Essays

IslamQA: God has not abandoned you: Regaining your sense of purpose when life feels spiritually empty, lonely and meaningless

Flowering Azaleas by Marie Egner (c. 1895)

I would appreciate some advice. I pray all my prayers on time and I read Quran daily, along with other forms of worship, but I feel so numb & empty. I feel like I have no purpose in this life, like if I died it won't even matter. I don't affect this Ummah in any way. I just work full-time, I'm single, I don't have friends, my family and relatives are not on good terms, and I have social anxiety so I hate interacting with others. I feel so useless, is there a point to my worship?

It is human nature to want to be productive and achieve things for the sake of any cause you believe in, such as Islam. But ideally, your Islam should not be in any way attached to results.

Even if you were the only remaining human on earth, you can still perfectly apply Islam in your life, achieving your mission in life and a great success in the afterlife.

Your mission is the same as the Prophet’s mission, peace be upon him. It is to read the Quran and apply it wherever you can in your life, living by its manners, principles and philosophy.

When speaking of placing humans on Earth, God said to the angels, “I am placing a steward on Earth.” What is a steward? It is someone who takes care of something, for example a farm, for the sake of its owner, until the owner comes back.

We Muslims (and faithful Christians and others) are stewards on Earth. Our job is to take care of it for the sake of its Master. And this is achieved by following God’s Straight Path. The Straight Path is a program designed to ensure two things: humanity’s long-term survival (by placing various mechanisms to ensure that humanity doesn’t die out), and humanity’s short-term moral integrity (never justifying evil in the name of the greater good, never saying “the end justifies the means”).

We stewards are God’s representatives on Earth, and an important part of our stewardship is to keep God’s remembrance alive:

"And I have chosen you so listen to what is being revealed.
"Indeed, I am God, there is no god except Me, so worship Me and establish the prayer for My remembrance. (The Quran, verses 20:13-14)

Regardless of your situation, you are always able to fully live your life as a Muslim. You do not need anyone else’s involvement, this is something between you and God.

I have lived alone twice in my life, once when I was 18 and another time when I was 27, and both are some of the worst experiences of my life. I understand the difficulty of your situation, and how purposeless and meaningless it feels.

These are the times when your faith in God is tested. Will you think bad thoughts about Him, consider Him incapable of helping you, or consider Him unkind so that He wants you to suffer?

If we are fair-weather friends of God, then we will worship Him and love Him when things are easy, and once things get truly difficult, once our patience is tested, we fail the test and prove that we are unworthy of being honored by Him.

The Prophet, peace be upon him, suffered many hardships during his career that must have seemed purposeless and needless, since God had the power to protect him at all times and to ensure the very best for him. For 13 years he and his followers had to suffer under the hands of the pagans of Mecca. Couldn’t have God made this only one year, so that the Prophet and his followers used their time more productively? Couldn’t they have used all these years of suffering better if God had enabled Islam to spread faster? What was the point of the Prophet losing his wife and his main protector in Mecca, his uncle Abu Talib, at a crucial place in his career, greatly weakening him?

What the Prophet was taught with all of these difficulties is that God is a King, and He does as He wishes with His servants. If we have truly submitted, we will accept His decrees, thinking the best of Him and continuing to love Him, praise Him and worship Him, even as we suffer knowing that He can end our suffering.

Know that God has no need of you. You cannot do God any favors. No matter how talented or capable you are, God can always create someone with exactly your talents and abilities in little time. Everything we do for God’s sake is actually a gift from Him, because it is He who taught us, guided us, and sustained us throughout all of these years so that we could do this thing in His name and claim credit for it.

Any good deed you do for God is actually a favor from Him. If you want to be productive, to serve Islam, Muslims and humanity, what you are actually asking is for God to give you the favor of being useful in His cause.

You are asking God for a great favor. Ask yourself if you deserve it. Ibn al-Qayyim says:

Whoever, among the workers, wishes to know his status in the eye of the King, let him look at what jobs He gives him and with what He busies him.

If you want the King to give you a great job that ensures you rewards in this life and the afterlife, then you must know that this job is given to those He wishes, and not to everyone. You must purify yourself, rededicate yourself to God, give up all sinful behaviors, and constantly seek His guidance and forgiveness, while remaining patient and thinking the best of Him, and in this way you will be guided to Him step by step, month after month, until you reach a place where He decides to give you a better task in life.

There are no shortcuts if you want to be a sincere and useful servant of God. You must turn yourself into the type of person who deserves God’s honors and favors, and He will give these to you.

God can change your situation in an instant, solving all of your problems, giving you immense knowledge and placing you somewhere where you can be a great and highly admired leader. God will not do this for you, because God does not perform miracles for us. If God did miracles for us, yet we sinned afterwards, this would cause us to deserve the utmost punishment from Him, as happened to Jesus’s apostles:

112. “And when the disciples said, 'O Jesus son of Mary, is your Lord able to bring down for us a feast from heaven?' He said, 'Fear God, if you are believers.'“

113. They said, “We wish to eat from it, so that our hearts may be reassured, and know that you have told us the truth, and be among those who witness it.”

114. Jesus son of Mary said, “O God, our Lord, send down for us a table from heaven, to be a festival for us, for the first of us, and the last of us, and a sign from You; and provide for us; You are the Best of providers.”

115. God said, “I will send it down to you. But whoever among you disbelieves thereafter, I will punish him with a punishment the like of which I never punish any other being.” (The Quran, verses 5:112-115)

They demanded a miracle from God, and God answered their prayer. But to maintain justice, it is necessary for God to hold these people who see the miracle to extremely stringent standards afterwards. Disobeying God after seeing physical evidence with your own eyes of His power is a far greater sin than disobeying God while He feels hidden from you.

It is out of His mercy that He does not do miracles for us. If He did miracles, this would be a burden that many of us couldn’t carry. On the one hand, it would cheapen our good deeds, because now we’d be doing them while having some proof of God’s existence. On the other hand, it would greatly increase our sinfulness if we disobeyed Him in anything, because we’d be committing sins while having had direct experience of Him.

What God wants, instead, is for us to go through the boring, difficult, numbing experiences of life, so that the good we do can be fully attributed to us, and so that we can be rewarded for our faith and patience. If God intervened directly in our lives, showing Himself and performing miracles, all of these things possibilities would be destroyed.

Accept your situation, knowing that God is fully capable of changing it in an instant. He wants you to be responsible for the change, so that He can reward you for it, instead of He Himself causing the change directly and taking away the chance for you to prove yourself.

Nothing you achieve in this life is going to be of any worth except the record of your deeds. Even if you build the world’s greatest mosque in His name, when the world ends, it will be destroyed and turned into nothing, as if it never existed. If you want to work for Him, then know that results only come through Him, and not through your own efforts. If He allows you to achieve any success in His name, then know that this is a favor from Him, not a favor from you to Him.

This is not to say that nothing we do for Him is of value, saying that He can accomplish anything He wants Himself. It is, rather, to realize that there are two worlds, the world of the seen and the world of the unseen. The unseen world is that which has priority. Nothing you do in the seen world is of value if the unseen part of your world is corrupt. And nothing you do in the unseen world is worthless regardless of your results in the seen world.

Becoming a chosen servant of God

If you want to become the type of servant that God favors by making him or her productive in His cause, then these are the steps you can follow to accomplish this.

1. Clean your slate

Chronic sins in your life will block God’s blessings. You cannot hope to be honored by God if part of your life is in direct contradiction to His teachings. For example, if you have usurious debt (debt upon which you pay interest, such as mortgage, car or credit card debt), then this is going to be a blocker of God’s blessings in your life. If you have cut off your relationship with a family member despite the fact that God commands love and kindness and tolerance toward them, then this will block God’s blessings.

Think of your life and find anything that could be considered a chronic sin, and fix it as soon as you can, doing your utmost to do so. God will not believe you to be sincere in wishing for His forgiveness and love if your life contains sinful parts that are insults toward Him.

The next thing to do is to ask God for His forgiveness for every great and small sin you have ever committed. Do this with every prostration of every one of your formal prayers, and do it after every formal prayer.

Equally important is to not add new sins to your record. Your goal should be to have a pristine record, clear of all sins. You cannot hope to have God’s favors if you are carrying a great burden of sins on your back.

2. Reestablish your connection with God through worship and Quran-reading

Perform tahajjud at night and read Quran between every two units. The Quran is the most important guide in our lives, because it is humanly impossible for us to remain mindful of all of our duties and concerns. Without the Quran, we end up focusing on one thing and ignoring other equally important things. We may think that being kind to our parents, or being charitable, or doing public service, or performing dhikr throughout the day, is the most important thing in life. We invariably edge toward one or a few things and lose our balance. Through daily Quran reading, we are made mindful of every possible mistake and are reminded of the dozens of things that we need to balance in life to be well-rounded and complete believers. There is no one clever maxim or teaching (“subdue the ego!”) that can replace the Quran, nothing can replace it because humans are complicated and life is complicated and to remain on track and to remain connected with God in the best way possible, we need its thousands of verses to help shape our characters and correct our errors.

For more tahajjud please see my essay: Mysticism without Sufism: A Guide to Tahajjud, Islam’s Meditation Practice

Sit down for a few minutes after every formal prayer, supplicating to God for everything you desire. Do this with all of your five prayers.

3. Be patient and do not expect results

Even if you do not see results for months, detach yourself from expecting results, knowing that God is a King, and a King does what He wills with His servants. Submit to His decree. Do your part of worship, seeking forgiveness and avoiding sins, knowing that God will do His part. If you repent, worship Him ardently and constantly pray for His help, yet see no results for a week or two, what do you know, perhaps if you are patient, results will come in a few months, when you are ready for it.

If you feel numb, uncared for and abandoned, then realize that all of us have felt like that at some point in our lives, even the Prophet, who after revealing the first few revelations, stopped receiving revelation for a period of six months to two years, after which these verses were revealed:

1. By the morning light.

2. And the night as it settles.

3. Your Lord did not abandon you, nor did He forget.

4. The Hereafter is better for you than the First.

5. And your Lord will give you, and you will be satisfied.

6. Did He not find you orphaned, and sheltered you?

7. And found you wandering, and guided you?

8. And found you in need, and enriched you?

9. Therefore, do not mistreat the orphan.

10. Nor rebuff the seeker.

11. But proclaim the blessings of your Lord. (The Quran, verses 93:1-8)

4. Read

An important help toward being patient, thinking the best of God and understanding His decrees is to read. Read Ibn al-Jawzi‘s and Ibn al-Qayyim‘s sayings. If you do not speak Arabic, read multiple translations of the Quran, especially Muhammad Abdel-Haleem’s. Read Tariq Ramadan’s In the Footsteps of the Prophet if you haven’t. Read every good Islamic book you can find, especially by modern, mainstream writers.

5. Put your hopes in the afterlife

This world will never live up to your expectations, and nothing you achieve in it will last forever. It is a central spiritual teaching of the Quran to focus more on the hereafter than on the present life, as verse 4 above teaches.

Think of this world as nothing more than a waiting room. You are here for a while, waiting for the door to be opened, behind which there is a beautiful and thriving city where you can finally have peace and freedom from all stress and worry. Arriving at this city must be your goal, you must never be deluded by the cheap counterfeit goods of the worldly life, which almost always cause as much pain as the pleasure they bring.

If you at this moment feel depressed and unable to do anything for the afterlife, then wait patiently, and this in itself is worship. Imagine yourself waiting in that waiting room. Just wait, if you cannot do anything more. Wait, knowing that eventually the door will open. You do not need to do anything more than waiting, God does not burden you with more than you are able.

6. Be easy on yourself

A mistake many of us make is to rededicate ourselves to God for a short period of time, such a during Ramadan, only to burn out, feeling that we can never be the perfect saint that we hope to be.

Never push yourself beyond what you are able to carry at this moment. Continue to enjoy what you enjoy, reading novels, browsing your favorite sites, playing video games, doing whatever (non-sinful) thing you enjoy doing.

Islam does not ask you to give up the pleasures of this world, or to turn yourself into a God-worshiping robot. It asks you reform your life, to remain close to God as much as you are able, and to continue living a normal human life. God does not blame you for enjoying yourself, for taking the time off to go to the park, to listen to music, to do anything you find enjoyable and uplifting.

Be gentle with yourself and increase what you do for God only when you are able. If today you are tired and cannot perform an extra good deed that you performed yesterday, then do not do it.

Pushing yourself too hard can cause your ego to rebel, because it will feel like Islam is an enemy that wants to prevent it from enjoying life. Children and teenagers also feel this way when their parents try to push them too hard to be pious and religious.

Instead, be a gentle and kind master with yourself, respecting your own dignity and giving yourself time to do what you enjoy.

7. Rely on His guidance

Another mistake that people make is losing hope in God’s ability to guide them. They lose hope and think that they are permanently lost, thinking as if God is incapable of reaching into their lives and purifying it again. The truth that Quran teaches us is that God is with us every hour of every day, teaching us, educating us, helping us overcome challenges and grow into better humans.

Some Muslims, especially strict ones, mistakenly think that for a person to acquire guidance, a thousand things have to go exactly perfectly for them. In reality, once a person accepts the Quran as their guide, and sincerely prays to God for guidance, then their guidance is assured. God will take care of arranging for them everything necessary to help them grow and improve. The Quran speaks much of guidance (al-huda), and there would be little point in mentioning this if it was all about a human’s own efforts toward learning about God and Islam. Rather, guidance is largely about God bestowing His favor upon humans, inspiring them and helping them along the way:

God chooses to Himself whom He wills, and He guides to Himself whoever repents. (The Quran, 42:13)

He said, “I am going towards my Lord, and He will guide me.” (The Quran, verse 37:99)

No matter how lost you feel, pray to God for guidance, and He will guide you, in ways you do not expect. He will arrange for you to go through the right experiences, to hear, read and see the right things, to be able to learn and grow and mature. What you must do, above all, is repent and be sincere.

On social anxiety and loneliness

I too do not enjoy social interactions except with people I know really well. This is perfectly normal. It is not a character flaw, it is due to your genes. If you get only four hours of sleep one night, the next day nearly all of your social anxiety will be gone, because the parts of your brain that cause you social anxiety will stop doing their usual thing.

Consider social anxiety just one of life’s annoyances, similar to a person who has an accident and has to limp for the rest of their lives. It is probably never going away completely, although many things can significantly reduce it (such as gaining wealth and status). Accept social anxiety as a part of life and move on. There are people who are blind, be thankful that your problem is not as serious. It will still get in the way of enjoying a life that people would call normal, but it is not more than you can bear.

When you are in a situation where your social anxiety becomes a factor, it is like a person who has a limp being expected to move fast or run. It is not enjoyable and you’d much rather avoid it, but if you think of it as just another physical disability, then you will be able to handle it with few negative emotions. If people constantly expect you to be outgoing and comfortable socially, then the blame is on them for expecting you to act in a way you are not designed to act. Instead of trying to live up to their expectations, trying to act the way their genes make them act, instead of acting the way your genes make you act, be comfortable with yourself, accepting your limitations, finding social enjoyment in the ways you can (instead of in the ways people expect), and having hope that as you grow older, you will learn better ways of dealing with the issue.

If you feel lonely and wish for meaningful social interactions, for example with a loving spouse, then you can pray for this and let God decide when and how you will have it. Loneliness is just one of the many tests of life, and the happiness we desire from ending our loneliness is only something that God can give to us:

42. And that to your Lord is the finality.

43. And that it is He who causes laughter and weeping.

44. And that it is He who gives death and life.

45. And that it is He who created the two kinds—the male and the female.

46. From a sperm drop, when emitted.

47. And that upon Him is the next existence.

48. And that it is He who enriches and impoverishes. (The Quran 53:42-48)

It is best not place your hopes of fulfillment in this life, as already mentioned, and this includes hoping for an end to loneliness. It is better to put our ultimate hope in the afterlife and to serve God as best as we can, expecting favors and blessings only from Him, whenever He decrees these for us.

This is about the spiritual side of things. As for the material side of things, you are free to seek fulfillment, for example by trying to get married. If you take care of the spiritual side, God will give you His help and guidance as you use your intelligence and planning ability to improve your material situation.

Spiritually, seek fulfillment only through God. Wealth, a spouse, family and friends will not bring you fulfillment unless He allows it and makes it possible. In the worldly life, act like any intelligent human, spiritually, act like His servant, knowing that He is the King above all kings.

Also see:

IslamQA: Understanding Islam’s Sophisticated Approach to Slavery: Why Muslims Practiced Slavery in the Past, and Why They Reject it Today

Below are my preliminary thoughts on why Islam’s tolerance for slavery is not necessary unethical.

It may sound like nothing but empty apologetics to defend Islam’s toleration of slavery and say that Islam’s goal was to abolish it, when Islam’s Prophet  and his companions all practiced it widely. And generally this is what much of the arguments defending Islam’s views on slavery sound like when they come from traditional scholars.

It is difficult to reconcile classical Islam with modern views on slavery because classical Islam calls for applying the Quran and the Sunnah (the Prophet’s traditions ﷺ as recorded in hadith collections) as equal authorities. Since the Prophet ﷺ practiced slavery, the implication is that anyone can practice it without it being an issue. Saying slavery is morally wrong today is like saying the Prophet ﷺ did something morally wrong, which naturally is considered unacceptable. The Saudi Salafi scholar Saleh al-Fawzan, reflecting this kind of thinking, recently issued a fatwa (ruling) saying that terrorist groups operating in Iraq have the right to enslave women belonging to the non-Muslim Yazidi minority.

According to Abul A’la Maududi, the Prophet ﷺ freed 63 slaves by himself during his life. In his commentary on Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani’s Bulugh al-Maram, the historian Muhammad bin Isma`eel al-San`ani says that the Prophet ﷺ and his companions together freed over thirty-nine thousand slaves in their lives.

I will focus on early Islamic history, since what Muslims did after that did not always reflect Islamic principles. If we find moral justification for the Prophet’s practices ﷺ, then this is sufficient. It is not necessary to find moral justification for Ottoman practices regarding slavery, since what they did regarding slavery and a thousand other things does not necessary reflect the teachings of Islam.

Islam’s critics may say that we modern Muslims are trying to back-rationalize Islam’s “savage” beginnings by reinterpreting the Prophet’s actions ﷺ as if he wasn’t a vicious and power-seeking warlord. But as will be shown below, his policies and reforms regarding slavery were so noble and ahead of their time that he puts the Christians of a thousand years later to shame.

The Arabian System of Slavery

Slavery has been a part of life in most human societies. American Christians were having sexual intercourse with their black slaves by the tens of thousands only to refuse to take care of the children born in this way and deny them their right to a family. Since Christianity has no framework for dealing with slavery, the slaves and the children born would be abandoned, rather than taken care of as Islam would require.

At Islam’s beginnings, it was common practice to take the defeated enemy’s women as slaves, this was done by the pagans too. It was an ordinary and accepted part of life. Before Islam, Arabs had twenty ways of acquiring slaves according to the scholar Muhammad Mutawalli Sha`rawi, such as people being made slaves due to debt, or a tribe offering one of their own as a slave as an offering to another tribe, or one tribe attacking another with the purpose of enslaving them. Islam reduces these ways to only one way: Enemy prisoners coming out of a just war, not an offensive war done for gain, but a war done against an aggressor.1 And if there are international treaties for dealing with prisoners of war, like there are today, then this way too would be closed.

So within the Islamic system, this is how slaves are created:

  1. During an age of the world where slavery is a worldwide practice, some group launches a war of aggression against Muslims. The Quran expects Muslims to sign treaties with their neighbors and commands them to not be aggressors, therefore a war would only be against an enemy that has broken treaties. Of course, many Muslim states throughout history have abused Islamic law to justify wars of aggression, but the actions of Muslims are one thing, and Islamic principles are another. You cannot hold Islam responsible when Muslims break its laws. All major religions, ideologies and constitutions have been used to justify wars of aggression.
  2. The enemy is offered peace but refuses to back down.
  3. The enemy is conquered.
  4. The enemy’s men, women and children are taken as captives and have the status of slaves, with a long list of rights ensured by Islam. Note that the enemy would have done the same to the Muslims if they had been the conquerors.

This is what happened to the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe, who at Islam’s darkest hour, when the Muslims were under attack by a large alliance of pagan Arabs during the Battle of the Trench, broke their treaty with the Muslims and plotted with the attackers to help them destroy the Muslim state. Their men were executed for high treason (treason during a time of war, it is also the law in the United States to execute those convicted of high treason), and their women and children were enslaved. Executing the enemy’s men was done for their treason, this wasn’t the standard Islamic practice against enemies. And it wasn’t the Prophet’s judgment. The Jews demanded that their judge should be a Muslim man from Medina that they liked and trusted, and the Prophet agreed to delegate the judgment to that man. And that was his judgment.

In Islam’s early history, this enslavement of an enemy was not done out of aggression. An enemy, instead, initiated the aggression, with full knowledge of its potential consequences. In the case of Banu Qurayza, it was a risk they took, hoping to annihilate the Muslims on the one hand, and to take over their wealth, lands, women and children on the other. The risk they took did not pay off. Had they been successful, it would have been the Muslims who would have suffered execution and enslavement under the hands of the pagan Arabs and their Jewish accomplices.

Couldn’t God have asked the Muslims to do something morally superior to enslaving the women and children? He could have, but He didn’t.

The main reason for tolerating slavery could be that slavery took care of providing for the women and children acquired through war. The Jewish solution to this problem in Biblical times was to also kill the women and children, as is recorded in the First Book of Samuel in the Bible and in other places:

…and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. (Samuel I, 15:3)

Christians did the same at times, for example:

Albert of Aachen, a chronicler of the First Crusade era, explicitly claims that the Arab soldiers capture and enslave virgins. (According to him, the Christians just kill everyone.)

[From a historian’s answer posted on Reddit]

Muslims, being more civilized, did not kill people needlessly, and especially not women and children. The killing of women and children in war is strictly prohibited by Islamic law.

New populations of slaves acquired during war would be mostly women and children (because the men were mostly dead, since the wars in those times were often “total wars”, where all the males fought). If this population of mostly women and children had been abandoned, they could have starved, since they had no men to take care of providing for it.

The Prophet ﷺ couldn’t have asked the Muslims to take care of these women and children without getting anything in return. Food, clothing and houses did not magically fall from the sky; it required much labor to provide these. Politically it could have been highly damaging to his cause to force the men to become practically slaves of the interests of this defeated population, building them new neighborhoods of homes in their towns and feeding and clothing them without getting anything in return. Doing this would have also led to a great increase in prostitution and theft, because this new population of women and children would have had no alternative ways for advancing in life. This is what happened in New York City in the 1850’s when a great number of unmarried Irish women and children were dumped into the city, escaping famine in Ireland. Their neighborhoods turned into ghettos full of crime, as happens to all jobless and idle populations, and the meme that Irish Americans are dirty criminals lasted for over a century afterwards.

The Prophet ﷺ could have asked his followers to marry these women and take care of their children. This wouldn’t have worked because only a man who had two homes and the income to maintain both could have married a second woman. They couldn’t keep two wives under the same roof, because this is practically guaranteed to cause marital discontent (it is quite difficult enough for a man to manage two wives living under separate roofs). Most men did not have a second home or the income to maintain one. So marrying these women wouldn’t have been practical, a few of the women could been married, but not most.

As a reminder, I am describing the reasons why Islam tolerated slavery in the ancient world. As I will describe below, Islam today does not tolerate slavery and Muslims around the world have supported banning it, this is not because Islamic principles have been abandoned for modern principles, it is because the Quran supports us in doing what we know to be the just and kind thing, while also tolerating slavery in societies that already practice it. The Quran has an anti-slavery agenda, but its agenda requires that it should tolerate slavery if a society already practices it, ending it from the inside. Societies that already practice slavery may be violently opposed to the thought of abandoning slavery, as the example of the American Civil War shows. Islam’s toleration for slavery enables it to spread in such societies and gently reform them until it can put an end to slavery.

So marriage was not a practical option. What was needed was a form of marriage that did not strongly compete with the man’s existing marriage, that did not require a second home, and that did not require high income for a man to engage in it. The Arabian system of slavery provided all of these features by enabling the women to work as servants in the men’s homes, in this way not being competitors in status to their wives. By giving the men the right to have sex with their female slaves, it made the men willing to keep them as slaves, otherwise they wouldn’t have wanted them (as will be described further).

In this way the women were taken care of and fed as were their children, they were not killed like Jews and Christians would have done, and they were not left to starve. These women grew up thinking of slavery and concubinage as a normal part of life and probably had them in their own homes, they saw nothing wrong with this as long as it was not happening to them. For them the difference between being a wife and a concubine was a difference in status, not a difference between a consensual sexual relationship and rape. This is evident to someone studying China and Japan’s ancient practice of concubinage. Concubines were neither wives nor mere sex toys. They had a specific social status, it was lower than that of a wife, but it is a highly naive view of history to think of such women as merely bodies that were abused and raped.

The Christians of Egypt gifted the Prophet ﷺ a Christian concubine named Maria. Were the Christians merely sending the Prophet ﷺ a sex toy as a gesture of good will? Of course not. As any historian of ancient times will tell you, this was similar to a man offering his daughter’s hand in marriage to someone else as the Christian Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos did when he offered his daughter’s hand in marriage first to Hulagu then to Hulago’s enemies in his attempts to ally himself with the winning side. In such a marriage her own opinion in the matter was ignored, as has been standard practice among large sections of society in all of history, especially among the aristocracy. A concubine did not have to be placed in chains and shipped off in a box. For her this was her status in life, and she had no problem with doing it, similar to the way today female actresses do not mind having a male actor’s sexual organ inside them for a movie sex scene, it is part of their job and they do it.

The difference is that, in theory, concubinage was “forced”, while a modern actress is not “forced” to do that. But it all depends on the woman’s mindset. A concubine did not feel raped the way a modern woman forced into slavery would feel, she felt that she belonged to a lower-class caste of women, one of whose jobs was to have sex with their masters. She may have hoped for a better life, to one day be a full wife and not merely a concubine, but she had a respected social status and function, she thought of herself as an integral part of society, not as someone imprisoned and raped against her will like modern-day sex slaves are. These things do not justify slavery, but provide part of the explanation for why Islam tolerated it. A modern woman may value her own dignity so much that she may consider murdering anyone who tries to enslave her, but at that time, the women thought of concubinage as a forced, low-status marriage that would be their fate if their men failed to protect them, and they perfectly approved of it as long as it was happening to their sisters.

In the modern world, a sex slave is an unperson; she is a non-human commodity used and discarded as an animal. In Islam’s system, a concubine was a person. She had rights, she could own property, her master could be punished for mistreating her and he did not have the right to sell her if he got her pregnant. A sex slave has no place in society, her status is lower than even a family’s dog, because a family dog fits within the family and is loved and is respected. It has a place. A sex slave has no place. She has been dehumanized into an object whose opinions, rights and free will no longer exist. It is as if she is dead and animated by some form of magic that keeps her flesh alive so that she can continue performing her sexual functions. This is a far cry from concubinage in Islam, in which, first and foremost, the concubine has a place in society. She is not an unperson, she continues to be treated like a human. A low class of human, certainly, but still a human; people would treat her the way they treat the extremely poor among them.

In Hegelian terms, the sexual relationship between a master and his concubine is a relationship between subjects, while the relationship between a kidnapper and his sex slave in the modern world is a relationship between a subject and an object. For more on the important differences between subject-subject and subject-object sexual relationships please see Sexual Desire by the British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton.

In Islam, the relationship between a slave woman and her master is an official relationship, it is similar to a marriage. She cannot be in a sexual relationship with anyone else during this relationship (there are many stories of masters who would unscrupulously exploit their concubines and share them with other men, but that behavior is against Islamic teachings.). If she is already pregnant when acquired, her master does not have the right of having sex with her until she gives birth. If she becomes pregnant by her master, her master no longer has the right to sell her, because she acquires that status of umm walad and cannot be sold as a slave, becoming a semi-wife instead. Her children that are born to her and her master will be free citizens and not slaves, and if her master dies, she becomes a free woman herself. If Islam was a barbaric religion that taught its adherents to enslave people, why would it have so many sophisticated mechanisms for eradicating it?

What is the point of preventing a master from selling his slave once she is pregnant or has given birth? The Christian slave owners of America didn’t think there was any point in this, since they were not civilized enough to worry about the status and rights of the slave, while the Muslims of 630 AD found a point in this, because it enabled the woman to care for her children under the care and protection of her master, while also forcing the master to take full responsibility for the children, who were now free citizens. Americans just 160 years ago were savages in their dealing with slaves compared to the Arabs of 630 AD.

A person who has a limited view of history may think that the best solution to slavery is to ban it and let whatever happens happen afterwards, and this was the idea of the North in mid-19th century America, which led to the American Civil War2, causing the death of about a million people (it was the bloodiest war in history up to that time). Since Islam was not invented by short-sighted humans, it respects the existing culture, enables an extremely undeveloped society to take care of the women and children who are victims of war (instead of killing them, allowing them to starve or encouraging them to become prostitutes and criminals by dumping them into cities), and provides various methods for slowly but surely eradicating slavery until it can be banned without any social unrest, the way almost all Muslim-majority countries today have banned slavery. Muslim Tunisia banned slavery before the United States did.

While these facts are, of course, not sufficient to justify slavery in the modern world, in the ancient world, given the political and economic circumstances of those times, it is understandable why Islam tolerated slavery.

It would be untrue to say that the Prophet tolerated slavery entirely out of charitable motivations. The Arabian system of enslaving war captives and distributing them was done as part of the distribution of war booty, the goods taken from a defeated prisoner. From Tariq Ramadan’s In the Footsteps of the Prophet:

Seven days had elapsed since the surrender, and the Hawazin had not appeared to ask for their womcn and children back. Now thinking that they would not come, Muhammad decided to share out the captives between the Quraysh Muslims (who once again received a more important share) and the Ansar. He only just finished the distribution when a Hawazin delegation arrived. The Prophet explained to them that he had waited for them, but since they had not arrived he had already shared out the captives; he said that he would intercede for them and ask people to give back their prisoners if they wanted to. After some hesitation, all the fighters gave up their captives to the Hawazin delegation. (Pages 184 and 185)

The Muslim fighters wanted the captives as their slaves. The Prophet, however, wanted them to wait for the captives’ tribe to come and hopefully sign a peace treaty, after which they would be given back to the tribe. Since the Hawazin didn’t seem willing to come for a treaty, the Prophet assumed they still intended war, and for this reason allowed the Arabian system to take its course, giving his warriors what they were used to get.

But once the Hawazin finally appeared, the Prophet showed his noble character and the non-Arabian-ness of Islam by convincing his fighters to give the captives back. Instead of acting like an Arab warlord, rejoicing in defeating and enslaving an enemy that had gathered to destroy the Muslims, he let them go free once their representatives came to ask for peace.

This scene also illustrates the sensitivity of the Prophet’s political situation. He could not force his fighters to give up the captives. They were from different Arabian tribes with their own ideas about their rights and their status in relation to the Prophet. The Prophet was not in charge of a “horde” of mindless soldiers like so many detractors of Islam wish to portray, he had to keep a sensitive political situation balanced, giving sufficient satisfaction to each section of his following so that they would not rebel against him.

He did not act like the largely Bolsheviks of Russia (led by the Jewish Vladimir Lenin), enforcing a new ideology on the entire population and giving everyone the option of either accepting it or dying. He humored the population, their pride, their culture and their various forms of social organization. He did not want to destroy society then rebuild it (like all Marxist and neo-Marxist ideologues wish to do), he peacefully gave his message to his society, giving them the option of either accepting it or leaving it, and never responding to the violence offered him and his followers. Only when he was elected the sovereign ruler of Medina by its main tribes did he start to act like a ruler, doing what was necessary to protect his state against aggressors.

And even then, he continued to respect the existing society and culture. Instead of acting like Lenin or Ayatollah Khomeini, using assassinations and purges to enslave the population to his interests in the name of the greater good, even though he was a prophet of God and had His authority behind him. He continued to respect them, consult them, while the Muslims continued to maintain the right to question and criticize his decisions. Even at the end of his life, when he had become the supreme ruler of Arabia, his companions severely criticized him to his own face after he chose a 17-year-old as the leader of a Muslim army. Instead of thinking “God’s messenger says so, therefore no argument can be admitted”, they treated him like a human and felt free to disagree with him, so that he had to convince them of the sense and rationality of his decisions.

In his truly democratic form of governance, in allowing everyone to voice their opinions and take part in decision-making, treating him like any other human, rather than as a supreme leader, he was a far cry from the typical modern dictator who expects absolute obedience, or the typical modern democratic leader who considers democracy an annoying formality that gets in the way of their achieving their goals, paying lip service to it while betraying its principles on a daily basis. It is all the more strange that someone who had over 100,000 people under him, considering him truly a messenger from God, would never make use of his status as God’s messenger to get his way, instead allowing people to challenge him daily.

Compare him to Ayatollah Khomeini, who by the virtue of (supposedly) belonging to the Prophet’s descendants and being the main religious authority of his sect, while in his weakness he professed to believing in democracy and spoke with non-Shia leaders like Ahmad Moftizadeh, once he achieved supremacy in Iran, he quickly went on to purge the government of his opposition, rushed the constitution he liked through the judiciary to the dismay of his opposition and his own friends, and used theological arguments to prove that his decisions could not be questioned.

Vaso di fiori sulla finestra di un harem (“The window of the Harem”) by Francesco Hayez (first half of 19th century)

The Prophet’s Concubines ﷺ

A person may acknowledge that politically and economically, it made some sense for Islam to tolerate slavery instead of banning it immediately. They may even acknowledge the fact that Islam in the modern world does not command slavery nor support it, since the Quran does not command the practice of slavery, and since we in the modern world dislike slavery and consider it repulsive, Islam gives us full rights to ban it.

But they may wonder why the Prophet ﷺ himself accepted to have slave women he had sex with (concubines). Couldn’t he himself, and his closest companions, have chosen the moral high ground of avoiding it?

We cannot find a conclusive answer for this, but we can speculate. Perhaps in God’s view, there was no good to be gained by prohibiting the Prophet ﷺ and his companions from keeping concubines when everyone else did. These women would have had masters anyway, so it wouldn’t have improved the lot of these women to prevent some Muslims from keeping them, it may have even worsened their lot, because many Muslims may have tried to follow the Prophet’s example ﷺ of not keeping concubines, creating large populations of female slaves that nobody wanted. And if the Prophet ﷺ had kept concubines without having sex with them, in this way practicing slavery without the sexual intercourse part, other Muslims may have tried to follow his example, and by so doing, they may have avoided keeping female slaves at all, since an important reason, perhaps 90% of the reason, for their wanting to take care of these slave women was that they received the privilege of intimacy with them. So the result, again, could have been large populations of female slaves that no one wanted. The result would have been that the slaves would have been sold to non-Muslims (since Muslims didn’t want them), and this wouldn’t have been better for the women, but worse, since the non-Muslims may have had no laws for protecting the rights of these slaves or providing them with ways for themselves or their children to be freed. So there would have been no moral gain from these choices.

By keeping concubines the way the rest of the culture did, the Prophet ﷺ showed the rest of the Muslims that they too could do this. In this way the society of that time was able to absorb conquered populations and slowly free them.

