PART 4
33
Denis Giron (United States)
Indeed I am an apostate from Islam, though from a decidedly heterodox form of the true dun (religion). I was a hadith-rejecting pseudo-Submitter,' and wholeheartedly considered myself a real Muslim. I suppose that being an apostate from a variant of the Submitter sect is to my benefit. The rabid foaming-at-the-beard neoSalafi fascist types that would generally invoke Muhammad's words (man baddala deenahu, faqtuluhu! He who changes his religion, kill him!) would probably declare that I was never a "real Muslim," thus not a real murtadd (apostate), and thus not subject to execution for apostasy. In fact, much to the delight of the pious armchair mujahidin (holy warriors) that would normally wince at the mere mention of a real apostate, I never recited the complete shahada, the Islamic testament of faith that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet!
You see, my pseudo-Submitter buddies informed me that the shahaada of Sunni lore is a statement of faith for "pagans," thus I never recited the second half of the testament of faith. Wa Muhammadul Rasulullaah: And Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah? Why is only Muhammad mentioned? Why the association of this particular messenger with the testament of faith in monotheism and not any other prophet? At the time, I thought this was a reasonable argument, and I, to this day, still feel there is a certain peculiar nature about only mentioning Muhammad. I could go on with humorous stories about Abu Hurayr, the shahada's first propo nent, getting punched in the chest by his fellow frat brothers among the sahaba, companions of Muhammad, but I'm a mulhid (apostate, atheist) now, so I'll leave such discussions to the Muslims, both orthodox and heterodox.
More interesting than my tales from the land of Arabo-Judaic monotheist madness are the stories about how I got there, why I left, and what I think of those embarrassing times now that I look back in hindsight. You see, I was one of so many who were pulled from the ranks of disillusioned Christians, a deep resource of potential converts for missionaries of every ideology from Krisna consciousness to the Noachide faith.2
Being that I was a "revert"3 from Christianity, I think I am in a position to ponder the mentality of such people as well as the psychology behind conversion from Christianity to Islam. No doubt Muslims who were once Christians will find my thoughts offensive, but I am convinced others who have traveled the Chris- tian-Muslim-murtadd route will agree with much of what I have to say.
Indeed this is a route much traveled; so many disillusioned Christians have embraced Islam because they assumed it answered their questions that Christianity could not. Islam is very attractive to Christians who are troubled by the difficult, if not incomprehensible, concept of the Trinity. Many such people have been raised in what is portrayed as a monotheist religion (and Jewish monotheism still runs strong in the Old Testament), and are often unimpressed with their pastor or priest's attempts to explain the more mystical (if not polytheistic) concepts in trinitarian Christianity.
If they are not troubled by the Trinity, they are those who are aware of the Bible's many obvious contradictions. These are the Christians with a faith that is suffering from fatigue. They are at a point in their life where they can no longer believe the tenets of Christianity (or maybe they never really believed them at all).
Such Christians who begin to doubt the alleged truth of their creed, as was stated before, move on to become atheists, Buddhists, communists, New Age pagans, and so on. However, the ones that still desire to hold on to some remnant of the Bible, particularly belief in Jesus and the other messengers of God, are the ones who are most prone to converting to Islam.
It is now that we begin to form a picture of the early mentality of the Christian convert to Islam. Here is a man or a woman who still wants to believe in Jesus, minus the incomprehensible idea of a triune deity, and along comes their local Islamic missionary with his dawaganda4 leaflet about "Jesus in Islam." The potential proselyte is told about how Jesus, whose real name was Eesa Ibn Maryam, was not a god; rather he was a devout messenger of Allah.
The new mu'min (believer) fallaciously assumes that Islam must be true in light of the "obvious accuracy" of the religion's version of the Jesus story. Many (dare I say most?) Christian converts to Islam feel that because the Islamic version is more "logical" the religion's validity and soundness have been estab lished. In reality the Islamic account is just as absurd, but the more consistent monotheist feel to it makes for a more palatable myth.
