of terrorism”. There is much of value in the varied and long history of Islam – in poetry, philosophy, music, art, architecture etc. What I am trying to point out is that within this rich history there is a strain of violent Jihad and that modern day Islamic terrorists can justifiably be seen as the inheritors of this tradition, even if they have perhaps failed to absorb the more noble and humane aspects of Islamic civilization.
(2) See Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani, Ibn Taymiyya, al-Mawardi, Ibn Khaldun, al-Ghazali etc.
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