In Islam, slaves also have the right of mukataba, which was for them to be given free time in which to work, so that they could buy themselves off of their masters. In this way many male slaves were able to buy their own freedom. America’s slave owners of 1850 CE and their official laws considered their slaves and everything the slave owned as properties of their masters. Imagine their infuriation if they were told their slaves should be allowed to have free time in which to work, or that what they earned was not a property of the master, but a property of the slave. They, including their religious clergy, would have considered this a dangerous attack against their God-given rights over their slaves.

The Prophet ﷺ himself could have kept no concubines, saying that God had commanded him not to keep any, while making it lawful for everyone else. This could have affected his status negatively in the eyes of his followers and allies, since the concubines belonging to a man’s household added to his prestige. The Prophet himself ﷺ was part of Arabian culture, considering slavery and concubines a normal part of life, like everyone else did. God could have taught him that one day humans will discover that it is morally wrong to enslave people, but He did not for His own reasons, perhaps it served the interests of everyone, including the slaves, for the Arabian system to continue functioning like usual, with a few crucial reforms added to it to significantly reduce the number of new slaves, and to provide various ways for slaves to be freed.

While today we can think of various things the Prophet ﷺ could have done at that time instead of practicing slavery and concubinage, we can never be sure that our solutions wouldn’t fail miserably in that ancient Arabian context. We can never be sure if Islam’s solution wasn’t the best possible solution for that time and place, enabling a society to slowly eradicate slavery without causing civil wars, and without the religion being abandoned for being too ahead of its time if it had outright banned slavery.

Therefore a fair-minded reading of the Quran and early Islamic history will see that there is not sufficient justification for calling Islam a false or unjust religion for tolerating slavery at that time. They will see that the Prophet ﷺ was already greatly ahead of his time and that he made some incredible reforms in various areas of life, including reforms regarding slavery. Therefore the only thing they can criticize him for is not being even more ahead of his time, which is a pretty weak criticism. Who is to say that he wasn’t already operating as much ahead of his time as it was possible to be without people abandoning his movement?

Is Islam Outdated?

A person could say that now that the world is sufficiently developed, Islam is an outdated religion, that since it contains many rules and regulations regarding slavery, the religion must have been meant for ancient times and not today.

The truth is that there is no guarantee that the world will continue to be developed. Perhaps a nuclear war will break out 10,000 years from now and there will be isolated areas of the world that would live in conditions as basic as those of 630 AD, and in that case, there may again be warring entities that practice slavery, and Islam’s rulings regarding it would become relevant again.

Or humans could establish a colony on another planet where slavery is practiced. If some people among them convert to Islam while belonging to that culture that practices it, then Islam’s rulings regarding slavery would be relevant again.

Islam’s Historical Mistakes

It is true that various Islamic empires have acted aggressively and have sought to enslave not as a matter of practical necessity but for profit and pleasure. One could say that if Islam had forbad slavery, all of those evils would have been prevented. There is no way to know this for sure, because as explained, banning slavery may have been politically and economically unfeasible, and even if it had been banned, Muslims were still free to do a thousand other evil things.

Therefore a fair-minded person will not criticize the deeds of Muslims, but the program they follow. Islam is the program, and its programming logic makes Muslims avoid and ban slavery, therefore there is nothing to criticize today’s Islam for regarding slavery. You can, however, make this criticism:

I dislike the fact that in some isolated space colony 1000 years from now if slavery is already practiced, and if some people embrace Islam, I dislike that they will not ban it immediately but instead take a generation or two doing it.

A final question could be; why believe in a religion that has parts which require so much justification, why not just abandon it and embrace the modern world instead? Because Islam has undeniable soft evidence of its truth in the Quran, therefore the issue of slavery is a very minor thing for someone who has accepted Islam based on this evidence. In my essay God, Evolution and Abiogenesis: The Topological Theory for the Origin of Life and Species, I discuss the reasons why I believe in Islam.

Conclusion

The best of Christians have also acted as the best of Muslims in fighting slavery, therefore what I mentioned above is about Christian history, not Christian ideals. Christians continue to use Islamic history against Islam, so there is no injustice in doing the same towards Christian history, so that it is known that Christian criticism of Islam is generally quite ignorant of the ugly sides of Christian history. As for Christian work against slavery, from Wikipedia:

Several early figures, while not openly advocating abolition, did make sacrifices to emancipate or free slaves seeing liberation of slaves as a worthy goal. These include Saint Patrick (415-493), Acacius of Amida (400-425), and Ambrose (337 – 397 AD). Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-394) went even further and stated opposition to all slavery as a practice. Later Saint Eligius (588-650) used his vast wealth to purchase British and Saxon slaves in groups of 50 and 100 in order to set them free.

Today, if there is a war of conquest between a Muslim nation and a non-Muslim one, then there would be no question of slavery, the enemy’s women would be treated according to modern practices. Muslim states officially recognize and respect international treaties, and the majority of Muslims have no problems with this. It is only barbaric, CIA-trained-and-funded groups like ISIS and al-Nusra which want to bring back slavery.

So it is true that Islam does not forbid slavery, and it is against the Quran and the Sunnah to say that the religion forbids it. But it does not encourage it either. It has a sophisticated approach toward it that takes the facts on the ground into account, regulating it and ending it when the time is right, rather than doing it too soon when it might cause starvation or war.

The fact that a child born to a female slave and her master is considered a free citizen, and the fact that the Quran strongly encourages the freeing of slaves is sufficient evidence for the fact that Islam came to end slavery, not to encourage it. If the Muslims before us made the mistake of encouraging slavery at times instead of fighting against it, we the Muslims of today are not required to act like them, and in fact are fully justified in disavowing their actions as we follow the Islamic program in the modern world.

The Last Mufti of Iranian Kurdistan (And a Critique of Political Islam)

This book is a beautiful tribute to the memory of Ahmad Moftizadeh, may God have mercy on him, containing a detailed and well-supported biography of the man and detailing his works and beliefs.

As someone whose (Sunni) family spent the late 80’s and most of the 90’s in Iranian Kurdistan, Ahmad Moftizadeh and Nasir Subhani, I have been hearing the names of these two men mentioned with love for as long as I can remember.

I am thankful that such a work was done by someone with a Western background, since the quality of the research is much higher than that of Eastern publications.

On the matter of politics, the author quotes Moftizadeh as saying:

He who embarks on a political project is the most likely to lose God’s way. Just take a look at the world.

The book provides further evidence of the futility of political Islam, something I have been studying for years, beginning with my study of Sayyid Qutb. Both men belong to a class of Islamists who believed that “good and sincere” men would be the perfect men to govern a country, ignoring the fatal flaw within this hypothesis; that there is no way to reliably find “good and sincere” men, and once supposedly “good and sincere” men are selected, there is no way to reliably make them continue being good and sincere. You always end up with a limited democracy where all kinds of insincere power-seekers make it through the system and gain power. From the history provided by The Last Mufti and clues elsewhere, it appears that there were many good and sincere men among the Shia leaders of the Iranian revolution, but within ten years the revolutionary government was ruled by some of the worst criminal scum to ever walk this earth.

The critical weakness within political Islam is that for it to work, everything must go perfectly:

  • Nearly everyone involved in the political movement must be sincere and not a power-seeker
  • The current government must respect the Islamists and allow them to peacefully take power, it must not persecute them and assassinate its leaders (Iran, Algeria, Iraqi Kurdistan and Egypt’s experience show just how naive this expectation is.)
  • Most of the country’s Muslims must support them, instead of the party becoming a cause for division and dislike among Muslims, where some people trust the party and others have good reasons not to trust it due to what they know about the party’s leadership and power structure.
  • It must be able to keep its moral integrity and attain success despite facing a thousand dirty tricks played by the opposition, which has no religion and no qualms about using every trick in the book to defeat them. If the opposition makes up lies, sets fire to its establishments, intimidates its members and uses the law to put hurdles in front of them, the Islamists, if they want to continue to follow Islam truly, must not counter these with their like.

The conclusion I have reached at the moment is that seeking power is like seeking wealth, and that no God-fearing Muslim or group of Muslims will self-elect themselves to do it. Power corrupts and attracts the corruptible. All Islamist political activism that is aimed at seeking power (such as by winning elections) is inherently un-Islamic because the chances of it doing good are far smaller than the chances of it doing evil:

  • The party can attract good and sincere people, only to have the government imprison and torture them, because the party makes them easy targets, and makes the powers that be uncomfortable. While if they had not acted politically, if they had remained ordinary civilians, they would have attracted dangerous attention far later in their careers, and any persecution would have befallen a far smaller group of people. The Muslim Brotherhood has probably caused the unintentional deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people who by today would have had millions of descendants who would be devout Muslim judges, journalists, writers and professionals, doing far more for Islam than the Brotherhood has done.
  • The party causes division among Muslims, because not everyone will want to join them, since people will judge the party by its members, and if they know any of its members to be insincere and corrupt (and the party is bound to attract such members), they will not want to have anything to do with the party. This is a cause for a highly dangerous and corrupting form of division in the community, as is highly evident in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Islamist scene.
  • The party can give Islam a bad name, as Iran’s Shia Islamists, Turkey’s Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood have all done. Any evil they do reflects on Islam.
  • Terrorism is just a continuation of political Islam by other means.
  • When a foreign government wants to interfere with local politics for its own benefit, political groups including Islamist ones, are at the forefront of the tools it will consider using. Examples are Iranian support for Iraqi Kurdish Islamists, Turkish support for Syrian and Chechnian Islamists, Saudi and US support for various Islamists around the world including terrorist ones. The Islamist group can easily be entangled in international power plays and become nothing but a disposable tool that will have support for a while from a foreign entity, until the winds change and the foreign entity abandons them or starts to support their enemies against them.
  • Group think: Every political party eventually builds its own culture of “political correctness”, because there will be members who seek power, and one of the main ways of ensuring an increase in power and avoiding a loss in power is to fit in with everyone else. The least sincere and most toxic individuals will be the most eager to fit in, to create a large set of virtue-signalling behaviors that they follow to show their sincerity and dedication. This will cause others to respond in kind, and soon members of the party can be easily distinguished from the general population by their distinguishing manners, values and forms of speech developed within the party. This culture makes it difficult for sincere members to contribute through constructive criticism, because insincere power-seekers will act as if such criticism is defeatist, divisive and harms the interests of the party. The sincerest members can easily become marginalized within the party.

I am not against all Islamic political activism, however. The “good” form of Islamic political activism has one key attribute: It must never seek power. That is the key differentiator. We can criticize governments, we can publish exposés, we can refuse to do any evil the government apparatus asks us to do, we can try to influence politicians in a publicized manner (we must never scheme behind the scenes, as this too is a form of power-seeking, any dealings we have with politicians must be public, such as in the form of open letters, if it has to be secret, it is a way of befriending politicians and gaining power from it, and this causes it to turn into the “bad” type of political Islam), we can do everything we can to improve the world and to reduce tyranny, but none of this must include power-seeking.

This is the way of the Prophet, peace be upon him, while he was under the sovereignty of another power. He spoke the truth, but he never sought power. And his activities eventually made those in power uncomfortable, until they tried to kill him. What he did was not fight back, but immigrate to a different area.

If the Prophet, peace be upon him, had acted like today’s Islamists, using political organization and directly targeting Mecca’s power structure, he would have attracted the murderous attention of Mecca’s pagans far more quickly, perhaps within a few months. But by not doing this, by not being political, he was able to work for 13 years in Mecca. And once it became too dangerous for him to be there, he left for a different place.

Whether political Islam seeks or does not seek power, it will always risk persecution. But the point is that while Islamism spends lives needlessly (attracting murderous persecution quickly), the Prophet’s type of political activism does not spend lives needlessly.

Islamism tries to change the world in a top-down way; we gain power, then we will do good with it. The Prophet’s political activism, on the other hand, tries to change the world in a bottom-up manner; we work with the people and tell the truth, and this causes social and political change down the road.

The Prophet’s way is far more likely to be successful because:

  • It only attracts sincere people. People are not attracted to the movement for power, because it promises no gain in power. This means that like the Prophet’s circle, it will be free from the poisonous personalities that seem to exist in every Islamist party.
  • It does not attract quick and harsh persecution. It may attract it eventually, but it will have far more time to attract devoted followers.
  • It does not create division among the people, because there is no “my Islamist group” vs. “your Islamist group”. All Muslims are treated the same by it.
  • There is no danger of group think, because the group does not seek power. There are fewer insincere people wanting to increase their power and status through virtue-signalling.

At this moment, to me the facts that the power-seeking form of political Islam attracts insincere personalities, creates division and invites harsh persecution are sufficient to consider it a very foolish form of activism. The right way is the Prophet’s way, which is to never seek power, but to work with the people, helping them improve spiritually, while also criticizing tyranny and injustice, knowing that all power comes from God, and if the time is right, He will give it, if He wants.

In Islam, we neither seek wealth nor power. We act as if we already have these, not feeling poor or weak, but criticizing those in power bravely, because we know we are servants of the Most Rich and the Most Powerful. Like the Prophet, peace be upon him, our mission is to live the Quran while not being attached to wealth or power (because by the virtue of being God’s agents, we already have these). The seeking of wealth or power has nothing to do with our mission. Our mission is to be with the people, the poor, the enslaved, the voiceless, to teach them, to help them regain some hope and courage. Like the Prophet, we deal neither with wealth nor power unless these things are freely and openly given to us, in which case we follow his example in dealing with them.

One argument in favor of political Islam that Islamists mention is that Muslims need “organization” to better arrange their affairs. I agree, but we can have all the organization we need without seeking power, therefore this does not justify Islamism.

And if they say that Islamists are needed to protect the interests of the Muslims, the examples of the past century show that Islamists expose Muslims to far more persecution, torture and murder than they would be exposed to without them, therefore no, Muslims do not need this type of poisonous favor. Islamists have shown time and again that they are completely powerless at defending the interests of Muslims. Either they and their friends get imprisoned, tortured and assassinated en masse, or they gain power only to be bombed into oblivion by the latest bully on the world stage. They can say that ideally, if everything goes perfectly, they can do much good. Yes, but things never go ideally. Ideally communism can create great happiness and equality. Realistically, communism always creates police states, purges and starvation. In the same way, realistically, Islamism always creates far more evil than good despite the best intentions of its leaders.

It should be mentioned that Maktab Quran, Moftizadeh’s movement which continues to exist today, does not seek political power. However, it continues to act as something of a party, just not a political one, and this makes it suffer some of the issues Islamist parties suffer from (causing division, attracting persecution, having limited penetration among the population). They would have done much better if they had been nothing but a group of friends with each of them acting independently, becoming leaders in their own communities, and not naming themselves anything. They continue to be highly respected and to do good deeds, as they do not suffer from one important weakness of political parties, which is the promise of power attracting toxic personalities. Their lack of power-seeking ensures that only sincere people are attracted to their group.

Better than Maktab Quran would be a movement that is not a party, but a creed, and that has no organization (or need for one). It is an intellectual movement of educated and dedicated people acting together because they all follow the same creed, similar to a colony of ants which does not have central organization, but whose each part functions in tandem with the parts closest to it. And this already exists to some degree. Throughout the world, millions of Muslim intellectuals are developing a sense of belonging to a “mainstream”, loving its leaders and doing good works in their local communities. A new creed from a new Ghazali could help give direction to them and cure the Muslim world from the misguided, power-seeking form of political Islam.

The author provides the following interesting snippet on life in modern Tehran:

During the government of Mohammad Reza Khatami, the first so-called reformist president of the Islamic Republic, the author was an intern for Iran’s premier private consulting firm in Tehran. The firm’s management was educated and or raised in the West, while the majority of its employees had similar backgrounds, or came from a segment of Iran’s middle class that was educated and relatively progressive in its values. Headscarves were promptly removed in the office, flirting was common among the young employees, and everyone but the valet sipped tea throughout the day during the month of Ramadan. Even though most of these individuals voted for reformist candidates in the Islamic Republic’s elections, they disavowed allegiance to the system, and did not believe religion should play a role in government. For them, “reformism” ideally meant reforming Iran into a modern, Western-style secular country.

On the Scrabble and IQ debate, or why mastering Scrabble doesn’t require genius

My answer to the Scrabble-IQ debate which keeps coming up on the Unz Review, from a comment I wrote on there:

The entire debate may be about crystallized versus fluid intelligence.

Scrabble requires that one be intelligent enough to be able to “crystallize” the patterns for solving each situation, so that a person can do it without having to think about it the next time they run into the same situation, but no more intelligent than that.

Winning games like chess and Scrabble requires some fluid intelligence (IQ), and massive amounts of crystallized intelligence (stored solutions), which is why they need so much training.

If you are familiar with computing, it is easy to understand what this means. A lower-IQ person can simulate high IQ in a game like Scrabble using this function:

solve(game_context) {
  if(cached_answer_exists(game_context)) {
    return get_cached_answer(game_context); // extremely fast, even for a low IQ person
  }
  else {
    return compute_answer(game_context); // slow, even for a very high IQ person
  }
}

So a game like Scrabble has a very high “caching advantage”, a person who spends immense amounts of time with it will have thousands, maybe millions, of cached answers in their heads, that enable them to nearly instantaneously find the solution for a new game context, because there is no computation involved, the solution is cached in their brains.

A lower-IQ Scrabble “genius”, however, will be incapable of mastering a topic of study they have never studied before (such as economics), so that they can quickly (within a year or two) come up with original and interesting solutions and ideas within the field, because their genius is about being good at caching answers. Their genius has nothing to do with fluid intelligence, the type of intelligence needed to handle massive data, operate on it and synthesize new things from it. Your millions of cached Scrabble solutions are just that, millions of cached Scrabble solutions. A Scrabble genius is like a computer that has tons of Scrabble solutions and is very good at winning Scrabble games, but that cannot do much of anything else. The computer is not an AI genius, it simply has a hard drive that is filled with canned solutions.

My hypothesis, therefore is this: A race or nationality’s ability to master Scrabble does not predict its intellectual, scientific or technological achievements, because Scrabble does not require very high IQ, while the rest of these things do.

In fact, I would hazard a guess that very few really-high-IQ people (135+) bother to play games like Scrabble, because they would rather do something open-ended, rather than something entirely unproductive, with their time.

Another hypothesis is this: A Scrabble genius will be very bad at games with a low caching advantage. Thus a race or nationality that is good at Scrabble will perform worse at Go than a higher IQ nation, because Go has a lower caching advantage (it requires more fluid intelligence, i.e. IQ, since the situations that arise in the game are too diverse to cache, there will of course still be some caching advantage, therefore we must find a game that has a very low caching advantage, such as…Raven’s Progressive Matrices1).

IslamQA: The Islamic View of Sex Education and Adolescent Exposure to Sexual Scenes in Novels and Films

My child loves to read books. Some of the books she wants to read mention sex. She is 13 years old and I don't know when to allow her to read those books or even when to tell her about sex. I need help with this. Thank you!

When a child reaches puberty (and I assume your daughter has), in Islam they are considered mukallaf (responsible for their actions, i.e. legally adults). This means that parents should start to treat them like adult humans, respecting their intelligence and freedom of choice as humans. Parents should no longer treat them like children whose lives they control and dictate.

At that age, they have the right to demand honest answers from their parents regarding sex, and they have the right to be educated about the Islamic rules and etiquette regarding sex and marriage. In Islam there is no difference between the rights and responsibilities of an adolescent 13-year-old and a 25-year-old, legally they have the same status, although developmentally they are not exactly the same.

It is natural to be wary of letting an adolescent learn about sex because of the vague potential for harm that we perceive, but we should also take into account the even greater potential for harm that comes from belittling them and restricting them for no obvious reason. There is no Islamic or scientific reason to prevent an adolescent from learning about sex, and the great scholars of the past, such as Ibn al-Jawzi, would have memorized thousands of hadith narrations, some of them explicitly dealing with sex, before the age of 10.

If she has reached puberty, then it is your duty to teach her all of the Islamic rules that surround menstruation, such as by getting her a book on this matter. You do not have to give it to her specifically if this would be too embarrassing, it can be somewhere in your house where she can look at it when she wants. It will be largely your failing if she prays in a way that is invalid because no one told her any better.

You probably know much about sex, but your appreciation for Islamic principles enables you to stay devout and to put sex in its proper context. An adolescent can do the same if the parents have done their duty of giving them an Islamic upbringing, and if inside the home they maintain Islamic manners and standards. Trying to control a child’s knowledge about sex is a futile effort, especially today when they can easily find out everything they want on the internet. There is no way you can take away all possible opportunities for them to learn about it. The logical thing to do is to be moderate, letting them learn about sex and read books that you yourself would read, while not letting them have unmonitored access to the internet and not letting them read erotic books that you yourself wouldn’t read.

There is No Conflict Between Islam and Sex Education

Is a 13-year-old who knows much about sex from books less likely to be religious and devout than a 13-year-old who has been forbidden to learn anything about it?

I would hazard a guess that the one whose intelligence and dignity has been respected to the degree that he or she is allowed to read books on sex is going to be more religious and devout, because they are not made to feel that Islam is against human nature, that there is something wrong with them when they think about sex or want to learn about it.

Devoutness has nothing to do with how much a person knows about sex. Regardless of whether an adolescent knows nearly everything or nearly nothing about sex, they will have the same level of desire for the opposite sex. This desire is not about knowledge, it is about hormones and the human brain. To be able to resist this desire, what is needed is an understanding of Islamic principles and internalization of Islamic values, so that the adolescent knows that there is a good reason why they should resist their sexual desire, instead of feeling like they are being prevented from sexual pleasure for no good reason (like some adolescents brought up in extremely strict Muslim and Christian homes feel).

For an adolescent, learning about sex is like learning about any other topic, such as physics. The mere knowledge of sex is not going to push them into sinful behaviors, the same way that a divorced 30-year-old is not going to be more likely to sin just because they know very much about sex from their previous married life. Their knowledge of sex and their knowledge of Islam are two separate things.

Once a child reaches puberty, their sex hormones make it certain that they will have highly detailed and explicit daydreams and nighttime dreams about sex, and that sex will be on their minds often. Muslim adolescents generally spend ten years thinking about sex, whether they want to or not, before they get married, and reading or hearing a story or anecdote about sex, whether in an Islamic book or non-Islamic book, is going to be little more than a drop in the ocean of sexual thoughts that is in their heads.

As for books that are designed to be read for sexual pleasure (erotic and explicit romance books), then neither you nor your child should reach such books, because it is against Islamic manners to seek sexual pleasure outside of marriage, and no one who reads such books can honestly claim to be reading them without sexual intent.

The Developmental Concern

The one serious concern regarding exposing an adolescent to information about sexuality is that with their as-of-yet undeveloped minds, and their heightened sexual desire, they may be more likely to fall into sinful behaviors.

Isn’t it better to let them grow some more, garner more experiences, before they are exposed to such things?

It is true that the human is not fully developed until the late twenties, that is when a person’s impulse control matures. It is for this reason that insurance companies charge higher rates to people under the age of 25, because such people are more likely to engage in risky behaviors and cause accidents.

The problem is that, their lack of wisdom and development also means that will be unable to understand why information about sex is being kept from them, and their impulsiveness means that they will be extremely unlikely to be content when a parent says they are too young. They will probably jump on any chance to learn about sex from friends, from the internet, from libraries, from anywhere they can.

Preventing an adolescent from learning about sex is in fact telling them, “You are too impulsive and not enough of an adult to learn about sex, but you must act like an adult and control your impulses when you desire to learn about it.” It is placing a contradictory demand on them. If they are too impulsive to safely read about sex, they are too impulsive to be prevented from reading about sex out of your sight.

Therefore the argument that they are too young to learn about sex is an empty argument. If they are treated like they are too immature and foolish to be allowed to learn about sex from proper sources, they will only be right to act immature and foolish by seeking information from harmful sources, they are acting exactly the way we say they will act, and they are likely to do it just out of spite. If we belittle them and make them feel they are not proper members of society, they will naturally feel like outcasts, and they will be right to act like outcasts, ignoring custom and people’s expectations. If they are not allowed to enjoy the privileges of being full members of society, why should they suffer its restrictions?

It is best to treat them the Islamic way, to acknowledge their status as full members of society while also acknowledging the fact that they are not fully developed yet. This is the best way to prepare them for adulthood; by treating them like adults. Treating them like children is not going to do any good–they are going to resent it.

Once an adolescent is given the freedoms and privileges of an adult, they will stop thinking of themselves as children who selfishly think of their own needs the whole time, and will instead start to think of themselves as respected members of their families and societies. This is very important for their growth. By being treated like a growing adult, being given both rights and responsibilities, they will try to live up to the expectation of acting like an adult.

If a parent is too strict, this can cause the child to feel oppressed and controlled, and this can cause them to dislike the parent and the religious motivations for the parent’s choices. It is better to give the child sufficient freedom to not feel oppressed, but not so much freedom that they can do whatever they want in private. Since they live under your roof, you can set standards of behavior and etiquette that must be observed by them and any other adult living with you.

I have rarely seen children brought up in strict families grow into sincerely devout adults. They generally consider Islam a burden that’s placed on them, rather than something they love and follow by choice. They sometimes have a child’s mentality, thinking that their families and societies are against them, that what is good and fulfilling in life is one thing and society’s expectations another thing, because they do not feel like full members of Islamic society.

The Islamic Way of Bringing Up Devout Children: Balancing Conservativeness and Liberality

The best Muslims I have known in my life have been brought up in families that mixed conservativeness and liberality, conservative in the most important things, liberal in the rest. This means that the children are taught to carry out all their obligatory duties like prayer and fasting. It is not accepted of them to abandon these like some misguided liberal Muslim families allow. They are taught the Quran and encouraged to read beneficial Islamic books, most importantly the life of the Prophet peace be upon him and the lives of his companions. If the child is female, she should have access to at least 10 books dedicated to famous Muslim women in history and encouraged to read them (but not forced).

What are Islam’s priorities? It is to believe in God and the Day of Judgment and the rest of the Islamic items of faith (aqeedah). The entire family must act and live by these beliefs. The next priorities are the obligatory deeds, the entire family must carry them out (except for children who cannot), it should be an unspoken assumption in the family that abandoning the Islamic obligatory acts of worship is entirely unacceptable.

The next thing after the above is abandoning sinful behaviors. It should be unacceptable for anyone in the family to engage in anything clearly sinful, such as drinking alcohol. It is the job of the parents to ensure that Islamic standards are maintained in the family, that no one engages in anything sinful.

The above is the core of Islam. A child brought up in a loving family to believe in the Islamic items of faith, to carry out the obligatory deeds and to follow Islamic manners is guaranteed to grow into a devout Muslim, unless at some point they make a conscious choice to abandon Islam. Humans have free will, which means that regardless of their upbringing, they will forever have the choice to abandon Islam, this ability cannot be taken away from them.

A family that focuses on the above and gets it right can then be liberal in everything else. This liberality is very important. Islam must feel small and simple to a child, it must not feel like something that controls and burdens them. This means that filling one’s home entirely with Islamic books, always having Islamic channels on TV, allowing the children to visit the mosque and no other venue, forcing them to go to Quran schools instead of learning about other things they are interested in, are all exactly the correct way to make a child hate Islam. There is only so much religion a person can take. Religion is a tool to help us develop a spiritual connection with God and to guide our manners as we go about in the world living our lives. Once a person has the correct aqeedah, performs the obligatory deeds, loves the Quran and fears God’s punishment, religion’s goal has been accomplished in them. Religion is not there to dominate them and take their humanity away from them, it is to guide them to be better humans, as they continue to be humans, doing and enjoying human things.

This means that once the core of Islam has been actualized in a family’s life, from then on everyone should be free what they do with their time. Islam does not forbid children from playing video games, women from enjoying shopping or men from playing soccer, even if none of these things serve a productive purpose. The clearest proof of this is that in Islam it is acknowledged that people have sex for pleasure, unlike among some Christians who think that sex must always be done with the intention of procreation. Sex that is done for pleasure does not serve an obvious productive purpose, except for the fact that it improves the relationship between the husband and wife and makes them have a more positive view of life.

And the above reason is also why many other enjoyable acts that strict Muslims may scoff at are actually lawful and even encouraged. A child who is allowed to play the video games he or she likes, while also being expected to follow Islamic manners and carry out their Islamic duties, is going to grow up knowing that Islam is not against human nature and the enjoyment of life, that Islam is there to help them live better lives that they define themselves, instead of being there to force them to live a narrowed down life defined by ancient texts and society.

On Books that Mention Sex

As for your original question, there is no clear Islamic text that deals with her reading books that mention sex, but if you yourself would read that book and think that it is permissible for you, then she too can read it.

Since Islam is vague on this topic, one should act based on maslahah (“what is in the best interest of the person, family and society”) with regards to it. Allowing her to read a book she likes is a good thing, because it reaffirms her dignity and freedom, and reaffirms the fact that she can enjoy what she likes while also being a devout Muslim, that Islam is not her enemy like some teenagers mistakenly think. If the book contains casual mentions of sex but is not dedicated to arousing sexual desire in the reader like erotic books are, then I see little harm in it. Adolescents are perfectly capable of imagining sexual scenes in their heads, reading about one more sexual scene is not going to be anything significant.

Philosophically, there is no difference between an Islamic book that describes a sexual act and a random non-Islamic book that does the same, since in both cases the reader is made to imagine a sexual scene in their heads. If reading about a sexual scene is sinful, then this means reading many hadith narrations and Quranic commentaries is sinful, since they too describe sexual scenes.

Your child has the right to read the Quran, books of interpretation of the Quran (tafseer), and books of hadith, and you should encourage her to do so, and if she does, then there is no avoiding the topic of sex, since the Quran, its interpretations and books of hadith cover various sexual topics in detail. Some scholars, in fact, consider it highly recommended that the child should be taught all of these things, meaning that to them sex education is part and parcel of Islam.

A person may say that the sexual acts described in a novel might be sinful acts (they might be between unmarried people), and that this makes it forbidden to read them. But this is logically a false argument. The Quran describes various sinful acts of previous nations, if reading the description of a sinful act is sinful, then reading the Quran would be sinful. And if reading the description of a sinful sexual act is sinful, then reading various books of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) would be sinful, since they are full of mentions sinful sexual acts. The reader is expected to understand that it is sinful, and to have their core of Islamic belief prevent them from engaging in similar acts.

A person may go on to say that novels would describe sinful sexual acts in a context that approves of them, while Islamic books do not. This too is an invalid argument. The Quran mentions in detail the arguments of Islam’s detractors, arguments which support disbelief if they are read out of context:

But the notables of his people, who disbelieved, said, “This is nothing but a human like you, who wants to gain superiority over you. Had God willed, He would have sent down angels. We never heard of this from our forefathers of old. He is nothing but a man possessed. Just ignore him for a while.” (The Quran, verses 23:24-25)

If you obey a human being like yourselves, then you will be losers. Does he promise you that when you have died and become dust and bones, you will be brought out? Farfetched, farfetched is what you are promised. There is nothing but our life in this world. We die, and we live, and we are not resurrected. He is nothing but a man, making up lies about God. We have no faith in him.” (The Quran, verses 23:34-38)

Since the person is reading the Quran, we assume that they will also know about counter-arguments the Quran offers. There is nothing sinful in relating a sinful behavior as long as the person is educated sufficiently to put it in context. The above verses relate the sin of shirk (denying God’s oneness), which is a far greater sin than any sexual crime, because it is the one sin that God says He will not forgive.

Someone who reads about a sinful sexual act is not going to be led into sin by it when they also read the Quran constantly, when they have had an Islamic upbringing and have internalized Islam’s values. Any novel a devout Muslim reads is already in proper context, because the context is their own minds, which is already firm on the belief in God and the Islamic principles. Reading a random sexual scene in a novel is only the feeblest challenge to someone’s faith.

I do not recommend letting adolescents read just about everything they want. Reading a book that is designed to be read for sexual pleasure is going to be an insult to the maintenance of Islamic manners in your home, and this should not be allowed. But as for the average Western-written novel, whether you let your daughter read it should rely on what you consider to be in her best interest. Preventing her from reading a book or a category of books she likes is going to harm her faith, because her freedom is restricted in something that is not clearly harmful, and her own interpretation of Islam is discounted and your interpretation imposed upon her, which always has a psychological cost on her and on her relationship with you.

We all want to bring up devout children, and our policies toward them should be geared toward this. If being strict in the Islamic matters of priority mentioned above while being liberal in everything else enables us to bring up children who are more devout and more likely to love Islam, then that is what we should do.

In general, arbitrarily forbidding children things because of a vague potential for harm is going to do more harm than good. I know someone who started to steal from his relatives in his childhood in order to be able to go to an arcade to play video games, because his strict father refused to buy him a video game console to play with at home, since according to him it was harmful. The child was forced to engage in a clearly sinful behavior due to the father’s misguided apprehension of the possible harms of video games.

Whenever you think of forbidding your child something that you consider potentially harmful, always keep in mind that the act of forbidding itself is also always potentially harmful. You must balance between these two concerns. Being too strict is always harmful, and being too lax is also always harmful. One must find a balance. The best balance I have seen is for the parents to focus on the core Islamic principles, manners and acts of worship, then be liberal in most other things, respecting their children’s right to make their own choices even if we are not always perfectly comfortable with their choice. It is in their best interest to feel free and to be treated like respected adults whose choices are respected, it is also in their best interest to follow Islam devoutly. These two interests must be balanced, neither of them should be neglected.

I would never forbid an adolescent from reading a book I would read myself, because there is no Islamic basis for creating such a rule, and it is disrespectful and belittling toward them, and they can probably find ways of reading it out of my sight.

If your child has not read the Quran, books of tafseer, books of hadith and Islamic biographies, then this should be corrected as soon as possible. They should have sufficient appreciation for Islam to follow it in public and in private of their own desire, and if they read or hear anything that challenges their Islamic belief, they should be able to counter it themselves.

If you worry about the influence of the non-Islamic books she reads, you can ask her to read one Islamic book for every few non-Islamic books she reads, or find some other arrangement.

I would have a library in my house filled with all kinds of books, and I would give the adolescent the right to read what they want. As long as they have had a proper Islamic upbringing, as long as they have been encouraged to read the Quran, hadith, Islamic biographies and other beneficial books, then there is no danger in this. I would never forbid my daughters from reading any of the hundreds of books I have in my house even though I may have the authority to do this. What right do I have to decide for her what she can and cannot read? If I give myself the right to read something, it feels highly hypocritical to me to forbid others from reading it.

Saying that she shouldn’t read a book she wants to read will make her feel insulted and belittled. I want to treat her like an adult, like a dignified and respected human, doing that will show her that I am not really honest in that treatment, that I still consider her a child even if I say otherwise.

Is it worth it to do this? Does it improve our relationship and her love for Islam or does it harm it?

My philosophy is that influences should be countered by influences. It is true that most of the West’s media and publishing contain harmful influences.The right way to counter this is to expose my children to good influences, such as from Islamic books and TV shows like the beautiful series The Companions of the Cave, instead of following the futile strategy of forbidding them from all potentially harmful influences, which would cause them to feel restricted and belittled, and which would reduce their love for their family and for Islam. As long as my children practice the core of Islam with understanding, this by itself is a strong influence helping them counter bad influences. And this understanding can only come from being educated in Islam, learning about the purposes of the acts of worship, the meanings of the verses of the Quran they recite, and biographies of the great Muslims of history.