Even more appetizing to the palate of the disenchanted Christian revert is the apparent internal consistency of the Islamic literature.' The Christian revert to Islam will have a few contradictions in the Bible memorized, and from there commits a subconscious bifurcation 6 fallacy: He assumes that because Christianity has been proven false, Islam automatically wins by default. Many an atheist who has discussed the validity of religion with a Muslim has been left puzzled by odd statements like "the Bible has been changed by man, but the Koran is still perfect and uncorrupted." In the mind of the Christian revert, attacking the Bible automatically validates Islam. This is the fallacious mode of thinking that subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) lines all their arguments.
Regardless of how poorly the Bible stands under criticism, this is not something that corroborates Islamic truth in any sense. Furthermore, the Koran is itself far from being free of error. Indeed, it has fewer contradictions than the Bible, but that is not surprising when one realizes that the Koran is roughly the size of the book of Psalms.' I could go into errors and contradictions within the Koranic text, but I suppose that issue should be touched on in akhoona (our brother) Warraq's other books.
Truthfully, I don't think it would really matter to anyone currently within the ranks of the mu'mineen (believers), as the vast majority of them believe in the Koran's perfection on blind faith. I am speaking from experience when I tell you that most Christians and Muslims will staunchly deny any error in their respective holy writs, and will maintain such a stance regardless of the evidence. While the Muslim seems to defend scripture better than his Nasara (Christian) tritheist counterpart, the reality is that their arguments are as weak and fallacy-ridden as those of any other Western monotheist. Muslims with strong iman (faith) will not hesitate to put forth any wild confabulation to salvage their most cherished beliefs.
Now the reader may be troubled by such claims if I don't back them up with a specific situation. The Muslim will claim it is a baseless claim, and the kaafir (disbeliever, infidel) will wish I cited an example. While I've already acknowledged that this is a discussion for another book, I will give one minor discrepancy. After that, we really must move on with my deconversion story.
To set the tone, let me give an analogy. Anyone who is familiar with the myriad contradictions in the Bible has heard the line about "what were Jesus' last words?" The reason this is a tough question is because the different gospel writers give slightly different final quotes for Jesus on the cross. Even a minor discrepancy makes one wonder about the claim of divine authorship.
The Koran often suffers from a similar problem with variant quotes. So many of the stories repeat ad nauseum, in the most unnecessary fashion. If one takes a closer look at the repeated stories, the minor differences in detail become apparent.
One story that is repeated many times is the discussion between Iblis and Allah at the time of the creation of Adam. As the story goes, Iblis (a lone jinn oddly among angels), refused to prostrate before Adam when Allah told him to (maybe he thought it was a trick, and didn't want to get accused of committing shirks). From there a conversation between Allah and Iblis takes place, and the exact wording of the discussion is never the same in the Koran.
So ask your Muslim friends, what did Allah say to Iblis? Did he ask, "0 Iblis, why are you not with the prostrators?" (XV.32) Or did Allah ask, "0 Iblis, what prevented you from prostrating before what I created with My hands? Are you too arrogant? Have you rebelled?" (XXXVIII.76)
While the questions are generally the same, the exact wording differs.
Furthermore, one wonders what Iblis's response was. Did Iblis turn to Allah and say, "I am not to prostrate before a human being, whom You created from aged mud, like the potter's clay" (XV33)?
Or was it, "I am better than he; You created me from fire, and created him from clay" (XXXVIII.77)?
If you ask such questions, you'll see your monotheist counterpart squirm and clutch for straws as he desperately tries to concoct his hermeneutic miracle. I promise you, however, that he will eventually come up with an answer, and it will be the sort of deeply mystical, unfalsifiable, and wholly ambiguous flim-flam that could be used to reconcile any error in any religious text.
The nature of the Muslim mind is not that different from the nature of the fundamentalist Christian mind when it comes to defending the alleged word of God. They assume that the Koran is of a divine origin, and reject anything that would allow one to dispute this belief. This is why all discussions on the nature of Islamic scripture deteriorate into exhibitions of question begging and special pleading. After a while, one is tempted to yell: "Ya Abdallaah (0 Servant of Allah), you cannot demonstrate the textual superiority by starting from the presupposition that this ancient manuscript is the word of God!"
