The Crucible of Islam by G. W. Bowersock

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G. W. Bowersock’s 2017 book The Crucible of Islam is a very brief survey of the religious and political situation of Arabia in the centuries leading up to the coming of Islam. There is mention of the relationship of the Byzantines, Persians and Ethiopians with the Jews and Christians of Yemen and Arabia.

The purpose of the book is to shed light on the “crucible” in which Islam was made. Due to the extreme lack of documentary evidence on the situation in Mecca and its surroundings, the book is restricted to retelling the stories of a few major events in the surroundings that may (or may) not have had an important influence in the way Islam came about. The Ethiopians conquered Yemen and Christianized it. The Persians and Byzantines competed for influence over the region through their relationships with allied Arab tribes. I cannot really say that much light has been shed on the crucible of Islam; due to its briefness and the lack of documentary evidence, the book serves mostly to show how little we know about the reality of the facts on the ground.

The most interesting thing I learned from this book is Michael Lecker’s theory that the Ghassanids in Medina may have had a role in encouraging the Jews and pagans to unite under the rule the Prophet Muhammad PBUH. The Byzantine emperor Heraclius may have encouraged his clients the Ghassanids to do this in order to ensure that the Persians did not regain influence over the Medina region.

Below are some notes on (mostly minor) issues and errors that I encountered in my reading.

On page 39 he says there are no daughters of Allah mentioned in the Quran. While it is true that no daughters of Allah are mentioned by name, the Quran does contain mention of the pagans attributing daughters to Allah:

Glen Bowersock, Professor of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

And they attribute to God daughters—exalted is He—and for themselves what they desire. (The Quran, verse 16:57)

Ask them, “Are the daughters for your Lord, while for them the sons?” (The Quran, verse 37:149)

Or for Him the daughters, and for you the sons? (The Quran, verse 52:39)

He considers the Wars of Apostasy an inappropriate label because he assumes they were majorly aimed at false prophets like Musaylama. But according to Muslim sources these wars were aimed first at tribes that refused to pay the zakat which they had paid during the time of the Prophet PBUH. The war on Musaylama was a sequel to these, and rather than being directed at extinguishing a rival religion specifically, the war was an act of statecraft; Musaylama had established a state that was at war with the Muslim state, and the Muslim state responded.

He mentions the word ukhdūd as referring to the Trenches in the Battle of the Trench, even though the name universally used is khandaq. He mentions that chapter 85 of the Quran al-Burūj commemorates this battle when there is no relationship between the chapter and the battle whatsoever. This chapter in fact commemorates that killing of Christians by Yemeni Jews, a chapter of pre-Islamic history that Bowersock himself mentions often. The chapter of Quran the actually commemorates the Battle of the Trench is chapter 33, al-Aḥzāb (“The Confederates”).

He mentions that the relics of the True Cross had been moved to Baghdad in 614, possibly meaning al-Madāʾin because Baghdad did not exist at the time.

He says that the Prophet’s cousin ʿAlī b. Abū Ṭalib did not belong to the Quraysh tribe but to the Banū Hāshim, confusing clan differences with tribal differences. Banū Hāshim were actually a clan within Quraysh.

He mentions that the Prophet PBUH “reconstructed” the Kaʿba. The phrasing implies that he did this as part of his mission. There is no evidence as far as I know that the Prophet PBUH made any changes to the Kaʿba. He had taken part in repairs to the Kaʿba before he became a prophet.

His treatment of the Dome of the Rock seems to suggest that he is unaware that the mosque (al-Masjid al-Aqṣā) is actually the original mosque that was established on the Mount. He expects the traveler Arculf to have seen the rock in the mosque, but since the mosque does not actually include the rock and is hundreds of meters away from it, it is quite natural that Arculf does not mention the rock. The Dome of the Rock itself is not a mosque but merely a shrine.

The Closing of the Muslim Mind and the Decline of Islamic Civilization

A response to Robert R. Reilly’s book The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. Last I year I published then took down an early version of this essay. This is the updated version (also published as chapter 3 of my book An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Understanding Islam and Muslims).

In his essay “The Problem of Islamic Decadence”, the British historian J. J. Saunders (1910 – 1972) mentions the many theories that Westerners have proposed to explain why Muslims went from being the all-powerful rulers of the world to being backward and politically weak.

Considering Islamic civilization a weak and backward one is a relatively new thing. Saunders writes:

Not until the Age of Enlightenment did the West awake to the fact that its enemy and former mentor had slipped so far behind: only then were attempts made to account for this decline. Up to the end of the seventeenth century Islam presented the appearance of great strength and viguor, at least politically: the three leading Muslim States, the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Persia and Mogul India, ranked among the world’s great powers, and even the Sharifian kingdom of Morocco was treated with respect by Christian nations as late as the age of Louis XIV. Around 1700 there was a noticeable change. The final repulse of the Turks from Vienna (1683), the Christian reconquest of Hungary, and the Peace of Carlowitz (1699), registered the unmistakable decay of Ottoman might. The death of Awrangzib (1707) was followed by the rapid disintegration of the Mogul Empire. The fall of the Safavid dynasty (1722) ended the political greatness of Persia.[1]

