A friendly epistle
Get a load of this – an open letter from Saleem Chagtai to Usama Hassan, which includes this fragrant observation:
First of all I suggest you stop playing games with people. You sat back quietly at the BMSD event as the Muslim community was derided by the likes of pretentious, ignorant, West-worshipping individuals like Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Nasreen Rehman and of course Ed “Traditional-Muslim-scholars-are-all-closet-secularists-really” Hussain and you talk about spreading misconceptions, lies and slander? I have seen your response to the open letters floating around the internet and have noticed utter intellectual inconsistency as well as skirting around specific charges levelled at you. You play the victim but I find it hard to believe you didn’t foresee what fitnah you would cause. Calling for secularism and democracy over and above the established shariah is disbelief as is doubting the obligation of hijab. I think it is pointless at this juncture to get into the ins and outs of these discussions as these are clear issues in Islam which unite all Muslims in the world today…
That’s blunt enough by anyone’s standards. Calling for secularism and democracy over and above the established shariah is disbelief, and so is thinking that women are not actually required to have their heads and necks bandaged at all times. Disbelief, of course, is a crime, especially for someone who considers himself a Muslim.
AlHamdulillah our illustrious history is full of heroes that fought off alien ideas from entering Islam and those who didn’t have been forgotten or doomed to infamy. I advise you as a one time friend and student not to become of the latter. It isn’t too late. I urge you, please turn back from the path of destruction for your own success before you are humiliated in this life and the hereafter. Save Shaikh Suhaib and your family from increasing discomfort and you will find Allah Most Forgiving and Merciful. If Abu Bakr As-Siddeeq was frightened about accidentally interpreting the Quran, which earth will hold you and which sky will cover you after what you have done? How will you save yourself from Allah’s anger and punishment?
The religious mind at work. New ideas are “alien” and must be fought off; there is one and only one Absolute law and it has already been given and it is evil to try to interpret it or improve it. Trying to improve it will piss off the giant angry god, and he will tear you to shreds. Look out look out, do what I say or else, are you scared yet.
Am I just over-reacting, or is this more than just a threat from a great big angry god? Isn’t there a real threat behind those words? When he says this, for example:
” … which earth will hold you and which sky will cover you after what you have done?” seems to me to be somewhat more than just a threat of hell fire or punishment after death. This is saying that there’s no room for you on earth, no sky to cover you.
But you’re right. This is the religious mind at work, but, perhaps more importantly, this is the Muslim mind at work. I’m willing to grant that there are thousands of moderate Muslims who don’t go along with this vile nonsense, but this is precisely the kind of rhetoric that was used in Europe before the wars of religion. It is the uncomprehending mind that simply cannot see that religious beliefs are only ways of looking at the world, not stores of knowledge. And, as such, they are hugely dangerous, as the very disturbing video piece by Haytham al-Haddad on so-called Western values demonstrates. This is what Muslims do. When someone says something that offends against their values they protest angrily and sometimes violently, and yet why, he asks, is this not tolerated, since it is, after all, less violent than the speech that so deeply offends us.
Do we have time to help these people through the Enlightenment? I didn’t think so.
Chaqtai might have saved his most serious charge for the last:
He is perhaps unfamiliar with the subtleties of spelling in English, but I can say for sure that a failure to provide gear for the Dean would be looked on most seriously in the Church of England, and for the life of me I can’t to see why the same would not be the case in any mosque.
On a less serious note, when heresies and reactive heresy hunts start appearing in any ‘community’, it is an encouraging sign. It shows that people are breaking out of the chains of conformity and tradition, resisting pressure from authority figures and peers, and thinking for themselves.
Let a thousand flowers bloom: daisies, orchids, violets… Whatever. In every mosque.
Islam is evil (as is all religion) as far as I am concerned. The burden of proof is now on the religious person to persuade me otherwise. Good people don’t follow heavenly dictators or genocidal maniacs. But each religious believer certainly seems to think that God is on their side, that they have a God given right to tell and force people how to think and behave, and if God won’t do anything about it, then they will personally, as God’s henchman, and probably through some painful means of torture, because that’s their role model in life.