Out of the fear of God, if a reader starts to feel sexually aroused by a sexual scene in a book, they can skip it. What is sinful is intentionally seeking sexual pleasure outside of marriage, and a person can use an Islamic book or non-Islamic book for this purpose if they want, and they can do it even without a book using their imagination. This is a small matter between a person and God, and it is not sufficient justification for forbidding someone from reading a book.

Films are a different matter, because it is impossible to watch a sex scene without becoming aroused by it, especially when the watcher is a young and healthy person. Since a person who fears God can never be sure that God approves of this, they will not engage in it. Parents should make sure that no one under their roof, child or adult, watches sex scenes under their roof, as a matter of maintaining Islamic standards. They, however, should not make a big deal out of this, keeping an authoritarian watch over everyone’s activities. They should put it in its proper context, which is that compared to the important matters of Islamic belief and practice, it is a relatively unimportant matter and no one should be condemned and harassed for it, the same way that if a man sees his son admiring an attractive woman on the street, instead of beating him up or shouting at him, he should gently tell him it is not polite to do that, and that should be the end of it, he should immediately go back to treating him like normal, with love and kindness. The son is treated like an equal, with dignity and respect, not like a piece of property to be beaten into shape.

Summary

In summary, what we allow our children to engage in should be decided based on their best interests. An important part of their interests is to be treated with dignity and respect, and to be given freedom instead of being made to feel oppressed and controlled. Another part of their interests is to ensure that they are not given so much freedom that they develop sinful habits and engage in them without restriction. Good Muslim parents will find a balance between these two concerns, neither being too strict nor too lax, but being strict in the Islamic matters of priority and liberal in everything else, while also ensuring that many good influences are available to counter bad influences, including Islamic books and TV shows.

Adolescents have the right to sex education. There is no conflict between Islam and learning about sex. And just because a book contains mentions of sex is not sufficient reason to forbid adolescents from reading it. Any book we think we can read ourselves, they too should be allowed to read. We should not approve of their reading erotic books or watching sex scenes in films. But we should also not turn these into a great matter of concern. We should instead treat it the same way we treat a son admiring an attractive woman, with politeness and gentleness, without condemnation, respecting them as our friends and equals.

Adolescents have poor impulse control due to a not-fully-developed prefrontal cortex. This means that even if they love Islam and want to follow it, they are more likely to fall into sinful behaviors without parental guidance. They should not be allowed to spend long periods of time in privacy, and they should not be allowed to have private access to the internet or television. They should be treated like good friends who are more likely to engage in minor sins if they are not watched, they should not be held to the same standards as older adults, and if they make mistakes, they should be quickly forgiven and not condemned, acknowledging that they are good people who do not have very good impulse control at the moment, but who will one day have it.

Follow-up Question

So if the child reads a book and the book contains just one scene of sex and there is some love triangles in the book, she can read it, right?

The general rule is that anything you can read, she can read too. As long as her life is filled with good influences, one book is a minor influence and of little concern. It will become a cause for concern if someone constantly seeks that type of book to the exclusion of other books. But if a person reads such books because they are famous or classics, then there is no issue with it.

It is about intentions. A person can peruse a medical textbook with the intention of learning. Another person can peruse it for the pictures of naked people it contains. Since adolescents have low impulse control, you cannot just let them read every romance novel they want, since it can become a habit like it becomes in some people in the West, who use romantic novels as a more refined alternative to pornography. The sexual arousal that comes from reading such books can make a person want to seek more of it.

But if I have a large library and some of the novels are romance novels, and the child likes to read every type of novel, then I will not prevent them from reading what they like. The context and the child’s reading habits matter.

The most important point is that, as a matter of maintaining Islamic manners, no one in the household should make it a habit to seek sexual arousal and pleasure in a non-marriage context. Your son should not be allowed to watch erotic music videos and your daughter should not be allowed to read books designed to be read for their erotic content. But a parent who harasses them by trying to control everything they can see and read is going to do more harm than good.

For the child’s own spiritual good, they should be given enough freedom of choice and privacy not to feel oppressed and controlled, but not so much that they develop sinful habits.

An Introduction to the Origins of Modern Islamic Terrorism

Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy. —George F Kennan, American Cold War diplomat and father of "Containment Theory"

Introduction

A terrorist attack can kill “only” 100 people but entirely change the course of an election or precipitate a country into war, and this can be extremely useful for achieving certain geopolitical goals. Israel treats al-Qaeda-afiiliated terrorists in its own hospitals and government officials have been quoted as saying the prefer ISIS’s rule to the Syrian government’s, because turning Syria into a devastated war zone helps eliminate it as a competitor to Israel in the region. The fact that these terrorists slaughter innocent women and children means nothing to the Israelis, because what matters is that they achieve their geopolitical goals, no matter the moral costs.

A Short History

The United States invented modern Islamic terrorism (the al-Qaeda/ISIS flavor) in 1979 as part of its efforts to fight the Soviet Union’s influence in Central Asia, that all-important part of the world, control of which is necessary for any would-be world hegemon.

The groundwork had been laid by the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that started out as a welfare and education society but grew too powerful for its own good. Its major political work was their helping in the Arab war against militant Jews who were intent on terrorizing the inhabitants of Palestine into leaving the country so that they could take over their homes and lands. David Ben-Gurion, who commanded the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinians, has an Israeli international airport and a major Israeli university named after him. Moshe Sharett, one of the terrorists who carried out the King David Hotel Bombing, in which Israelis dressed as Arabs bombed the offices of the British Mandate in Palestine, killing 96 people, would later go on to become foreign minister and then prime minister of Israel. The Israeli war hero Ariel Sharon, 11th Prime Minister of Israel from March 2001 until April 2006, oversaw the execution of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, killing 3000 innocent men, women and children.1

The Brotherhood’s power grew to the point that it developed its own intelligence and covert operations arm, known as al-Jihaaz al-Sirri (The Covert Apparatus), which was involved in assassinations and bombings, such as the assassination of Ahmed El-Khazindar Bey, President of Egypt’s Court of Appeal, and Mahmoud El Nokrashy Pasha, Prime Minister of Egypt, both in 1948. Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Brotherhood, condemned both of these assassinations, but he had practically lost control over his organization, since powerful factions within it wanted violence, and they had the power to bypass al-Banna’s wishes.

The Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb, well-known among Egypt’s intelligentsia and student of the famous Egyptian journalist Abbās Mahmūd al-Aqqād, reverted to Islam after a life of secularism and adopted the Brotherhood, while also, perhaps without realizing its true consequences, building the intellectual foundations necessary for the Brotherhood’s violent arm to carry out its insurgencies. If Sayyid Qutb’s highly partisan biographer is to be trusted2, his house was used as a meeting place for Gamal Abdel Nasser and his friends as they planned the 1952 July 23 Revolution in Egypt against the British occupation.

Once president of Egypt, Nasser wanted Qutb on his side, offering him high government positions, which Qutb always refused.3 Once he despaired of Qutb joining him, he started persecuting him and his associates, imprisoning him for a decade. Nasser ordered Qutb’s hanging on the 24th of August, 1966, after a show trial. These events turned Qutb into the perfect martyr, a secular convert to Islam, a literary critic, a warrior for social justice, and a revolutionary who was stabbed in the back by Western-friendly seculars that he had supported into power.

The Brotherhood distanced itself from Qutb, going back to its early position of advocating peaceful activism (at least openly), but extremists around the world wishing for a resurgence of Islam continued to follow him as their primary source for both knowledge and inspiration.

Brzezinski’s Genius

Operation Cyclone, conceived by the Jewish US foreign policy strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski, armed and financed jihadi warriors in Afghanistan to use them as a buffer against Soviet influence from 1979 until after 1992, to the tune of $630 million per year by 1987:

What judgment to render on all this is a matter of perspective. Asked in 1998 if he had any regrets about having helped instigate Soviet intervention in Afghanistan4, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in many respects the god-father of Operation Cyclone, reacted with astonishment. "Regret what?" he replied. "That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?"

The interviewer pressed the point. Hadn't subsequent rise of radical Islamism tarnished that victory? Not in Brzezinski's view. "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"5

Check out Edmonds’ interview with Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine: Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?

This brilliant program to manufacture Islamic jihadists to fight America’s enemies resulted in the creation of Operation Gladio B, the United States program to train al-Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates, exposed by the FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds.

...Edmonds described how the CIA and the Pentagon had been running a series of covert operations supporting Islamist militant networks linked to Osama bin Laden right up to 9/11, in Central Asia, the Balkans and the Caucasus.

While it is widely recognised that the CIA sponsored bin Laden’s networks in Afghanistan during the Cold War, U.S. government officials deny any such ties existed. Others claim these ties were real, but were severed after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989.

But according to Edmonds, this narrative is false. “Not just bin Laden, but several senior ‘bin Ladens’ were transported by U.S. intelligence back and forth to the region in the late 1990s through to 2001”, she told this author, “including Ayman al-Zawahiri” – Osama bin Laden’s right-hand-man who has taken over as al-Qaeda’s top leader.

“In the late 1990s, all the way up to 9/11, al-Zawahiri and other mujahideen operatives were meeting regularly with senior U.S. officials in the U.S. embassy in Baku to plan the Pentagon’s Balkan operations with the mujahideen,” said Edmonds. “We had support for these operations from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, but the U.S. oversaw and directed them. They were being run from a secret section of the Pentagon with its own office”.

Edmonds clarified, “the FBI counterintelligence investigation which was tracking these targets, along with their links to U.S. officials, was known as ‘Gladio B’, and was kickstarted in 1997. It so happens that Major Douglas Dickerson” – the husband of her FBI co-worker Melek whom she accused of espionage – “specifically directed the Pentagon’s ‘Gladio’ operations in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan at this time.”

In testimony under oath, Edmonds has previously confirmed that Major Doug Dickerson worked for the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) under the weapons procurement logistics division on Turkey and Central Asia, and with the Office of Special Plans (OSP) overseeing policy in Central Asia.

[...]

Edmonds said that the Pentagon operations with Islamists were an “extension” of an original ‘Gladio’ programme uncovered in the 1970s in Italy, part of an EU-wide NATO covert operation that began as early as the 1940s. As Swiss historian Dr. Daniele Ganser records in his seminal book, NATO’s Secret Armies, an official Italian parliamentary inquiry confirmed that British MI6 and the CIA had established a network of secret “stay-behind” paramilitary armies, staffed by fascist and Nazi collaborators. The covert armies carried out terrorist attacks throughout Western Europe, officially blamed on Communists in what Italian military intelligence called the ‘strategy of tension’.

“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game” explained Gladio operative Vincenzo Vinciguerra during his  trial in 1984. “The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people… to turn to the State to ask for greater security.”

While the reality of Gladio’s existence in Europe is a matter of historical record, Edmonds contended the same strategy was adopted by the Pentagon in the 1990s in a new theatre of operations, namely, Asia. “Instead of using neo-Nazis, they used mujahideen working under various bin Ladens, as well as al-Zawahiri”, she said.6

The US tradition of spreading the American ideals of democracy and liberty in the Middle East by funding and training Islamic terrorist groups continues to ISIS, also known as ISIL, Daesh or the Islamic State.

James Shea, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Emerging Threats at NATO – now that’s a lovely title – recently gave a talk at a private club in London on the Islamic State/Daesh. Shea, as many will remember, made his name as NATO’s spokesman during the NATO war on Yugoslavia in 1999.

After his talk Shea engaged in a debate with a source I very much treasure. The source later gave me the lowdown.

According to Saudi intelligence, Daesh was invented by the US government – in Camp Bacca, near the Kuwait border, as many will remember — to essentially finish off the Shiite-majority Nouri al-Maliki government in Baghdad.

It didn’t happen this way, of course. Then, years later, in the summer of 2014, Daesh routed the Iraqi Army on its way to conquer Mosul. The Iraqi Army fled. Daesh operatives then annexed ultra-modern weapons that took US instructors from six to twelve months to train the Iraqis in and…surprise! Daesh incorporated the weapons in their arsenals in 24 hours.

In the end, Shea frankly admitted to the source that Gen David Petraeus, conductor of the much-lauded 2007 surge, had trained these Sunnis now part of Daesh in Anbar province in Iraq.

Saudi intelligence still maintains that these Iraqi Sunnis were not US-trained – as Shea confirmed – because the Shiites in power in Baghdad didn’t allow it. Not true. The fact is the Daesh core – most of them former commanders and soldiers in Saddam Hussein’s army — is indeed a US-trained militia.

True to form, at the end of the debate, Shea went on to blame Russia for absolutely everything that’s happening today – including Daesh terror.7

Then there are reports like this, of US troops feeling completely safe in the presence of ISIS:

For years, Iraqi politicians, including members of parliament, have accused the US of airdropping supplies for ISIS. Since what they say goes against the US narrative, these accusations are given no airtime in the West.

Ending Terrorism

A previous incarnation of this essay blamed the root causes of Islamic terrorism on hadith-primacism, the Islamic establishment’s focus on inherently unreliable narrations regarding the Prophet, peace be upon him, at the cost of the Quran’s teachings and principles. I have come to question this thesis, however. I continue to research this topic to find out an answer. It is obvious that the Islamic establishment is not very capable of handling this new threat, what it must do to evolve remains an open question.

I do not know if anything can be done when the world’s most powerful countries are willing to spend billions of dollars recruiting and arming ignorant youth from around the world to do their dirty work for them in the name of God and Islam.

Islam and Christianity have both been exploited by vicious and blood-thirsty rulers for most of their respective histories. Islamic terrorism might simply be another incarnation of this trend.

The Coming Multipolar World

The final solution to terrorism would be for the United States not to be the world’s hegemon, the big bully that can get away with anything it wants. As Russia and China’s power and influence grow, just as the United States continues its decades of decline, Russia and China will be increasingly capable of throwing wrenches into America’s terror-exporting business.

This is already evident in Syria, where Russia has been a big thorn in the side of the CIA’s various al-Qaeda spin-offs. What is crucially needed is for Chinese businesses to become heavily invested in Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest of America and Israel’s playgrounds. Once this happens, Chinese intelligence and its military will start doing what Russia is doing in Syria, protecting their investments and regional interests, not letting America/Israel get away with being the only geopolitical manipulator on the scene.

As I discuss in my essay Forecasting the World’s Top 50 Most Powerful Countries in 2035 Using the HQI, China is on track to become two and a half times as powerful economically, technologically and militarily than the United States within the next few decades, and when that happens, we will be living in a very different world indeed.

Below is a beautiful illustration of the coming times:

The presence of these new players means that Israel has to, for once, stop acting like a mafia and more like a civilized nation, worrying about the consequences of its actions, instead of acting the way it has always acted, like a god over the gentiles, deciding who lives and who dies, what country survives and what is turned into a war zone, with Christians doing their dirty work for them and paying them for the privilege.

Reconciling Islam and Darwinian Evolution: Al-Ghazali’s Matrix and the Divine Template

Introduction

(Download this essay as a PDF)

This essay demonstrates the relationship between Islam and science/rationality through my effort to reconcile Darwinian evolution with the Quran. I am as much a “Darwinian” as any evolutionary biologist and as much a believer in the literal meaning of the Quran as any conservative Muslim. By showing how these two seemingly clashing worldviews can be reconciled, I hope to clarify many important matters relating to the relationship of Muslims with the modern world and its scientific and rationalist ideals.

How can any rational person believe in religion when there is no proof for it? To put it another way, does not a believer, by the very fact of believing, prove their credulity and irrationality?

The history of religion, including that of Islam, is often thought of as a struggle between “faith” and “reason”; that a Muslim can be as much a rationalist and empiricist as an irreligious person is inadmissible for many. When it comes to a Muslim rationalist, it is assumed that there must always be a “catch”, some laxity of mind or weakness of spirit that makes them inferior rationalists or inferior Muslims. If they are devout, they may wish to be rationalists and empiricists, they may even think they are, but at the end of the day they are merely practicing self-delusion.

To today’s proud secular mind, there is always some sickness or feeble-mindedness hiding beneath faith.

In this essay I will present a form of faithful rationality—inspired by highly futuristic Islamic theological ideas from over 900 years ago—that reconciles faith and reason without there being any “catch”; the world is as rational as any scientist imagines it to be, and as controlled and maintained by God as any mystic imagines it to be. The “Matrix” of the Iranian philosopher and mystic Al-Ghazali (died 1111 CE)—his conceptualization of the universe as something akin to a computer simulation, provides for intellectually honest rationality that in no way places chains on God’s powers, nor does it place chains on science and rationality. One can wholeheartedly believe in the entirety of the Quran in its plainest sense while retaining their independence of mind, skepticism and rationality. This may sound like rather too much for a religious person to claim, but I hope to illustrate it in the first part of this essay.

The essay goes on to use the notion of a “divine template” to reconcile the Quran’s views on creation with the theory of evolution. This notion does not come from ancient Islamic learning; it is my own creation arrived at after years of reading and searching. There is no “catch” here either; the proposed reconciliation will make complete sense to any scientist and any lover of the Quran without requiring either to submit to the other’s authority—once they understand al-Ghazali’s Matrix.

The essay will spend some time building the groundwork for the argument on evolution that follows. Those wishing to only read the part having to do with evolution may go directly to the section “Topology: God’s Template” and read from there.

So-Called “Proofs” of God’s Existence

I do not believe that a proof for God’s existence is possible. Numerous theologians, Muslim, Christian and Jewish, inspired by Aristotle and other philosophers, have proposed theories that they claim prove that God must exist. All such proofs suffer from a fatal weakness recognized by Kant, namely that they assume the logic of this universe extends to what is outside of it

My conscience recognizes the pull of the various “proofs”, but my conscience also recognizes their inherent weakness and rebels against calling them “proofs”. I agree with Roger Scruton when he says:

and while none of them is wholly believable, they serve the useful purpose of showing the rumours of God’s death to be greatly exaggerated.1

I believe there can never be hard evidence that compels all rational people to believe in God. There is, however, a preponderance of soft evidence that, once recognized, experienced and accepted by a person, make it unconscionable for them to reject God. Not all humans necessarily get exposed to sufficient soft evidence to make it unconscionable for them to reject God; this is something about which I do not speculate.

In order for me, as a self-respecting human, to be able to continue believing in my religion, I must be able to re-analyze its founding text (the Quran) at any time of my choosing and reach the same conclusion about it—the same way that any re-analysis of one of Euclid’s proofs should always lead to the same conclusion; that the proof is correct. This should happen despite my increase in knowledge and experience as I age, despite all the secular books I read, including highly enjoyable books by atheists like Terry Pratchett. At age 15 I read the Quran and found it true. At 40 I should be able to read it again and find it true, despite the fact that I will be very much a different person by then. An atheist may imagine that as a faithful person’s intellectual horizons grow wider, it will become increasingly difficult for them to continue believing in their faith. That would be true of a false religion. But if a religion is truly from the Creator and is based on an unadulterated text that transmits His words, then the experience should be quite the opposite. The more one learns about the Creator’s handiwork (this universe and everything in it), the more sense His words should make and the more convincing they should become.

So is Islam really that “one true” religion that all of these highly intelligent and admirable non-Muslims failed to get the memo about? It is not my goal to convince readers of Islam’s supposed truth, but this essay should shed some light on certain misconceptions that have prevented such people from taking Islam’s most important text, the Quran, seriously. I believe that a religion like Christianity is truly from God and that it provides a sufficiently meaningful worldview for a person to believe in it while also believing in a scientific worldview. I do not claim that Islam possess exclusive rights to being a religion that can meet the latest scientific challenges.

My goal is to show that the Quran and the theory of evolution have no difficulties with one another once we give the Quran a reading that is innocent of preconceived notions about a supposed incompatibility. I let the Quran speak for itself, and I write as someone who has read this book dozens of times in the original Arabic, besides studying translations and interpretations of it in Kurdish, Farsi, Arabic and English.

The most important reason preventing Muslims from appreciating the Quran’s compatibility with evolution is that they do not take the Quran very seriously. They treat it as a historical artifact immersed in a vast web of cultural and intellectual assumptions. The book’s meaning is dimmed by so many lenses of bias that the book rarely gets a chance to speak for itself.

The religion of Islam is not based solely on the Quran but also on the far greater literature of hadith which transmits sayings and actions from the time of Islam’s founder. If it is shown that the Quran is compatible with the theory of evolution, this does not necessarily mean that hadith is. This issue will be dealt with later in the essay.

While anti-intellectualism and anti-empiricism is common among the religious, it is not true to say that this is a doctrine of the Quran. The Quran speaks of observation and proof in numerous places. Discovering this conflict between the irrationalist tendencies of some Muslims and the seemingly rationalist doctrines of the Quran, I am forced to build my own Islam based on the Quran. It would be a mistake to consider Islam anti-rationality, anti-skepticism, anti-science or anti-evolution merely because many Muslims act as if it is.

The religion of the Quran is founded upon the commandment “Thou shalt question!” The Quran continuously mocks various sections of humanity for not thinking clearly or for believing in superstitions. It also constantly calls its readers to think, to reason, to observe, to analyze, to question. Speaking to those Christians and Jews who claim that only Christians/Jews will enter Paradise, it asks for “proof”.2 Speaking to pagans, it asks them to show a proof for the truth of their deities.3 The question “Will you then not reason?” is used 13 times in the Quran.

The Quran claims to be reasonable, and claims to contain much to convince the ulī l-albāb (“those endowed with intelligence and wisdom”, a phrase that is used nine times in the Quran). In verse 39:21, it says:

Have you not considered how God sends down water from the sky, then He makes it flow into underground wells, then He produces with it plants of various colors, then they wither and you see them yellowing, then He turns them into debris? Surely in this is a reminder for ulī l-albāb.

To a skeptic, it will seem especially ironic that the Quran is calling wise and intelligent people to take its claim seriously that perfectly natural phenomena like rain and the growth of plants are God’s doing. There is nothing special about a book pretending that it is convincing or that reasonable people will agree with it. Most books make just such a claim.

However, as a skeptic who wants to make an accurate judgment about the Quran’s logic, I should find out what I could arrive at if I were to take the book seriously. Let us pretend that the book is what it says it is, that it really is reasonable, that it is from an invisible but all-knowing God, and that it can be found as such by intelligent and wise people, where does this take us?

The Quran claims to contain the unadulterated words of God, claims to contain no errors, and claims to enjoy divine protection against corruption. It logically follows that the presence of a single error proves the entire book false, because it either means that God uttered a falsehood, or that he was incapable of protecting His book from corruption, both of which are equally fatal flaws in an all-powerful, all-knowing God.

The Rain of God

In the Quran, God takes credit for various natural phenomena that all have scientific explanations, as in the aforementioned verse 39:21. More of these instances are:

God is He who sends the winds. They stir up clouds. Then He spreads them in the sky as He wills. And He breaks them apart. Then you see rain drops issuing from their midst. Then, when He makes it fall upon whom He wills of His servants, behold, they rejoice.4

It is He who sends the wind ahead of His mercy. Then, when they have gathered up heavy clouds, We drive them to a dead land, where We make water come down, and with it We bring out all kinds of fruits. Thus We bring out the dead—perhaps you will reflect.5

Have you not seen how God propels the clouds, then brings them together, then piles them into a heap, and you see rain drops emerging from its midst? How He brings down loads of hail from the sky, striking with it whomever He wills, and diverting it from whomever He wills? The flash of its lightning almost snatches the sight away.6

We, as rational humans, are supposed to believe that God is responsible for the things described above even though we never see God taking care of these things. Since we never see God’s hand in these matters, it would be right to think that perhaps the universe would go on functioning like normal even if there was no God. We can carry out experiments inside sealed chambers where we can make it rain or snow, what does God have to do with any of this?

Imagine a king giving a speech in a newly conquered city, telling the listeners “I bring you food, so be thankful!” A skeptical person may go to the gates of the city early in the morning to see who it is who actually brings food. Since he never sees the king himself carrying sacks of flour into the city, he concludes that the king lied.

His mistake is that he fails to realize that it is by the king’s order that people are bringing food to his city, so when the king says he is doing it, he is right. If it was not for the king, it would not be happening.

When God claims to make it rain, the fact that His hand cannot be detected in the process does not necessarily mean he is lying. If we are to really find out whether God’s claim is true, we have to investigate further. If the pharaoh of Egypt claims that he makes the sun rise, I would be skeptical and ask him to provide some very convincing evidence before I take him seriously. In all likelihood the sun would rise even if the pharaoh were to die.

So what is so special about a 14-centuries-old book out of the deserts of Arabia7 that I should take it seriously when it says its writer makes it rain?

Hard and Soft Evidence

Atheists demand hard evidence before they believe in books like the Quran. But such evidence is not forthcoming. The Quran itself promises that it will not be forthcoming:

Are they waiting for anything but for the angels to come to them, or for your Lord to arrive, or for some of your Lord’s signs to come? On the Day when some of your Lord’s signs come (i.e. when hard evidence for God’s existence is seen), no soul will benefit from its faith unless it had believed previously, or had earned goodness through its faith. Say, “Wait, we too are waiting.”8

The above concept is repeated in multiple places in the Quran; that once a person has seen irrefutable evidence for God’s existence their faith will no longer be of any worth—since faith will no longer be necessary.

Seeing hard evidence for God’s existence places a terrible burden on humans. This is expressed in one of the most terrifying verses of the Quran in the story of Jesus and the Apostles:

And when the disciples said, “O Jesus son of Mary, is your Lord able to bring down for us a feast from heaven?” He said, “Fear God, if you are believers.”

They said, “We wish to eat from it, so that our hearts may be reassured, and know that you have told us the truth, and be among those who witness it.”

Jesus son of Mary said, “O God, our Lord, send down for us a table from heaven, to be a festival for us, for the first of us, and the last of us, and a sign from You; and provide for us; You are the Best of providers.”

God said, “I will send it down to you. But whoever among you disbelieves thereafter, I will punish him with a punishment the like of which I never punish any other being.”9

In the final verse above, the writer of the Quran claims that once the Apostles (and others present) see empirical evidence for God’s existence, this changes the very nature of their relationship with Him. They made a request and God physically revealed Himself to them by responding. If they were to deny God’s existence after that, they would deserve a singularly terrible punishment.

The purpose of this universe, in the Quranic view, is to host free-willed creatures who have the option of rejecting God’s existence–so that an act of will and a submission of the heart is needed for them to become believers in Him, and for this act of will, which they have to repeat every day of their faithful lives, they will be rewarded with Paradise. If God’s existence were ever proven, and the world did not end, this would prove the Quran false, since the Quran claims that hard evidence for God’s existence will only be shown to humanity when the world ends.

Are they waiting for God Himself to come to them in the shadows of the clouds, together with the angels, when the matter has been settled? All things are returned to God.10

Once God’s existence is empirically shown, the “matter” will be “settled”, that will be the end of the age-old argument between theism and atheism. Hard evidence would settle the matter; the point of faith is to believe in God without it. This naturally leads to the thinking that religion asks humans to abandon rationality for the sake of faith. But the truth is otherwise, since there is a second category of evidence that is ignored by atheists: soft evidence.

A verse of the Quran is called an āya in Arabic, which literally means “sign”, something on the road that points toward a direction. As for its figurative meaning, the Indian Islamic scholar Hamiduddin Farahi (1863-1930) says in his definition of āya:

That which is used as evidence toward (proving) some matter. It is not the whole of the proof, but it directs you toward the proof.11

Each verse of the Quran acts as a truth-pointer. A skeptic can read many of its verses without reaching any conclusion about the book’s truth or falsehood. Open a book of Quran and you will see these verses at its beginning:

In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful.

Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds.

The Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

Master of the Day of Judgment.

It is You we worship, and upon You we call for help.

Guide us to the straight path.

The path of those You have blessed, not of those against whom there is anger, nor of those who are misguided.

These verses do not contain anything to launch a critique on. God is the Lord of the Worlds, he is gracious and merciful, and he is the master of the Day of Judgment. These claims are unassailable, since they do not make any scientifically testable claims. The verses might as well be saying that the universe is carried on the back of a giant turtle; we have no way of verifying their claims.

However, if the skeptic goes on to read, one thing they will find striking will be the absence of nonsense. How likely is it that a man out of 7th century Arabia could have written a page of cosmological fiction without it containing anything that insults one’s intelligence in the 21st century?

Going on to read page after page, the skeptic’s conscience is seriously challenged. Can he in good conscience say this is human-written fiction? Personally when I read the Quran with a skeptical eye, assuming it was written by Muhammad himself, I cannot maintain my skepticism beyond a few pages without feeling like a criminal, like I am acting against my conscience. At page 5, already impressed with the lack of anything that is obviously false or ridiculous, I may admit that there is a 1% chance that this is from God, but my skepticism makes me continue to say that Muhammad may have simply been a genius, therefore I say that it is still 99% likely that a human wrote it. The rational assumption is that any piece of text you see is human-created, extraordinary evidence is needed to prove otherwise.

At page 10, however, I am further impressed with the Quran’s quality; its way of thinking, its morality and ethics, its continued lack of nonsense, therefore I may end up saying that there is a 98% chance it is  human-written and a 2% it is not. By page 300 my conscience may force me to admit that there is a 30% chance that it is from God. By page 600 (the end of the book), I may conclude that there is a 50% chance that it is from God.

I will have many difficulties with the book, such as its taking credit for natural phenomena, but the book, its form and content, make it impossible for me to casually dismiss it. The Quran, for one who reads it with naïve eyes in the original Arabic, is a serious problem that must be addressed if one is to remain honest with himself or herself. If the Quran is true, I must do as it says. I cannot summarily dismiss it, since I have acknowledged that there is a 50% chance it is from God. Therefore the Quran throws me into serious intellectual turmoil; I can neither dismiss it nor accept it…yet.

There are converts to Islam who reached this stage then remained there for years, unsure whether it would be right to make the jump into faith, yet unable to forget the Quran and go on as before. A Scottish man described his personal journey to Islam thus:

The Qur’an really shook me. It’s quite a scary book to read because it tells you so much about yourself. Some things that I found out about myself I didn’t like. So I decided to make some changes.

And I knew what the end result of this process would be: I would be a Muslim.

So I kept on reading. I read it three times, looking for the catch. But there was no catch; I was quite comfortable with everything.12

“I was quite comfortable with everything” is more than I can say (it took me many years to fully justify the entire book to myself). The article led to over 800 comments in which the writer was severely attacked by his fellow citizens for buying into this barbaric religion. Personally, until recently, I have never been completely comfortable with the Quran, in that there were certain things in it that I couldn’t fully justify to myself. Despite those points of discomfort, the rest of the book was a tremendous, non-dismissible challenge to me.

At some point, the evidence starts to feel overwhelming that the likelihood of the truth of the Quran is greater than the likelihood of its falsehood. Once that happens, once a person believes that there is more than a 50% chance that the Quran is truly from God, he or she starts to feel that it is something tantamount to a crime against conscience and rationality to reject the book or ignore it. And that is where faith and submission begin.

The reason I believe in the Quran is the same reason so many scientists in the late 19th and early 20th century believed in Darwin’s theory of evolution despite never actually observing evolution take place. They both get too many things right, which makes it impossible to casually dismiss them in good conscience.

For the Quran, I can list a few of those things, although each verse of the Quran can be thought of as one of those “things” that makes me believe in it.

  • The aesthetic experience of the Quran. It is not without reason that the Quran’s literal meaning is “The Recitation”. The Quran is meant to be experienced as a recited thing, and for a person who speaks Arabic and experiences a good recitation of it, the Quran compels them to pay attention to it and to take it seriously, like any great work of art. The opening verse of Mary (chapter 19) starts with a set of seemingly meaningless sounds: “Kaaf haa yaa ain saad.” In an English translation these look like a bunch of strange and possibly unnecessary sounds. In a good Arabic recitation, however, they are a very compelling set of tones that tell the listener that a very serious symphony is about to start. They transport the listener into the atmosphere of the Temple in Jerusalem in which the story unfolds. It is not only rational arguments that have a “rightness” to them; aesthetic experiences also have rightness (the architecture of a beautiful church looks “right”, while a badly designed one looks “wrong”). There is something deeply “right” about the Quran when experienced. While the aesthetics of the Quran do not prove that it is from God, they cast very strong doubt on the possibility of a human having composed it. The soul or conscience wishes it to be from God. If it was filled with absurd nonsense, we as rational beings could dismiss the conscience’s desire. But there is nothing in it to insult the rational mind; rather, it contains much that satisfies it too.
  • The Quran’s  zero-tolerance policy toward the charging of interest (also the Bible’s policy according to a minority of Christians). The evils of usury are long-term and require deep and lengthy analysis to bring them to the surface, so much so that today perhaps one among a thousand economists cannot be found who appreciates how it leads to an unsustainable economic system where an over-class of usurers (lenders, i.e. the banks) slowly take control of the economy, as has happened in the United States and Europe.
  • The fact that the Quran bans gambling. Without this ban, usury could be practiced in a different guise.
  • The zakat system, in which the poor charge an annual 2.5% interest on the uninvested and speculatively invested wealth of the rich (this system would be useless without banning usury, it takes a genius to plug that loophole, and the Quran does it).
  • The fact that in 600 pages written in the 7th century CE, it does not contain a single statement that is provably false, or that contradicts another part of itself. This is a highly unlikely achievement for a human writer, especially one from so far back in the past.
  • The moral philosophy of the Quran, where moral integrity and justice are always paramount. Killing a single innocent human is similar to killing all of humanity, which means that there can never be such a thing as a utilitarian murder. The end never justifies the means. No evil done in the name of the greater good is justified.
  • The writer is always superior to me. I have never had a similar experience with any other writer. As I grow intellectually, I am made better capable of critiquing the thinking of others. The Quran has survived this process.
  • The Quran’s non-Arabian character and the unusual restraint of the writer in not engaging in the typical rhetoric of the time. This is perhaps the greatest clue to its truth. Someone who studies Arabic poetry from that period and the fabricated words of revelation of Musailamah and other “false prophets” will see that while all of the literary speech from that era has a distinctly Arabian character, full of hyperbole, self-aggrandizement, tribalism and bad logic, the Quran does not. The Quran was brought to us by an Arab from the heart of Arabia, yet it does not have an Arabian character.
  • The fact that the Quran points out various mistakes of Prophet Muhammad. It severely rebukes him for ignoring a blind man who came to him for guidance (chapter 80), cautions him not to repeat the offense of taking prisoners when he was not supposed to (8:67-68), and criticizes him for accepting the excuses of a certain group of Medinans not to join a certain battle (9:43). While he could have invented these verses as an all-too-clever device to convince skeptics that the Quran came from a higher power, they do lend soft support to the Quran’s own theory of itself, that it is a message given to the Prophet, rather than something invented by him. It shows far too much imagination for that time for a prophet to criticize himself in such a severe manner.

The aesthetic experience of the Quran and its contents both strongly support its own theory of itself (that it is a book from God). A person who rejects the Quran after experiencing it aesthetically and recognizing the unlikelihood of a random man from Arabia composing it is committing something that is both unconscionable and irrational: unconscionable because they are repressing their conscience’s response to the aesthetic pull of the book, irrational because they are acting against probability theory. The rational mind, once it experiences the Quran aesthetically and affirms the plausibility of its contents, recognizes that the likelihood of it being from God is greater than the likelihood of it being a man-made work by an uneducated and illiterate Arab. For such a person to dismiss the Quran is as irrational as dismissing the news that a great storm will affect the area they live in in an hour despite dozens of data points all pointing to the likelihood of such a thing taking place.