Among undeniable signs of the decline of Islamic civilization were the fact that the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb needed a Dutch passport to perform the Hajj in 1706,[2] and the fact that the Ottomans were so geographically ignorant that they were taken aback by the appearance of a Russian fleet in the Mediterranean in 1770, not knowing that the Baltic Sea was connected to the Atlantic Ocean according to Saunders.[3] As early as 1670, a European traveler through Persia and India noticed the lack of intellectual curiosity and the low technological sophistication of these lands.[4]

The French intellectuals Montesquieu (1689-1755) and Voltaire (1694-1778) and the English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) blamed government tyranny and mismanagement for the state of Muslim societies.[5] Ernest Renan, one of the most prominent intellectuals of the 19th century, blamed Islamic theology. According to Renan:

Only by freeing themselves from the paralysing grip of the Koran and the Law could the Muslim people hope to contribute again to the general advance of civilisation.[6]

Since Renan, the idea that Islam causes backwardness has been thoroughly taken up by the West’s intelligentsia so that it is taken for a fact these days—despite its banality and its sociologically amateur understanding of the functioning human societies. The works of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis are a more sophisticated restatement of Renan’s ideas. One of the latest contributions to this field of Islam-blaming is The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis by Robert R. Reilly.[7] This essay focuses on a critique of Reilly’s writing while introducing an alternative, and far more plausible, explanation.

Reilly argues that the Islamic theological doctrine of predestination and other Ash’arite—the dominant theological framework within Sunni Islam—teachings have driven Muslims to a fatalistic, anti-intellectual dead-end, a “suicide” as Reilly describes it, quoting Fazlur Rahman (1919 – 1988), the famous Pakistani Islamic intellectual.

Reilly’s thesis is that scholarly theological positions hamper Muslim curiosity and intellectual achievement. He asserts that religious scholars and their doctrines have the power to put a damper on the freedom of thought among Muslims. In his rather depressing vision, intelligent Muslims are almost mind-controlled by a fatalistic Islam, and if only they would abandon this version of Islam, they would, as if by magic, acquire the ability to stop being narrow-minded and develop into full human beings. As is sadly typical of Western discourses about Islam, Reilly compares the very worst examples of the people of the Middle East with the best of the West, and from this highly skewed comparison he concludes that Islam must be the reason why the Middle East is not doing as well as the West.

If Reilly is right that the presently dominant version of Islam causes narrow-mindedness and is tantamount to “intellectual suicide”, then we would expect the intellectual elite of the Muslim world to be severely affected by this suicidal doctrine. Men and women who would have been scientists and inventors in a different reality would instead be narrow-minded and anti-intellectual worshipers at the feet of the religious scholars. It sounds like the set-up for a good story, but is there any reality to this scenario? The question to ask is: are city-dwelling, cosmopolitan Muslims hampered in their intellectual curiosity by theological doctrines?

Reilly’s answer should be yes. These people would be responsible for intellectual progress; but there is supposedly little intellectual progress, therefore these people are instead narrow-minded anti-intellectuals who need to be freed from harmful Islamic doctrines.

In the Reilly’s imagination, Muslim hordes listen to their religious scholars then zealously go on to implement whatever backward thing said scholars recommend.

But in the world of reality, like George Eliot’s Christians and George Orwell’s proletarian Catholics, Muslims politely listen to the preachers at the Friday sermons, then go out to think whatever they themselves choose to think. If the sermon makes sense within their personal, familial and cultural conceptual frameworks, they may be motivated to slightly change their behavior in response to it. And if it did not survive this critique, the content will simply be ignored. And if a preacher insults their intelligence or conscience one too many times, they will simply stop attending their sermons and find another mosque to go to (if one is available). If not, they may go to the sermon as late as possible to catch the obligatory performance of the communal prayer after sermon ends, as I have seen some Muslims do.

Reilly writes:

There are people in Saudi Arabia today who still do not believe man has been on the moon. This is not because they are ignorant; it is because accepting the fact that man was on the moon would mean also accepting the chain of causal relationships that put him there, which is simply theologically unacceptable to them.

Reilly quotes things like the above, thinking that they are somehow representative of all Muslims, when:

  1. Saudi’s cosmopolitan Muslims would find that just as laughable as any Westerner.
  2. There are perhaps tens of thousands of Americans who do not believe the moon landings ever happened. A quick search on Amazon.com for “moon landing hoax” brings up dozens of books.
  3. Saudi Arabia, this supposed capital of Islamic backwardness, now produces more scientific research[8] than Hungary, Thailand, New Zealand, Israel or Romania.[9]

Whether Saudi’s Wahhabi preachers dislike the country’s research institutions or not, the Muslim population not only tolerates them, but is proud of them and their achievements. In 2010, the Saudi website al-Weeam reported that a female Saudi student had come first in her class at Southampton University in England. The article led to 88 comments, most of which praised her achievement. A few of the usual suspects were present to mention how she was suffering moral decay by being in England, but these were the exception “that proves the rule”; most readers found positive value in her achievement and expressed pride in it.[10]

An illustration of the independence of the Muslim mind from religious scholars is the way Iran’s middle class rejects the Shia practice of temporary marriage, rightly recognizing it as legalized prostitution[11], despite scholarly approval for it.