While I can now sit from my quasi-intellectual perch and deride the Muslims (I find Islam ridiculous, hence I ridicule), I must concede that I can only speak of the Islamic psyche with such confidence because I was once drowning in such madness. Indeed, it is a fallacy to assume that one can determine the mental state of all Muslims by reflecting on one's own history, but I assure you that I have experienced a large enough number of interactions which lead me to feel justified in my generalizations. However, I acknowledge that this will be a gross stereotype if it is applied to the global ummah (Islamic community) in total.
That said, I still think my story can be a relevant tool for understanding the mind of the Muslim, particularly the Muslim revert from Christianity. However, I do not assume for a second that my conversion is original at all. It has been my goal to express how mechanical and robotic conversion to Islam is, and demonstrate that it is only apostasy that is mildly original.
My whole life I was raised as a nominal Christian. My father was a Catholic who seemed much closer to an atheist, and my mother was a Quaker of less-thanspectacular faith. While I believed in the myths of the Judeo-Christian story, it never played a major role in my life. I did not gain a passion for religion until the early 1990s, when, in my senior year in high school, I became a more pious (read: fundamentalist) Christian.
I joined the New York City Church of Christ and passionately immersed myself in diligent Bible study. Within a very short period of time I was having serious doubts about the trinity and other aspects of the Christian story. I was, without a doubt, a prime piece of revert meat for the Islamic predators who prey on disillusioned Christians.
In my freshman year in college at the City University of New York I came into contact with many Muslims who were eager to espouse the tenets of their faith. In high school I had only one Muslim friend, a nominal Sunni girl I still consider to be a close friend, despite the animosity I've developed toward monotheist beliefs. In college my circle of friends was becoming increasingly Muslim.
The strange part of my rapid conversion is that my closet-Submitter friends were able to suck me in right from under the noses of the much larger Sunni cross-section within my social circle. The reason is obvious to anyone who has talked with a Western Submitter. As strange as this will sound, a lot of it can be pinned on the popular Islamic apologist Ahmed Deedat.
Western Muslims have, in the past, become drunk on Ahmed Deedat, though his popularity is starting to really disappear these days. His debates with Christians, along with his numerous booklets, have made up the heart of British-American dawaganda literature for the last two decades. Unfortunately, the Islamic literature cannot stand up to the standards that brother Deedat demanded the Bible be judged by.
Deedat's idea of the "Bible Combat Kit," where Muslims are encouraged to keep an inventory of contradictions, vulgar verses, and other embarrassing excerpts of the Bible, was one of the more popular aspects of Islam's missionary onslaught on the West. However, this caused some Muslims to ponder the idea of a "Hadith Combat Kit." As should have been expected, Muslims were beginning to doubt the use of the ahadith collections as a source of guidance considering the many contradictions, absurd stories, and vulgar tales found therein.
These problems became painfully apparent to me, and I leaned toward my pseudo-Submitter friends instead of the more Orthodox Muslims, whom I was already beginning to look down on as far as Islamic sectarian prejudice goes. Like my Submitter buddies, I was a closeted blasphemer. Such things are easier than one might assume, as any given local Muslim Students Association (MSA)9 chapter is filled with Ismailis, Qadianis, Alevis, members of the Ahmadiyya movement, and various other blasphemers who keep their subtle kufr to themselves. In fact, the first time I went to an MSA meeting, I was already an atheist!
I would try to discuss my anti-hadith views with my Sunni friends, but they would go on long rants about how Shaytaan (Satan) is always whispering in our ear, encouraging us to give up something more. I was told that first I'll give up the ahadith, then I'll give up the prayer, then the Koran, and finally I'll say, "I disbelieve in Allah." At that point Shaytaan is supposed to move away from me and say, "I will have nothing to do with you Mulhid, as I fear Allah." Let's be honest, this is an absurd story, and ... well ... er ... maybe not, in light of my current state of theological bankruptcy. W'ash-Shaytaanu 'Aleem!10
Regardless, I rejected the "authentic traditions" of Orthodox Islam, but also felt that this left me outside the general Islamic community. I kept my beliefs mostly to myself, and only preached my beliefs within a closed circle. Muslim fears about the monolithic "Zionist Free Masons" who try to disrupt the truth of Allah's religion might not be so absurd in light of the fact that I was part of a small circle of heterodox Muslims that resembled some sort of ad hoc secret society.