The above are not the reasons why I believe in God. They are the reasons why I believe that the Quran is from God. As for my belief in God, I consider it extremely likely that all humans already half believe in God, in some sacred and transcendent person whose eyes are on them at all times. The Quran is a vehicle for strengthening my belief in God, but it is not the only vehicle, and it is not necessarily the strongest one. For me, it feels as if to merely exist, to merely be a self-conscious subject who looks out onto the world, is a very compelling force pointing to God’s existence, making it nothing short of criminal for me to deny Him.

Describing why I believe in the Quran feels similar to describing why I am in love with someone. I can mention a few obviously good qualities of the beloved, but every reason given for this love cannot help but feel weak and absurd, since it does not capture the real thing.

If the Quran is so compelling, one may wonder how there can be Arabic-speaking atheists who read the Quran and reject it. The reason, I would say, is that due to the lack of hard evidence, there is always room for doubt. Accepting the truth of the Quran feels like a “jump” for those who have not accepted it yet. One cannot easily dismiss the Quran in good conscience, but one is not compelled to accept it either. A person’s biases may also strongly affect the amount of charity they give to the text; the Quran mentions that God has beautified the sky with “lamps”. A person who is predisposed to think very negatively of the Quran will see in such a statement a proof for the superstitious and unscientific nature of the Quran, while Muslims will see it as a poetic reference to the stars.

We can now discuss the topic of rain. God could claim credit for making it rain for three reasons:

1. Purposeful invention

God designed and built a universe in which rain happens, for the very purpose of having it be a help toward the evolution and sustenance of the creatures that would one day come about on Earth.

2. Operating the universe

Let us imagine that the universe is a simulation sustained by God, what I call al-Ghazali’s “Matrix”. The word Matrix is a reference to the popular film of the same name, in which the characters famously live inside a simulated universe. The Matrix theory enabled al-Ghazali to free God from the chains that previous philosophers had tried to impose on Him. Islam’s earlier philosophical movements, inspired by Greek thought, were stuck within the Aristotelian paradigm of considering the universe all that there is, and thinking that God would have to follow the same rules and logic seen elsewhere within our reality.

Al-Ghazali, who was developing lines of reasoning started centuries before, was able to think “outside the box” of this universe, recognizing that there was no obvious reason why God should be stuck following the same rules as everyone else if he was truly transcendent and all-powerful. In his view, this universe is like a simulation maintained by God from the outside, who is under no obligation to follow the rules internal to the simulation. When a tree catches fire, it is not because matter decided that catching fire was a good idea at that instance of time, but because God changed the universe. Explaining this concept would have been extremely difficult in the past, but today, thanks to video games, we have a ready-made illustration. Inside a video game, if you see a tree catching fire, it is not because the atoms and molecules of the tree came in contact with a hot object that lit them. We know it is a fake, imaginary tree, and that the reason it caught fire was because the computer that runs the video game knows that when a hot object touches the tree, a fire should start. If you are stuck inside a video game, you “know” that when hot objects touch trees, the trees catch fire, and you may see this as a simple rule of nature that any scientist can verify. But if you come out of the video game, you realize that the whole thing is a set-up; the things you considered rules of nature are actually computer instructions that can be changed by a video game designer. He can change the code so that when a hot object touches a tree, it no longer catches fire.

Al-Ghazali was answering the challenge of the philosophers who, like most atheists, were incapable of thinking in the “fifth” dimension (in and out of the universe), and who could see no way of reconciling the attributes of God as taught by religion with their ideas about nature, so that they were forced to say that God had to follow certain rules dictated by nature. These philosophers could only think in the four dimensions of space and time. Al-Ghazali added a new dimension; the inside and the outside of the universe, and through a few simple examples showed that there is no conflict between nature and God. Nature is to God as the simulated world inside a video game is to the computer that runs it.

According to this theory, this universe would be a blob of inert, unmoving matter if God stopped animating it. If this theory is true (and there is no evidence that it is false), then saying that the universe would continue existing or operating normally even if there was no God would be similar to saying that the world inside a computer video game would continue to be there even if you take away the computer. It is to be so enamored by an illusion as to deny its source.

An atom, according to the Matrix theory, has no power or will to exist or move. It is God who has to sustain the existence of everything in this world and cause them to move when. This means that in the case of rain, God has to cause steam to rise, He has to make it go where it is supposed to go in the sky, He has to bring it together into clouds, and then He has to take it to where it will eventually become rain.

He does all of these things so reliably, that we start to think of them as “natural” phenomena that just happen without needing something to make them happen. But this universe, if God decided to “let it go”, would disappear as if it had never existed, similar to turning off a computer: “God upholds the heavens and the earth, lest they cease (to exist). And were they to cease, there is none to uphold them except He. He is Most Clement, Most Forgiving.”13

3. Intervention.

While the above two points admit for the possibility of God being responsible for the phenomenon of rain in general (the way that a computer is responsible for the rain that happens inside a video game), we need something more. God seems to claim that He purposefully sends rain here and there (especially in verse 24:43 quoted above), in directions He wants, meaning not necessarily directions that only obey the laws of nature (even if the laws nature are of his own making). God seems to claim that his agency goes into deciding when and where rain happens—that it is not mere chance caused by the laws of nature. The way that God could make this happen is by making it happen regardless of the laws of nature, because he has the power to do that.

This, of course, would be impossible to detect, according to his plan, since God does not want the discovery of hard evidence for his existence. Even if we could build a machine that perfectly predicted rain around the world, so that any aberrations caused by God’s decisions could be seen, God could change what the machine shows.

Saying that God intentionally makes it rain here and there is to claim a miracle happens, since one is saying this rain is happening due to a supernatural phenomenon (God), not due to a natural, scientifically explicable phenomenon. To prove a miracle, an equally miraculous piece of evidence is needed. For those who have experienced the Quran and accepted it, the Quran is sufficient evidence, although the evidence is not hard, in that there is room for doubt that has to be bridged by the conscience every day. Experiencing doubt is quite natural for a believer. When this happens, they go back to the things that convinced them their beliefs are true, such as the Quran, examine them again until both their rational minds and their conscience are overwhelmed with the recognition of their truth.

The Quran claims that God, who is in charge of this simulation-like universe, is personally responsible for rain. This is similar to saying that the computer that runs the Matrix decides when it should rain and what rain should be like (while someone stuck inside the Matrix might say rain happens due to perfectly “natural” laws of the universe).

In other words, if it is true that this universe is a simulation operated by God, then it logically follows that God could take credit for making it rain.

By being outside the simulation, God, if he really exists, can make it rain while making his own role in the matter undetectable. Therefore the fact that rain can be explained scientifically does not tell us anything about God’s role in the matter; what we call “science” is nothing but a description of how God operates the universe.

The above does not prove that religion correct in its claims regarding God’s role in nature. It, however, shows that the existence of a conflict between religion and science in this matter is illusory; we can be rational scientists inside the universe, while believing that outside the universe God is operating things, similar to being in the Matrix while acknowledging how it is run from the outside. We fully support scientific explanations, and we will not bother non-believers with supernatural explanations, since that requires that they believe in God in the first place. Since they do not, there is no point in telling them about God’s potential role in undetectably making it rain in certain times and places.

A skeptic could rightly say that saying God is undetectably involved in making it rain is like saying invisible magical fairies make it rain. The reply is that yes, it is just like that. But in our case, we have extraordinary evidence to support our thinking; the Quran with its preponderance of soft evidence in its favor, while a person who claims that invisible magical fairies make it rain has no evidence, soft or hard.

A Muslim scientist can study the weather as a purely natural system, while also believing in God’s power to direct it as He wills, so that they can thank God when a tornado avoids their neighborhood. This is like thanking the Matrix operator for letting you have an easy time of it inside the Matrix. And when thanking God for getting the job you wanted, you do not claim that your getting the job does not have a scientific explanation—you merely admit that there is sufficient room for undetectable divine action within this universe, so that God could have made the crucial difference in whether you got the job or not while keeping Himself hidden in the matter. From a scientific point of view, this is an entirely useless point of view; whether it is true or false makes no difference to science. And that is the point; we are merely claiming that thanking God for getting a job is not irrational if one believes in God, since it is just like thanking the Matrix operator for arranging things smoothly for us inside the Matrix. One can thank God for every great and small blessing in their lives while treating the world as a perfectly scientific system; God is ever-present and ever-undetectable at the same time. One never knows if God did not make the crucial difference when something, anything, happened or did not happen.

When I write of the lack of incompatibility between the Quran’s theology and science I do not mean that we should bother non-believers with such topics; we should only do so if they bring it up by saying or implying that this or that scientific fact or technical discovery somehow exposes the existence of shaky foundations within religion. What they say is provably false if we imagine the universe as a simulation that operates rationally inside while being divinely operated from the outside. An atheist might say: (1) science explains rain perfectly (2) therefore it is false to claim that God makes it rain.

What we say is: (1) science explains rain perfectly (2) if God exists, He could be in charge of a Matrix in which He makes it rain according to scientific principles (3) therefore the matter at issue here is not rain, but (a) whether God exists or not and (b) whether this universe is like a Matrix or not.

There is no proof that God does not exist, and there is no proof that this universe is not like a Matrix, therefore any claim that scientific explanations contradict God’s existence are automatically and always false. An atheist who wants to convince me that God does not exist is completely wasting his time if he talks about scientific explanations, since I too believe in all of that. To stop wasting his time, he will have to do one of these three things:

  1. Prove to me that God does not exist.
  2. Prove that the soft evidence I rely on for having faith in God (the Quran) is false.
  3. Prove to me that this universe could not possibly be a Matrix.

Atheists have so far failed to provide any of the above proofs. They continue to waste their time propounding science as a cure for religion, not realizing that al-Ghazali made that whole line of argument irrelevant nine centuries ago through his discovery of the “fifth dimension”.

Another phenomenon for which God claims direct agency is the formulation of the genetic makeup of humans during conception:

It is He who forms you in the wombs as He wills. There is no god except He, the Almighty, the Wise.14

When a father and a mother’s genes recombine, there are 64 trillion different possible combinations that could be created.15 God claims to have a hand in choosing which combination ends up actually taking place. Again, God can claim responsibility for forming our genes in the womb through the three methods mentioned earlier: Purposeful invention, operating the universe and intervening when he wants. Similar to weather events, the process of genetic recombination is so immensely complex and chaotic that God does not need to do anything to hide his hand in the matter; his interventions would be easily explainable as mere randomness, which is as it should be.

In verse 67:3 of the Quran, the writer appears to take pride in the lack of “glitches” in this Matrix:

He who created seven heavens in layers. You see no discrepancy in the creation of the Compassionate. Look again. Can you see any cracks?

In effect, the Quran tells us that God exists, but that we should be scientists in our dealings with nature: any glitches in the simulation (any supernatural phenomena pointing to him) would be hard evidence of his existence, but he says there will never be hard evidence for his existence until the end times, therefore if we detect anything provably supernatural and the world does not end, that in itself could be considered a refutation of the Quran.

The doctrine of considering the universe a simulation-like thing controlled by God is known as occasionalism. It has been unjustly criticized for promoting an anti-science and irrationalist attitude, since it teaches that things only appear to be following scientific rules when in reality they are following God’s commands. But this criticism focuses on a small area of Islamic thought and ignores its wider context. The Quran teaches that the universe is a simulation-like thing so that the laws of nature are merely byproducts of God’s choices, it also teaches that we should act rationally and expect the universe to act rationally too: for example, it tells us that if we give away too much in charity we will get poor, which as any materialist will tell you, is a true fact of nature. Occasionalism only promotes irrationality if it is surgically removed from the rest of the Quran’s teachings. The historian and Islamic scholar Ibn al-Jawzi (died 1200 CE), although not a very original thinker, uses the Quran’s rationalist advice (such as that of the necessity of preparing provision for long journeys) to criticize certain lines of Sufi thought that taught that God would save and take care of His true believers without regard for the material reality around them.16 Some of them, for example, desisted from work thinking that God would provide for them regardless of the laws of economics.  That is irrationalist because it expects God to materially intervene in this universe to take care of certain humans, which is opposed to what the Quran teaches. The Quran teaches us not to waste money (17:26), not to do physical harm to ourselves (2:195), to break our fasts if we are ill (2:184), and to perform the Hajj pilgrimage only if we have the material means to perform it (3:97) rather than setting out come what may. The Quran does not teach its believers to march into fires for the greater glory of God. It teaches them to view this world as a Matrix controlled by God, a Matrix that has rational rules that must be respected.

There is, of course, historical evidence of some Muslims acting irrationally (although the Western imagination often greatly exaggerates this as any good Western historian of Islam can tell you), but what Muslims do within their limited historical and cultural perspectives does not necessarily have a one-to-one relationship with the Quran’s teachings, therefore we should look at the Quran itself to see what it says.

Like any scientist, I never expect to detect anything supernatural in this world. Like any mystic, I believe my life and the rest of this universe is entirely under God’s control and command. My attitude is that of the mystic-scientist; not the crackpot who thinks quantum theory proves the healing power of crystals, but the scientist who considers science, hard, rational science, to be merely a way of looking at God and His works. From this standpoint I have no desire to deny science—this would be denying an aspect of God’s handiwork. And I am not ashamed to pray to God and ask Him for His help and support because I know that He can do anything He wants (as the Quran teaches), that He answers prayers (as the Quran teaches), while also expecting this world to continue operating under clearly-defined rational rules (as the Quran teaches).

In short, the Quran teaches that God is present but hidden. It does not tell me to expect nature to work one way today and a different way tomorrow; it teaches me to expect nature to act rationally, and it teaches me that if God intervenes in my life, it will be done undetectably, through means that always have rational explanations. I will never argue with an atheist about whether it was God or the surgeon who saved my life after an accident, because both views are true at the same time, and there is no point in bothering the unspiritual about God’s role in this world. From this side of the wall that separates us from the Unseen, it was the surgeon, from the other side, it was God. This is not to discount the surgeon’s role; maybe it was their years of determination and hard work that enabled them to accomplish their task. This simulation is a system controlled by God, but humans—who have free will—are plugged into it and make changes to it, again, similar to the Matrix film. We can be credited with our choices since we have free will, but we have no power to make the Matrix behave one way or another. We choose, God changes the Matrix in response and does it so reliably that we get the illusion that we are really in charge of our bodies and can make changes to the universe. This is similar to being stuck inside a video game and thinking you can fly because the video game allows you to. In reality, it is the video game that gives you all the powers you enjoy.

Yet another place where God claims direct responsibility for physical phenomena is in his providing sustenance to humans:

Or, who originates the creation and then repeats it, and who gives you livelihood from the sky and the earth? Is there another god with God? Say, “Produce your evidence, if you are truthful.”17

And whosoever fears God, He will create for him a way out. And He will provide him with sustenance from where he does not expect.18

The second verse above implies that God has a direct hand in providing sustenance, because he says that if we fear him, then he will provide. This is a central concept of the God-human relationship, repeated often in the Bible and the Quran. For example, in the Old Testament Book of Isaiah, God informs us:

10 If you extend your soul to the hungry And satisfy the afflicted soul, Then your light shall dawn in the darkness, And your darkness shall be as the noonday. 11 The Lord will guide you continually, And satisfy your soul in drought, And strengthen your bones; You shall be like a watered garden, And like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.19

In the Quran, Moses says:

“And [remember] when your Lord proclaimed: ‘If you give thanks, I will grant you increase; but if you are ungrateful, My punishment is severe.’”20

If God did not intervene directly in the affairs of humans, there would be no way for this contractual relationship to be maintained. If we fear God, God will provide for us. We act, God reacts by arranging the events inside the Matrix favorably for us. For God to react, He has to intervene directly, but undetectably, in our universe. Once we think of the universe as a divine simulation, then intervention will be nothing out of the ordinary. Every movement of an atom is itself a divine decision; it would not happen without God making it happen. An intervention is merely a different decision where God, instead of operating the universe according to the laws of nature that he has laid down, he operates the universe in a certain time and place according to different laws that operate on a higher plane and override the laws of nature, such as the divine law of rewarding thankfulness.

A family may live in a house that is in danger of collapsing. If nature were to take its course, the house would suddenly collapse without warning. But God can intervene, causing unsettling creaking noises to come from the house’s structure for a few days before the collapse—giving the family ample warning and preparation time for responding to the problem. It would be foolish for a believer to expect God to warn them of every threat, and I have never met an intelligent Muslim who thinks thus. But as a spiritual person, I thank God daily for all the problems He has helped me avoid or solved for me.21

Topology: God’s Template

The theory of evolution seems to claim that the creatures on Earth could have come about regardless of God. The religious think it is a God versus nature problem. This mistake is also made by atheist scientists who think that finding a scientific explanation for natural phenomena disproves God’s role. As the previous discussion showed, according to the Quranic worldview, scientific explanations are merely man-made descriptions of the way God operates the universe. Therefore the existence of scientific explanations is not merely a non-problem for religion, it is required by it. The Quran teaches that God will keep Himself hidden, therefore all that we see around us should be so natural and rational that atheists should always have the choice of remaining atheists. Humans must forever maintain the choice between faith and disbelief. The universe provides many signs that point toward God, and the various “proofs” of God’s existence strongly suggest the need for the type of God they describe, but there is always a place for doubt.

Topology refers to the physical configuration of the universe; the physical constants that govern the universe (such as the speed of light), the placement and chemical composition of the galaxies, stars and planets, and the placement of the continents, mountains, rivers and oceans on Earth.

You are probably familiar with the concept of a topographical map. This is a type of map that shows which areas have high elevation and which areas have low elevation. A country’s topography refers to those features of the country’s land that show up on a topographical map. We can say a country has a “rugged topography” if it has many hilly and mountainous areas and few areas of flat planes.

Topology, on the other hand, in the specific usage of this essay, goes beyond topography to account for the entirety of the physical configuration of an area of space. We can say this galaxy has a different topology from that one, which could mean that the arrangement of their respective stars and planets are very different. We can also say that this universe has a different topology from another universe, meaning that this universe has different physical constants, chemical compositions, and/or galactic arrangements compared to the other universe.

Topography is 3-dimensional; a topographical map extends a 2-dimensional map by adding elevation, making it 3-dimensional. On the other hand, topology is n-dimensional; it has as many or as few dimensions as one cares to name. A topological map of a galaxy could account for its 3-d appearance like a topographical map while adding temperature, the strength of gravity, the velocity of its spirals, and so on and so forth, adding as many additional factors into it as one wants. Each additional factor we add is a new “dimension”.

Topology is critical to evolution. No evolution can take place unless the topology of the universe and the relevant planet is just right for it. Very minor differences in the universe’s topology would have made life impossible to exist (if the gravitational constant had been just a tiny bit larger or smaller, for example). Very minor differences in the topology of the earth would have led to the evolution of extremely different creatures than the ones we have now, and could have made the existence of humans impossible.

Imagine if the earth was entirely an ocean planet. On such a planet, there would be no way for land animals to evolve, and therefore there would be no humans. The number of all species that would evolve on such a planet would likely be far fewer than the 8.7 million species we have on the earth today.

The design of a planet is crucial to the types of creatures that evolve on it. And it follows that if you could design a planet with the right topology, you can create any type of creature you want. And perhaps it is for this reason that God says:

Certainly the creation of the heavens and the earth is greater than the creation of humanity, but most people do not know.22

27. Are you more difficult to create, or the sky? He constructed it. 28. He raised its masses, and proportioned it. 29. And He dimmed its night, and brought out its daylight. 30. And the earth after that He spread. 31. And from it, He produced its water and its pasture. 32. And the mountains, He anchored. 33. A provision for you and for your animals.23

God might be saying that the fact that he designed our universe’s topology is a greater accomplishment than the fact that he created humans. This would make a lot of sense if the existence of humanity was nothing more than a byproduct of the universe’s design. When God created the universe, He did not merely create a lifeless system of stars and planets. He created a universe in whose design was embedded the program that would ultimately lead to the existence of 8.7 million species, including humans.

Topology–the way the universe is configured–is a template that God uses for creating creatures.

Imagine if Earth lacked mountains and rivers. Could humans or human-like creatures evolve on such a planet? It is unlikely, perhaps impossible. The design of the planet and the universe in which it exists decides what types of creatures can evolve on that planet, meaning that the designer of the universe can be fully credited with the creation of all the creatures that exist inside that universe if the designer had the creation of those creatures in mind to begin with.

To create apes, God can either create apes from a puff of smoke, or he can create a universe in which apes can evolve after billions of years. From his perspective, the two things are equally easy. It is just that the second choice enables him to ultimately create humans who have the choice of denying his existence. It allows him to retain his plausible deniability. The issue of human evolution is more complicated than the issue of the evolution of other creatures and will be dealt with specifically later on.

Through the Quran’s consistent references to mountains, rivers, seas and the design of the earth and the “sky”, God explains the topological design of the universe in detail and says that this is of greater importance than the creation of humans, because he is in effect describing the template or the intelligently designed factory that led to the existence of humans.

By considering the universe’s topology a template created by God, we can credit him with creating all of the creatures on the earth without having to deny evolution. At the Big Bang, God created the universe with the exact conditions required to create life on one of the planets inside it billions of years later.

Dynamic-Kinetic Equilibrium

How can non-living matter lead to the complex biological machines that exist in all kinds of creatures? Does this not go against the idea of entropy—that the universe continues to break down and become simpler over time?

It is possible if we provide (1) energy sources and (2) complexity-inducing topologies, leading to what can be called a dynamic-kinetic equilibrium, in which matter stays in a state of heightened complexity as long as certain conditions around it continue to apply.24

Both of these conditions come true on Earth, where energy is available in the form of sunlight, geothermal energy and tides, and where the topology of the earth and the universe in which it is contained create an environment in which life can not only originate, but diversify by finding niche after niche in which it can survive.

The origination of life requires that dead matter somehow join together and increase in complexity. This is somewhat like expecting a pile of rocks to join together and walk up a hill. The difference is that in the world of atoms and molecules, things join together and increase in complexity all the time, as can be seen in the highly complex organic compounds found inside meteors.25

All that’s needed is the right mixture, and usually a source of energy, and from this, extremely complex molecules can evolve. This is a fact of chemistry.

The question is: just how complex can these natural structures become? Someone who denies abiogenesis (the origination of life from non-living matter) would say that there is no way that the complexity of these randomly formed molecules could increase to the degree seen in living things. This would mean that life could never evolve from non-living matter.

But someone with sufficient imagination would see that it might be possible given a large enough test chamber, ample building blocks of life, water, energy and hundreds of millions of years, and most importantly, a designer who put all of these together in just the right way to create life.

The chances of life happening by random are so small that they tend to zero. But if there is a designer who created the right universe for life to come into existence in it, then the origination of life would no longer be random, it would very much be planned. Therefore believers can acknowledge the possibility of abiogenesis without supporting the idea that life came about randomly. We instead can say that life came about because the designer got all the conditions right at the beginning of the universe.

Physicists say that if the Big Bang had taken place the merest fraction of a second slower or faster, the galaxies couldn’t have formed, and humanity wouldn’t have existed.26 To create humanity, what God had to do was get the conditions of the Big Bang exactly right, and 13.8 billion years later human-like creatures came into existence on one of the planets inside the universe created by the Big Bang.

The timescales involved in this, and the amount of intelligent design necessary, make it very difficult for people to imagine this actually taking place; that is, imagining God creating humans in such a complex and roundabout way.

But if you imagine the whole process taking just one second, it becomes easier to believe. Imagine a god who is holding a blob of matter in his hands. He parts his hands, the blob expands with it, and in just that second, you see a planet inside that blob of matter on which certain creatures live. Should a god not have such power? And can such a god not claim responsibility for the existence of those creatures if the nature of the blob of matter and the way he expanded it is all that lead to the existence of those creatures, and if the way he did this was intentional, with the aim of creating those creatures?

Do the disbelievers not see that the heavens and the earth were one mass, and We tore them apart? And We made from water every living thing. Will they not believe?27

We constructed the universe with [our] capability, and We are expanding it.28

The Islamic version of intelligent design (the phrase Christians use to refer to God designing humans and other creatures) can be called topological programming. When you want to create a creature or group of creatures, all that you need to do is design a universe with the right topology. In this topology would be programmed the existence of those creatures, and after millions or billions of years, which, if you are God, could be no length of time at all, those creatures would evolve on the planet or planets of your choice.

To wrap your head around this idea, think of a computer program that lets you design living creatures, but instead of letting you design the creatures directly by choosing their shape, color and anatomy, it asks you to design a universe that would lead to the type of creature you want. This computer program shows you a box where a picture of the creature would be, but currently it is blank. And it gives you various boxes where you can input various numbers. It asks you for the size of the universe, the speed of its expansion, the external shape of it, and the various physical constants that go into that universe, such as the speed of light and the gravitational constant. By making the tiniest changes to any of these variables, the creatures it shows you on the screen change immensely. Get the numbers just right, and you will get humans, among the trillions upon trillions of other possible creatures you could create. Increase the number for the gravitational constant and your humans may get smaller. Increase it beyond a point and the human disappears; the universe you are designing will no longer be able to support humans.

This is what topological programming means; designing universes with the specific aim of seeing creatures originate and evolve inside them after billions of years. A topological programmer is a designer of universes, and that is what the Creator is.

There is no difference between God creating all the creatures on the earth by a single command that turns a large puff of smoke into all of them, which is the way our ancestors used to think how creation should work, and creating them by designing and sustaining a universe that would lead to their existence after billions of years. The end result is exactly the same, it is just that the second method is harder for the human brain to understand and appreciate, and it helps hide God’s role in the matter.

There is no clash between Darwin’s theory of evolution and intelligent design (except when it comes to the evolution of humans, which will be dealt with below). The theory of evolution is merely telling us about God’s means of designing creatures, which is far cleverer than anything one tends to imagine. To design an elephant, God does not need to create an elephant from a puff of smoke. He instead brings a blob of matter and expands it, and billions of years later elephants will exist on a planet or many planets inside that expanding blob. God has the power to create a new universe full of millions of planets all of which are inhabited by elephants, merely by designing a universe with the right topology to lead to such planets and creatures.

Evolution is only a challenge to God if we cannot think outside the box of this universe. But once we see the universe as a mere simulation designed by God, evolution becomes a God-made design feature of the universe. From this view, evolution is a testament to God’s incredible power and ingenuity; he can create creatures as intelligent as humans in such a round-about way that they would be able to deny the need for a Creator, and despite their very best efforts at detecting Him, they are never able to do so.

Topological programming does not only explain evolution; it also explains the origin of life. The same way that God can program evolution into the universe’s topology, He can also program the origination of life into it and take credit for it.

There is no clear statement in the Quran saying artificial life cannot be created, and humans creating artificial life does not take away from God’s greatness. If we were to create it, we would be merely copying him, from inside a universe that he designed and that he sustains.

The following verse seems to suggest that humans cannot create artificial life:

O people! A parable is presented, so listen to it: Those you invoke besides God will never create a fly, even if they banded together for that purpose. And if the fly steals anything from them, they cannot recover it from it. Weak are the pursuer and the pursued.29

But this verse can actually be used as an argument for the possibility of humans creating artificial life. The second part of the verse says, “And if the fly steals anything from them, they cannot recover it from it.”

Is it impossible to recover things stolen by flies? As a general rule, it is not impossible to catch flies and take back whatever they have stolen. What the verse might actually be saying–which is a point repeated many times throughout the Quran–is that we have no inherent power of our own; we have zero power over this universe: it is ultimately God who operates it. This means that we have no power to recover something a fly stole except when God enables us by moving the relevant atoms, photons and energy fields for us so that we can carry out our intention of recovering something the fly stole. God is telling us that it is he who is letting us have a remote control that enables us to control our bodies or avatars in this universe, a connection that can be severed by God at any moment.

By the same reasoning, we have no power to create artificial life, except when God enables us, by maintaining and operating the universe. Both of these things might be possible for us to do, if God makes them possible, and both would be impossible, if God makes them impossible. By the logic of the verse, creating artificial life might be as possible as recovering something stolen by a fly.

Still, it is possible that humans will never be able to manufacture life, as predicted by the great science fiction writer Frank Herbert in his Dune series, novels set thousands of years in the future. Perhaps there really is something special about life and perhaps at some point God had to breathe life into Earth to jump start the process of evolution that would eventually lead to the rest of all of the creatures we see on Earth. We do not know, and it is best that we do not issue definitive statements on matters we know little about.

I believe God is great enough to program the origination of life into the universe’s topology, meaning that he can create a universe that leads to the origination of life without him having to intervene afterwards to plant life on it. Questioning the possibility of this happening is actually questioning God’s greatness and creativity; it is saying that God is incapable of creating life using topological programming.

Why would God create life in such a roundabout way instead of creating it directly? This is not just some absurd mental gymnastics; there is a very strong reason for it. Creating life in such a way allows for the creation of the rarest species of all. No, not humans.

Atheists.

The God of the Quran wants His existence to be impossible to prove. He wants there to be the possibility of disbelieving in him, and that requires that his own hand should be invisible from direct measurement. God wants it to be possible for humans to think that they are alone in a universe without a creator. It should be possible for humans to deny him, ignore him and go about their entire lives acting as if he did not exist. And that requires that nature should appear supreme and unchallenged. Evolution is just the right way of achieving this goal of maintaining God’s plausible deniability.30

Human Evolution

The Quran describes the creation of humans in detail, which causes many Muslims to automatically reject evolution, thinking that evolution goes against the Quran:

We created the human being from clay, from molded mud.

And the jinn We created before, from piercing fire.

Your Lord said to the angels, ‘I am creating a human being from clay, from molded mud.’

‘When I have formed him, and breathed into him of My spirit, fall down prostrating before him.’

So the angels prostrated themselves, all together.31

We know that humans share many of their genes with chimpanzees, rats, yeast and even some viruses. Are the above verses false, or is evolution false?

The answer might be in the Quran itself, in this verse:

The likeness of Jesus in God’s sight is that of Adam: He created him from dust, then said to him, “Be,” and he was.32

We know from the Quran that Jesus was a human.33 Yet the Quran says his creation was similar to that of Adam. There is an important clue in here.

How did God create Jesus? He used some clay to create a human whose genetic code was like any other human, and at a time when other humans were around. In the same way, God could have created Adam at a time when humans or human-like creatures already existed on Earth (and existing, of course, by God’s design, who designed the topology that lead to the existence of such creatures).

God already had the genetic code for humans before the creation of the universe. He embedded that code into the universe’s topology. For example, a minimum number of continents of a certain shape may be necessary on a planet for humans to exist on it. For humans to evolve on a particular planet, their genetic code has to be translated into topological features of that planet and the universe in which it is contained.

The evolution of humans or human-like creatures on the earth, and the creation of Adam from scratch (rather than from another human), are not mutually exclusive. God created Adam from dust, and he created Jesus from dust, and in the first instance, humanoids may have already existed on earth, similar to the second instance.

Adam had free will, while the human-like creatures that had evolved on the earth lacked it. The fact of God breathing “His spirit” into Adam may have been the critical differentiator that turned Adam into something more than yet another animal. Before Adam, the earth lacked any creature that could be held responsible for its actions. Adam’s introduction into the earth was the start of the existence of responsibility. It is likely for this reason that the angels complained when God mentioned placing Adam on Earth:

“Will You place in it (i.e. on the earth) someone who will cause corruption in it and shed blood, while we declare Your praises and sanctify You?”34

The angels do not like the idea of ruining the earth’s pristine freedom from evil, since everything on it (including the humanoids) acted according to instincts placed inside them by God’s topological programming, meaning that everything on it perfectly obeyed God’s design as accurately as the planets do in following their orbits.

Before Adam, the universe was a piece of clockwork that functioned according to God’s design and in this way celebrated His greatness. Bears still ate deer, but that was according to God’s design, so that was not an evil thing. They shed blood, but they did not commit bloodshed. Placing Adam on the earth, on the other hand, meant that there would be a creature on it that could defy God’s design, in this way creating evil. Adam would be a loose cannon on the planet, capable of interfering with the functioning of God’s clockwork.

The reason humans could do evil on the planet, when no other creature could do it, is that by having free will, they could do “artificial” things, things that did not directly follow from the rules and the wisdom that went into the creation of the universe. They could defy the program embedded in the universe’s topology, in this way bringing about corruption. Everything in the universe followed from God’s authority. But Adam was an independent authority in his own right, capable of challenging God’s authority.

Some atheist writers mention the simple line of reasoning–famously propounded by the French Encyclopédistes of the 18th century–that if the universe is entirely ruled by physical laws, then there is no place for free will and responsibility because every action on it would be a derivation of the system itself35 The big “if” at the beginning of that train of thought is usually neglected.36 The Quran says that humans have responsibility and thus freedom of choice and the capacity to do evil, therefore there is some special ingredient in humans that makes them an exception to the physical laws. The question is whether we accept the Quran’s evidence or reject it. If we accept it, then we believe human actions are free-willed. There is no scientific opposition to this, since there is no scientific proof that free will does not exist. Whether free will exists or not is an issue outside science and will likely remain so, making it a matter of personal belief. For a Muslim, the soft evidence of the Quran and quotidian experience both strongly support the existence of free will.

We do not know the exact moment in the history of Earth when Adam was placed on it. It is possible that it was in the past 10,000 years, or it could have been 100,000 years ago. We do not know how Adam interacted with the existing humanoids, whether there was any interbreeding.37

Even if Adam and his children (humanity) share genes with various humanoid creatures that have existed, this does not  mean we are directly descended from them, just that God used some of their genetic code to create Adam, the same way he used the genetic code of existing humans to create Jesus from dust.

We can assume that God already had the full genetic code of humans before the creation of the universe as mentioned, and it is for this reason that he can take full credit for the creation of humans (and all the other creatures) despite the fact that they evolved naturally. This universe is simply a seemingly automated factory that follows a program placed inside it (embedded in its topological features) by God that is designed to lead to the origination of life and ultimately humanoids. Therefore it is not that God “took” genetic code from other humanoids to place them in Adam during his creation. He already had all of the genetic code to begin with, even before the universe was created. He placed some of the code in those humanoids indirectly (using evolution driven by topology), and some in Adam directly. The code in both cases comes from God’s “library”, so to speak, one travels indirectly, hiding in the universe’s topology until, after billions of years, it is brought to life through evolution, and one travels directly, with God creating Adam from dust based on that same code. At the time of Adam’s creation, God may have already had a library full of genetic code used in previous universes for all that we know.

It is a case of starting with the recipe and building a massive universe in which the recipe can come into existence, without leaving any trace of one’s direct involvement in the process. God did not have to come look on the earth 10,000 or however many years ago to find genetic code to use for Adam. The code was already in His library.

To repeat what has already been said a number of times, none of the above is evidence for the truth of religion. It is, rather, evidence for the falsehood of the idea that there is a conflict between the religion of the Quran and the science of the origination and evolution of life. The Quran’s theories are compatible with what the latest science tells us, and that is all that we need to know as Muslims. Therefore Muslims should stop denying evolution, and non-Muslims should stop using it in their critiques of Islam. They can of course continue using the hundreds of other critiques available.

The Problem of Hadith

As mentioned in the introduction, Islam is based on both the Quran and hadith (historical reports about the sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad). While it has been shown above that the Quran and evolution are compatible, there is still the issue of whether evolution is compatible with hadith. The Quran is far more authoritative than hadith in Islam due to the fact that it supposedly transmits God’s unadulterated words directly (while hadith texts are human interpretations of what was heard or took place), and due to the fact that orders of magnitude more effort went into the preservation and transmission of the Quran compared to hadith.