Egypt is a very conservative country, yet its scientific output has increased from 4,515 scientific research papers published in 2005 to 17,300 in 2016. It is common to brush such data aside by saying this progress is happening despite Islam. Even if the research institutions that are producing these papers are staffed by devout Muslims, this is brushed aside by saying that they are not really Muslim in their hearts, that they have abandoned parts of Islam and this enables them to be rational and human. In this way, all actual cases of Muslims acting rationally, acting as intelligent and modern creatures, are dismissed in order to maintain the narrative that Islam promotes irrationality.

Western pundits preemptively close all doors to data that would prove their theses wrong; any data about real Muslims behaving intelligently, rationally and humanistically is inadmissible to them (they are not real Muslims, or they are doing what they do despite Islam), while all data showing otherwise is admissible.

Reilly, as many other pundits, considers Wahhabism somehow a natural form of Islam that has the danger of spreading to all Muslim minds. This is despite the fact it is likely only practiced by less than 1% of the world’s Muslims, largely sponsored by Saudi Arabia, and despite the fact that the vast majority of Muslims strongly dislike it. When the Wahhabi Ibn Saud conquered Mecca and Medina with the help of British funding[12] in the 1920’s, the people of these two cities so strongly disliked Wahhabi preachers that he had to import clerics from Egypt.[13]

Reilly has to focus on Wahhabism because he is trying to explain why Islam is causing so much terrorism.[14] Like almost all of those who try to answer this question, he tries to find the reasons for Islamic terrorism within Islamic cultures and societies, ignorant of the fact Islamic terrorism is very much a 20th century phenomenon triggered by colonial rule in Egypt, the Jewish ethnic cleansing of Palestine[15], and the US arming, training and funding of the Wahhabi Taliban and al-Qaeda organizations in the 1980’s in order to weaken the Soviet Union.[16]

Instead of trying to look blindly grope inside Muslim minds for the causes of Islamic terrorism, Reilly would probably do much better to call up a few of his friends at the Pentagon.[17]

The decline of Islamic science

The rise of the rationalist Mu’tazilites coincided with the rise of Islamic science in the 9th century, and the fall of the Mu’tazilites and the rise of Ash’arites in the 11th century coincided with the fall of Islamic science. Reilly considers it his most important contribution to the discussion of the decline of Islam to suggest that the abandonment of Mu’tazilite doctrine and the adoption of the less intellectual Ash’arite doctrine was a cause for the decline and fall of Islamic civilization. For him this correlation equals causation.

During the period of decline that started from 900 CE onward, the Abbasid empire suffered repeated Turkic invasions. The same process that caused the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (centuries of barbarian invasions causing a breakdown in urban networks of professionalism and trade) happened to Islam from the 10th century to the 15th century. The West was spared this process during the same period so that it enjoyed a Renaissance in peace just as the Turkic Mahmud of Ghazni was carrying on his slaughter of cosmopolitan and productive Iranian cities.

Baghdad was the center of Abbasid science and philosophy, which was largely conducted by Iranians coming from the great Persian-speaking cities of Central Asia. These cities were one by one decimated by the Turkic and Mongol invasions, and Baghadad itself never recovered from the destruction of its irrigation system by the Mongols.[18] Two centuries after the Mongols, the Turkic warlord Tamerlane re-destroyed Baghdad even more thoroughly than the Mongols had managed.[19]

Russia and Poland, the only significant areas of the West that suffered Mongol and Turkic invasions during the same period, were until recently just as famous for being backward and undeveloped as the Muslim lands, despite being Christian lands. John Saunders writes:

Since the conversion of Northmen and the Magyars around 1000, Western Europe had been completely free from this scourge. The Mongols, who devastated Russia as thoroughly as they did Western Asia, got as far as Silesia in 1241 before their leaders were obliged to return home in order to elect a new Great Khan. Had they pressed westwards to the Rhine and the Atlantic and overrun Germany, Italy and France, which they could probably have done with ease, there would have been no Renaissance, and the West, like Russia, would have taken centuries to reconstruct the shattered fabric of its civilisation. Western Europe has perhaps never properly appreciated its good fortune in escaping conquest by the last and most dreadful of the invaders from the steppes of Asia. It emerged from the Dark Ages in the eleventh century, at the very time when the first barbarian blows were being struck at the world of Islam, and it was able from then onwards to build up a new civilisation on the Atlantic fringe of the Eurasian continent uninterrupted by the raids and devastations of Turks or Mongols or Bedouins.

Now that the destruction brought by the barbarian invasions has been repaired and trade has resumed, we should take another look at Muslim societies and see whether things are changing or not. Islam has not changed greatly in the past 200 years. Muslims continue to consider the Quran the literal Word of God and the hadith collections of al-Bukhārī and Muslim as canons of the faith. If Renan, Lewis and Reilly are right that Islamic theology is causing a closing of the Muslim mind (John Saunders, too, considers Islam a potential negative influence), we would expect little change to have taken place after the restoration of peace, because they tell us that it is the Muslims’ Islamic beliefs that is making them backward and decadent, not something outside of Islam, such as historical circumstances.