I don’t believe there are good religious people any more, but of course, not every atheist is good either, but it’s a good beginning.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa and Mike Daniels, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: A friendly epistle http://dlvr.it/9gqVT […]
Egbert, “I don’t believe there are good X any more” looks to me like intolerance from the same mould as that offered by any common-or-garden sectarian of whatever religious, political or tribal stripe.
I know some very good religious people, one of whom is carrying on a treat at this very moment and right now about me spending less time blogging and more on household chores.
By which, I suspect, he means the mob. Rather than some actual divine retribution.
My answer, as always, if Allah/God/Jesus/Vishnu has got a problem with the heretic, let him take care of it. After all, an all powerful God should be able to smite a heretic without anyone’s help…
And no cop-outs of “divinely inspired” because that just looks like a jackass getting butt-hurt and doing the wrong thing.
Right. Why should a god as powerful as they claim need or want someone else to do his dirty work?
Eric, no, I don’t think you’re over-reacting – the words sounded very threatening to me. Very ugly, too.
Of course those words are a threat. I notice ‘your family’ is also mentioned.
Ian MacDougall,
Smoking is also a bad habit, and I’m rather intolerant of smokers too. Of course I’m not going to claim that smoking makes a smoker a bad person, only that it’s a bad habit. Christopher Hitchens smoked for years, he’s not a bad person.
Religion is a bit more than a bad habit, it’s an evil moral guidance in life. Most religious people are innately more moral than their religious beliefs, however, their innate morality just doesn’t seem strong enough to shrug off religion.
So I described them as ‘not good’ or not doing good (possibly even bad for not doing good), because, by analogy, I don’t think smokers are doing good by smoking, nor are religious people doing good by spreading their poisonous and dangerous beliefs. It’s corrupted a naturally good person, turned them not so good, even bad.
Egbert: Noted.
Good to see someone honestly standing up for his faith. But then again, that’s not the essence of Islam, right? Just another interpretation some us happen to disagree with. Not a big deal.
@Egbert: “The burden of proof is now on the religious person to persuade me otherwise.”. But they don’t want to persuade you of anything. They want you to submit to the will of allah and are ready to kill you if you don’t.
After reading through all that stuff coming back to BFAW was like a breath of air after being suffocated in the dark. How can anyone actually want to live those lives?
sailor1031,
I was thinking about this very thing today, how subjection of the will is almost the definition of evil.
And language itself can be hijacked for the purpose of subjecting the will of others, particularly through hatred, fear or guilt. Many so-called arguments by the irrational (or religious) online are in fact not so carefully disguised assaults on the will. It is that we are usually unaware of what is going on, in the name of free speech and the marketplace of ideas.
The open letter above, is a prime example of evil at work against a person, subjecting their will through fear, guilt and hatred.
Perhaps a methodological analysis of texts based on power relations would help in determining their real meaning, separate from rational texts. But of course, this would be open to abuse itself. But it does explain–at least to me–why I have a moral ‘problem’ with certain types of language. I think this might explain my reaction to posts that appear like trolling, because the meaning of their posts is not about reason but about power relations.
AlHamdulillah our illustrious history is full of heroes that fought off alien ideas from entering Islam and those who didn’t have been forgotten or doomed to infamy. I advise you as a one time friend and student not to become of the latter. It isn’t too late. I urge you, please turn back from the path of destruction for your own success before you are humiliated in this life and the hereafter.
When you read nonsense like that, you begin to understand why the islamic world lags behind the rest of the planet in practically every field of human endevour. When inovation, any inovation, is seen as a threat, then progress becomes pretty much impossible.
For once, Sauder, I agree with you. Those words “heroes that fought off alien ideas from entering Islam” made my blood run cold. What an absolute guarantee of rigid ignorant stultification and cruelty.