We exchanged our thoughts on the sins of so-called Orthodox Muslims quite openly, save for when such sinners were around. Had a neo-Salafi savage witnessed some of our discussions at the pizza shop, he would probably flip through his Urdu translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, looking for a precedent. In the end, this hypothetical discoverer of our blasphemous group would just yell, "Astaghfirullaah! Isn't this how Skull and Bones, the Illuminati, and the Bahais got started?!?"
At the time, I did not see a problem with this, as I felt I was a true Muslim; I was a Submitter. While today I sometimes answer the question, "How long were you a Muslim?" with "I was never Muslim; I was a pseudo-Submitter," I still see nothing incorrect about my previous beliefs in any Islamic sense. There is no set rule for proper interpretation of a theological text; hermeneutics is anarchy. I see no reason to assume my heterodox beliefs were any less "Islamic" than those practiced by members of the Orthodox fold. Besides, some of them probably had secret shrines dedicated to the Agha Khan in their homes.
Now there are the questions about what kind of a Muslim a Submitter is. Without the Sunna, how do you know how to pray properly? Well, to answer that now, I will admit that I've met Submitters who prayed five times a day and prostrated themselves, but this was not the case with all of us. There were times when I'd be at a friend's apartment and we'd rub our foreheads raw on the carpet, chanting Allahu Akbar and other meaningless phrases in a monotone voice that resembled that of an android. However, and this will horrify many Muslims, there were times when we would pray sitting up at a meal table before eating, with our hands clasped like Christians!
The argument that "with only the Koran you cannot know how to pray," which is a popular Sunni attack on the Submitters, was actually turned around by my Submitter buddies. Their logic" went along the lines of "The Koran does not say we have to pray like that, therefore we do not have to pray like that!" It's that simple. While I wonder about the more popular Submitters and their tendency to retain numerous Orthodox traditions, I think the version I experienced is still reasonable. What kind of an imbecile would assume that God, the being with infinite scope and knowledge, would actually be upset if you prayed a certain way? Furthermore, who takes seriously this madness that is the justification for five prayers a day? It stems from a hadith about Moses and Muhammad bargaining with Allah, getting the number of prescribed prayers down from fifty!
Reading through this, some might begin to realize that there is more than one kind of Submitter. While my group of friends considered themselves Submitters, I swear I never once saw Rashad Khalifa's translation of the Koran in hard copy. There was never any talk about the magic of the number nineteen (though there were silly discussions about the number of times words like "day," "night," and "month" appear in the Koran). We used the Ahmed Ali translation, which also offered a bit of subtle hostility toward the ahadith via the right interpretation.
The Ahmed Ali translation had one particular footnote that pointed readers toward Surah Luqman XXI.6, which spoke of those who spread lahv-al-hadith (frivolous stories), and essentially make the Koran mahjura (ineffectual). I'm not sure Ahmed Ali was a man who rejected the Orthodox traditions, but we sure believed he did back then. To this day I still see this as a relatively strong argument for the antihadith bunch, but I also acknowledge that there is no set logic in theism. Ashkurullaah li'annani mulhid! Thank God, I am an atheist.