Today, throughout the Muslim world there is great interest in philosophy, in science, in literature. The top 6 Muslim-majority countries in terms of population (Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran and Turkey) have increased their scientific output by three to ten times in the past ten years alone.  Iran now publishes more scientific research papers in peer-reviewed journals than Sweden, Poland or Belgium. Muslims are sending their children to Western-inspired universities by the millions. In Iran and Egypt, most Western bestsellers are translated and published a year or two after their publication in the West. It is breathtakingly ignorant to color one’s understanding of the Muslim societies of today by prejudices inspired by the decaying societies of 1000-1900. Islamic theology has remained the same, yet everything else is changing.

The Scientific Revolution was the edge of edges that enabled Europe to rule the world until the year 2000. It has only been in the past 20 years (since the 1990’s) that the nations outside of Europe, Muslim and non-Muslim, discovered the importance of formal scientific research. Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, India and China realized they would forever be second-class citizens on the world stage, clients of Europe, as long as they did not have a system for churning out discoveries as Europe did.

All of the 20th century was a difficult lesson for the third world in learning that, to keep up with Europe, it is not sufficient to copy its technologies; one needs to recreate its scientific research culture. Only this enables one to have the well-educated and well-equipped men and women needed to develop the blades of aircraft engines and the connectors used in supercomputers.

At the moment that I am writing this, we stand at the moment in history when the non-European world has finally realized the essential necessity for scientists. China went from publishing 28,000 scientific papers in 1996 to over 400,000 in 2016. Recently it was announced that China had surpassed the United States in its output to become the world’s number one publisher of scientific research.[20] Iran has seen even more dramatic growth, going from less than 1000 papers in 1996 to over 47,000 in 2016. Similar growth can be seen in all major Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia.

We are now in a major turning point in history, perhaps as important as that in 1600 when Western Europe became the world’s supreme civilization. The thing that gave Europe its permanent edge over the past centuries no longer solely belongs to it. The culture of scientific inquiry is being recreated throughout the world, so that today any of Egypt, Iran, India or Malaysia is likely perfectly capable of carrying science forward even if Europe and the United States were to vanish from the world.

A theory that blames Islam for the Islamic world’s status today will have to tell us that this recent realization of the crucial importance of science to national prowess and prosperity is going to make little difference as long as Muslims remain devout. We are supposedly backward because of Islam, not because of historical circumstances. But a quick comparison between Muslim countries and their non-Muslim equivalents in the next section shows that this is just a figment of the imagination; these nations are remaining devout Muslims while embracing science.

We Muslims are often given the nonsensical choice of either choosing to be human or choosing to be Muslim, and in Western works like S. Frederick Starr’s Lost Enlightenment and Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Islamic Enlightenment, the writers make it amply clear that they could never see eye-to-eye with a faithful and devout Muslim (who is invariably an enemy of rationality and intellectual progress). They cannot conceive of someone as intelligent as themselves (or God forbid, more intelligent) being a faithful Muslim.

Caught between Western discussions of often imaginary Muslims are actual, living and breathing Muslims who are experiencing no crisis, who are happy to engage in intellectual pursuits, and who while respecting the religious scholars, do not take them seriously when what they say goes against reason and conscience. Are Muslim doctors systematically avoiding intellectual inquiry because of Ash’arite indoctrination? This is such an incredibly outlandish thought that it would make most Muslims laugh. Are Muslim parents systematically forbidding their children from reading Western classics and studying the humanities at Western universities? No. They see no conflict between intellectual inquiry and Islam because to them there is no conflict, and it is their opinion that matters; it is they who make Islam’s history.

Imaginary Muslims live in Muslim “no-go zones”, do not read except strict religious literature, do everything the scholars tell them, and keep their women in cages. Real Muslims live wherever they want, read whatever they like, are respectful but inwardly skeptical toward the religious scholars and treat their women according to whatever their human instincts and cultures demand. It is time that we started considering real Muslims in our discussions of Islam. Imaginary Muslims need to be taught reason, rationality and humanism. Actual Muslims do not—they have already embraced these ideas and integrated them into their own lives. In just a single century the Islamic world’s scientific output has increased by orders of magnitude, nearly all Muslim families have started to send their children to secular universities that have popped up all over the Muslim lands, and almost all Muslim countries have adopted some form of constitutional democracy. This, I believe, is sufficient progress for just one century.

Harmful theology?

The Ash’arites (represented by al-Ghazālī and others) said that God is capable of willing anything. Reilly thinks this shows a dangerous moral relativism within Islam, since it tells us that God’s nature is totally arbitrary.

But this is fantastical nonsense; a Muslim cannot perform the obligatory prayer without referring to God as the Gracious, the Merciful, multiple times, amounting to a minimum of 36 times a day. Can a theological idea that the majority of Muslims have never even heard of[21] somehow override this consistent emphasis on God’s attributes of grace and mercy?

Reilly writes that the elimination of cause and effect “makes prediction impossible”. He refers to the case of certain Islamic scholars getting weather forecasts banned between 1983-1984 as evidence.  But his evidence actually takes away from his thesis; even in a traditional and supposedly backward country like Pakistan, the ulema could not get weather forecasts banned for more than a year. The scholars won for one year and consistently lost every single year before and after that—despite Pakistan remaining very much a conservative Muslim country. The sensible conclusion is not that Muslims believe in irrationalist nonsense, but that they reject nonsense even if it comes from their religious scholars.