They don’t, they want to be able to tell other people how to live their lives.
Spot on, Steve. That’s what it’s about. Religion is a cheap way to get power. You just have to look the part and act the part and sound the part…If you can do that, you will become an “authority”. People will listen. Some may think you’re an idiot, but they’ll have to listen. Even the ascetics get something out of their pains, some “respect” and “authority”. Isn’t the whole damn thing about little me and my precious ego which wants to live for ever?
I note that Chaqtai’s letter was “open”. Now why was that? Not exactly “a word in your ear”. Not exactly a bit of kindness to a friend. He must be very proud of himself.
I think we’re all onto something here: religious language is about power, whether dominating others or submissively accepting the will of another. It’s all about power, and we need to diffuse it somehow.
I’ve just been reading about Asia Bibi Noreen. Isn’t the piddling little imam Qureshi just another cretinous seeker after power? “Here’s a cause! Cry ‘Blasphemy!’ Never mind the rights and wrongs! Who cares? She’s only a Christian woman. We Speak for Our God.” And all those disgusting mobsters, able to play some pitiful little part in the glory and lust of injustice and cruelty in the name of their foul god.
Even better (of course) if you can write a near-literate (if ill-punctuated) letter to bring your straying brother gently back to the fold. Why, that’s quite civilised! And 100 extra points for publishing it, just so that everyone knows how godly you are. These are foetid, crawling people.
So much for righteous indignation, and all that. How “to diffuse it”? Aye, there’s the rub.
The good news however is that there are also people like Salmaan Taseer and Sherry Rehman. I looked Taseer up on Twitter as soon as I read that Independent story and sure enough, there he is. He scorns the bullies. Stout fella.
True, Ophelia, thank goodness, and them. And for anyone who hasn’t yet come across it, there’s a petition here:
http://www.petitionbuzz.com/petitions/asiabibi
“How can anyone actually want to live those lives?”
Steve & Gordon: I agree completely about those who use religion to gain power over others. It was those others to whom I was referring here. Why would anyone want to be one of them?
Oh, I agree with what you are saying, Sailor. I think that the desire for power is at least a part of the answer to your question. I like what you said, that for you, coming back to Butterflies and Wheels is like breathing again.
If one really wants to use one’s mind to the best of one’s ability and try to discover as far as is possible what is actually the case – what is actually true about the world – then sooner or later one has to put aside petty vanities, or at the very least learn to see them and how they are operating. To prefer truth is the very opposite of preferring belief. Power-bids are more likely to succeed in a belief-based society than in a society in which people are sceptical and ask serious and penetrating questions. Of course, I may be missing something here, given the ubiquity of personal vanity, but that is how it looks to me at the moment. I cannot see how vanity can survive the determination to know, unless one confines the thirst for knowledge to a specific area and lives a compartmentalised life. At the very least one must be open to others who will soon point out where one is going wrong. But to restrict the search for truth for reasons of vanity is ipso facto to prefer belief.
Holding fast to the truth is something that religious people talk about all the time, but of course they are only holding fast to their beliefs: they believe they can hold fast to “the truth” because they think they know what it is. Naturally, because they believe, what they believe looks true. They can’t tell whether they are right, because they have no means of probing: such means are forbidden, for the obvious reason that mere belief cannot sustain the weight of inquiry or of evidence. It doesn’t even occur to some people that there could be any disagreement between the world as they have learnt to believe it and the world “as it really is”, and it is hard for them to accept that philosophy and science can cast doubt on their view. Trying to find out what is true must seem perverse. And they are enormously supported in their view by the very normal tendency of the human mind to stick to what it knows and to resist doubt or any radical degree of change.
All very Darwinian, no doubt, and would have worked well in a simpler, more animal world. In our more complex world it opens the door to every kind of bid for personal power. An easy route to corruption. It has been increasingly failing to work well for several millenia, but people still cling to it, even now.