If it is shown that the Quran and evolution are compatible, the discovery of hadith narrations that go against evolution do not in any way prove that Islam was meant to be an anti-evolution religion. It could simply mean that a hadith fabricated or misunderstood by someone made its way into the hadith literature.

The issue of judging the authenticity of hadith is extremely complicated and cannot be carried out by amateurs. However, we now know that Islam’s great hadith collectors rejected hadith narrations that they considered patently absurd despite the fact that these hadith narrations were transmitted by supposedly trustworthy people.38 It is up to us to decide whether a rejection of evolution, once shown to be compatible with the Quran, is patently absurd. If we decide it is, then we can actually use evolution to critique hadith: any hadith text that unequivocally contradicts the theory of evolution can be thought to be unauthentic. This is not a modern fiction designed to drag Islam kicking and screaming into the 21st century. The reliability of hadith narrations is always a matter of statistical probability rather than certainty, therefore anything in the hadith literature that clearly contradicts objective reality can be discarded without being intellectually dishonest. The same does not apply to the Quran; even a single false statement in the Quran is sufficient to prove the entire book false. Hadith narrations, however, were transmitted piecemeal by thousands of people, therefore even if most are authentic, we can never know with complete certainty, except when it comes to a small minority of narrations, whether some narration truly transmits from the Prophet, transmits a highly distorted interpretation of something the Prophet said or did, or is entirely fabricated.

I write the above as something of a hadith traditionalist; I believe that it is safe to assume that any hadith judged authentic by hadith scholars is really authentic unless there is a very strong reason to doubt it. Mid-20th century Western scholarship cast doubts on the reliability of the hadith literature, with scholars such as Schacht and Crone recommending that the entire literature be considered fabricated unless proven otherwise. More recent scholarship, such as the works of Motzki and Lucas, has uncovered empirical evidence that strongly supports the traditional Islamic views on hadith.

Unlike hadith traditionalists, rather than considering the issue of authenticity a black and white issue, I support an empirical view that works according to probabilities. One authentic narration may be 99.99% likely to be true (such as one of those known as mutawātir), another one might be 95%, and another 90% likely to be authentic. I believe Islam can greatly benefit from explicitly adopting probability theory within the science of hadith. A Muslim who discovers an “authentic” narration that is ranked 90% likely to be authentic and which supports a certain view, and another that is ranked only 70% likely to be authentic and which supports a different view will be better able to know which view to prefer. With the present system, both narrations will simply be called “authentic”, making it nearly impossible for a non-expert to judge between them.

Beyond Guided Evolution

There is a theory that tries to reconcile creationism with evolution by arguing that evolution may be real, but that it is God who guides it behind the scenes. The theory offered in this essay has no need for that type of divine guidance that assumes God has to interfere in the world. In order to create the creatures He wants, all that God needs to do is get the starting conditions right at the Big Bang, and from there everything else is taken care of. All that God needs to do is get the production system working properly. As has already been mentioned, the universe can be thought of as a factory for creating life forms. The universe’s topology acts as a template that shapes or sculpts the course of evolution, the same way that the various robots in a car factory assembly line shape and sculpt the final product.

Through designing a universe with exactly the right qualities needed for the origination and evolution of life, God can create whatever He wants without necessarily having to interfere with the process afterwards. Only a defective factory would require that God tinker with the production process after launching it. If His factory is perfect, there would be no need for further tinkering later on.

A believer who questions whether God can really and intentionally, in a single step (the Big Bang), launch a factory that billions of years later leads to various forms of life is actually questioning God’s power. If God’s power and knowledge are infinite, there is no reason to doubt that He can do this.

As for an atheist who questions whether things could be this way, their right to skepticism is not denied. The point that this essay is making is that there is a theory that can explain how God and evolution can co-exist without canceling each other out, so that atheists may stop using evolution as an argument against God, and so that the religious may start loving evolution and working on it rather than considering it a challenge to their faith.

Since God desires plausible deniability, God’s existence must be impossible to prove, therefore there must always be scientific reasons that explain things without a need for God.

The reason that religious people feel a need for guided evolution is that they are stuck in the God-versus-nature paradigm. Al-Ghazali’s Matrix helps us escape this paradigm; this universe is no more real than an image projected on a screen, therefore it is silly to consider this mirage a challenge to the God who invented it and upholds it moment-by-moment lest it should cease to exist. Those who consider nature (and its study, meaning science) a challenge to God have not really appreciated His greatness.

The world of the Unseen, the supernatural, is by God’s design beyond human knowledge and measurement. Everything we see around us must have a logical explanation, or seem to, or there should be the hope of finding a logical explanation for it one day. There should never be anything provably supernatural. God must always maintain his own plausible deniability until the end of the world.

Do they mean to wait until the angels come to them, or for your Lord to arrive, or for some of your Lord’s signs to come? On the Day when some of your Lord’s signs come, no soul will benefit from its faith unless it had believed previously, or had earned goodness through its faith. Say, ‘Wait, we too are waiting.’39

Atheists say they want to wait for hard evidence for God’s existence before they believe in the fairy tales present in scripture. The Quran tells religious people to say the same thing; that we too are waiting. The above verse can be considered a pointer to the proper religious mindset toward science. We too acknowledge, with atheists, that there is no hard evidence for God’s existence. They say they will wait for hard evidence before believing, we say we believe in the soft evidence of scripture and wait for hard evidence, and for this we will be rewarded.

What I say here is not the final word on Islam and evolution. It is an educated but personal attempt at making sense of the issue.

Updated April 2, 2019.

IslamQA: On Islam, Homosexuality and Homosexual Muslims

You don't have to answer this because its a very complex question but do you think you can be Muslim and gay? And how should we as Muslims feel about gays? How shall we treat them? How do you reconcile Islam (in the sense it is a religion that discourages/disagrees with homosexuality) with homosexuality? Is there even anything to reconcile? How should Islam (or I guess Muslims) move about in this world that supports homosexuality? Is there a compromise that can be made in such a pluralistic world?

There is nothing wrong with having homosexual feelings, the same way there is nothing wrong with a man having sexual attraction toward another man’s wife. The attraction exists, what Islam forbids is acting upon it.

We can speculate about the reason why God forbids these things, for example it appears that any society that approves of sex outside of marriage and homosexuality quickly dies out due to low fertility rates. There isn’t a single civilization on Earth today that has tolerated homosexuality for centuries on end and survived.

I don’t doubt that some people can have highly fulfilling homosexual relationships, the same way that people can have highly fulfilling relationships outside of marriage. What matters is that God considers these harmful, and so He forbids them.

We do not need to be convinced of the harms of these things to avoid them. God forbids that we eat bacon, although by all accounts it is an extremely tasty thing to eat. We do not need to be convinced that bacon is bad for our health, God forbids it, therefore we avoid it. God forbids that we eat during the daytime in Ramadan, even though the food and water in the Ramadan daytime are just as nourishing as they are at night. The food and drink don’t turn into poison during the day, yet God forbids that we consume them.

The Quran gives a certain structure to our lives that we have to implement, even if we do not fully appreciate the wisdom behind it. The matter all boils down to the Quran, one reads it, becomes convinced that it is truly from the Creator, and decides of their own free will to follow it, which means they will follow all of it, including the parts of it that they do not fully understand, because, since they are convinced that it is from the Creator, they trust Him to know what is best for them.

Part of the structure that the Quran gives to our lives is to not have sex outside of marriage, and to not engage in homosexual relationships, despite whatever fulfillment that exists in these things. As God’s lowly servants, we can only say “We hear and we obey.” (The Quran, verse 24:51).

Reconciling Islam with homosexuality is similar to reconciling Islam with the desires of a man who is not satisfied with having sex within marriage only but constantly desires other women. While there might be scientific reasons for their desires, and while carrying out their desires might give them extreme fulfillment, Islam requires that they do not act on their desires for the greater good, therefore there can be no reconciliation.

A person who has homosexual desires might wonder, “What is so wrong with desiring a person of the same sex? We don’t mean harm to anyone, and our relationship is consensual.” What’s wrong with it is that it goes against the structure that God wants to give to our lives. It is similar to eating in the daytime during Ramadan. You can do it without meaning harm to anyone, and it can give you pleasure, but it goes against the rules that God has placed.

If one thinks God’s rules are silly and not worth following, then this is not about homosexuality, it is about their not believing in the Quran. And if they believe in the Quran but feel that it is unjustly discriminating against them, this is similar to a person feeling it is unjustly discriminating against their desire for alcohol, or for sex outside of marriage. It might feel unjust and oppressive, but it is for the greater good.

If a person feels that giving up the fulfillment of a homosexual relationship for the greater good is not worth it, then they are choosing the present life at the expense of the hereafter. Millions of people have taken this choice in various ways, choosing fulfillment in the present life instead of being content with God’s commandments, to their ultimate loss.

Homosexuality is just another condition that prevents a Muslim from having satisfactory intimate relationships. There are thousands of such conditions, and there is nothing special about homosexuality that makes one deserve to break God’s laws so that one can attain fulfillment.

A Muslim engaging in homosexual sex saying there is no other way for them to receive fulfillment is like a poor Muslim man of 60 who really desires women but who has never had sex saying that he deserves to sleep with a prostitute in order to receive fulfillment, since God has prevented him from getting fulfillment the acceptable way, or like a crippled Muslim woman who thinks she can never get married saying that she is allowed to get sex outside of marriage since there is no other way for her.

There are many people living with horrible conditions that prevent them from enjoying life and cause them great suffering, or that prevent them from ever having intimate relationships. Being homosexual and not being able to enjoy heterosexual relationships is just one of those thousands of conditions. Many Muslims patiently suffer through such conditions, and they do not justify breaking God’s laws in order to attain fulfillment.

Millions of Muslim men and women desire marriage but live their lives without enjoying an intimate relationship even once because they are too poor or too unattractive to marry, or they are attractive but there is no one they can marry, and in this way they get old and die without marrying.

For a homosexual Muslim, the matter is entirely between themselves and God. They should read the Quran and use their conscience to decide the best course of action, and they should reject the 24/7 propaganda in the West that constantly tells them they should act on their desires.

As for dealing with a Muslim who has homosexual desires but who does not act on them, then they should be treated like any other Muslim, since they haven’t broken any Islamic laws.

And as for dealing with Muslims who do engage in homosexual acts, they should be dealt with like other sinners, for example those who engage in heterosexual sex outside of marriage, or those who drink alcohol. We should treat them in public with politeness like we treat all people. If we have a close friend who is a sinner, we can admonish them with kind words if they are close enough to not be offended by our words. As for distant friends and acquaintances; we will not cause a Muslim alcoholic to suddenly come back to the Straight Path by calling them sinners or sending them articles about how people like them will go to hell. In such cases, it is best to avoid them, or if we have to interact with them, to be as polite and generous as we always are.

If such a person seeks our friendship or help, we should not reject them automatically. The Prophet, peace be upon him, says: “For God to guide another person through you is greater in worth than red camels.” Red camels were considered the most valuable commodity in Arabia at that time. (Bukhari and Muslim)

But he also says: “The similitude of good company and that of bad company is that of the owner of musk and of the one blowing the bellows. The owner of musk would either offer you some free of charge, or you would buy it from him, or you smell its pleasant fragrance; and as for the one who blows the bellows (i.e., the blacksmith), he either burns your clothes or you smell a repugnant smell.” (Bukhari and Muslim)

Associating with any type of sinner can be good for both of you; they may be encouraged to become better people, and you could earn the rewards of being a cause for them to come back to the Straight Path. But it could also be harmful for both of you, in that you could become involved with their sin, and in this way both of you could earn punishment, you for falling into sin, and they for being a cause for it. What one should do is not a clear matter, it is a conscience call, and one should decide on a case-by-case basis. There is no single rule that fits all cases.

To reiterate regarding your main question (whether there is something to reconcile), there isn’t. Homosexual sex is like sex outside of marriage, drinking alcohol or engaging in usury. There is nothing to reconcile. Regardless of how common it is, or the billions of dollars that leftist billionaires spend promoting it, we must judge things according to how God judges them, even if this makes us unfashionable. Fashions come and go, but God’s words remain the same. Today it is fashionable to legally steal money from the poor through usury, and every rich celebrity engages in it by “investing” their money into various financial institutions that lend money at usury. Just because fashionable people do this does not mean we should follow their example or approve of it or try to reconcile Islam with their desires. They may all have a mental condition that makes them really like stealing money from the poor. Islam, however, asks them to not carry out their desires for the greater good even if what they do is perfectly acceptable according to today’s fashions.

200 years ago in the West usurers were treated like the most disgusting wretches of society by Christians. Today almost every single Christian engages in usury through mortgages and various investments, and even the Vatican lends money at usury through the Vatican Bank. Have they gained anything by this other than God’s wrath and the hollowing out and demise of their culture and civilization?

Question:

I'm not Muslim but I've been looking into the religion lately. I'm just wondering why don't Muslims stand up for the ways LGBT are treated in Muslim countries? I understand that the Koran is against homosexual acts but I don't understand why they are OK with gays and lesbians being alienated, beaten and killed in Muslim countries. It scares me that Muslims have so much hatred for them. If I can understand this part then maybe I can understand the rest of the religion.

It first be noted that Islam is not forced upon people. People are free to embrace it or leave it as they see fit. Classical Islam ignores this right and considers leaving Islam a punishable offense, which is against the Quran.

Ideally, Islamic law is enacted by democratic choose. If the majority of the people in a state are Muslim, they can elect to have Islamic law as the basis of their legal system. While if Muslims are a minority and are not in charge of the country, as in the West, then they do not have the right to use force to make others follow Islam, therefore they must either tolerate what the law allows or leave the country. They can take part in the democratic process, like the various different religious and political groups in the United States do, in order to affect the legal system.

In Islamic law, engaging in homosexual acts is a punishable crime, meaning that a Muslim majority country can use the democratic process to enact a law that punishes homosexual acts.

Punishing sexual acts is something that is done throughout the world, but different countries have different ideas about what is acceptable. In the United States, for example, pedophilia is punishable by law and the police is allowed to use extreme violence against people wanting to engage in it, or to even watch videos of people engaging in it. The reason for this is that the people of the United States agree that pedophilia is harmful to the child involved and to the rest of society. Regardless of how much fulfillment pedophilia brings to a pedophile, they are required to keep themselves in check and to neither engage in it, or even watch videos of others engaging in it. They are required to stay put and act as if they are not pedophiles, for the sake of society’s greater good.

Homosexual acts are of course not like the acts of pedophiles, since it involves consenting adults. So why would a society punish consenting adults for doing what brings them fulfillment and which seemingly harms no one?

The reason is that, according to the Islamic view, tolerating homosexuality has long-term harms to society. Even if in the short-term it brings great fulfillment to the people involved, in the long-term, thinking in terms of generations and centuries, it brings great harm. A plague is still a plague whether it takes one year to cause a civilization to go extinct, or whether it takes two centuries.

There isn’t a single civilization existing today that has tolerated homosexuality for multiple centuries and survived. The civilization always experiences declining fertility rates and either collapses, is conquered, or its entire population is slowly replaced by a section of its population that does not tolerate homosexuality.

The harms of homosexuality are similar to the harms of usury (the charging of interest). You can get a credit card, a mortgage and invest in bonds without seemingly doing any harm to anyone, and without suffering harm. But on a macro level (looking at the entire economy), usury always leads to exponentially increasing wealth inequality, a soulless corporate economy that is controlled by the banks, a corrupt corporate media that is fully in bed with the banks and the political elite, and a defense-military-intelligence complex that constantly seeks to get into new wars, because new wars require the issuance of bonds, and the super-rich earn hundreds of billions of dollars every single year on their bond investments, so the more bonds, the better, and if they get the country into a war that costs trillions, that means tens of billions of extra annual interest income for them.

Islam, since it is a religion from God, takes society’s long-term interest into account, its interest over generations and centuries, and for this reason it requires them to avoid short-term fulfillment (sex outside of marriage, credit cards, cars bought on loan) for the sake of the long-term good of themselves and their civilization.

You can argue that since homosexuality is between consenting adults, it is unlikely to do any short-term or long-term harm to society. But you do not know that. Every society on earth that tolerates homosexuality has a below-replacement fertility rate as far as I know, and this means that the society is slowly, but surely, going extinct. Since this process takes many generations, most people couldn’t care less about it. But Islam cares, because Islam has a very-long-term view, it is a religion that thinks in terms of generations and centuries.

For these same reasons, Islam forbids sex outside of marriage, even though it is perfectly natural for people to have sexual desire toward each other and want to be intimate.

The central mission of Islam is to follow the Straight Path, and the Straight Path is made up of two things:

  • Ensuring humanity’s long-term survival
  • Preserving humanity’s short-term moral integrity (never justifying evil for utilitarian purposes)

So a society of intelligent and devout Muslims living on an isolated planet have both of these things assured. Their civilization will not die out like so many other civilizations do. And their civilization never justifies evil (such as killing innocent people when there is something to be gained by it, like the CIA and every intelligence organization in the world does) for the sake of some gain. Even if doing an evil act will ensure great gain for the civilization (such as the US funding various terrorist groups because it advances its geopolitical goals), the civilization instead chooses to lose out on that opportunity, because to it, its mortal integrity is more important than material gain.

Islam’s punishment for all sex outside of marriage is flogging, and this includes homosexual acts. Homosexual acts are just a subcategory of “sex outside of marriage”.

As for killing homosexuals, it is similar to killing adulterers, both of which are against Quranic law, although most classical Islamic scholars support both of them, because they prefer hadith over the Quran.

Any punishment homosexuals receive should be after due process. There is no such thing in Islam as individuals taking the law into their own hands. This is similar to honor killings, which in Islam would be considered murder, but which is carried out in the Middle East and Southeast Asia by many cultures, Muslim and non-Muslim. Classical Islamic scholars have been party to this crime (of killing people without due process) by being silent about it, and by accepting the corruption of the Quran’s place as Islam’s central authority, preferring less reliable hadith narrations over its principles and teachings.

As I mentioned in the earlier part of this essay, a homosexual who doesn’t engage in homosexual acts is not a sinner and Islamic law has nothing against them they are similar to anyone else wanting to have sex outside of marriage but not doing it.

The reason that in Muslim countries few people stand up for the “rights” of homosexuals is the same reason that few people in the United States stand up for the “rights” of pedophiles. Homosexuality is taboo and practicing it is forbidden and considered harmful in Muslim countries. Pedophilia is taboo and practicing it is forbidden and considered harmful in the United States.

Very few people in the United States stand up for the “rights” of pedophiles, even if it is a pedophile who has a genetic preference for children and who promises to never touch a child, because standing up for their rights causes one to be associated with them, and very few people want that. In the same way, in Muslim countries standing up for the “rights” of homosexuals is similarly taboo and few people want to be associated with it.

As the world progresses, Muslim countries will hopefully adopt the Quranic attitude toward homosexuality, which is that there is nothing wrong with it as long as it is not acted upon, and that if acted upon and proven after due process, the punishment is not execution but the Quranic punishment of 100 lashes.

As for what “hope” there might be for homosexual rights in Muslim-majority countries, it is similar to what “hope” there is for pedophiles in the United States. They are required to stay put and not to engage in their desires for the greater good.

Again, I am aware that homosexuality and pedophilia are extremely different, but it is useful to compare them since both of them involve sexual acts that are violently suppressed by society. While the Western view of “sexual acts that must be violently suppressed” only includes pedophilia and rape, the Islamic view expands this definition to also include sex outside of marriage, which automatically includes all homosexual acts.

A homosexual is treated with hatred in Muslim countries for the same reason that a pedophile is treated with hatred in the United States. Both of them threaten to do harm to society, it is just that the Islamic view takes very-long-term harm into account, while the Western view is short-sighted and only cares about immediate or short-term (single-generation) harm.

IslamQA: What happened to Islamic civilization? Why did Muslims fall behind in science and technology?

I wanted your in depth opinion on a particular observation. Muslims, historically speaking, have been responsible for hundreds and thousands of scientific discoveries. What happened to us? Why are we in the stage we are?

Only 100 years ago, which is just a little more than one human lifetime, the Ottoman Empire was a sovereign Muslim nation that could stand up to any Western power. No Jewish colonizer would have dared to terrorize and massacre Palestinians when the Ottoman Empire was there to protect its citizens.

While many Muslims, including scholars, think that Muslims were always powerful, capable and thriving throughout history until modern times, this is mostly a romantic fairy tale told to console and encourage.

The Crusaders were able to take Jerusalem and other parts of the Levant from the Muslims in 1099 CE and ruled it for nearly 100 years. Where were the great Muslim powers in this time that they couldn’t take it back? The Middle East was a mix of weak and fractured “Muslim” powers, who were only Muslim in name but in general acted like any modern power, using religion to justify their actions while being under the influence and sometimes control of foreign non-Muslim powers.

The current weakness and powerlessness of Muslims is similar to their state during the Mongol invasions. Some Muslims thought the end of the world had arrived, thinking the Mongols were the promised Ya’jooj and Ma’jooj (Gog and Magog) mentioned in the Quran. The Mongols utterly destroyed the Sunni Muslim Khwarezmian Empire which controlled nearly all of Modern Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and parts of Afghanistan and Kazakhstan, and which had existed for 150 years, through the wholesale slaughter of men, women and children. After that, they went on to destroy Baghdad and Damascus, although the Abbasid Empire had been in decline for centuries before the Mongols arrived.

On the other side of the Medieval world, Muslims ruled nearly half of Spain for nearly 800 years, until 1492 CE (which is also the year the Americas were discovered). Just as they threw Muslims out of Spain, Christians went on to conquer two continents, spread Christian rule all over them, and eventually built the world’s most powerful nation there.

The Myth of Continuous Power Increase

There is a myth among Muslims that since they belong to God’s chosen religion, they should have been able to establish a globally dominant power that ruled the world forever. But God doesn’t promise us that. He promises that we will be tested:

You will be tested through your possessions and your persons; and you will hear from those who received the Scripture before you, and from the idol worshipers, much abuse. But if you persevere and lead a righteous life—that indeed is a mark of great determination.1

God also threatens us with His ability to remove us from power and replace us with others if we do not follow His guidance:

131. To God belongs everything in the heavens and everything on earth. We have instructed those who were given the Book before you, and you, to be conscious of God. But if you refuse—to God belongs everything in the heavens and everything on earth. God is in no need, Praiseworthy.

132. To God belongs everything in the heavens and everything on earth. God suffices as Manager.

133. If He wills, He can do away with you, O people, and bring others. God is Able to do that. 2

Verse 131 above mention’s God’s warning to the People of the Book. The Old Testament contains many promises by God that if His people disobey, He will abandon them to whatever that may happen to them, and that He will make others dominant over them. In the Book of Deuteronomy (part of the Old Testament, and part of the Torah), prophet Musa (Moses) says:

25 When thou shalt beget children, and children's children, and ye shall have remained long in the land, and shall corrupt yourselves, and make a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, and shall do evil in the sight of the Lord thy God, to provoke him to anger:

26 I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that ye shall soon utterly perish from off the land whereunto ye go over Jordan to possess it; ye shall not prolong your days upon it, but shall utterly be destroyed.

27 And the Lord shall scatter you among the nations, and ye shall be left few in number among the heathen, whither the Lord shall lead you.3

The Quran, too, mentions prophet Musa saying similar things:

6. Moses said to his people, “Remember God’s blessings upon you, as He delivered you from the people of Pharaoh, who inflicted on you terrible suffering, slaughtering your sons while sparing your daughters. In that was a serious trial from your Lord.”

7. And when your Lord proclaimed: “If you give thanks, I will grant you increase; but if you are ungrateful, My punishment is severe.”

8. And Moses said, “Even if you are ungrateful, together with everyone on earth—God is in no need, Worthy of Praise.” 4

Our relationship with God is not one where He constantly supports us just because we say we are His nation, unlike some Muslims and many Jews think. Here is the Jewish feminist author Naomi Wolf expressing her surprise at finding out (by reading the Hebrew Bible) that unlike what many Jews think, God does not promise them never-ending support just because they are “His chosen people”:

He never says: "I will give you, ethnic Israelites, the land of Israel." Rather He says something far more radical - far more subversive -- far more Godlike in my view. He says: IF you visit those imprisoned...act mercifully to the widow and the orphan...welcome the stranger in your midst...tend the sick...do justice and love mercy ....and perform various other tasks...THEN YOU WILL BE MY PEOPLE AND THIS LAND WILL BE YOUR LAND. So "my people" is not ethnic -- it is transactional. We are God's people not by birth but by a way of behaving, that is ethical, kind and just. And we STOP being "God's people" when we are not ethical, kind and just.5

She is not quite correct when she says “my people” is not ethnic. Jews are God’s chosen, but being chosen does not necessarily mean one is chosen for a good thing. Jews are God’s chosen in that He gave them many scriptures and throughout the centuries continuously sent them new prophets to guide them back to the Straight Path. He chose them for a specific test. Their being chosen is not just a privilege, it is both a privilege and a heavy burden. If they reject God despite being chosen, God sends the most terrible punishments on them, like He has done many times throughout history. Many Jews forget the burden and choose to enjoy the privilege of thinking of themselves as God’s chosen elite.

Our relationship with God is contractual. If we obey, He supports us. If we disobey, He stops supporting us and subjects us to unfriendly powers.

The story of the Jews is a good lesson for us. Many times in their history they were extremely powerful. After they left Egypt, they entered Canaan around 1446 BCE. They disobeyed God when they were about to overtake a city and live in it, so God punished them by having them wander in the desert for 40 years. They finally entered Canaan in 1406 BCE and completely conquered it by 1399 BCE. Once they become a sovereign power, they soon start to do evil, abandoning God, worshiping Baal or the Calf, practicing usury or allying themselves with irreligious foreign powers like Egypt. For this reason, as they rejected and sometimes even killed their prophets, every few generations God would send a powerful foreign power to destroy many of their cities and slaughter many of their people.

When they continued to reject God, He sent Babylon to conquer their lands and sent them into exile for 70 years. After that the Persian emperor, whose empire had conquered Babylon, allowed the Jews to return to their lands and reestablish themselves there. Their story continued the same as before, with them doing evil and being punished for it. In 70 AD, a few decades after they rejected Jesus and tried to kill him, they tried to escape the rule of the Roman empire. In return they had their city of Jerusalem utterly destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Jews killed.

The Arch of Titus, which commemorates the Roman victory over the Jews, among other things, still stands in Rome.

Titus, the Roman commander who was in charge of the Roman victory over the Jews, is supposed to have refused to wear a wreath after the victory, saying that he was only acting as a tool of God’s wrath over the Jews. Perhaps this was God’s punishment on them for their rejecting God’s prophet Jesus.

In Jewish history there is an important historical lesson; that just because a nation associates itself with God and claims to be His people does not mean they will always have God’s support.

Muslim nations have had a history similar to that of the Jews. Many powerful Muslim states have risen and fallen throughout history, and this process is not going to end. If we establish a caliphate like some Muslims dream about, and even if it rules the world for 1000 years, if most of the population abandons Islamic values and Islam becomes largely culture and tradition and not faith, then that caliphate too will fail. God will enable another Mongol invasion, or another invasion by the British and the French, to come and divide their caliphate and do with it as they please.

Christianity’s Place in Islamic History

Just as Islam faded in the Middle East and became little more than cultural tradition and ceremony, Christianity rose in the West. The Christians who conquered the Americas thought they were doing it for God’s sake. They read the Bible daily, they established Biblical law in their colonies, and they braved many dangers in order to establish families, villages and cities in empty and hostile lands.

God’s promise in the Quran came true for them for their deeds:

65. Had the People of the Scripture believed and been righteous, We would have remitted their sins, and admitted them into the Gardens of Bliss.

66. Had they observed/enforced the Torah, and the Gospel, and what was revealed to them from their Lord, they would have consumed amply from above them, and from beneath their feet. Among them is a moderate community, but evil is what many of them are doing.6

While it is common for many Muslims to think of Christians as nothing but heathens who should magically disappear now that Islam has come, Christians are as much God’s people as Muslims are, that is, they too have a contract with God, and if they uphold their contract with God, God will uphold His contract with them. If a Christian nation is more faithful, more eager to serve God, and more observant of God’s laws, then we shouldn’t be surprised if God gives them His full support.

This was the case in the Americas and much of Western Europe until 1900 CE. With all of the corruption present, the average person’s actions and thinking were still largely controlled by Christian ideals.

Today, things are different. The West has finally abandoned the religion that made it great. The only reason the West is great today is the momentum of the past. A Muslim may lose hope when they look at the United States and see its immense capacity to dominate and do evil throughout the world. But the United States is already past its prime. It is desperately trying to hold onto its past power, constantly threatening Russia, China and Iran, but incapable of doing anything about them as they continue to rise.

The United States has had a below-replacement fertility rate since the 1970’s. If it wasn’t for their continuous importation of immigrants, their population would have been shrinking by now. A decades-long below-replacement fertility rate is all that is needed to illustrate that a nation is failing.

It is a country’s population that gives a nation its economic, technological and military power, and once the population starts to shrink, its power will decrease, because there will be fewer people to innovate, and fewer people to consume the fruits of these innovations and in this way pay for further innovations. Today the United States can afford to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on military spending every year, and it is this spending that enables various military companies to continue innovating. But as the American tax base and economy both shrink, with this its power to spend will shrink. America is on a trajectory to become the next Portugal, once a global superpower, now almost a complete non-entity (unless it continues to import immigrants, but this cannot go on forever).

One illustration of the continuing fall of the United States is that of the world’s top 15 skyscrapers (those higher than 350 meters) finished in the past 3 years, 10 are in China, and only one in the United States. China continues to rise, the United States continues to stagnate and fall. America’s failing economy has no need for new office buildings, hotels and restaurants, since it already has more than its shrinking economy needs.

The answer to the question of why Muslims are so powerless compared to the West these days is that Islamic history ran into Christian history. Christian power was still rising when it clashed with an Ottoman Empire that was already past its prime, so the Ottomans didn’t stand a chance.

Today, Christian powers too are past their prime, and great change is coming.

The United States is unlikely to become a Portugal any time soon, and if Islam continues to spread, it might change into a new type of superpower without becoming irrelevant.

It should be noted that while China’s rise will probably be a good thing in the short-term, as its rise to power will probably prevent further significant US excesses for the next few decades, once it is firmly established as the world’s most powerful country, it could start acting like the US, forcing every other country to either become a de facto client state or get turned into a war zone.

The Long View of History

Even if Muslims establish a new global superpower that lasts for hundreds of years, it too can eventually fail and get conquered by non-Muslim powers. Imagine if this world continues to exist for the next 100,000 years. The story of Muslims being powerful then weak then powerful again might play out fifty or a hundred times more.

We humans want safety and security. We want to establish Paradise on Earth once and for all and then go on living in it. But that is not the purpose of this world, and dreams of establishing a Paradise on Earth are naive and futile. We are taught over and over again in the Quran that this world is worthless, that it will soon be over, that none of our deeds done in this world will last. The Quranic character Dhul Qarnain shows his appreciation for God’s message when he says the following right after completing building a structure for God’s sake:

He said, “This is a mercy from my Lord. But when the promise of my Lord comes true, He will turn it into rubble, and the promise of my Lord is always true.”7

For us Muslims, it is always about the journey, not the destination. It doesn’t matter what we accomplish in this world, because nothing we do will last. Everything we think we can accomplish, if God is really all-powerful, God can accomplish it in an instant if He wants. The point is not accomplishment in itself, the point is to follow God. What matters is the record of our deeds. No matter what we build, no matter how much power we have, we could see it all destroyed tomorrow. This has happened over and over again in history, though sadly we continue to fail to learn the lesson.

Why did God let the Mongols destroy Baghdad and Damascus if our purpose was to continue to gain power, wealth and fame in this world? Why did He let the Ottoman Empire, the last truly sovereign Muslim power, be invaded and destroyed? Why did He not allow the Arab powers to defeat Israel during their multiple wars?

Because this world is a test. It is not our purpose to build Paradise on Earth. Our purpose is khilafah, literally “to be stewards”. We are stewards of the earth. Our purpose is to take care of it by enjoining good and admonishing against evil, so that humanity continues, and so that the the earth does not become entirely corrupted.

A steward takes care of a farm until the owner returns, continuing the running of the farm as best as they can. It is the owner’s business what they do with the farm. In the same way, our job in this world is to continue be God’s stewards, God’s agents for good in this world, but it is His business what He does with this world, and whether He gives us power or takes it away from us. All that we can say is, “We hear and we obey.”

We are not seekers after power. The Prophet (peace be upon him) did not seek power, it was given to him. Neither did any of the righteous Rashidun caliphs. We do not seek to establish global dominance, or to carry out global war. Our job is to be God’s stewards, to walk on the Straight Path.

Being on the Straight Path does not require gaining power, and in fact the seeking of power is directly opposed to it, for the seeking of power always requires that one abandon one’s moral integrity. This is the story of every political party that starts out with high moral ideals only to become a nest of corruption and evil.

It is God who gives us power if we deserve it, and if the time is right, for His own purposes, and as long as it pleases Him, until He takes it away from us. As for us, we must be thankful and content throughout all of this:

No, but worship God, and be among the thankful ones.8

It is God who manages history for us. We are not in charge, God is.

No calamity strikes except by God’s permission. Whoever believes in God, He guides his heart. God is Aware of everything.9

No calamity occurs on earth, or in your souls, but it is in a Book, even before We make it happen. That is easy for God. That you may not sorrow over what eludes you, nor exult over what He has given you. God does not love the proud snob.10

God does not change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves. And if God wills any hardship for a people, there is no turning it back; and apart from Him they have no protector.11

God has promised those of you who believe and do righteous deeds, that He will make them successors on earth, as He made those before them successors, and He will establish for them their religion—which He has approved for them—and He will substitute security in place of their fear. They worship Me, never associating anything with Me. But whoever disbelieves after that—these are the sinners. 12

Our job is to do good wherever we find ourselves, to worship God, to be kind and just, to follow His commandments as best as we can, and it is God who will establish us on Earth when He pleases:

God has promised those of you who believe and do righteous deeds, that He will make them stewards on Earth, as He made those before them stewards, and He will establish for them their religion—which He has approved for them—and He will substitute security in place of their fear. They worship Me, never associating anything with Me. But whoever disbelieves after that—these are the sinners.13

We can, of course, be political activists and social critics. We can constantly work toward social justice and the lifting of poverty. But instead of doing these by seeking power first, we do them without seeking power. We do what is right and just and kind toward everyone, and God, if He wishes, can give us power any time He wants.

Ibn al-Jawzi says in his Sayd al-Khaatir (“Quarry of the Mind”):

I reflected upon the envy that exists among scholars, and saw that its source is the love of the worldly life, because the scholars of the afterlife engage in love and do not envy others. What separates the two groups is that the scholars of the worldly life seek power and leadership in it, and they love to accumulate wealth and praise, while the scholars of the afterlife live in seclusion from these things, they fear them and have mercy toward those who are being tested by them.

Truly good and kind people, who fear God and take the afterlife seriously, do not seek power in my experience. Sometimes the right situation arises for a good person to rise and become powerful, as it happened with Saladin. Saladin wasn’t a revolutionary who grabbed power or a politician. He became powerful as part of his job as a military commander, and one thing led to another until he became a powerful ruler.