The Safavids and Qajars were not Ash’arites, they were in fact Shia who maintained respect for the opposing rationalist Mu’tazilite tradition, yet they were no more open to intellectual inquiry than the Ash’arite Ottomans. Additionally, today Ash’arite Sunni countries like Egypt, Turkey and Malaysia are not behind non-Ash’arite Iran and Azerbaijan in science and intellectual inquiry. Both the past and the present show that Ash’arite theology is useless as a predictor of the openness or closedness of the Muslim mind.

If religious scholars abuse Islamic theology to attack common sense, Muslims will feel embarrassed that their religion has to be represented by such people. Reilly continually uses the excesses of certain minor sects and political groups in their support for unreasonable policies as proof for Ash’arite theology’s extreme influence, despite the fact that the majority of Muslims consider these groups unrespectable and unworthy of attention. George Makdisi mentions an interesting case of theological abuse by a scholar:

The Spanish grammarian Ibn Mada’ (d. 592/1196) wrote a refutation of the concept of the regent (‘āmil: regens) in grammar, on the basis that government belongs to God alone. The author, applying the Ash’ari theological view to grammar, denies the power of the regent on the basis that desinential inflections are really the result of God’s acts; they are merely attributed (kasb) to man. Needless to say that this view had no success in the field of grammar.[22]

A person who views Islam as an anti-intellectual force will consider the above “typical” of Islam. But Makdisi, who understands the functioning of real-world Islamic societies, considers it “needless to say” that this absurd abuse of theology was not taken seriously by Muslims. The quoted anecdote does not show that Ash’arism had a negative influence on Muslim minds, it in fact shows the opposite; Muslims by and large do not accept nonsense even when dressed in the language of religion.

It is tempting for an intellectual, especially a Westerner, to think of himself or herself as a knight in shining armor chosen to rid the Muslim world of its backwardness, chosen to bring the Muslims out of the darkness of faith into the light of reason. But such a person, if they were to go to cosmopolitan places like Cairo or Tehran, and if they were to have dinner at a devout cosmopolitan Muslim’s home, will find that there is no need for the battering ram of reason and rationality they brought with themselves. The closed gates of the Muslim mind are an illusion; there are no gates. Look at the books sold on the streets of Cairo, Tehran or Baghdad. The openness of the Islamic world of today to ideas from around the world would shock medieval Islamic theologians (and medieval Christian theologians). Even in the Islamic theocracy of Iran the books of freethinkers like Avicenna and the latest Western bestsellers are not merely tolerated but celebrated. This alone should be sufficient to show that the idea of “closed” Muslim societies and minds is uninformed fantasizing.

[1] J. J. Saunders, Muslims & Mongols: Essays on Medieval Asia, ed. G.W. Rice, Christchurch: University of Canterbury and Whitcoulli Limited, 1977, 27.

[2] Eric Tagliacozzo, The Longest Journey, 26.

[3] Saunders, Muslims & Mongols, 106.

[4] Ibid., 102.

[5] Ibid., 103.

[6] Ibid., 104.

[7] Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, Wilmington: ISI Books, 2010.

[8] 18,953 research papers in 2016 according to Scimago Journal and Country Rank.

[9] Perhaps the larger part of Saudi’s scientific growth is due to the importation of foreign scientists. But the fact that the Saudis are willing to spend billions of dollars on research, and the fact that the Saudi population is not up in arms against this scientific growth but actually supports it should give us pause.

[10] Sālim al-Shaybānī, “Mutaba`ithah saudiyyah tuhaqiq injaz ilmi wa tatafawwaq al-talabah al-baritaniyyin fi jami`atihim”, Alweeam, December 1, 2010, weam.co/4351 (retrieved January 27, 2018).

[11] One can marry someone for a day as long as a cleric is present to officiate the wedding.

[12] See Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, London: Profile Books Ltd, 2018.

[13] See Henri Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

[14] Almost all cases of Islamic terrorism are carried out by Wahhabis and sects following similar doctrines.

[15] For the Palestinian issue, see Ila Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007.

[16] See Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s Wars for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2016.

[17] The Pentagon was providing regular flights to al-Qaeda members right before 9/11, as FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has publicized. See Edmonds’ interview with Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine: “Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?”, November 1, 2009, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/whos-afraid-of-sibel-edmonds/ (retrieved December 24, 2018).

[18] Saunders, Muslims & Mongols,  114.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Dockrilll, Peter. “China Just Overtook The US in Scientific Output For The First Time.” ScienceAlert, January 23, 2018,  https://www.sciencealert.com/china-just-overtook-us-in-scientific-output-first-time-published-research (retrieved March 5, 2018).

[21] In my discussions of Ash’arite theology with Muslims, I have found that they find it very unsettling and outlandish, since it goes against the normative Islam they have learned throughout their lives; that God is just and kind.

[22] George Makdisi, The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West: With Special Reference to Scholasticism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990, 124.

The Philosophical Reason why Homosexual Relationships are “Wrong”

Some preliminary thoughts on homosexuality that uses the Western philosophy of personhood to argue that homosexual relationships are morally wrong. Although homosexual desires can be natural and blameless, acting on them is harmful.

