THE ALLAH THAT FAILED
[This Monday’s Archive was originally published on January 6, 2004. Facts are slippery things, especially when they are inconvenient. Ibn Warraq continues to speak out and publish the inconvenient truths of Islam under his pen name (which means “son of a papermaker”). It is a name that dissident authors have used throughout the history of Islam, who hide in fear for their lives. In 2007 Douglas Murray described Ibn Warraq as one who “refuses to accept the idea that all cultures are equal. Were Ibn Warraq to live in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, he would not be able to write. Or if he did, he would not be allowed to live.” The culture of Allah is a culture of death.]
Let’s say there’s this fellow named Moe. He makes a living as a highway bandit robbing travelers. Any victim who gives him any trouble he kills. Moe has a special hatred for Jews. “Kill Jews wherever you find them,” he tells the members of his gang.
At age fifty, Moe tells his best friend that he’s fallen in love with his daughter and wants to marry her. She is six years old. They are “married” and Moe starts having sex with the little girl when she is nine years old.
Moe tells his gang that God talks to him. As the Messenger of God, every word of Moe’s is the Word of God. Moe has his gang members kill anyone who refuses to believe this.
Here’s the question: Is Moe a criminally insane pervert and moral monster, or is he worshipped by hundreds of millions of devout followers who deeply believe that he is the most moral human being who ever lived?
The answer is: he is both. Moe’s real name is Ubul Kassim, an Arabian bandit chieftain who became known as Mohammed (“The Praised One” in Arabic) and founded the religion of Islam.
According to official Islamic tradition, Mohammed personally conducted at least 27 bandit raids, married Abu Bakr’s daughter Aisha when she was six and started having sex with her when she was nine, married a total of thirteen women and had nine wives at the time of his death (including Aisha), ordered that his enemies have “their hands and legs cut off, that their eyes be branded with heated pieces of iron, and that their cut hands and legs not be cauterized until they die,” and claimed that God told him to “kill any Jews that fall into your power.”
(Quotes from Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Mohammed — the original and most authoritative biography written in the 8th Century — Oxford Univ. Press translation, 1979)
Let’s state it clearly. To compare Mohammed to such founders of other major religions as Jesus or Buddha is obscene.
Followers of Mohammed are the world’s penultimate example — along with Michael Jackson fans — of people who, rather than believing only what they see, they see only what they believe.
Moslems today are afraid to see anything they don’t believe in, because they are afraid of the terrible question asked by modern Islam’s greatest philosopher Mohammed Iqbal:
“O Allah, why are Your blessings showered on the homes of unbelievers, strangers [to Islam] all, while on the poor Moslem Your wrath like lightning falls?”
Allah is the God that has failed.
While so much of the rest of the world continues to culturally and economically progress, the Islamic world — especially its Arabic core — remains mired in dictatorship, poverty, ignorance, and violent resentment.
Over half a century ago, Arthur Koestler compiled the testimonies of ex-Communists, who had passionately believed in the God of Communism, witnessed its evil from the inside, and had the moral courage to use their rational brains and denounce it. Koestler entitled his book The God That Failed.
An Islamic Koestler has now emerged, who has the courage to acknowledge the totalitarian parallels between the ideologies of Communism and Islam, and has compiled the testimonies of ex-Moslems into an anthology he almost entitled The Allah That Failed, but instead chose Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out.
This Islamic Koestler’s name is Ibn Warraq. The stories he and his fellow Islamic apostates tell are riveting — all the more so when you realize that under Islamic Sharia law, apostasy is punishable by death.
One of the Sharia’s chief formulators, Ismail al-Bukhari (810-870 AD), quoted Mohammed as saying, “Kill him who changes his religion.” The Sharia tradition of death for apostates is further based on Sura 4:89 in the Koran, in which Allah demands that apostates be seized and put to death.
No other major religion commands its apostates be killed. The concept of apostasy does not even exist in Buddhism and Hinduism. Judaic doctrine proscribes at the most expulsion and social ostracism. The Christian Inquisition’s burning of heretics was a long time ago.
The twin beliefs that Allah commands Moslems to kill apostates and make war upon unbelievers are why Islam at its core is the most intolerant and violent religion on earth.
Allah commands Moslems in the Koran (Sura 8:12) to “cast terror into the hearts of the infidels — cut off their heads, cut off the tips of their fingers,” and (Sura 8:39) to “make war (jihad) on infidels until their idolatry shall cease and Allah’s religion shall be supreme.”
Such a religion preaching intolerance and violence has no future in today’s world. More and more Moslems are realizing that Allah is the God That Failed.
They realize that, in the words of Bangladeshi writer Mohammed Bin Abdullah, “Mankind will not lose a single moral precept if Islam is not there tomorrow.”
From Morocco to Indonesia, more and more Moslems are understanding that the basic precepts of Islam are antithetical to human rights and political freedom.
Terrorism is the last gasp of Old Islam. The Old Islam of intolerance and violence is dying. Will a New Islam, reformed and tolerant, emerge from its ashes?
Only if Islam submits.
“Islam” is Arabic for Submission. Only by submitting to Civilization’s basic values of human rights and political freedom will Islam have a future — and by no longer submitting to the Allah That Failed.