The writer Frank Herbert says the following in Chapterhouse: Dune, and I find them true from all that I have seen:

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological
personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the
corruptible.

Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it.

Scientific vs. Divine Explanations for Islam’s Decline: Islam, Christianity and Indo-European Genes

A mistake many people make, both religious and irreligious, is that when they discover a scientific explanation for something, they start to think that it means that thing is not from God. But it is a principle of God that He will never allow us to have direct evidence of His existence, therefore when God does something, it is always through scientific means, or He makes it appear to be that way. God will not carry out miracles that can be recorded and published on YouTube. The only time that we will have direct proof of the existence of God and the rest of the Unseen is at the end of the world. When the pagans requested that they see an angel before they believe in God, God’s reply was this:

Had We sent down an angel, the matter would have been settled, and they would not have been reprieved.14

If we ever had direct evidence of God’s existence, then there would be no need for faith in God. God does not want that to happen, therefore everything that happens to us must have logical scientific explanations. We can examine Islamic history to find out where things went wrong. But even if we discover every single cause and try to cure it, our success is not guaranteed.

The divine reason for the fall of Muslims is that they abandoned Islam in their hearts, while the scientific reason might be the demographic collapse of the Persian population after the endless flood of Turkic and Mongol attacks that devastated the great Persian-speaking cities of Central Asia (over 90% of Islam’s greatest scholars, thinkers and scientists came from these cities). The divine reasons precede the scientific reasons. If we disobey God, God will bring about logical and scientifically-explainable reasons for our destruction. And if we obey God, and carry out our stewardship in the best manner possible, God will inspire us toward whatever will give us success and power in this world.

Conclusion

As Muslims, our goal in life is not to acquire power, glory or supremacy in this world. Our goal is not to establish Paradise on Earth. We can appreciate technological and scientific accomplishments, and we can work toward them as part of our stewardship on Earth, but we must never lose sight of the fact that ultimately, everything we do is meant to serve God, and that a day will come when all of our worldly works will be destroyed as if they never existed.

In this world, we are stewards of a temporary farm, a farm whose Owner has promised to destroy in the end. We must never get attached to this farm, or seek its improvement or power over it as a goal in itself. We must never get attached to the idea of establishing a global power. Even if we establish one, it too can come and go like every other Muslim power in history. History will continue going in cycles, Muslims will rise to power, fall, and rise again. The only people who achieve success are those who fear God and serve Him in the best way possible. It is only the record of our deeds which lasts forever, everything else is temporary.

If Muslims are weak today, look again in 500 years, and they may be the strongest and most technologically advanced power on Earth. Look again in 1500 years, and they may again be weak,  oppressed and backward. It is God who gives and God who takes. If we are thankful and obedient, He will increase us and improve our station in life, and if we are ungrateful, He can always take it all away from us and subjugate us to others.

Note that I am not saying that Muslims should turn their backs on science and progress. I love science and technology and eagerly follow its news, and I look forward to Muslim societies catching up to Western ones. Last year Muslim-majority Malaysia overtook Japan in its scientific research output per capita, as the graph below shows, and that is a very hopeful sign for the growth of scientific knowledge among Muslims:

The graph shows the number of scientific research papers published by each country divided by its citizens in millions. In 2017 Malaysia produced 936 papers per million citizen, while Japan produced 892.

Other Muslim nations have shown tremendous growth in scientific research as well. Egypt today produces five times more scientific and scholarly research compared to a mere 15 years ago. Iran is on track to catch up with European countries before 2030. These are things to look forward to, but we should not lose sight of the bigger picture.

Why God Allows Evil to Exist, and Why Bad Things Happen to Good People

Introduction

There is a surprising amount of confusion among the religious, even among clerics and scholars, when it comes to understanding why evil exists and why God stands aside when so much suffering happens throughout the world. Most of us express wonder when we see some horrible catastrophe happen, or when we see evil individuals, companies and institutions wield so much power. Some people even go so far as to blame God for the evil things that exist in this world, since if God had desired, He could have prevented such things from existing or happening in the first place. Others take this even further, using the existence of evil as proof of God’s non-existence. How can a good and supposedly all-powerful God stand by while so much evil happens? Where is our God?

There are good, perfectly logical explanations for these things, deep explanations that elucidate the purpose of this universe, our place in it, and our relationship with God, and through this give us perfectly good reasons for the existence of evil.

Why Evil Exists

What is the point of the existence of this world anyway? Many mistakenly think that the purpose of this world is to be a permanent residence where people judge whether God exists or not. They think that they can gauge God’s “level” of existence by the things that happen around them, so that given the right set of events, they will decide He is alive and active, and given others, they will decide He doesn’t exist, because if He existed, the world wouldn’t be the way it is.

A friend said that he once went on a trip abroad, and before he left, he asked God to protect three things that were most important to him in his life. During his trip, he lost all three, which included the dying of loved ones, and this made him decide that God doesn’t exist. He is a Buddhist now.

The above case is an example of earth-centric thinking, that considers this world a goal in itself. This is the core mistake that leads to millions of people misunderstanding, even disliking, God. That is a mistake because this world is nothing besides a testing hall where humans can freely choose to do as they like, to prove their worthiness of God’s approval or wrath. This world is not meant to be a permanent residence.

Most religions teach that an end of the world is coming. Regardless of religion, the universe is on track to become a dark, lifeless mass as the stars and galaxies die out. Everything is going to end, and what remains is the record of our deeds, kept by God. Even if we manage to create the greatest empire on earth, or write the most wonderful novel, none of our accomplishments will last.

One day the universe will shut down as if it never existed, and on that day what significance can our achievements have? This world is not meant as a permanent home of peace, but as a test. And a test requires that the possibility of failure should exist. If all humans acted according to God’s wishes, evil would not exist. But since God has given humans the freedom to disobey Him, they have the ability to do evil.

God is good, and evil is the absence of goodness, the same way that darkness is the absence of light. If God is Light, we cannot blame Him for the darkness we encounter when we turn away from Him, distance ourselves from Him, and act against His wishes.

Why didn’t God make the universe a place of wholesome goodness lacking in the possibility for evil? Because if evil could not exist, humans wouldn’t truly be free beings.

To be free, humans require the freedom to act against God along with the freedom to act for His sake. God wants to give humans perfect freedom to act and grow, so that they can be the best or the worst they want to be. Since humans have the freedom to act against God, and since to act against God is to create evil, humans have been given the freedom to create evil.

God did not make this world a perfect place because that is not its purpose. Imagine if you were a maker of creatures. If the creatures you made were controlled by their nature to do exactly what you put in them to do, they could never be truly your friends. They would be subservient robot-like machines that cannot help doing whatever you put in them to do.

But imagine if one day you wanted something more. You wanted to make creatures that could truly be your friends. The only way to have a true friend is to create a creature that can choose whether to be your friend or not. And so, you make creatures with free will, who can act according to whatever they wish, rather than according to your programming. Some of these creatures will choose to be your friends, others will ignore you, others will choose to be your enemies. They may fight among themselves, doing much evil to one another, and blaming you, their creator, for the evil they do, when in truth they should blame themselves, for they are the ones choosing to act the way they do. They have the freedom to be good, and many of them choose to be good, but some of them  choose to be evil instead.

The only thing we can blame God for is His creating us and giving us the freedom to be evil. This is a pointless blame. This is our reality and our fate, we cannot escape it. We have been thrown into this game regardless of our wishes, a game that forces us to choose to be either good or evil. We can debate the ethics of forcing people to choose between good and evil. But at the end of the day, we are forced to play this game. There is no dropping out.

Our Creator has done this to us, possibly against our will1, but we cannot get hung up over this fact, because our future holds something very important: Either eternal reward, or eternal punishment. Blaming God will not help our future. It may make us feel better now to hate God as so many do, but by making us think badly of God, this will reduce our chances of future success. The future is coming whether we want it to or not, and we have the power to make it a good or a bad future.2

Not all evil is done by humans. Droughts, floods and other natural disasters can cause much evil and suffering, and we can lose loved ones through car accidents and illnesses. Why doesn’t God prevent these things from happening if He loves us? Because, in order for the testing hall that is this world to be a true and consistent place of testing, God shouldn’t interfere with the functioning of nature3. The laws of nature should behave in such a way that makes sense even without reference to God. If we were as intelligent as we are, and yet we saw that nothing bad ever happened on earth, no car accidents, to illnesses, nothing, that everyone died in old age of natural causes, then this would be undeniable evidence of the existence of a higher power that protects humans.

God wants us to have the possibility of being atheists. It is one of God’s self-imposed rules that it should be impossible to directly detect His existence. And that requires that the functioning of this world should make perfect sense according to predictable scientific laws.

God wants us to believe in Him without seeing Him or knowing that He truly exists, because if it were possible to prove His existence, it would reduce our freedom to act against Him. God wants our universe to seem to make perfect sense without any necessity for His existence. This way we are given the freedom to discover Him and His Scriptures, and through our knowledge and conscience, we gain the ability to either follow His way or disbelieve in Him. Once we are given this knowledge, there is no turning away from the choice between good and evil.4

God wants our test to be a perfect test, in which we have perfect freedom to be good or evil. This would allow us to take credit for our actions. If God’s existence were proven, we’d be turned into slaves who cannot help but do as He says. We’d become merchants who act in our best interests by following God’s commandments. This is not what God wants. God wants us to be honored creatures who befriend Him not because we are forced to, but because we choose to. This is what gives worth to our friendship.

There is little honor in an employee acting according to his or her boss’s wishes, this is the expected behavior. While even this amount of obedience to a boss justifies reward, so that even if we had proof of God’s existence, we could still be rewarded for obeying Him5, God wants to take us beyond this boss-employee relationship. He wants to raise us to the status of honored friends, who act out of love and friendship, and out of our own efforts toward remembrance of God, rather than acting out of practical compulsion.

God wants us to be the servant who continues to love and serve his master, even though the master goes away for years, decades. What incredible honor and reward can await such a servant who faithfully loves and serves his absent master for 50 or 60 years, until he dies, even though the master never returns?6

God, by creating the possibility for the existence of true friendship between Himself and the humans He created, had to also create the possibility for the existence of true enmity between Himself and them. He wanted friends, but He knew that they couldn’t truly be called friends unless they had the option to be His enemies.

The evil done by humans on Earth is a doing of humans when they act against God, it is not a doing of God, therefore humans should be blamed, not God. And the evil done by nature is nature’s own doing, caused by the rules of physics, and God does not want to interfere with it because constant interference with nature would cause His existence to become apparent. It is necessary for disasters and accidents to be possible, as these prove to us the validity of nature’s rules, and allows the atheist the freedom to use these to prove that God doesn’t exist.

God and Nature shall always be apart, or seem to be apart, so that each one appears to function without the other. This is necessary, as this is what enables humans the freedom to choose between faith and disbelief, between good and evil. The world needs to make perfect, logical sense without having to refer to God in our thinking. It should be possible for us to believe that the world functions on its own without anything supernatural existing, this is what gives us the freedom to believe and disbelieve in God.

We need to be able to believe that the Master is absent. This is when the true nature of the servant comes through. Bad servants start to misbehave as soon as the Master looks away, and if the Master is away long enough, they entirely give up serving Him. They will start to loot His property and defile His name. But the good and honorable servant, even as he sees all of this happen, continues to have love and loyalty toward his Master. It makes no difference to him even if the Master never comes back. He keeps the remembrance of his Master in his heart, and he admonishes and encourages himself to continue to be the best servant he can be.

The world, the way it is, gives us the perfect opportunity to be this honorable and admirable servant. If evil did not exist, and if bad things did not happen, then there would have been no way for such servants of God to exist. We’d instead all be lowly and menial servants who never had a chance to disobey, and thus never had a chance to prove our loyalty toward God.

A world without evil and disaster would be a dysfunctional testing hall that cannot differentiate between the best and the worst of us. Without evil and disaster, God’s existence would be so clearly visible to us that most of us would cower in front of Him. A few people might be found who are daring enough to disobey God even in such circumstances, but the majority of people would kneel before God as they would before a great emperor, regardless of whether they had any loyalty toward Him.

A world that seems to be ruled by the cold, harsh laws of nature, and that completely hides the existence of God from our eyes, gives us the perfect opportunity to prove our loyalty to God. This world, with all of its problems, is the perfect testing hall, because of the problems it has.

Why Bad Things Happen to Good People

I will get around the metaphysical complexity of defining good and bad people by saying that a good person is anyone the reader thinks does not deserve to suffer, while a bad person is someone who does not deserve God’s protection.

Why good people suffer has already been mostly answered. If bad things never happened to good people, this would act as a proof of God’s existence and the invalidity of nature’s laws. If all good people lived to old age and died of natural causes, this would be easily detectable by even the simplest analysis.

There are religious people who wrongly think that if you are truly faithful, you will never suffer anything bad. When they see bad things happen to people, they try to find the reasons why the sufferers themselves are responsible for the suffering that has come upon them.

But disasters are a natural part of life, and it should affect good and bad people equally, or at least it should seem to do so. God does not want to be seen, so it should be impossible to detect miracles happening to save good people.

The suffering of good people proves that nature’s laws are real. If nothing bad ever happened to good people, but only happened to bad people, the fact would act as a proof of God’s existence, and this is what God does not want in this world. God wants us to follow Him and serve Him of our own free will, without any compulsion or strong inducement.

There would be millions, maybe billions, more believers if avoiding suffering was as simple as believing in God and serving Him. But these believers would be tantamount to fair-weather friends, who are on the bandwagon of faith only for their own immediate, short-term interest. They wouldn’t be loyal friends of God.

The world should occasionally give the faithful the impression that God has abandoned them. This is the true test of faith. Once all blessing seems to have gone from our lives, that’s when we look inside our hearts to find God again. If we weren’t true believers, if we only believed in God to ensure our own worldly good, then there would be no God in our hearts. We’d lose faith and abandon religion once we had the impression that God has abandoned us, like millions do.

But as for the truly faithful, when life gives us the impression that God has abandoned us, we continue to believe in God and to do our best to protect our faith. If our Master seems absent, it does not mean He has gone away forever. Only a dishonorable servant would start to act as if the Master is dead once He is gone away for a month or two. Those of us who truly believe in God, who love Him and want His friendship, and who have accepted to be His servants for eternity, will not abandon serving Him, regardless of what hardship and loneliness comes our way.

By the morning brightness

And [by] the night when it covers with darkness,

Your Lord has not taken leave of you, nor has He detested [you].

And the Hereafter is better for you than the first [life].

And your Lord is going to give to you, and you will be satisfied.

Did He not find you an orphan and give [you] refuge?

And He found you lost and guided [you],

And He found you poor and made [you] self-sufficient.
[Quran 93:1-8]

The possibility of good people suffering something horrible is nothing but an extension of these facts of life; the need for a proof of nature’s laws, the necessity for some suffering to prove one’s faith and virtue. God can inflict the greatest suffering on His most beloved servants, as He did with Abraham when He asked him to slaughter his beloved son, and as He did was Jacob in allowing him to believe, for years on end, that his most beloved son was dead, as this is how the greatest friends of God are raised to the highest ranks.

There can never be virtue without suffering. A virtuous act is one where we overcome our natural tendencies for the sake of God, and attaining virtue always has an element of suffering in it, small or great. A rich person who, out of love for God, refuses to practice usury to further enrich himself or herself, is doing a virtuous thing. Their suffering is that they watch their fellow rich men and women practice usury and see their wealth increase exponentially, while their own wealth increases slowly and is subject to far more risk.

And someone who attains virtue by working for a charitable cause, or by giving money to the poor, is also subject to a mild form of suffering (what economists would call “opportunity cost”), as they lose time and money that could have been used for something pleasurable.7

The possibility of good people suffering does not mean that blessedness in this world does not exist. As in the story of Joseph, God will allow suffering to happen, followed by periods of ease and enjoyment, followed by more suffering, until His servant is raised to the highest possible status. God will not leave his faithful servants abandoned alone to be entirely subject to the cold, harsh laws of nature, though it is necessary that it should appear so, so that God’s existence will not become apparent. The Quran says:

Whoever does righteousness, whether male or female, and who is a believer - We will surely cause him to live a good life, and We will surely give them their reward [in the Hereafter] according to the best of what they used to do.
[Quran 16:97]

Besides reward in the afterlife, the verse promises a good worldly life. The word used in the verse to mean “good” is tayyib, which can also be translated as “wholesome”. God will have a hand in the lives of good people, ensuring that despite the disasters they suffer, they will end up having wholesome, blessed lives. This, of course, cannot be proven, in accordance with God’s plan. But it can be seen in little things for those of us who have faith. The lives of believers seem to have more purpose. Their life stories seem better arranged and guided. This of course cannot be proven to an atheist, and it doesn’t have to be.

On the other hand, for disbelievers, people who knowingly rebel against God even though they believe in Him in their hearts, the Quran has this to say:

But whosoever turns away from My Remembrance, verily for him is a life narrowed down, and We shall raise him up blind on the Day of Judgment. He will say: "My Lord, why have you summoned me as a blind person when I was sighted?" He will say: "Thus did Our signs come to you, and you forgot them; that is why you have been forgotten this Day."
[Quran 20:124-126]

This verse, similar to the previous one, implies that there are worldly consequences for having (and in this case, not having) faith. Those who knowingly reject God will have a “narrowed down” life, also translated as “straitened” and “constricted”. Similar to how the lives of good people are blessed despite their hardships, the lives of evil people are constricted despite their joys and pleasures.

To put it another way, the general theme of a believer’s life is blessedness, while the general theme of a disbeliever’s life is constrictedness, a feeling of being oppressed by life. Both will enjoy periods of joy and periods of suffering, but through submitting to God, believers are blessed by God and are freed from many of the constraints of life, while disbelievers are, in general, and not very detectably, made to submit to the harshness and coldness of nature.

There will be a hidden hand of God that shields and guides the believer, while there is no such shield and guide for the disbeliever, and the world, itself a servant of God, treats them the way they like to be treated, as if God does not exist.

God could inspire us to always make the right choices in order to avoid all that is bad and to always gain what is good. But, besides making God’s existence apparent, this would reduce the value of our friendship with Him. A true friend of God is the one who keeps his faith in Him during difficulties, while a fair-weather friend of God is the one who only loves and worships God during times of peace and plenty, and whose faith is shaken whenever something bad happens to them (and plenty of such believers do exist).

The matter of ranks of God’s chosen friends in the afterlife is important, because it decides a person’s status in the afterlife for all of eternity. God does not want most of us to leave this world without having proven how good of a friend of God we are. That, in fact, is the main purpose of this world: To distinguish our ranks, from the very best of us to the very worst.

Some people die before they can prove themselves to God, for example infants. God allows this to happen because infant deaths are required by the laws of nature. And as for the poor infant, while their death is a tragedy in this life, in the afterlife God can choose to give them great reward without them having worked for it, since God’s generosity is not limited. He may also give them a higher status in the ranks of His friends than their parents as a reward for the parents, while also raising the status of the parents who kept their faith during the ordeal. A truly just God will not let an infant’s death go to waste.8

There are a thousand ways in which God can preserve eternal justice while allowing tragedies like infant deaths to happen, since this life is no more than a mere flicker compared to the eternity of the afterlife, and everything that happens here will one day be nothing more than a pale memory when a person has spent millions of years enjoying the rewards of the afterlife, close to family and friends and close to God.

Suffering is a natural part of a believer’s life. God does not ask us to stoically control our emotions, never letting any suffering show, to prove that we are faithful. Jacob was a prophet of God, and yet he cried so much after his son was believed dead that his eyes turned blind. There is no shame in sadness. God does not ask us to be super-human, but to keep faith alive in our hearts as we are subjected to life’s joys and sorrows.

Isn’t it Unkind for God to Punish His Creatures?

Think of God as Light. By staying close to Him, by following His commandments, we ensure our eternal good. No one is perfectly close to Him, each person is at some degree of distance. Eternal punishment is only for those who knowingly stray so far away from the Light that they knowingly wallow in complete darkness. Anyone who stays within the merest flicker of Light may gain God’s forgiveness and eternal reward.

Eternal punishment is necessary because that is the only way of ensuring that evil-doers don’t get away with their evil deeds. Many Jews (and Christians too) have become corrupted by the idea that they are God’s chosen children and that no matter what they do, they will eventually be forgiven. This is a highly dangerous thing to believe, because once you believe that you will never be punished eternally, then you can get away with anything. If you are an Israeli settler, who cares if you take over other people’s lands with violence. You are God’s Chosen, and you will be forgiven.

Once the idea of eternal justice is corrupted, then from that all evil follows. Even if people believe in an afterlife, if they think that there will be a limit on their punishment term, that they will burn for a thousand years and then will be freed to enjoy life for the rest of eternity, then many of them will not find it so bad to devolve utterly into sin, since they will eventually get away with it.

To preserve justice, people should not be able to get away with their crimes. During their lifetimes God gives them thousands of opportunities to repent and become better people. God believes that a human lifetime is sufficient to distinguish good people from bad, that it contains enough opportunities for humans to prove whether they deserve eternal good or eternal punishment. Every hour of every day contains opportunities for us to change, for better or for worse, and these small changes mount. There is a Light in this world and we can choose to either walk toward it or away from it every hour of every day. Every time we take a step away from it, we do it in the full knowledge that we have the chance to take a step toward it instead.

If we spend all of our lifetimes walking away from the Light by knowingly doing evil, we shouldn’t be surprised when one day we find ourselves in total darkness, hopeless of ever finding the Light again. It was our own choices that brought us here. For years and decades we had the option to turn back and walk toward the Light again, our consciences kept reminding us that we still had a chance to return to God, that God’s door was wide open to us, but instead we decided to keep walking away, chasing our shadow instead of chasing the Light.

Once a person falls into total darkness through their own choices, there will no longer be a point to extending their lives to let them come back. This is what Scripture claims, that once a person is totally surrounded by their evil deeds, they will never come back toward the Light. There is a point of no return, meaning that a person who crosses this point, even if given a lifetime of a hundred thousand years, it will not make a difference in their fate.

In fact, the Quran claims that such evil people, even if taken to the afterlife and shown all of the signs of God’s greatness, then brought back to earth, they will continue to be evil. Among some Christians there is the belief that people, no matter how bad, can be made to become good through education and reformation. The Quran, always unabashedly realistic, has a more satisfactory view, that guidance can only be had with God’s blessing, that even if someone fully understands God and believes in Him, they can still choose to be evil. The Quran goes beyond this, saying that once a person fully devolves into evil, not only will they become unreformable, but that God will actively prevent any reform, because they’ve done sufficient evil to seal their fate (as in the case of the Pharaoh of Egypt in the story of Moses).

If you could but see when they are made to stand before the Fire and will say, "Oh, would that we could be returned [to life on earth] and not deny the signs of our Lord and be among the believers."

But what they concealed before has [now] appeared to them. And even if they were returned, they would return to that which they were forbidden; and indeed, they are liars.

And they say, "There is none but our worldly life, and we will not be resurrected."

If you could but see when they will be made to stand before their Lord. He will say, "Is this not the truth?" They will say, "Yes, by our Lord." He will [then] say, "So taste the punishment because you used to disbelieve."

Truly, they have lost, those who deny the meeting with God , until when the Hour [of resurrection] comes upon them unexpectedly, they will say, "Oh, [how great is] our regret over what we neglected concerning it," while they bear their burdens on their backs. Unquestionably, evil is that which they bear.

And the worldly life is nothing but amusement and diversion; but the home of the Hereafter is best for those who fear God, so will you not reason?
[Quran 6:27-32]

The average person might be a sinner, but they do not fight against God every chance they get, and at the time of death they will likely possess enough light to be eligible for God’s forgiveness.

What are some examples of people who deserve eternal punishment? Usurers and their central bankers, who knowingly enslave millions to an evil, unnatural type of debt to enrich themselves, who orchestrate economic bubbles and bursts to reap trillions of dollars in profit while destroying the livelihoods of millions of families, and who plunge countries like the US into war after war, knowing that hundreds of thousands of innocent people will be killed, just so that they can earn their trillions financing these wars. A just God will not let these people go unpunished, and their punishment will not be something they can laugh at, it will not be a slap on the wrist like the US government gives to the usurers at Goldman Sachs every year when they are caught manipulating markets and destroying parts of the economy to enrich themselves. It will be something that will make them cry every single day for eternity.

I will not believe in a God who lets these people get away with the immense evil they do.

Conclusion

People make the mistake of considering this world their permanent home. They become attached to its blessings and disasters, and they think they can judge God based on what happens in their lives. But this world is nothing more than a tool for distinguishing God’s true friends from His fair-weather friends, and distinguishing these from His true enemies.

This world is nothing more than a preparation for the eternity of the afterlife. We would be wise not to become attached to its ups and downs, and to know that these are the days given to us by God in which we can prove ourselves to Him.

***

I originally published this essay as a short ebook on Amazon in 2015. I’ve decided to publish it for free here on my website, after thoroughly rewriting it, so that more people may (hopefully) benefit from it.

Why the Banks are So Powerful and Why the Bible and the Quran Forbid Usury: Charting How Interest Creates Obscene Wealth Inequality

Imagine if in 1913 the real economy of the US had $100 billion in capital, while the banks and money-lenders had only $1 billion. Given everyday economic circumstances, by 2017, the wealth of the real economy would have grown to $2163 billion (with a 3% economic growth rate). Meanwhile, the wealth of the banks and money-lenders during the same period would have grown from $1 billion to $3806 billion. Starting at only 1% of the wealth of the real economy, within just over 100 years, the financial sector grows to 175% the size of the real economy.

This is the heart and soul of usury; the reason why banks are so powerful, and the reason why usurers have been hated with visceral hatred throughout history. The usury sector uses the law to enforce an alternate reality where their profits grow faster than the real economy. If they were honest investors, their money would be directly invested into the economy, so that their wealth would grow (and shrink) with the real economy. But through the hateful invention of usury, they create an alternate reality where their wealth always grows faster than the real economy.

The chart assumes a relatively low business loan interest rate of 5%, and a high delinquency rate of 6.75% (the highest recorded by the St. Louis Fed between 1987 and 2016), and a high (usurer-unfriendly) reserve ratio of 33% (the lower the reserve ratio, the faster the wealth of money-lenders grows, as they earn more interest on their capital).

Usury is evil because, on a macro scale, it passes off most risks to the borrower, and most profits to the lender. In the world of business, businesses sometimes make a profit, sometimes make a loss. But in the world of usury, usurers always make a profit. They lend money at 5% to a business and demand 5% profit after the year with complete disregard for whether the business profited or made a loss.

In this way, usury turns the whole economy into a casino where the usurers win most of the time. They happily lend money to everyone they can burden with debt then demand profits (interest) at a fixed rate without regard for the fact that in the real world people sometimes profit, sometimes make losses. The usurers live in a parallel reality where they always profit.

In this way, the wealth of usurers grows faster than the wealth of the rest of society, enabling them to slowly but surely take control of the whole economy by buying up its lands and businesses. Below is a chart of this process over 20 years in a small town, assuming both the money-lender and the townsfolk have $10 million at the beginning.

A wealthy usurer looks at a fellow human and thinks, “How can I turn this person into a profit-making tool for myself?” They want to give him $10,000 to take risks with, but they want to charge him 5% annual profit regardless of whether he profits or loses. In this way they drive a wedge through reality; most profits to the usurer, all losses to the borrower. They do not want to honestly invest their wealth (such as by starting businesses), because they may lose. Instead, they give their money to you so that you will lose if things go badly, while enjoying the power of the law in extracting their profits from you year after year regardless of your loss.

The usurers at the Federal Reserve, Wall Street and the Chicago School of Economics would have you believe that the above situation is unavoidable, that it is just a fact of life, and that if you dislike money-lenders for their profiteering and rent-seeking, you are just hating them for their wealth.

What is not mentioned is that there is a way for the wealthy to invest their wealth without creating wealth inequality and giving themselves such an obscene advantage over the population, and that method is simply honest investment, what I call Socratic Finance, as Socrates mentions it in Plato’s Republic. It is to make the lender and the borrower share in their fair portion of risk and gain.

How is this magic performed? By prohibiting the charging of interest. When the charging of interest is prohibited, money-lenders are made to invest in the real economy, and to share in its profits and losses. If the town’s money-lender cannot practice usury, and has $10 million in wealth compared to the town’s $10 million, he would be forced to spend his money investing in the real economy by buying businesses or starting new businesses, creating jobs in the process, and raising wages, as he has to compete with other business for available talent. In this way he shares in the town’s profits and losses, instead of enjoying a 5% guaranteed annual profit rate that has nothing to do with reality, that is just a legal fiction designed to enrich him at the expense of his borrowers.

If he wants to invest his money to finance housing, instead of using the corrupt practice of mortgaging, he would offer up houses on a rent-to-own basis. In a normal mortgage, a person is made to carry the burden of a $300,000 loan while the money-lender continues to own the house. In the case of default, the money-lender gets the house back, sells it, and if it sells for less than the outstanding loan amount, he goes after the borrower for the rest of the principal. Most mortgage defaults happen during times of financial crises, when people lose jobs, and when houses lose value. If the home was mortgaged at $300,000, during a crisis it would sell for only $200,000. If the buyer had paid $20,000 of the principal off, they would lose the house, and still owe $80,000 to the usurer.

But Socratic home financing is a world apart from this. If a person gets a Socratically-financed home, and then is unable to make payments, the investor gets the house back and sells it, and the home-buyer gets his principal share of the house back. If he had paid off 20% of the principal, he would get 20% of the house’s sale price. In a Socratically-financed home, the buyer always gets some money back in the case of default, as there is no loan involved, it is real ownership transfer of the house. In the previously mentioned case of the $300,000 house, the buyer would get $40,000 back after foreclosure, instead owing $80,000.

Over the past 400 years, most Christians have continued the tradition of being utter disgraces to the name of Christ, so that today even the Vatican funds its operations through usurious lending. Even the Amish practice usury.

If but a probable suspicion arose
of a man to occupy that filthy trade
He was taken for a devil in the likeness of a man.
But good Lord, how is the world changed?

That which infidels cannot abide, Gospellers allow,
That which Jews take only of strangers
and will not take of their countrymen for shame,
That do Christians take of their dear friends
and think for so doing they deserve great thanks.

Thomas Rogers (Anglican theologian, ca. 1555-1616)

Today’s usurers try to absolve themselves from their sins, and whitewash their actions, through the practice of philanthropy. Almost every wealthy usurer is described as a “philanthropist” on Wikipedia. They gain billions of dollars by squeezing the life out of the economies that play host to them, using usury to drive a wedge into the economy and extract rent from it, then spend a few hundred million dollars funding hospitals, museums and universities, and lo and behold! They are philanthropists. It is to this usurer trick of philanthropy that Rabbi Hermann Adler, Chief Rabbi of the British Empire from 1891 to 1911, refers when he says:

No amount of money given in charity, nothing but the abandonment of this hateful trade, can atone for this great sin against God, Israel and Humanity.

The Risk-Profit Differential

The evils of usury, and the immense urge that usurers feel to practice it, can all be summed up into one phrase: the risk-profit differential.

Whatever reasons usurers bring up to defend usury can be defeated by mentioning this phrase. The risk-profit differential is the core of usury, the reason why usurers prefer usury over productive investment, as was recognized by Jesus in his Parable of the Talents.

The risk-profit differential refers to the fact that, at its core, every usurious contract is about passing off more risk to the borrower than to the lender, and passing off more profit to the lender than to the borrower. This differential, this unbalanced arrangement that constantly pushes risk away from the usurer while also constantly pushing profit toward him, is where the attraction of usury lies.

It is the desire of every human to want to increase profits while also wanting to decrease risks. A usurer is simply someone selfish enough to create an arrangement that puts this unchecked, selfish animal desire into law through a contract that ensures him more profit and less risk, while also ensuring less profit and more risk to the borrower.

Usury is about enforcing a contract that enslaves the borrower to the usurer’s interests. The usurer class ensures itself a constant rate of profit (the class as a whole always profits, never loses), while the borrower class profits and loses randomly as economic conditions demand. The usurer class gets guaranteed profits. The borrower class is forced to share its profits with the usurers, while also being made to keep its losses to itself.

Through this unbalanced arrangement, the wealth of the usurer class balloons. They build skyscrapers to house their banks and insurance companies. The rest of society’s prosperity grows fast at first, then stagnates, and then starts to decline as the debt load grows, until a situation is reached, like that in the US, where bankers and their friends are the richest and most powerful people in the country, almost living in alternate reality, with lavish lifestyles and massive mansions subsidized by the interest payments of the millions of peasants.

Casinos make profits by having machines that win very slightly more often than they lose. Perhaps winning 52% of the time and losing 48% of the time. Usury, through the risk-profit differential, turns the entire economy into a casino where the usurers win 80% of the time, and lose 20% of the time (through defaults and bankruptcies). While a large casino makes a few billion dollars a year for its owners through its rigged nature, the economy, due to the rigged usury, makes trillions every year for the usurer class.

Usury is an unbalanced arrangement, otherwise it wouldn’t be usury. There is no way to make usury fair, to make it harmless, to make it add positive value to society. The only solution to usury is to ban it, as the English Kings Edward I and Edward VI did.

No matter how many clever arguments the usurers and their economists come up with in defense of their usury, they can never make this fact go away, as this is the only reason a usurer practices usury: he wants nearly all profits to come to himself, and nearly all losses to go to his borrowers. He wants to give his money to a peasant who is legally forced to share his profits with the usurer while bearing the full burden of any losses.

Debt slavery

The problem with usury is that the profits of lenders always grows faster than the profits of borrowers. When you borrow $10,000 at 5% interest, within this transaction is the embedded assumption that your prosperity will grow by at least 5% in the next year. This is why Aristotle and many other philosophers and intellectuals call usury “unnatural.” The profits of usury are separate from the profits of the actual economy in which it exists. When usurers lend at 5%, they are maintaining a parallel alternate reality in which the economy profits at 5% in the next year, regardless of whether the actual economy profits at 5% or not.

While some borrowers make good use of the money they have borrowed and make more than 5%, so that they can pay off the usurers and still make a profit, others, because of the millions of chances that operate in the reality of an economy, make a loss on the money they have borrowed. They may have borrowed $10,000, and a year later they only have $8,000 left, because their business dealing didn’t work out as they expected. But the usurer, in his alternate reality, continues to pretend not only that the $10,000 still exists, but that the $10,000 made a 5% profit. He collects $500 from the borrower at the end of the year, leaving the borrower with $7500 in cash, and a $10,000 debt to pay off. If the borrower continues to be unlucky the next year, he loses another $2,000 of his cash, but he still has to pay about $500 to the usurer, so now he has $5,000 left in cash, and a $10,000 debt to pay off.

Meanwhile, during these two years, the usurer has earned $1,000 in profit, without losing any of the $10,000 he gave to the borrower, since the borrower is required to pay it back regardless of his or her profits or losses.

Usury is a way of earning money by the virtue of having money, while making others carry the burden of any risk that comes out of using the money. It is an amazing deal—for the usurer. For the borrower, sometimes it is a good deal, sometimes it breaks even, and sometimes it is pure slavery.

A modern, poignant form of debt slavery today is student debt. A usurer lends a student $100,000 at, let’s say, 5% interest. Within this debt is the assumption that not only will the student be able to use their $100,000 degree to earn that much back over their career, but that they will also make a 5% profit, every year, over and above the cost of the degree.