In this essay, I will argue that among the elite and highly-educated, we can have “proper” male homosexual relationships between two men who love each other. But among ordinary people, many men will devolve into sex addicts who spend most of their time and energy hunting for their next climax. Gay men say that on gay dating websites it is very common to start a chat by sending the other person a picture of their penis, which some gay men find revolting. I’ve read that it is very hard for gay men looking for long-term relationships to find men who don’t just treat them like pieces of meat.

In the modern understanding of Islam, we believe that Islam and Islamic law should never be forced on others, and that people should be free to leave Islam. So abiding by the ban on homosexual relationships is like being vegans. You do it for the sake of the greater good, while leaving others to do as they like. It’s our own business with God. We don’t want to change the law to force homosexuals to break up. We just want to have the freedom as Muslims to avoid it ourselves if we choose, while always having the choice of leaving Islam and doing as we like.

Islam wants sex to happen in the context of the nuclear family, so that each man is dedicated to building his own little civilization. Allowing homosexual relationships makes things too easy. It’s similar to porn and sex robots. While a minority of the elite and highly-educated will be able to have long-term romantic homosexual relationships, there will also be an underclass of male sex addicts who only think about their next fling. All a man needs to do is look reasonably attractive and he can go on a gay dating site and immediately hook up with another man without having to prove anything. It becomes a huge waste of a civilization’s energies. In this way men learn to objectify other men and to live only for their sexuality, leaving their families and civilizations to crumble and die. And the stats seem to back it. Male homosexuals have many times the number of sex partners than male heterosexuals.

Perhaps if all men were perfect romantics, then there wouldn’t have been an issue with homosexual relationships, the same way that if all people could use alcohol safely then Islam probably wouldn’t have banned it.

Note that as Muslims we aren’t required to dislike gay people. Muslim parents whose son comes out as gay in no way lose their parental duties toward their child, as I discuss here: Dealing with a homosexual child in Islam

Since we can’t permit female homosexuality without permitting male homosexuality, it too has to be forbidden, even though women are not like men and are much more interested in safe, long-term relationships. And of course having a lot of women in lesbian relationships means there will be fewer women to enslave men to the goals of civilization.

Corporealization

The line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” from the 1939 film Gone with the Wind was one of the most shocking examples of profanity that had been shown on screen up to that time in the English language. The Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s brought with it a flood of profanity-celebrating cultural products; films, novels and songs. There is a good reason why the celebration of sexual freedom and the celebration of profanity come hand-in-hand: they are both symptoms of the same process–the increasing corporealization of humans that takes place when a culture abandons its traditional values.

To corporealize a person means to treat them as if they were a mere body rather than a person. Seeing a person you respect slip on a banana peel in front of an audience is highly embarrassing because it corporealizes them: it takes attention away from their unique personhood and reveals them to us as mere bodies, helplessly flailing around and falling. Immediately after such an accident, it becomes extremely difficult to take that person seriously, for example if they were about to give a speech. It will take a while for the memory of the embarrassing incident to fade away so that we can start to see the person again as a person, not an object, and so that we can take them seriously.

Rape is a form of corporealization: it is to use a person as an instrument for one’s own pleasure, with their humanity, their personhood, stripped away from them. Mugging someone is also a form of corporealization: the person is treated as a mere instrument, a tool for enriching oneself, without consideration for who they are and what kind of person they are. Rape and mugging are, in a way, the same crime: the crime of treating a person as if they were merely a tool that can be used for one’s own purposes.

Whenever we treat someone as if they were not a person, as if they were not possessed of an inviolable dignity, uniqueness and transcendence as humans, we corporealize them. The philosopher Kant calls this to treat a person as a means (instrument) rather than as an end (aim/goal).

The way this ties into the issue of homosexuality is that homosexual relationships are corporealizing. They stress the fact of our fleshiness at the expense of our personhood.

If you imagine an idealistic, fairy tale homosexual relationship where the couple utterly love and respect each other and live in a society that happily respects and accepts them, there appears to be nothing wrong with the picture. There in fact are some people who have created such a world for themselves–highly intelligent professionals who are in homosexual relationships and surrounded by social circles that love, respect and accept them.

But you cannot judge social policy by looking at the rare successes and ignore the average person who is in such relationships. Even if 10% of homosexuals can live in such a happy world, we need to look at the remaining 90% to see how they live and behave. The homosexual dating app Grindr is a good illustration of ordinary homosexuality. Its very name refers to the sexual act, and those who use it consider it largely a “sex app”, an app for those who find someone whom they meet for an hour before moving on immediately to having sex with each other.

Ordinary rather than elite male homosexuality is largely about finding attractive male bodies to use for one’s own pleasure. It is sex in its physicality that is the focus of the lifestyle; the focus is on one’s own body, one’s own penis and its needs, and attractive pieces of flesh that can satisfy those needs.

Ordinary homosexuality normalizes the “hookup” culture that is also practiced by heterosexuals, especially in the West. If you see nothing with wrong hookup cultures, then you will likely see nothing wrong with homosexual relationships.

But there is a deep problem with hookup cultures, and anything that leads to hookup cultures is morally wrong. So the problem with homosexuality is not necessarily anything within it (unless we believe in God, but this essay is not about divinely ordained morality), the problem with homosexuality is that it is a force that always leads to hookup cultures.

