HOW ISLAM BECAME HIJACKED BY REVISIONISTS

This article was published in the e-edition of Outlook magazine

The brutal killing of over 130 innocent people in Paris is another example of the mindlessness of Islamic terrorism. Few people however realize that terrorism had never been endorsed by the prophet Muhammad nor sanctioned in the Quran. Like all religions the traditions of Islam were however frequently changed over time and many passionate clerics moved Islamic Sharia from the mostly gentle words of Muhammad to the angry rhetoric of the Taliban or ISIS. The Quran clearly says that killing in the name of Islam is the opposite of Jihad and expressly forbids an attack on anyone who had offered no offence. It is forbidden to harm or to kill women and children, take hostages or to torture or kill prisoners and commit suicide. 

Two hundred years after the death of the prophet several pious Muslim scholars put together another sacred book called the Hadis (or Hadith) that told Muslims that they should not only follow the words of the prophet but also examples from his life. Several scholars like al Bukhari tried to reconstruct the stories of his life from the testimonies of people who claimed to be descendants of the prophet or his companions. After eight or ten generations such testimonies were very dubious. Restrictions on women like the veil only now become an Islamic requirement. Many Muslims now began to copy the prophet’s behavior as acts of piety. Even acts like putting on the left slipper first or entering a room with the right foot and every detail including his clothes, habits or behavior became acts of piety. 

The next major change came with the Abbasid Caliphate (750 – 1258). The huge Islamic empire with many diverse races needed new legal authorities like the Qazi (magistrate) to manage complex legal matters, police, taxes and the status of non-Muslim subjects. So Islamic law underwent many changes but adopted many Jewish and Persian laws and split into six schools of law. The Jewish Torah (Toraat) introducing the Jewish sins including blasphemy and heresy that now became Islamic sins. Clerics began prescribing draconian death sentences by burning, stoning, beheading and strangulation as prescribed in the Torah even though the Quran had never demanded such punishments.

Four categories of punishment in Islamic law seem to have been devised much after the Quran. These were Qisas, (retaliation) as `an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth’ that is prescribed in the Jewish Torah; Diyya, or compensation paid to the heirs of a victim in blood money or ransom; Hadud or harsh pre determined punishments for severe crimes like murder, adultery, blasphemy, intoxication, idolatry or apostasy and Tazir that were punishments given at the discretion of a Qazi. The Quran is silent about alcohol and quite mild about intoxication that became a sin according to the authors of the Hadis.

In 1256, after the bloody sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols, Ahmad ibn Tamiyya, a Muslim scholar, was driven out of Iraq and he defined a new policy to divide the Islamic world into two. `Dar ul Islam’ (abode of Islam) and `Dar ul Harb’ (abode of disbelievers). He also redefined the word Jihad to mean a `Holy War’ In 1683 the defeat of the Turkish armies outside Vienna marked the end of Islamic expansion and the rise of European powers that were to soon dominate the world and make Muslim nations react with increasingly narrow orthodoxy. The rise of Europe resulted in the impoverishment of many great Muslim empires and Muslim cultures sank from liberal scholarship to narrow minded illiteracy allowing clerics to exploit the frustration.  

Then, in the eighteenth century, Islam was completely hijacked by Mohammad Abd Al Wahhab (1703 – 1792) who started the Sunni Wahhabiya movement that accepted the authority of the Quran and Hadis but opposed all innovations, superstitions and deviances from their narrow interpretation of these in a very puritanical and legalistic manner. They considered the veneration of pirs, the intercession of Imams, religious holidays, and other devotional acts as heresies and even they desecrated the tomb of Muhammad. With the support of the ibn Saud family of Arabia they promoted an extreme form of Islam that led to formation of the Taliban and Al Qaida.

After the Balfour declaration of 1922 at the end of the First World War, Britain casually divided up the former Turkish territories they had occupied and Israel became an independent country in 1948. This immediately triggered a bitter war between Israel and its Muslim neighbors of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria leading to an unending cycle of conflict ever since.

Then American support to Pakistan for the creation of the Taliban in their covert war to oust USSR from Afghanistan was to make the Taliban a potent force. Radical Muslim clerics would target impoverished young boys who were taught the Quran in Arabic that they could not understand and fool them to believe false translations or interpretations to make them into fanatical terrorists. The American `War on Terror’ against Iraq (1991 and 2003) and Afghanistan (2001) then made most Muslims infuriated by these morally unjustified invasions.

Muslim clerics continued to give the greatest reverence to the Quran and the Hadis as their most sacred books but most of their religious pronouncements were actually dictated by the words of numerous passionate revisionists who preached long after the time of the Prophet. The Quran, for example, was unprecedented in its time for its support of women and their rights but because all the subsequent clerics were men the gentle words of the prophet were steadily eroded to make Islam the most restrictive religion concerning women. Most Muslims accept the sanctity of the words of the prophet but they need to ask themselves whether they should believe there is any sanctity in the words of all the many revisionists. They need to also ask themselves why they should be fooled to go bloody deaths by listening to the words of bigoted Mullahs and other clerics.

Islamic terrorism will not easily succumb to military action but the terrorists might submit to social pressure if the large moderate Muslim majority convinces them that their actions are absolutely against the injunctions of their prophet and will get them to the eternal fire instead of the paradise they fervently hope for.