As it happens, some students graduate and succeed in the business world, so that they pay off the loan in 10 or 15 years while enjoying a good, or at least an acceptable, standard of living.

But for many students, this is only something that they can dream of. They borrow tens of thousands of dollars, only to spend the rest of their lives barely being able to make the monthly payments on their loans. And ten years after graduation, due to changing economic, political or technological conditions, their degrees may be completely worthless, meaning that they racked up $100,000 or more in debt for something completely useless. This $100,000 will hover over them like a dark cloud for the rest of their lives.

Meanwhile, the usurer in his or her high tower, continues to extract a 5% interest, or $10,000 a year, from the student, with the law enabling them to maintain an alternate reality in which that completely useless degree is actually worth $100,000, and also that that useless degree is enabling the student to earn a 5% yearly profit over the value of the degree.

In 2015, there were 2.8 million Americans over the age of 60 who were still living with student debt. US law, authored by usurers and their lobbyists, prohibits these people from declaring bankruptcy so that they can get rid of this cloud that has been giving them constant stress since their early adulthood. The law forces them to pay it off, and empowers usurers to seize these people’s wages and properties to get not only the original $100,000, but an additional $10,000 yearly profit over and above that for every year these people have had their debt, which, for a person of 60, means for their entire adult lives. Student debt has turned these people into money-making machines for the usurers.

Usury is about creating an alternate reality in which the economy profits at 5%, or 20%, or whatever the usurers are currently lending their money at, and using the law to force this reality on the population, regardless of the actual economy.

In the real economy, each year and each month’s profits are different from the previous ones’. One year the economy may make a 5% profit, another a 2.5% profit. A war may break out, or natural disaster may strike, causing the economy to make a loss. Political conditions can change. Trade wars, currency speculation and terrorism can severely damage an economy’s profits.

But in the blissful alternate reality of the usurer, none of this happens. Each year is full of sunshine and great harvests, and the population will have to subsidize this alternate reality for them.

Forecasting the World’s Top 50 Most Powerful Countries in 2035 Using the HQI

The following table is a list of 50 countries that are predicted to have the most economic, technological and military power in the world by the year 2035, according to HQI theory. The projected power of the United States is set to 100 to make it easy to compare other countries with it. China’s projected power is 251.6, meaning it will be more than double as powerful as the United States in 2035.

The 2035 populations are projected based on the average of a linear regression of population growth rates between 1995 and 2015. If a country’s population growth rate was 3% in 1995 and 2% 2015, it is assumed that in 2035 the population growth rate will be 1%. The average of the 2015 and 2035 growth rate is taken (1.5%), and this is recursively applied 20 times to arrive at the 2035 population. This is somewhat crude but good enough for our purposes.

The HQI is the Human Genetic-Cultural Quality Index, a measure of a population’s capacity for intellectual achievement and technological innovation, by taking into account a country’s scientific output and real (Smithian) economic growth. China’s HQI is 856 while the HQI of the United States is 1372, meaning each Chinese citizen adds a relative value of 856 to China’s economy, while each American citizen adds a value of 1372. The HQI indicates the “quality” (as opposed to quantity) of the human capital of a country.

By multiplying a population’s count by its HQI, we arrive at a number that indicates the total power for innovation in the population as a whole. In 2035, India will have more people than China (1.52 billion versus 1.46 billion), but since China’s HQI is higher (i.e. since its population is of higher genetic-cultural quality), its power and might will be consequently larger. In fact, China will be five times more powerful than India in 2035, and 2.5 times more powerful than the United States. It will be the most powerful country in the world by a wide margin.

Iran gets an advantage over Russia due to its higher economic growth, fast growing population, and its higher scientific output per capita (25% higher than that of Russia). However, many of Russia’s recent troubles have been due to economic warfare from Wall Street, therefore it is highly unlikely that it will ever be less powerful than Iran. As the HQI is updated over the next few years, Russia’s numbers should improve significantly.

Qatar and Saudi’s high HQI numbers are largely due to their importation of foreign scientists to carry out research in their universities and are not indicative of native capabilities.

It is unlikely that Germany will be less powerful than the United Kingdom in 2035. The HQI of the UK is inflated by the UK’s higher output in the “soft” sciences. Germany actually outdoes the UK in many important scientific fields, such as energy, engineering, physics, astronomy, mathematics and chemical engineering. The UK is superior in medical research.

South Korea produces far more science per capita than Japan, and its economy is growing fast. Both of these factors go toward its much higher HQI compared to Japan (1627 vs. 605). South Korea’s actual advantage may be smaller, and it seems unlikely that it will actually be more powerful than Japan.

How it Works

A country’s HQI shows its potential for growth. It says that after decades of infrastructure-building, urbanization and everything else that goes into producing a developed economy, that country can reach the level of output and innovation that another, fully developed nation of similar HQI has. What this means is that multiplying a non-fully-developed nation’s HQI will give us a number that reflects its power in a few decades, when it has finished developing.

The Chinese population’s HQI of 856 is close to that of Italy’s (945). What this means is that 20 years from now, once China has fully developed, it will have the same economic, military and technological power of an imaginary Italy that has 1.46 billion people. This thought alone should be sufficient to keep those Americans awake at night who think they will forever be the world’s biggest power. Can an America with 364 million people stand up to an Italy with 1.46 billion people? Italy’s 60 million people published 106000 scientific papers in 2015. If that population grows to 1.46 billion, an increase by a factor 24, that means they would likely be able to publish 2.5 million scientific papers per year, dwarfing America’s scientific output of 600,000 papers per year, and with that, dwarfing America’s ability at innovation and technological progress, and its economic and ultimately military power.

That imaginary Italy is very much what China is going to be in 20 years. The HQI of Italy and China are similar. All that remains for China to do to become an Italy with 1.46 billion people is to finish building its economic and scientific infrastructure, and this will probably be done in the 20 years, as the example of South Korea’s development shows.

As for already developed nations, their HQI can be multiplied by the present population to get its present level of power, and it can be multiplied by its projected future population to get its future power. This only makes sense for developed nations. For developing nations like China (and South Korea until recently), the population is high quality, but everything else isn’t, therefore the population is being held back by various factors from achieving what their HQI suggests. For this reason we give these fast-developing nations 20 years to reach their full potential.

Country Projected 2035 Population HQI Relative Economic, Technological and Military Power in 2035
1 China 1,464,562,493 856 250.46
2 United States 364,631,940 1372 100.00
3 India 1,520,438,646 162 49.24
4 United Kingdom 79,223,389 1818 28.79
5 Germany 93,984,408 1218 22.88
6 Australia 31,623,131 3561 22.51
7 France 72,157,368 1165 16.80
8 South Korea 50,400,996 1627 16.39
9 Canada 42,699,016 1859 15.87
10 Brazil 225,917,248 332 14.99
11 Japan 117,049,007 605 14.15
12 Iran 100,194,389 626 12.53
13 Italy 61,510,122 945 11.62
14 Spain 44,357,325 1277 11.33
15 Turkey 101,374,566 479 9.70
16 Russian Federation 149,971,486 312 9.35
17 Switzerland 10,987,401 3910 8.59
18 Poland 37,352,026 1120 8.37
19 Netherlands 18,189,750 2238 8.14
20 Taiwan 22,039,541 1717 7.56
21 Sweden 12,588,464 2775 6.98
22 Saudi Arabia 43,095,570 768 6.61
23 Nigeria 312,375,890 97 6.05
24 Singapore 5,924,284 4823 5.71
25 Malaysia 36,376,961 756 5.50
26 Israel 10,953,808 2410 5.28
27 Egypt 132,313,330 198 5.23
28 Belgium 12,642,382 2058 5.20
29 South Africa 70,569,040 292 4.12
30 Iraq 68,203,001 295 4.03
31 Norway 6,858,738 2925 4.01
32 Austria 10,735,422 1859 3.99
33 Czech Republic 11,684,419 1569 3.66
34 Pakistan 272,264,022 66 3.59
35 Denmark 6,374,946 2812 3.58
36 Mexico 152,508,904 110 3.37
37 New Zealand 6,972,004 2352 3.28
38 Hong Kong 7,811,688 1997 3.12
39 Qatar 4,879,996 2815 2.75
40 Argentina 50,278,252 253 2.54
41 Finland 5,873,345 2034 2.39
42 Portugal 8,783,800 1359 2.39
43 Thailand 68,077,965 174 2.37
44 Chile 21,146,173 535 2.26
45 Ireland 5,233,086 1959 2.05
46 Indonesia 314,805,429 29 1.84
47 Romania 19,228,586 475 1.83
48 Colombia 55,052,245 163 1.80
49 Greece 8,774,644 934 1.64
50 Algeria 58,570,388 129 1.51

Please see my essays on the HQI and the 12-Year Min-Max Average for the fine print regarding how the above numbers were calculated. Most of the data is from the World Bank. Taiwan’s population growth rate was taken from Worldometers.com as it is missing from the World Bank data.

Below is the same table with the nitty-gritty details exposed, and with seven bonus countries at the end. Download it as an Excel file or PDF.

Country 2015 Citable Scientific Documents 2015 Population 1995 Population Growth Rate 2015 Population Growth Rate 2035 Projected Population Growth Rate Projected Annual Population Growth Rate (Mean of 2015 & 2035 Rates) Projected 2035 Population Average Real Annual Economic Growth (2004-2015) [12-Year Min-Max Method] HQI Relative Power in 2035
1 China 416,409 1,401,586,609 1.1 0.5 -0.1 0.2 1,464,562,493 10.5 856 250.46
2 United States 567,007 325,127,634 1.2 0.8 0.4 0.6 364,631,940 0.5 1372 100.00
3 India 123,206 1,282,390,303 1.9 1.2 0.5 0.9 1,520,438,646 7.1 162 49.24
4 United Kingdom 169,483 63,843,856 0.3 0.8 1.4 1.1 79,223,389 -0.6 1818 28.79
5 Germany 149,773 82,562,004 0.3 0.5 0.8 0.7 93,984,408 -0.8 1218 22.88
6 Australia 82,567 23,923,101 1.2 1.3 1.5 1.4 31,623,131 3.0 3561 22.51
7 France 103,733 64,982,894 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.5 72,157,368 -0.1 1165 16.80
8 South Korea 73,433 49,750,234 1.0 0.4 -0.3 0.1 50,400,996 3.6 1627 16.39
9 Canada 89,312 35,871,283 0.8 0.9 0.9 0.9 42,699,016 0.1 1859 15.87
10 Brazil 61,122 203,657,210 1.5 0.9 0.2 0.5 225,917,248 3.7 332 14.99
11 Japan 109,305 126,818,019 0.4 -0.1 -0.7 -0.4 117,049,007 -0.4 605 14.15
12 Iran 39,727 79,476,308 1.4 1.2 1.1 1.2 100,194,389 5.0 626 12.53
13 Italy 95,836 61,142,221 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 61,510,122 -1.7 945 11.62
14 Spain 79,209 47,199,069 0.2 -0.1 -0.5 -0.3 44,357,325 0.3 1277 11.33
15 Turkey 39,275 76,690,509 1.6 1.5 1.4 1.4 101,374,566 2.3 479 9.70
16 Russian Federation 57,881 142,098,141 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.3 149,971,486 0.4 312 9.35
17 Switzerland 39,358 8,238,610 0.7 1.2 1.7 1.5 10,987,401 1.0 3910 8.59
18 Poland 37,285 38,221,584 0.1 0.0 -0.2 -0.1 37,352,026 4.2 1120 8.37
19 Netherlands 51,434 16,844,195 0.5 0.4 0.4 0.4 18,189,750 0.0 2238 8.14
20 Taiwan 34,011 23,381,038 0.8 0.1 -0.7 -0.3 22,039,541 4.5 1717 7.56
21 Sweden 35,039 9,693,883 0.5 1.1 1.6 1.3 12,588,464 0.4 2775 6.98
22 Saudi Arabia 17,529 29,897,741 2.6 2.1 1.6 1.8 43,095,570 5.9 768 6.61
23 Nigeria 5,112 183,523,432 2.5 2.6 2.8 2.7 312,375,890 18.2 97 6.05
24 Singapore 17,976 5,618,866 3.0 1.2 -0.7 0.3 5,924,284 7.3 4823 5.71
25 Malaysia 23,414 30,651,176 2.5 1.4 0.3 0.9 36,376,961 3.0 756 5.50
26 Israel 18,040 7,919,528 2.7 2.0 1.3 1.6 10,953,808 3.7 2410 5.28
27 Egypt 14,800 84,705,681 1.9 2.1 2.4 2.3 132,313,330 4.5 198 5.23
28 Belgium 29,180 11,183,411 0.2 0.5 0.8 0.6 12,642,382 0.7 2058 5.20
29 South Africa 17,409 53,491,333 2.2 1.7 1.1 1.4 70,569,040 2.0 292 4.12
30 Iraq 1,793 35,766,702 3.1 3.2 3.4 3.3 68,203,001 27.8 295 4.03
31 Norway 18,228 5,142,842 0.5 1.1 1.8 1.5 6,858,738 1.2 2925 4.01
32 Austria 21,818 8,557,761 0.2 0.8 1.5 1.1 10,735,422 -0.1 1859 3.99
33 Czech Republic 20,759 10,777,060 -0.1 0.3 0.6 0.4 11,684,419 1.0 1569 3.66
34 Pakistan 10,962 188,144,040 2.5 2.1 1.7 1.9 272,264,022 4.6 66 3.59
35 Denmark 23,081 5,661,723 0.5 0.6 0.6 0.6 6,374,946 -0.6 2812 3.58
36 Mexico 18,417 125,235,587 1.9 1.3 0.7 1.0 152,508,904 0.2 110 3.37
37 New Zealand 13,052 4,596,396 1.5 1.9 2.3 2.1 6,972,004 1.3 2352 3.28
38 Hong Kong 14,710 7,313,557 2.0 0.9 -0.2 0.3 7,811,688 3.1 1997 3.12
39 Qatar 2,766 2,350,549 1.2 2.9 4.6 3.7 4,879,996 14.9 2815 2.75
40 Argentina 11,815 42,154,914 1.3 1.0 0.8 0.9 50,278,252 2.2 253 2.54
41 Finland 17,551 5,460,592 0.4 0.4 0.4 0.4 5,873,345 -1.5 2034 2.39
42 Portugal 21,159 10,610,014 0.4 -0.5 -1.4 -0.9 8,783,800 -0.8 1359 2.39
43 Thailand 11,632 67,400,746 0.9 0.3 -0.2 0.1 68,077,965 3.4 174 2.37
44 Chile 10,347 17,924,062 1.5 1.0 0.6 0.8 21,146,173 2.5 535 2.26
45 Ireland 11,370 4,726,856 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 5,233,086 1.1 1959 2.05
46 Indonesia 6,280 255,708,785 1.5 1.2 0.9 1.0 314,805,429 5.5 29 1.84
47 Romania 13,053 21,579,201 0.0 -0.4 -0.8 -0.6 19,228,586 0.7 475 1.83
48 Colombia 7,500 49,529,208 1.7 0.9 0.2 0.5 55,052,245 4.3 163 1.80
49 Greece 16,616 11,125,833 0.5 -0.6 -1.7 -1.2 8,774,644 -1.7 934 1.64
50 Algeria 5,171 40,633,464 1.9 1.9 1.8 1.8 58,570,388 3.8 129 1.51
51 Serbia 6,540 9,424,030 -1.4 -0.5 0.5 0.0 9,490,218 3.0 663 1.26
52 Tunisia 6,228 11,235,248 1.9 1.0 0.1 0.5 12,525,418 2.2 493 1.23
53 Hungary 9,478 9,911,396 -0.1 -0.2 -0.3 -0.3 9,408,537 -0.8 653 1.23
54 Viet Nam 4,092 93,386,630 1.6 1.1 0.5 0.8 109,194,988 6.4 55 1.20
55 Slovakia 6,271 5,457,889 0.3 0.1 -0.1 0.0 5,463,349 2.7 1068 1.17
56 Morocco 4,079 33,955,157 1.5 1.3 1.1 1.2 43,445,867 5.0 134 1.16
57 Ukraine 8,868 44,646,131 -0.8 -0.4 0.1 -0.1 43,369,074 -1.4 129 1.12

 

Measuring Economic and Military Potentials of World Nations with the Human Genetic-Cultural Quality Index (HQI)

Introduction

What is the biggest predictor of a country’s scientific output, industrial capacity and military prowess? It is not geographic size. For instance, Kazakhstan and Mongolia are huge compared to Israel and Switzerland, yet Israel and Switzerland far outdistance them in all measures of intellectual, technological and military attainment.

It is not population. India’s 1.28 billion people are close in number to China’s 1.4 billion. And India has been a West-connected capitalist country since its independence in 1947, while China only started in the 1980’s. Yet China far outstrips India in all measures of technological and military power.

It is not natural resources. Russia has vastly more natural resources than Germany. Yet Germany’s economy is many times that of Russia, and its scientific output is double that of Russia, even though Russia’s population is close to double that of Germany.

The most important predictor of a country’s power and accomplishment is the nature of its population. A country’s most precious natural resource is its citizens. It is the genetic makeup of a population, enabled by supportive cultures, institutions and infrastructure, that predicts the country’s military-industrial power and capacity for innovation.

The book IQ and the Wealth of Nations by the professors Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen makes a powerful argument for the importance of IQ in predicting a country’s power and prosperity, with IQ being a highly heritable (genetically-mediated) trait. While some of the data they use is not reliable, the general force of their argument is undeniable. The data used by Adam Smith and Charles Darwin were none too reliable either, but that didn’t stop their theories from being world-class accomplishments.

IQ is not everything. Japan’s IQ is in the same league as Germany and Sweden. Yet Swedes produce four times more science per citizen than the Japanese (measured in scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals). Germans produce double the amount of science per citizen than the Japanese. An argument can be made that Japan’s infrastructure has yet to catch up with that of Western Europe. But Japan has had more than enough time (seven decades, in fact) to catch up. And a look at Japan’s infrastructure shows that they might even be ahead of Western Europe when it comes to infrastructure.

The factors that lead to Japan’s low accomplishment relative to Western Europe could be other genetic factors not widely studied. One factor could be Japan’s low testosterone levels compared to Europe, with testosterone being a significant contributor toward the drive for accomplishment1. Another factor could be aging. An aging population is going to be less productive than a younger one. Another factor could be non-genetic; for example cultural practices and ideals, although these factors are not independent of genetics and should be considered together with genetics2.

The Human Genetic-Cultural Quality Index

The HQI, short for the Human Genetic-Cultural Quality Index, takes account of both genetic and cultural factors to accurately predict a country’s real scientific, economic and military potential. It is a measure of the quality of human capital, a nation’s most important natural resource, and provides a single number that can be used to compare the quality of the human capital of different nations.

The math of the HQI will be explained below. For now, I will offer certain examples from it to illustrate the concept. Ukraine has an HQI of 129, while Russia’s HQI is 311. This means that a Russian citizen adds 2.6 times more value to Russia’s economy and scientific output than a Ukrainian citizen adds to Ukraine’s economy and scientific output. The quality of Russia’s human capital is 2.4 times that of Ukraine’s human capital. Even if Russia and Ukraine had exactly the same population (let’s say each had a population of 150 million), Russia would still be 2.4 times as powerful as Ukraine. Today, Russia’s population is 3.15 times as large as Ukraine’s (143.5 million vs. 45.49 million). Multiplying this by the 2.4 times HQI advantage, we arrive at a factor of 7.59. Russia is, or will be, 7.59 times as powerful as Ukraine when both countries reach their near-full development potential, perhaps in the next 30 years.

China’s HQI is 855. India’s is 162. Even if both countries had the same population, China would still be 5.2 times as powerful as India once both countries reach their near-full development potential.

The HQI uses two data points as predicting variables:

  1. Scientific papers per capita, which refers to the number of scientific papers published in a year by the nation, divided by its population. This measures the intellectual capacity of the nation’s population.
  2. Real economic growth rate. When a nation’s economy is growing fast (such as that of China), it shows that the nation’s institutions and infrastructure haven’t reached their full potential. The economic growth rate is used to correct for this fact. For instance, China’s papers per capita is only three times that of India’s. But China’s real 12-year average annual economic growth rate is 10.5%, while India’s is 7%. This means that the economic and scientific potential of China’s human capital has significantly more room to grow than India’s, as will be further illustrated down below.

The (real) economic growth rate of a nation expresses elasticity of human potential for a given nation. If growth is faster, improvements in infrastructure and institutions lead to big gains in the human potential of the nation, i.e. that the human potential of the nation is being held back by infrastructure and institutions, and that as these improve, so will the output of the nation’s human capital.

A slow economic growth rate indicates one of two things:

  1. The nation has reached close to its full potential, so that its human capital is already working at its full capacity. This is the case with slow-growing developed nations like Japan and the Netherlands.
  2. The quality of the nation’s human capital is so low that while theoretically there is much room for growth given the nation’s circumstances, that growth is being held back by human capital that’s not capable of achieving it. This is true in the case of various African and Latin American countries that have everything they could possibly need for growth, except a population that’s actually capable of said growth.

The history of colonization shows the importance of the genetic and cultural factors that go into the HQI. Any nation that becomes colonized by a high HQI population will quickly grow to reflect the home population’s intellectual prowess rather than the native population’s destitution. This has been true in the United States, Australia, Argentina, New Zealand and South Africa.

The most recent example comes from Israel. When Israel was colonized by Ashkenazi Jews that had been selected for high IQ in Europe during their 2000 year stay there3, Israel’s economy quickly grew to reflect a developed European nation, rather than a typical Middle Eastern one. It grew even above Eastern European nations, though it doesn’t seem likely it can surpass Germanic nations, as it has already had all the time and help it needs to achieve this.

The Mathematical Model

For any given nation and year, this is how the HQI basis number is calculated:
With a being the number of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles published in the year, b being the 12-year min-max average of economic growth4 for that year and the preceding 11 years, and c being the population of the nation in that year.

China published 416,409 peer-reviewed scientific journal papers in 2015. Its annual economic growth rate was 10.545 for the period 2004-2015 inclusive. And its population in 2015 was 1,401,586,609 (1.4 billion). The equation to calculate the HQI basis number thus becomes:

This results in a number of 0.001162729158. Since this is not a user-friendly number, the numbers for all nations are all multiplied by the arbitrary value of 735853.761, which gives an HQI of 1 to the lowest HQI country. This provides an easy-to-follow ground to which other countries can be compared. China’s HQI thus becomes 855.59. This means that a Chinese citizen adds a value to China’s economy that is 855.59 times greater than the value added by a citizen of the lowest HQI country to their respective economy (which happens to be the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Raising the number of a country’s scientific papers to a power of (1 + its economic growth rate) is a mathematical trick that models both of these scenarios:

  1. Scientific output growth that continues at the rate of the country’s past 12-year economic growth rate for the next 11 years.
  2. Scientific output growth that starts off at the country’s average past 12-year economic growth, and then slows down by 6.95% every year over the next 30 years.

The assumption here is that a country’s scientific output will continue growing at the rate of the country’s economic growth over its past 12 years. This may seem a strange assumption, since a country’s future growth cannot be assumed to follow at the same rate as its past growth.

In fact, the correct assumption is that its economic growth will be quite lower. But what we are modeling here is not economic growth, it is growth in scientific output, whose future growth follows along the lines of a country’s past economic growth.

An example will make this clear. South Korea’s GDP grew from $771 billion USD in 2004 to $1.14 trillion in 2015 (all in 2000 dollars), a growth of about 48%. During the same period, its scientific output rose from 31182 papers in 2004 to 69469 papers in 2015, a growth of 122%, more than double its economic growth.

The growth in South Korea’s scientific output from 2004 to 2015 is actually similar to its GDP growth from 1989 to 2003 ($332 billion to $735 billion, a growth of 122%).

In short, scientific output is a lagging indicator of a country’s development, due to the amount of past investment necessary for its growth. No matter how much a country invests into increasing its scientific output, the tangible fruits of said investment will be over a decade in the future. The exception being countries like Saudi Arabia who rapidly increased their scientific output by importing foreign scientists.

India’s scientific output grew from 33031 papers in 2004 to 113144 papers in 2015, a growth of 242%. During the same period, its inflation-adjusted GDP grew from $0.971 trillion to $2.03 trillion, a growth of 109%. The growth in its scientific output was more than double the growth in its economic output.

Its growth, in fact, was similar to its GDP growth from 1981 to 2003. The reason for its slow economic growth over this period may have been its low-effectiveness gene-culture (low IQ, etc.), and its low urbanization rate accompanied by its vast size, that meant it took far longer than South Korea to build the infrastructure and institutions necessary to support effective scientific research.

This phenomenon of scientific growth growing far faster than economic growth can be seen throughout the world. Needless to say, a more rigorous study of the relationship between scientific output and past economic growth can be done. But we can take it as a general rule that past economic growth predicts future scientific output growth.

China’s Coming Supremacy

Raising China’s 2015 scientific paper count of 416409 to a power of 1.105 (1 + its annual economic output growth over 2004-2015) results in 1620204, or 1.62 million. What this means is that once China reaches close to its full economic potential (perhaps after 2030), it will be producing about 1.62 million scientific papers every year. Compare this to the 567000 scientific papers published by the United States in 2015, which, according to the same HQI calculation, will grow to 606000 during the same period. In other words, in the next 20 or more years, China’s scientific output will be 2.67 times as large as that of the United States.

While this may sound controversial to someone who has been wooed by the nascent racism of neocons, globalists and central bank usurer economists in their propagandizing the idea that the US can somehow maintain a permanent technological edge over China, that despite China’s enormous growth and a scientific output that is closely approaching that of the United States, that there is something wrong with the Chinese that will forever keep them as second-class citizens on the world stage, to someone who understands the history of Japan and South Korea’s growth, and who understands the realities of the gene-culture, this conclusion of China’s approaching supremacy is merely stating the obvious.

Using the HQI for Comparative Study of Gene-Cultures and National Potentials

Below is a list of the world’s highest HQI nations (the full list is at the end), for the reader’s viewing pleasure, and to help you follow along the rest of the essay.

Rank Country 2015 Citable Scientific Documents 2015 Population Average Real Annual Economic Growth (2004-2015) [12-Year Min-Max Method] HQI Predicted Scientific Output at Near-Full Potential (2035 and After)
1 Singapore 17,976 5,618,866 7.32 4823 36,824
2 Switzerland 39,358 8,238,610 1.01 3910 43,774
3 Australia 82,567 23,923,101 2.99 3561 115,764
4 Iceland 1,365 336,728 2.41 3549 1,624
5 Norway 18,228 5,142,842 1.17 2925 20,445
6 Qatar 2,766 2,350,549 14.88 2815 8,991
7 Denmark 23,081 5,661,723 -0.65 2812 21,633
8 Sweden 35,039 9,693,883 0.41 2775 36,556
9 Monaco 129 38,320 1.64 2683 140
10 Luxembourg 1,692 543,261 1.51 2564 1,893
11 Israel 18,040 7,919,528 3.71 2410 25,938
12 New Zealand 13,052 4,596,396 1.25 2352 14,693
13 Netherlands 51,434 16,844,195 -0.03 2238 51,239

While the Qatari population have a higher IQ, and are more liberal, than most other Arab populations (perhaps with the exception of Lebanese Christians), their high HQI is strongly a result of their importation of foreign scientists on the one hand, and their fast growing oil revenue on the other, the latter funding the former.

Germanic nations have the highest HQI in the world. Switzerland and Iceland, with their relatively low immigration rates, show the high productivity of Germanic genes and cultures. Australia, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand and the Netherlands, with their Germanic roots, follow along the same lines.

The table shows how the HQI can be used to compare the genetic-cultural quality of any two countries. Iceland’s HQI of 3548, divided by the 2238 HQI of the Netherlands, results in a 58% advantage for the Icelandic people. Icelandic people are 58% more capable and productive than Netherlanders, and if the two countries had the same population, Iceland would be 58% more powerful militarily, technologically and economically.

Israel’s high HQI is influenced by its high economic growth, a large portion of which comes from its cozy relationship with the United States (US intelligence agencies, for example, are reliant on many Israeli technology companies). It’s highly unlikely that its population is more capable than that of the Netherlands or New Zealand. This shows that the HQI is not immune to aberrations, similar to all other methods, as reality is full of aberrations caused by disasters, sanctions, wars and political changes.

But regarding Israel, the HQI shows one very important result: Israel is already close to its full scientific potential. Over the next 30 years or so, its scientific output can grow from 18040 papers to 21631. No great improvement can be expected from Israel, and given its precarious political situation, even this much growth may not be possible, though stranger things have happened.

Changes in HQI Reflect Fundamental Genetic-Cultural Changes in a Nation

Far more interesting than a country’s economic growth is HQI growth. The HQI itself is a measure of growth potential, HQI growth means growth in the growth potential. When a nation climbs toward a peak in achievement, economic growth refers to this climb. HQI growth refers to an increase in the height of the peak, a removal of constraints that prevent a nation from reaching the heights reached by other nations.

China’s 2015 HQI was 6.4% lower than its 2010 HQI. This means that between 2010 and 2015, there were some forces in effect that reduced China’s genetic-cultural fitness, or economic fitness, so that while it continued to grow fast, its predicted near-full potential decreased. This was mostly caused by a large drop in the number of scientific papers published by China in 2015. I have contacted SCImago to find out whether this change was due to changes in their paper counting methodologies or whether it was due to a real drop in China’s output. If it was a real drop, maybe it was due to China’s best and brightest aging and retiring, or due to growing practice of usury creating a Western European-style of stagnation faster than expected, or due to some unknown dysgenic effect.

From 2010 to 2015, Ethiopia’s HQI increased by 173%. This is a very, very good sign. It means that there are genetic-cultural changes that are improving the nation’s future potential, or that there are bottlenecks that are being overcome. Not only is the nation climbing toward the peak, the peak itself is growing. Perhaps it is due to improvements in nutrition and health care, or beneficial cultural changes, or both. The actual beneficial change is probably smaller.

Poland has been Europe’s favorite backwater since at least Adam Smith’s time. What does the HQI tell us about what is going on in there? From 2010 to 2015, Poland’s HQI increased by 21.9%. There are forces at work in Poland that are increasing its population’s genetic-cultural fitness, so that whatever we believed Poland’s maximum growth potential to have been in 2010, in 2015 that maximum growth potential was 21.9% higher.

The HQI of the United States decreased by 12.3% from 2010 to 2015. This means that there are forces at work reducing the genetic-cultural fitness of America’s average citizen. One simple explanation could be the increase in immigration from lower HQI nations, who increase the population of the US without significantly increasing its economic and scientific output. Keeping population constant, the HQI still decreased by 8.9%, therefore immigration might be only causing a 3.4 percentage points of this dysgenesis.

Germany’s HQI increased by 0.2% from 2010 to 2015, meaning that no interesting structural change happened. These numbers are from before the recent migrant crisis, whose presence is sure to bring down Germany’s HQI.

Japan’s HQI fell 15.7% from 2010 to 2015. Not only is the nation coming down the peak (through its negative economic growth), the nation’s peak is also decaying.

Russia’s HQI increased by 31.1% from 2010 to 2015. Even though its economic growth was low (0.36%), its scientific output greatly increased during this period, from 38878 papers to 55500. Russia’s seeming low GDP growth is largely due to economic warfare from Wall Street. Its scientific growth shows its true economic fitness.

Why Scientific Output is Important

The HQI uses scientific output as the most important indicator of a nation’s genetic-cultural fitness. There are many good reasons for this, the two most important being:

  1. Producing science requires that a nation be prosperous enough to afford having a class of society who dedicate most of their time to research. And that prosperity can only come from high genetic-cultural fitness for most countries, excepting a few oil states that can afford to import scientists.
  2. Producing science requires very high intellectual capacity and drive for accomplishment (perhaps most importantly IQ and testosterone). If a nation’s population is incapable of producing science, they will be equally incapable of producing high-tech military equipment and industrial innovation, necessary for a nation to increase its power.

A nation’s scientific output is a very good indicator of its fitness. If a nation’s economy is growing fast, by raising the scientific output to the power of its real economic growth, the HQI gives the nation a fair chance at proving itself. China’s scientific output per capita is quite low compared to that of the United States. But its real economic growth is much higher. We can safely assume that China’s per capita scientific output is going to grow at a rate similar to its past economic growth.

The Bottleneck Effect in the Growth of Scientific Output

India’s example shows that there might be a bottleneck effect in the growth of scientific output in large and highly undeveloped nations. As mentioned, India’s scientific output grew by 242% from 2004 to 2015, similar to its economic growth from 1981 to 2003. 12 years of scientific output growth were equal to 23 years of past economic growth. While in the case of South Korea, its 2004 to 2015 scientific growth was roughly similar to its economic growth of the 12 years preceding that.

India may have already overcome the bottleneck. Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, the Philippines and Vietnam probably haven’t yet, and this probably partly accounts for their low HQI’s.

For a large, undeveloped and already low-HQI nation (low IQ, bad law enforcement, etc.), building the prosperity and infrastructure necessary for doing science takes far longer than it takes a smaller and higher HQI nation. Decades of education, infrastructure building and perhaps most importantly, urbanization, are needed before a country’s scientific output momentum gets going.

List of 203 Sovereign States by Human Potential

Below is a table of 203 sovereign states sorted by HQI, from highest HQI to lowest. Note that the HQI number shows the genetic-cultural quality of each individual citizen within that nation, not the nation’s power. While each additional Singaporean citizen adds a value of 4822 to the economy of Singapore, each additional US citizen adds a value of 1372. Since the genetic-cultural quality of Singaporeans is so much higher than the genetic-cultural quality of US citizens, what the HQI shows is that if Singapore had the same number of citizens as the United States, it would 3.5 times as powerful as the United States, as each individual citizen adds so much more to its power and productivity. Singapore’s real superiority is probably lower, as it is mostly its fast economic growth, aided by its geo-political situation, that’s contributing to its high HQI.

The HQI for certain nations, such as Indonesia and North Korea, are clearly inaccurate due to their exclusion from the world’s scientific community. The HQI of Indonesia and many former Central Asian Soviet states should increase considerably as they start to adopt Western scientific practices.

Please see below the table for the fine print regarding the numbers.