So the philosophical reason why homosexuality is wrong is expressed in this syllogism:

  • Hookup cultures are morally wrong
  • The practice of (male) homosexuality always leads to hookup cultures
  • Therefore homosexual lifestyles are wrong

Hookup cultures and civilizations

In order to show that homosexuality is wrong, we need to show that hookup cultures are wrong, i.e. harmful. What is wrong with the meat-market mentality of the hookup culture where most people are interested in quickly finding fellow humans to use for sexual pleasure then discard?

The reason is that the hookup culture is diametrically opposed to traditional marriage and the wholesome family atmosphere that it is meant to create. Marriage is the basis of civilization. By destroying marriage, hookup cultures destroy civilization.

Think of two types of men. One of them, the civilization man, is interested in finding a woman to love, building a family and contributing to his civilization’s future through his works. The other, the hookup culture man, man is interested in his own pleasures. He wants to take as much as he can from the civilization he lives in by sleeping with as many women as he wants without caring for the future.

Now imagine two civilizations. One of them is filled with civilization men, the other with hookup culture men. Which civilization is going to be prosperous, productive and successful?

Imagine the civilization in the Victorian novel Pride and Prejudice. This is a society where everyone has extreme respect for their parents, siblings and spouses. Everyone is treated as automatically worthy by the virtue of being born into that civilization. Mrs. Bennet in the novel is an ignorant and annoying woman. But since she is a wife and a mother, she is treated with extreme respect and consideration by everyone around her. She is like a queen who is treated with respect whether she deserves it or not because her society has a place reserved for her that gives her status and protects her from insults and demeaning treatment.

In that society, almost everyone feels important, needed and necessary for their society. Depression is rare because everyone treats you like you matter regardless of whether you are attractive or interesting. No one can insult you or treat you in a demeaning way. Everyone is busy working to maintain the illusion that you are important and loved. And since everyone is involved in it, the illusion becomes reality. You never feel lost or purposeless because there is so much going on around you that constantly reinforces in you the feeling that you are important and essential to that society–to your parents, siblings, spouse and children. Even a stupid, unattractive and poor man is treated like a king within his own household by his relatives, spouse and children. The mother, regardless of her personal qualities, is Mother and is treated like a queen who deserves a special status and consideration.

That society is a human and humane society that is utterly suited to the happiness and mental health of its members. That is what it is like to live in a society filled with civilization men and women.

Many people who have never lived in such a society think that it is all an illusion. They laugh at Victorian novels and think it is all pretense that those people were so respectful toward each other. They think there are all kinds of evil and ugly things hidden underneath. But as a rare person who grew up in a such a society in Iran and Iraq, I know its truth and its irreplaceable value. I want to live in a society where dads are loved and considered irreplaceable by their wives and children rather than being treated like village idiots as so many dads are treated in the West. I want to live in a society where mothers are respected as Mother, important, irreplaceable and possessing inviolable dignity.

If you have never read a Jane Austen novel, I recommend you read a few to know exactly what I am talking about. And having been brought up in a similar society, I know that it is not all a lie. Such societies do exist–all that is needed is strong religious belief and respect for traditional values.

The hookup jungle

Now think of the hookup culture where every woman is judged by her beauty and bodily attributes. She has no place reserved for her in this hookup society. Her only place is assured by the virtue of her body. If men want to have sex with her, she is worthy. If men are disgusted by her because she is ugly, then she has no worth. Imagine the utter despair of unattractive men and women in this hookup culture where no one wants them and no one treats them like they are worthy. It is a jungle where everyone is judged not as humans, but as animals. If you can be a good instrument of other people’s pleasure–if you have charisma and physical attractiveness, you are treated like the king of the jungle. And if you lack these, you are cast away to the margins where you have to be content with being forever alone and unwanted.

That is what many young men and women experience as they eagerly abandon their families and embrace the hookup culture thinking that it will give them all that they desire. They find out that all it can give them is short-lived climaxes of pleasure followed by long periods of feeling worthless and fearful for one’s status in the popularity contest.

Since Western society has not utterly degenerated, some of these young people are able to abandon the horrors of the hookup jungle to build families, switching their mode of life from the hookup life to the civilization life. They leave the jungle and hope to embrace the normalcy of a traditional way of life.

But their life in the hookup culture causes many forms of often irreparable damage. The corporealization mentality of the hookup culture where everyone is an instrument rather than an infinitely worthy person causes them to be cynical, distrusting and disrespectful toward their families, societies and future spouses. By having lived such a degenerate life for so long, they will not be able to miraculously switch to acting like Victorian gentlemen and ladies in their respect and love for other people. They will rather be like so many failed individuals in the West, having damaged their relationships with their families irreparably so that they cannot count on their help. When a person spends years corporelizing other humans and being corporealized themselves, they are unable to see their fellow humans as persons anymore. They find it difficult to respect their parents because father and mother are two corporealized bags of matter like every other human. They can be beneficial materially for oneself, so that the corporealizer treats the father as an ATM and the mother as something of a servant. They certainly cannot be treated like kings and queens enjoying infinite respect because they themselves are incapable of envisioning any human deserving such respect since they themselves were so corporealized by everyone around them that they now feel everyone corporealizes them all the time.

Such people often build a half-successful marriage with an equally damaged human and beget a child who suffers the consequences of their damagedness. The couple do not truly respect each other because they are not very capable of treating others as persons. They continue to maintain the cynicism, distrust and sense of worthlessness that the hookup culture imparted upon them. And the child grows up in an atmosphere where no one is sure of their place. The dad is not sure of his place with his woman because the woman, having been used by so many men before, cannot truly trust him nor fully embrace the role of Wife to an infinitely respected Husband. To her the very idea of respecting a man like that sounds utterly ridiculous, a silly joke, a pretense. She is incapable of appreciating that the atmosphere in novels like Pride and Prejudice is actually real.

And the man, having used so many women in the past and been used by so many women, considers his wife merely just another woman who now happens to be his wife. He is unable to truly trust her or to embrace the role of Husband as an infinitely respected and irreplaceable person in his household.

You may find it easy to imagine a couple who enjoyed the party life of the hookup culture in their 20’s then went into to build a perfectly happy and wholesome family life in their 30’s. But that is just your imagination. You may be thinking of a few successful examples and ignoring the majority; the failures and train wrecks that are everywhere around us.

If you are unable to imagine being in a society like that in Pride and Prejudice, then you yourself may be the product of the trauma and destruction that the hookup culture has brought on your society. You may be unable to imagine any alternative, so you think this is all that there can be, and you think this is just how life is. And from such a perspective, you will be unable to appreciate my reasoning for why homosexuality is wrong.

Male homosexuality and hookup cultures

As mentioned, male homosexuality leads to hookup cultures. A statistic that backs up this claim is that in surveys homosexual men constantly report having many times more sexual partners than heterosexual men. It is in the nature of the male libido to demand constant stimulation and variety. It sounds utterly stupid to the average homosexual to limit their satisfaction to just one man that they love as Husband, with whom they live side by side through life until they die hand in hand. It feels far more natural, interesting, and fun to use apps like Grindr to constantly meet the best available males around them.

My assertion therefore is that there can never be such a thing as the normalization of male homosexuality in a society without the normalization of hookup cultures. And that means that the normalization of male homosexuality destroys the basis for the existence of the Pride and Prejudice society.

To me the Pride and Prejudice society is the only truly civilized and wholesome society that can exist in the modern world. Such a society must be defended and maintained, and a part of this means to do everything needed to prevent hookup cultures, which includes an avoidance of homosexual relationships.

If you think there can be normalized homosexuality without hookup cultures, the burden of proof is on you. You may be thinking of a few idealistic images of homosexual relationships and ignoring the behavior of the majority of male homosexuals.

Islam forbids alcohol despite the fact that some people can use it safely, because among ordinary alcohol users there are many who are unable to use it safely, so as a whole it is a danger to society. In the same way, even if there are some of the elite who can live homosexual lifestyles without it being a danger to society, among the ordinary homosexual population there are many who are unable to live this lifestyle safely, therefore as a whole it is a danger to society.

And if you do not believe in the worth of the Pride and Prejudice society and the need to create and maintain it, then we will just have to agree to disagree. Defending this society means defending the treatment of humans as persons rather than corporealized objects. And this to me is an infinitely important goal, because treating humans as persons is the basis for all civilized human life. Anything that promotes it is good, anything that promotes its opposite is evil and dangerous.

Male homosexual relationships promote the corporealization of humans because they allow the male libido to run wild and to use numerous other humans for the satisfaction of its physical desires. Other humans are instrumentalized by it (turned into instruments), and in this way the flesh becomes paramount and the personhood of the people involved fades away. The average person who engages in this lifestyle will find it impossible to be part of the Pride and Prejudice society where humans are treated as persons of infinite worth. The same of course also applies to a heterosexual man who constantly sleeps with random women and prostitutes and makes his sexuality the paramount factor in his life.

The average man’s homosexual lifestyle causes him to sink into obscenity. He becomes a servant of his sex drive, a sex addict for whom traditional morality sounds like a pretense. His male sex drive’s predatory nature dominates him so that he starts to see other humans largely in terms of their ability to stimulate him sexually. The same is true of a heterosexual pornography addict whose brain becomes rewired in a way that makes it nearly impossible for him to relate to other humans within the context of civilized, humane social relationships. Every woman he sees is just another a bag of matter whose ability to satisfy him is the first thing he thinks about.

For the good of society and civilization, therefore, it is paramount that the male sex drive be limited through marriage. Allowing his sex drive to run wild through hookup cultures, whether homosexual or heterosexual, causes him to degenerate into something of a predatory animal in society who is far more concerned with his next climax than with living a wholesome, humane life surrounded by infinitely respected persons.

As civilized humans we therefore face a choice. Either we give men free reign to their sex drive so that they become a sex-seeking underclass who feel out of place in respectable society, or we limit their freedom so that they are forced to marry a woman, be content with her, and go through the extremely difficult process of making something worthy and productive of their lives.

Female homosexuals

I have not covered female homosexuality so far because it is different from male homosexuality. Women are more interested in long-term relationships than short-term flings, therefore their homosexuality is not a direct force for bringing on the hookup culture (as far as I am aware). But since no society can approve of female homosexuality without also approving of male homosexuality, female homosexuality is an indirect force for bringing on the hookup culture, therefore it too should be avoided if we wish to avoid creating hookup cultures.

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