Rank Country 2015 Citable Scientific Documents 2015 Population Average Real Annual Economic Growth (2004-2015) [12-Year Min-Max Method] HQI
1 Singapore 17,976 5,618,866 7.32 4823
2 Switzerland 39,358 8,238,610 1.01 3910
3 Australia 82,567 23,923,101 2.99 3561
4 Iceland 1,365 336,728 2.41 3549
5 Norway 18,228 5,142,842 1.17 2925
6 Qatar 2,766 2,350,549 14.88 2815
7 Denmark 23,081 5,661,723 -0.65 2812
8 Sweden 35,039 9,693,883 0.41 2775
9 Monaco 129 38,320 1.64 2683
10 Luxembourg 1,692 543,261 1.51 2564
11 Israel 18,040 7,919,528 3.71 2410
12 New Zealand 13,052 4,596,396 1.25 2352
13 Netherlands 51,434 16,844,195 -0.03 2238
14 Belgium 29,180 11,183,411 0.68 2058
15 Finland 17,551 5,460,592 -1.55 2034
16 Hong Kong 14,710 7,313,557 3.12 1997
17 Liechtenstein 102 37,461 -0.40 1967
18 Ireland 11,370 4,726,856 1.09 1959
19 Canada 89,312 35,871,283 0.13 1859
20 Austria 21,818 8,557,761 -0.09 1859
21 Slovenia 5,428 2,079,085 -0.43 1851
22 United Kingdom 169,483 63,843,856 -0.60 1818
23 Taiwan 34,011 23,381,038 4.53 1717
24 South Korea 73,433 49,750,234 3.61 1627
25 Greenland 125 57,275 0.05 1610
26 Czech Republic 20,759 10,777,060 1.02 1569
27 United States 567,007 325,127,634 0.51 1372
28 Portugal 21,159 10,610,014 -0.77 1359
29 Macao 819 584,420 3.20 1278
30 Spain 79,209 47,199,069 0.30 1277
31 Estonia 2,620 1,280,227 -2.23 1264
32 Germany 149,773 82,562,004 -0.77 1218
33 France 103,733 64,982,894 -0.08 1165
34 Grenada 140 106,694 3.33 1138
35 Poland 37,285 38,221,584 4.23 1120
36 Cyprus 1,789 1,164,695 -0.51 1088
37 Slovakia 6,271 5,457,889 2.67 1068
38 Malta 559 431,239 0.75 1000
39 Italy 95,836 61,142,221 -1.74 945
40 Greece 16,616 11,125,833 -1.67 934
41 Saint Kitts and Nevis 62 55,376 1.83 889
42 Croatia 5,533 4,255,374 -1.12 869
43 China 416,409 1,401,586,609 10.55 856
44 Saudi Arabia 17,529 29,897,741 5.90 768
45 Malaysia 23,414 30,651,176 2.95 756
46 Brunei Darussalam 366 428,539 1.03 668
47 Serbia 6,540 9,424,030 2.97 663
48 Hungary 9,478 9,911,396 -0.81 653
49 Lithuania 2,973 2,998,969 -1.86 629
50 Iran 39,727 79,476,308 5.02 626
51 Japan 109,305 126,818,019 -0.41 605
52 New Caledonia 171 263,147 3.75 580
53 San Marino 22 31,802 3.26 563
54 Seychelles 59 93,754 3.79 540
55 Chile 10,347 17,924,062 2.50 535
56 Latvia 1,503 2,031,361 -1.23 498
57 Tunisia 6,228 11,235,248 2.17 493
58 Bermuda 43 65,578 0.13 485
59 Palau 14 21,291 -0.22 481
60 Turkey 39,275 76,690,509 2.27 479
61 Romania 13,053 21,579,201 0.70 475
62 Lebanon 2,076 5,053,624 5.60 464
63 Montenegro 316 621,556 2.50 432
64 Dominica 37 72,680 2.90 416
65 Bulgaria 3,441 7,112,641 1.73 410
66 United Arab Emirates 3,858 9,577,128 2.30 358
67 Uruguay 1,208 3,429,997 4.39 354
68 Macedonia 814 2,109,251 3.01 347
69 Barbados 128 287,482 0.83 341
70 Russian Federation 57,881 142,098,141 0.36 312
71 Jordan 2,313 7,689,760 5.45 338
72 Oman 1,461 4,157,783 3.56 335
73 Brazil 61,122 203,657,210 3.70 332
74 French Polynesia 122 282,764 0.11 319
75 Kuwait 1,327 3,583,399 1.84 311
76 Iraq 1,793 35,766,702 27.77 295
77 South Africa 17,409 53,491,333 2.03 292
78 Argentina 11,815 42,154,914 2.17 253
79 Bahrain 344 1,359,726 5.20 252
80 Georgia 1,067 4,304,540 4.28 246
81 Armenia 953 2,989,467 -0.14 232
82 Andorra 24 80,950 -0.26 216
83 Fiji 231 892,727 1.95 212
84 Trinidad and Tobago 285 1,346,697 5.03 207
85 Egypt 14,800 84,705,681 4.49 198
86 Cuba 1,760 11,248,783 6.76 191
87 Bosnia and Herzegovina 756 3,819,684 2.95 177
88 Thailand 11,632 67,400,746 3.39 174
89 Guam 36 169,885 3.00 174
90 Colombia 7,500 49,529,208 4.28 163
91 Belarus 1,554 9,259,666 3.78 163
92 India 123,206 1,282,390,303 7.08 162
93 Azerbaijan 676 9,612,580 17.29 160
94 Botswana 410 2,056,370 1.11 157
95 Panama 485 3,987,866 8.46 151
96 Tuvalu 2 9,916 2.01 150
97 Mauritius 208 1,253,581 3.57 148
98 Kazakhstan 2,062 16,770,447 5.95 142
99 Libya 352 6,317,080 21.21 142
100 Costa Rica 720 5,001,657 3.88 137
101 Cayman Islands 11 59,967 -0.20 134
102 Morocco 4,079 33,955,157 5.00 134
103 Ukraine 8,868 44,646,131 -1.35 129
104 Algeria 5,171 40,633,464 3.75 129
105 Puerto Rico 660 3,680,058 -0.79 125
106 Namibia 286 2,392,370 6.15 125
107 Albania 406 3,196,981 4.32 121
108 Bhutan 82 776,461 10.04 121
109 Mongolia 298 2,923,050 8.01 118
110 Vanuatu 34 263,888 4.84 112
111 Palestine (West Bank & Gaza) 475 4,548,815 6.18 112
112 Mexico 18,417 125,235,587 0.21 110
113 Marshall Islands 7 52,993 0.88 99
114 Nigeria 5,112 183,523,432 18.20 97
115 Ecuador 1,418 16,225,691 4.25 88
116 Bahamas 46 387,549 -0.39 86
117 Federated States of Micronesia 12 104,460 -0.51 83
118 Moldova 348 3,436,828 1.71 82
119 Antigua and Barbuda 10 91,822 0.67 81
120 Ghana 1,531 26,984,328 8.97 81
121 Aruba 12 103,889 -2.26 80
122 Gabon 174 1,751,199 1.72 80
123 Jamaica 305 2,813,276 -0.77 76
124 Congo 388 4,671,142 3.59 76
125 Belize 32 347,598 2.69 74
126 Swaziland 106 1,285,519 2.38 68
127 Sri Lanka 1,255 21,611,842 6.27 67
128 Pakistan 10,962 188,144,040 4.64 66
129 Cape Verde 35 508,315 6.95 65
130 Solomon Islands 43 584,482 4.10 63
131 Gambia 157 1,970,081 1.36 63
132 Peru 1,813 31,161,167 5.10 63
133 Suriname 38 548,456 5.38 62
134 Venezuela 1,473 31,292,702 7.55 60
135 Maldives 22 357,981 7.57 57
136 Viet Nam 4,092 93,386,630 6.40 55
137 Samoa 13 193,228 0.76 50
138 Kenya 2,215 46,748,617 4.32 49
139 Tonga 7 106,379 -0.20 48
140 Saint Lucia 11 184,937 3.25 47
141 Cameroon 1,116 23,393,129 4.09 47
142 Senegal 691 14,967,446 4.22 45
143 Uganda 1,270 40,141,262 7.03 38
144 Laos 226 7,019,652 7.81 36
145 Benin 409 10,879,828 4.30 36
146 Kiribati 5 105,555 1.51 36
147 Guyana 34 807,611 2.53 34
148 Nepal 922 28,440,629 4.73 33
149 Malawi 519 17,308,685 5.75 32
150 Zambia 432 15,519,604 6.76 31
151 Burkina Faso 508 17,914,625 5.81 30
152 Indonesia 6,280 255,708,785 5.49 29
153 Ethiopia 1,691 98,942,102 11.11 29
154 Tanzania 1,261 52,290,796 6.56 28
155 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 4 109,374 2.15 28
156 Bolivia 290 11,024,522 5.08 26
157 Rwanda 278 12,428,005 7.92 26
158 Paraguay 182 7,032,942 5.04 25
159 Kyrgyzstan 142 5,707,529 5.23 24
160 Syrian Arab Republic 502 22,264,996 5.07 23
161 Equatorial Guinea 17 799,372 12.91 23
162 Zimbabwe 552 15,046,102 -2.88 23
163 Bangladesh 3,011 160,411,249 6.06 22
164 Cambodia 317 15,677,059 6.67 22
165 Philippines 2,091 101,802,706 4.39 21
166 Papua New Guinea 156 7,631,819 6.48 21
167 Togo 156 7,170,797 3.56 19
168 Lesotho 43 2,120,116 5.09 18
169 Uzbekistan 426 29,709,932 8.46 18
170 Sierra Leone 112 6,318,575 6.20 17
171 Guinea-Bissau 37 1,787,793 3.77 17
172 Timor-Leste 23 1,172,668 4.25 16
173 Niger 169 19,268,380 18.20 16
174 Côte d’Ivoire 386 21,295,284 3.16 16
175 El Salvador 135 6,426,002 0.39 16
176 Sudan 597 39,613,217 4.66 15
177 Guatemala 243 16,255,094 3.42 13
178 Mali 239 16,258,587 3.18 13
179 Mozambique 299 27,121,827 8.06 13
180 Nicaragua 100 6,256,510 1.74 13
181 Tajikistan 107 8,610,384 7.05 13
182 Liberia 63 4,503,439 4.92 13
183 Djibouti 13 899,658 4.59 12
184 Yemen 297 25,535,086 4.38 11
185 Dominican Republic 116 10,652,135 5.81 11
186 Madagascar 278 24,235,390 1.56 9
187 Honduras 92 8,423,917 2.07 9
188 Mauritania 35 4,080,224 8.92 9
189 Comoros 8 770,058 1.95 8
190 Haïti 112 10,603,731 0.01 8
191 Sao Tome and Principe 2 202,781 6.19 8
192 Central African Republic 41 4,803,082 3.45 7
193 Guinea 106 12,347,766 2.35 7
194 Angola 83 22,819,926 12.50 5
195 Myanmar 181 54,164,262 10.42 4
196 Chad 38 13,605,625 16.86 4
197 Eritrea 29 6,737,634 3.86 4
198 Burundi 42 10,812,619 1.42 3
199 Afghanistan 74 32,006,788 11.27 3
200 North Korea 52 25,155,326 1.85 2
201 Turkmenistan 9 5,373,487 9.85 2
202 Democratic Republic of the Congo 75 71,246,355 5.92 1

The economic growth rate data comes from my essay The 12-Year Min-Max Average. Please see this essay for technical details on how the numbers were calculated.

Only “citable” scientific documents are counted, citable documents are generally higher in quality and more important than non-citable ones. However, citable and no-citable documents tend to rise and fall together, so that including non-citable documents shouldn’t have a significant effect on the HQI numbers.

Population data comes the United Nations and the World Bank. Scientific output data from SCIMago. Economic growth data from the World Bank and Trading Economics.

* A country’s GDP growth rate could be said to somewhat take into account its population growth, since when all other things are equal, growth in population results in economic growth. However, this will only apply to a stagnant economy whose only increase or decrease is a result of population change rather than

The 12-Year Min-Max Average: A Simple Method for Calculating Real, Legitimate Economic Growth and Canceling Out Central Bank Manipulations and other Noise

Introduction

Real economic growth is different from the increase in GDP that comes from monetary expansion. The 12-year min-max method that I have come up with is a way of calculating a country’s GDP growth rate over a 12-year period that aims to cancel out “fake” growth caused by monetary expansion and boom-bust cycles by taking recent economic crashes into account.

To find out China’s real economic growth from 2004 to 2015 (inclusive), find the year with the highest economic growth and the year with the lowest economic growth over the 12 year period, then average the two numbers. Over the 2004-2015 period, China’s highest economic growth was 14.7%, in 2007. Her lowest economic growth was 6.9%, in 2015. To find her real economic growth:

14.7 + 6.9
__________ = 10.8
    2

China’s GDP in 2004 was $1.9417 trillion. According to the above calculation, her economy grew at an annual rate of 10.8%, meaning that in 2015, her true GDP would be $5.999 trillion.

According to the above, China’s real economy in 2015 was three times as large as its 2004 economy. This finding is remarkably close to the 3.3 times growth of GDP from 2004 to 2015 predicted by PPP calculations ($5.7 trillion to 19.4 trillion).

Since the dollar is not a reliable store of value, the $5.999 trillion number for 2015 doesn’t mean much of anything, unless we compare it to the 2004 number of $1.94. The result, as mentioned, is that the 2015 number is three times larger, meaning the 2015 economy was three times as large as it used to be in 2004.

Another way of thinking of the above graph is to draw a rectangle with the country’s highest and lowest economic growth rates at opposing corners, then taking the midpoint of the height of the rectangle:

Extending the calculation to other countries, I will start with India:

Over the 2004-2015 period, India’s lowest growth rate was in 2008 at 3.89%. Its highest growth was in 2010 at 10.26%. Averaging the two results in 7.075%.

In 2004, India’s GDP was $0.7215 trillion. An annual growth rate of 7.075% results in a 2015 real GDP of $1.53 trillion, meaning its economy grew by a factor of 2.12. Both nominal and PPP calculations say its economy grew by a factor of 2.7. The 2.12 is quite believable to me, the truth probably lies somewhere in between.

Moving on to the United State:

America’s highest GDP growth was in 2004, at 3.79%. Its lowest growth was in 2009, at -2.78%. Averaging the two, the result is a miserable annual growth rate of half of a percent. America’s GDP in 2004 was $12.27 trillion. According to this calculation, its real 2015 GDP was $12.97 trillion, which fits the feelings of America’s population. America’s 2015 economy was only 5% larger than its 2004 economy from an honest, Smithian point of view. During the same period, its population grew 9.77% larger, meaning the wealth or income of America’s average citizen actually fell during the period. The pie grew by 5%, the pie eaters grew by 9.77%.

Predictably, Japan is even more of a trainwreck than the United States.

Over the 2004-2015 period, Japan’s high point of growth was in 2010 at 4.71%. Its low point was in 2009, at -5.53%. Averaging the two, the result is an annual growth rate of -0.41%, meaning its economy actually shrunk by that amount every year. This is well in keeping with a stagnant economy and an aging and shrinking population count. Japan’s GDP in 2004 was $4.65 trillion. According to this economic shrink rate, Japan’s GDP in 2015 was $4.45 trillion, 4.3% smaller than in 2004.

Why 12 Years

The average length of a central-bank induced asset bubble cycle is 8 years (think the late 2000 and 2008 crashes). 12 years is a cycle and a half. The 2004 to 2015 window, as an example, captures the recovery from the last crash, and our current “recovery”, providing a rich picture of what brought us here. If we look at two cycles (2000-2015 inclusive), the data will be skewed by the previous cycle’s peak, which is quite irrelevant today. If we look at only one cycle (2008-2015), we will lose historical context that is still relevant today (the period that lead to the 2008 crash).

A market cycle and a half makes for a relevant and informative picture of most periods of a country’s economic history. The idea of using a market cycle and a half comes from John P. Hussman, manager of the billion-dollar Hussman Funds mutual fund.

Why It Works

The 12-year min-max average takes a realistic look at the “fakeness” factor within an economy and takes it out. It shows how much of an economy is a house of cards built on debt and investor euphoria, and how much of it is real and of lasting value.

The basic idea is that it measures the psychology of an economy’s participants. Crashes happen when a very large number of investors realize it wasn’t such a smart idea to buy those overpriced assets, thinking that they would be able to sell them for even higher. This moment of realization happened in 1929, 2000 and 2008.

After a crash, central banks use monetary easing to motivate investors to bid up the prices of assets. This creates a growing atmosphere of euphoria that increases spending in the economy and creates years of apparent growth. When the next crash inevitably comes, the atmosphere changes from one of euphoria to one of fear and panic. The market sobers up. In this year of sobriety, investors often underestimate the market’s worth. This acts as an antidote to the overestimation of the market during euphoric years. This is what happened in March 2009.

The momentum of an economy that’s truly expanding cannot be reversed by a financial crisis. It can slow a little, but it will continue growing, as China, India and Bangladesh’s numbers show. When we average out the years of most euphoria and least euphoria in a fast-growing economy, we still get a high rate of growth, because the growth is real, it is not entirely based on the feelings of investors.

But how does investor feeling affect GDP? The blaze of euphoria caused by monetary easing and fanned by complicit mass media makes it easier, and more likely, for businesses to borrow and expand their activities, regardless of supply-and-demand considerations. Overvalued corporations find it easy to convince lenders to give them large loans. The wealthy from around the country open their wallets and outbid each other in investing their wealth in all kinds of business activities in fear of being left behind.

In stagnant economies (where standards of living for the average citizen are no longer improving appreciably) like the those of the US, Japan and Western Europe, it is by and large the feelings of investors that drive economic expansion and recession.

Measuring Crashiness

One obvious difficulty with choosing only two points on a 12-year growth graph is that growth is cumulative. A 3% growth at the beginning of the period could mean a trillion dollars increase, while at the end of the period it could mean two or three trillions.

Regardless of where the low point is on the graph, it shows that it is possible, within that economy, to lose this much value. It shows that a great amount of volatility exists within the economy, so that even if in recent years the growth numbers have all been great, if there is one big crash year on the 12-year graph, it tells us that a similar crash is in the future.

The cumulative effect doesn’t take away from the idea, the idea contains it within itself. No matter how much growth we’ve had in recent years, a crash can take most of it away, as it is farther in the future, so that its percentage effect is going to be larger than the effect of the growth of the previous years.

The PPP GDP per capita of the United States over the 12-year period  (denominated in 2005 international dollars) illustrates this. In 2004 it was $48,597. Five years of “growth” later, it was $48,557 in the 2009 crash. The crash easily outweighed all the previous years of growth. In 2015, the number had grown to $52,549, and the coming crash can easily take it back close to square one again.

The 12-year min-max average shows the “crashiness” of an economy. And since there is always a bigger crash in the future, measuring a country’s greatest year of growth against its worst year of growth makes a lot sense.

Honesty requires that I admit I came up with these reasonings for why the 12-year min-max average works after I had discovered it. I needed a reliable way of comparing the true economic momentums of different countries for the HQI, the Human Genetic-Cultural Quality Index that I will announce later, and among the methods I tried out, this one brilliantly fit the true states of many economies I have studied.

List of Countries by Real 12-Year Annual GDP Growth

Below is a list of 203 sovereign states along with their real economic growth from 2004 to 2015 according to the 12-year min-max average. The countries are sorted by population.

The number I’m most skeptical of is Germany’s. Germany has appeared to grow fast in recent years. The 12-year min-max average says its growth has actually been negative 0.77% (i.e. that the next crash will wipe out all of its recent growth). This is possible, and only history will tell.

Russia gets a 0.36% growth rate. I expect its rate will be shown to be quite higher after the next crash, as it puts the 2008 crash behind, and what remains will be its recent real economic growth rate that cannot be wiped out by a crash.

Please see the fine print at the end of the table regarding certain corrections I’ve made.

Country Population Real 12-Year Annual GDP Growth Rate (2004-2015)
China 1,401,586,609 10.545
India 1,282,390,303 7.075
United States 325,127,634 0.505
Indonesia 255,708,785 5.49
Brazil 203,657,210 3.7
Pakistan 188,144,040 4.64
Nigeria 183,523,432 18.195
Bangladesh 160,411,249 6.055
Russian Federation 142,098,141 0.36
Japan 126,818,019 -0.41
Mexico 125,235,587 0.205
Philippines 101,802,706 4.39
Ethiopia 98,942,102 11.11
Viet Nam 93,386,630 6.4
Egypt 84,705,681 4.485
Germany 82,562,004 -0.77
Iran 79,476,308 5.02
Turkey 76,690,509 2.265
Democratic Republic of the Congo 71,246,355 5.915
Thailand 67,400,746 3.385
France 64,982,894 -0.075
United Kingdom 63,843,856 -0.595
Italy 61,142,221 -1.735
Myanmar 54,164,262 10.415
South Africa 53,491,333 2.025
Tanzania 52,290,796 6.56
South Korea 49,750,234 3.605
Colombia 49,529,208 4.275
Spain 47,199,069 0.3
Kenya 46,748,617 4.315
Ukraine 44,646,131 -1.35
Argentina 42,154,914 2.17
Algeria 40,633,464 3.75
Uganda 40,141,262 7.025
Sudan 39,613,217 4.655
Poland 38,221,584 4.23
Canada 35,871,283 0.13
Iraq 35,766,702 27.77
Morocco 33,955,157 4.995
Afghanistan 32,006,788 11.27
Venezuela 31,292,702 7.545
Peru 31,161,167 5.095
Malaysia 30,651,176 2.95
Saudi Arabia 29,897,741 5.895
Uzbekistan 29,709,932 8.46
Nepal 28,440,629 4.73
Mozambique 27,121,827 8.06
Ghana 26,984,328 8.965
Yemen 25,535,086 4.38
North Korea 25,155,326 1.85
Madagascar 24,235,390 1.56
Australia 23,923,101 2.985
Cameroon 23,393,129 4.085
Taiwan 23,381,038 4.53
Angola 22,819,926 12.5
Syrian Arab Republic 22,264,996 5.065
Sri Lanka 21,611,842 6.27
Romania 21,579,201 0.695
Côte d’Ivoire 21,295,284 3.16
Niger 19,268,380 18.195
Chile 17,924,062 2.5
Burkina Faso 17,914,625 5.81
Malawi 17,308,685 5.745
Netherlands 16,844,195 -0.035
Kazakhstan 16,770,447 5.95
Mali 16,258,587 3.18
Guatemala 16,255,094 3.415
Ecuador 16,225,691 4.25
Cambodia 15,677,059 6.67
Zambia 15,519,604 6.76
Zimbabwe 15,046,102 -2.88
Senegal 14,967,446 4.22
Chad 13,605,625 16.855
Rwanda 12,428,005 7.92
Guinea 12,347,766 2.35
Cuba 11,248,783 6.76
Tunisia 11,235,248 2.165
Belgium 11,183,411 0.675
Greece 11,125,833 -1.67
Bolivia 11,024,522 5.08
Benin 10,879,828 4.295
Burundi 10,812,619 1.42
Czech Republic 10,777,060 1.02
Dominican Republic 10,652,135 5.805
Portugal 10,610,014 -0.77
Haïti 10,603,731 0.01
Hungary 9,911,396 -0.81
Sweden 9,693,883 0.405
Azerbaijan 9,612,580 17.285
United Arab Emirates 9,577,128 2.3
Serbia 9,424,030 2.965
Belarus 9,259,666 3.78
Tajikistan 8,610,384 7.05
Austria 8,557,761 -0.09
Honduras 8,423,917 2.07
Switzerland 8,238,610 1.005
Israel 7,919,528 3.705
Jordan 7,689,760 5.45
Papua New Guinea 7,631,819 6.48
Hong Kong 7,313,557 3.12
Togo 7,170,797 3.56
Bulgaria 7,112,641 1.73
Paraguay 7,032,942 5.035
Laos 7,019,652 7.81
Eritrea 6,737,634 3.855
El Salvador 6,426,002 0.39
Sierra Leone 6,318,575 6.195
Libya 6,317,080 21.205
Nicaragua 6,256,510 1.735
Kyrgyzstan 5,707,529 5.225
Denmark 5,661,723 -0.645
Singapore 5,618,866 7.32
Finland 5,460,592 -1.545
Slovakia 5,457,889 2.67
Turkmenistan 5,373,487 9.85
Norway 5,142,842 1.17
Lebanon 5,053,624 5.6
Costa Rica 5,001,657 3.88
Central African Republic 4,803,082 3.45
Ireland 4,726,856 1.085
Congo 4,671,142 3.585
New Zealand 4,596,396 1.25
Palestine (West Bank & Gaza) 4,548,815 6.175
Liberia 4,503,439 4.915
Georgia 4,304,540 4.28
Croatia 4,255,374 -1.115
Oman 4,157,783 3.555
Mauritania 4,080,224 8.915
Panama 3,987,866 8.46
Bosnia and Herzegovina 3,819,684 2.945
Puerto Rico 3,680,058 -0.785
Kuwait 3,583,399 1.84
Moldova 3,436,828 1.705
Uruguay 3,429,997 4.39
Albania 3,196,981 4.32
Lithuania 2,998,969 -1.86
Armenia 2,989,467 -0.14
Mongolia 2,923,050 8.01
Jamaica 2,813,276 -0.765
Namibia 2,392,370 6.15
Qatar 2,350,549 14.875
Lesotho 2,120,116 5.09
Macedonia 2,109,251 3.005
Slovenia 2,079,085 -0.43
Botswana 2,056,370 1.105
Latvia 2,031,361 -1.225
Gambia 1,970,081 1.36
Guinea-Bissau 1,787,793 3.765
Gabon 1,751,199 1.715
Bahrain 1,359,726 5.195
Trinidad and Tobago 1,346,697 5.025
Swaziland 1,285,519 2.375
Estonia 1,280,227 -2.225
Mauritius 1,253,581 3.565
Timor-Leste 1,172,668 4.245
Cyprus 1,164,695 -0.505
Djibouti 899,658 4.585
Fiji 892,727 1.945
Guyana 807,611 2.53
Equatorial Guinea 799,372 12.905
Bhutan 776,461 10.035
Comoros 770,058 1.95
Montenegro 621,556 2.5
Solomon Islands 584,482 4.1
Macao 584,420 3.2
Suriname 548,456 5.38
Luxembourg 543,261 1.51
Cape Verde 508,315 6.95
Malta 431,239 0.75
Brunei Darussalam 428,539 1.03
Bahamas 387,549 -0.39
Maldives 357,981 7.57
Belize 347,598 2.69
Iceland 336,728 2.405
Barbados 287,482 0.825
French Polynesia 282,764 0.11
Vanuatu 263,888 4.84
New Caledonia 263,147 3.75
Sao Tome and Principe 202,781 6.185
Samoa 193,228 0.755
Saint Lucia 184,937 3.25
Guam 169,885 3
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 109,374 2.145
Grenada 106,694 3.33
Tonga 106,379 -0.2
Kiribati 105,555 1.505
Federated States of Micronesia 104,460 -0.505
Aruba 103,889 -2.26
Seychelles 93,754 3.785
Antigua and Barbuda 91,822 0.67
Andorra 80,950 -0.26
Dominica 72,680 2.895
Bermuda 65,578 0.13
Cayman Islands 59,967 -0.2
Greenland 57,275 0.05
Saint Kitts and Nevis 55,376 1.83
Marshall Islands 52,993 0.875
Monaco 38,320 1.64
Liechtenstein 37,461 -0.4
San Marino 31,802 3.255
Palau 21,291 -0.22
Tuvalu 9,916 2.01

For Iran, ignored the 2012 crash, as it was a political event. Used the 2008 crash instead, as it was a shared world event. For Brazil too due to 2015. For Iraq 2014 due to CIA-ISIS. For Venezuela, 2009 was used due to recent mismanagement. For Syria, 3.23 lowest growth from 2010 was used, due to start of the Syria v. CIA war in 2011. For Yemen, ignored numbers from 2011 due to the crisis, used lowest number from 2006.

Data for New Caledonia taken from Trading Economics (World Bank data missing).

Monaco’s highest growth rate taken from World Bank (14.58 for 2007). Lowest number (-11.3 for 2009) missing from World Bank, taken from Trading Economics.

Data for Greenland after 2009 is missing. Used 2009 number as lowest growth rate (-5.41), and 2007 number as highest growth rate (5.51).

No reliable annual growth data for French Polynesia. Assumed a top growth of 4.42 and a bottom growth of -4.2, as hinted at by the CIA World Factbook.

For Sierra Leone, ignored 2013 and 2015 numbers, as they were aberrations caused by the mining sector’s boom and collapse.

For Liechtenstein, top and bottom growth numbers were taken from Trading Economics as World Bank seemed inaccurate and missed the years after 2009.

Guadelope, Cook Islands, Montserrat, Netherlands Antilles, Anguilla, Martinique, Réunion, Gibraltar, American Samoa, US and British Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands and French Guiana not included as GDP growth rate is not. It is possible that the World Bank counts them toward their parent states, couldn’t verify this.

Faroe Islands not included as GDP growth rate data is unavailable.

Data for North Korea, Guam and Cayman Islands’ GDP growth rate taken from Trading Economics as World Bank doesn’t provide them.

For the Central African Republic, numbers after 2012 are ignored due to the civil war there. Used 2004’s GDP growth rate as the top number (5.99) and 2005 as the bottom (0.91).

For Eritrea, ignored 2008 GDP growth low as it was caused by US sanctions. Used 2006 low instead (-0.97).

Somalia is not included in the World Bank data, and other available data is none too reliable due to the fact that the country is a war zone. Decided not to include the country as no useful conclusions can be drawn from the data.

No reliable data found for Turks and Caicos Islands, Wallis and Futuna, Nauru, Mayotte, and Western Sahara, so omitted them.

Charting the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory in 2017

Below is a chart (click it to zoom) that shows the seasonality of Anglo-American history since the end of the Middle Ages, according to the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory (as described in their 1997 book The Fourth Turning). Click here to download an enlarged version.

Below is the inner circles zoomed in (for those who don’t want to click the above chart to zoom in):

The “saeculum” is the word that Strauss-Howe use for each circle of the chart above, four seasons together make one saeculum. A saeculum is generally the length of one human life time, and its regularity has been noted since ancient times. We are currently living at the end of the saeculum that started in 1943, and which will probably end sometime between 2025 and 2035.

Below is the part of the chart that is most relevant to 2017. Many world leaders feel that we are approaching a major war. Countries are preparing for war, with Russia and China at the forefront, and Japan starting its own re-militarization program. According to the Strauss-Howe theory, 2017 is equivalent to 1933 (when Hitler got in charge and started rebuilding Germany’s army), 1854 (when the prospect of an American Civil War felt more and more imminent), and 1779 (the middle of the American Revolutionary War against Britain, and the year of the French Revolution). Needless to say, right now we are living in very interesting times.

[I updated these charts in 2018.]

How cyber pirates anonymously torrent movies on the internet

For my views on Internet piracy see my essay: Why Digital Piracy is Ethical and Necessary

We all know that you, as a law-abiding citizen, would never download a car. And yet there are people out there who download movies for free and refuse to add a few more bucks to the billions of dollars that movie studios squat upon. There are film executives who, thanks to cyber pirates, only have a net worth of $100 million instead of $101.

So how do they do it? How are these cyber criminals subverting our democracy and freedoms to acquire knowledge and entertainment for free without making the wealthy even wealthier? It all burns down to three simple letters: I2P.

I2P, or the Invisible Internet Project, is a project that enables anyone anywhere to download information in a way that makes it impossible for anyone to track them or reveal their identity. Many experts at the CNN agree that our democracy is in great danger when we freely allow citizens to practice speech that is genuinely free. Speech needs to be controlled and approved by the government, for our own security, and most importantly, the safety of our children. The cyber police work tirelessly to prevent free speech from actually taking place. But the pirates have found a home in I2P where no one can catch them.

I2P is slightly like TOR, which you may have heard of. However, unlike TOR, I2P is not used to browse normal internet sites (though it can be used that way), rather, it has its own sites, such as stats.i2p. And unlike TOR, I2P supports and encourages torrenting; it even has a built-in torrent client that is ready to go as soon as you install I2P.

Cyber pirates follow the following steps when they download high quality Blue Ray movies, ebook and textbook collections, and the latest Battlefield video game anonymously. We can show you the steps since downloading, installing and using I2P is perfectly legal under current laws (so long as you do not intentionally seek out and download copyrighted movies, books, songs, etc., see step 18 below for more clarification on this).

  1. First, they visit the I2P site to download the I2P software:
    If the site is for some reason down or has moved, they can easily find the new site by Googling “download i2p”:
  2. Then they click the I2P download link to download the I2P software:
  3. Below is a picture of the finished I2P software download:
  4. They may then do a signature check to make sure their version of I2P has not been tampered with. You can read TOR’s guide for how to do this, and apply the same logic to I2P.
  5. Once I2P is installed, they do not run it. They will set up a browser to be fully dedicated to I2P. This means that the browser will be able to browse I2P websites, but not ordinary internet sites. In our example we show how the Opera browser can be configured to handle I2P. They click on the Opera button, then point to Settings->Preferences:
  6. Then they click the Advanced tab:
  7. Then they click on the Network section, then the “Proxy servers” button:
  8. Then they make the following changes to the window that pops up, then click “OK”:
  9. Once they are done setting up Opera, they start I2P. There are two programs, and it doesn’t matter which one you run, the only difference is that the second one has a restart option. In our example we show you the restartable one:
  10. The I2P Service window shows up for them. Here they wait a little while for the program to fully start up.
  11. If all goes well, their computer launches their default browser, which could be Internet Explorer. While they do not want this, it is useful for getting the address to the I2P service. Thus they copy the address shown.
  12. They go to Opera and paste the address in the address bar. Then they drag the icon where it says “Web” to the bookmarks bar for easy navigation in the future.
  13. They wait a while as their I2P program becomes integrated into the worldwide network. They watch these two indicaters on the I2P homepage. Once they are green, they know they are good to go:
  14. Now, they click on the “Torrents” link at the top of the I2P Console.
  15. They are taken to I2PSnark, which is the built-in torrent client for I2P. Currently the client is empty since we haven’t added any torrents. They click on the “Postman” link to take them to the Postman tracker, which is the largest torrent tracker on I2P. There is also the Diftracker link, which is another tracker.
  16. Depending on how long the I2P program has been running, the Postman website will open immediately or after a while. They may also get a “Proxy server error” kind of page, which is nothing to be worried about, they will simply try the website again in 5-10 minutes.
    In the image it can be seen that the sneaky anonymous cyber pirates have uploaded torrents for a movie called Let the Right One In and a video game called Wasteland 2.
  17. Since we are perfectly law-abiding citizens, we will show an example of downloading a legal non-copyrighted file from the Postman I2P bittorrent tracker. But the pirates download movies and other files, committing copyrighted infringement. Of course, nobody, government or otherwise, can catch them do it, since everything is fully anonymous and encrypted. So they get away with downloading their favorite movies without making the super wealthy even wealthier. The communism!
    Here, to find a legal file, we put the keyword “pdf” into the search box so that we only see ebook files, some of which are copyright-free and legally distributable.
  18. Here is an example of some of the books that came up. We find some German magazine, a book by John Gray for clueless men trying to lead a politically correct life, two sex guides for autistic individuals, some convoluted self help nonsense, and a book for antenna nerds. These are all copyrighted books, therefore we will have to skip them; we wouldn’t download a car, so why would we download books? Of course, balaclava-wearing cyber pirates do not skip them just because they are copyrighted, since they know the cyber police have no way of catching them, since they are using I2P.
  19. After a very, very long time, we find a book that seems copyright-free.
  20. Here, the pirates will right-click the magnet icon on the left of the book title and click “Copy Link Address”.
  21. Then, they will go back to I2PSnark, paste the link in the “From URL” box, then click “Add torrent”.
  22. Below we see that the torrent has been added to the list of torrents. The word “Magnet” ahead of all those numbers tells the pirate that the torrent file hasn’t been fetched yet (it usually takes a minute or two). Once it is, the name for the torrent will be shown.
  23. Below you can see the finished torrent being seeded. We have blacked out the names of the other torrents for undisclosed reasons. Seeding is also perfectly anonymous; therefore pirates often leave many torrents running in the seeding mode to help other pirates download things faster. Due to all of the cryptography that happens, downloading more than 5 torrents at the same time can cause significant CPU usage.
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