Really, looking back on those days I still feel that the Submitters put forth a better argument than their Sunni brethren, despite the fact that I consider all theist arguments to be quite absurd. Under a relatively literal interpretation of the Koran, it does seem that the ahadith collections are being rejected. I am still fond of the verse that reads, tilka aavaatullaahi nutloohaa `alayka bil haggi fabi-ayyi hadeethi ba'dallaahi wa aayaatihi yoo'minoon.12
The Sunni-Submitter debate probably fascinates me only because I once had a vested interest in that theological battle. The reality is that it is wholly absurd for the simple fact that both parties assume the Koran is of a divine origin. This is where I have to break with the Submitter minority that I have sympathy for. I have given Islam up altogether and, inshati'1-laat,13 I will not have any lightning bolts hurled at me for this kufurous14 decision. A'oodhu bish-shaytaani min Allaahi ir-rajiim!'s
I finally broke from Islam in 1998, when I quite suddenly became an atheist. Prior to that, the bulk of my dawa (if you can call it that) was performed on the Internet. I was one of many anti-intellectual armchair cybermissionaries who went off to battle the evil Jochen Katz." My name was briefly up there with the likes of Mohamed Ghounem17 and other cyber-mujahideen.
My shift to atheism came at a time when I began to ponder the other reli gions. As a Muslim I was still caught in the fictional world where only Christianity and Islam were the possible religions; thus, if Christianity was false (which it is obviously was), then la ilaaha illa'llaah: There is no God but Allah. Of course, such an argument is totally unsound, as there is no reason to assume that Christianity's failures imply the truth of the first half of the shahaada or any other mindless Islamic chant.
Studying logic in college and learning about other religions made the space in my heart that was reserved for Allah shrink at a rapid rate. The real coup de grace came in 1998 during a class on the religions of India at the City University of New York. There I was, the arrogant monotheist with half a brain, reading about the colorful beliefs in Hinduism. Castles made of beeswax, Siva replacing the head of his decapitated son with that of an elephant, Hannuman jumping over the ocean, and many other tales were, in my less than humble opinion, utterly ridiculous.
However, I stopped and wondered for a second, Why should I assume that these stories are ridiculous while at the same time believe that the myths of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic folklore are perfectly reasonable? The Hindu nationalist A. Ghosh18 once wrote an article that is the embodiment of such questions. Do the Abrahamic19 monotheists really believe stories about virgin births, sticks turning into snakes, talking babies, flying horses, men being swallowed by a big fish, and animals that speak human languages?
The Muslim will try to defend such fantastic myths by calling them "miracles." Unfortunately, is not this appeal to the belief that God can bend the rules of nature basically a justification for anything? The Muslims who laugh at the colorful stories that exist in the Hindu tradition are totally unjustified. Yes, Hannuman jumped over the ocean, as anything is possible for God.
The very concept of a "miracle" is difficult to believe. Ibn Warraq, in his first book,20 gave the Ikhwaan al-Kaaflreen21 an interesting introduction to miracles in Islam, and a reason for his tendency not to believe them. I recommend others read that section if they have not already. Berkeley Professor John Searle expressed a similar feeling toward miracles:
We no longer think of odd occurrences as cases of God performing speech acts in the language of miracles. Odd occurrences are just occurrences we do not understand. The result of this demystification is that we have gone beyond atheism to a point where the issue no longer matters in the way it did to earlier generations.22
So this appeal to the word "miracle" is mildly fallacious. A rational person can no longer accept such fantastic stories on blind faith. The Muslims' failure to provide evidence for the wild stories written in their religious literature will always be a point of friction between them and the Western freethinkers with whom I now align myself.
After I came to this conclusion, the floodgates of rational thought were open and could no longer be closed. Every rational argument I had ever heard began to make sense to me, and Islam began to seem more and more silly. My plunge into the world of 11had (atheism) was very rapid, and I even found myself using arguments traditionally used against Christianity to attack Islam. For example, Carl Sagan used to ridicule the ascension of Jesus into heaven on the grounds of our current understanding of the universe. Using that against Islam, we have to laugh off the whole story about Muhammad's night journey on his flying horse (which, by the way, is the beginning of the story that justifies the aforementioned rule about five prayers a day). If Muhammad left the nonexistent Masjidul-Aqsa 23 at the speed of light fourteen hundred years ago, he still would have not yet left our galaxy today!
Suddenly Islam, the most logical religion, looked as absurd as all the others. The more I pondered Islam, the more it seemed open to the same attacks the other religions were. The Koran, like the Bible, is an obvious compilation of variant traditions from a plurality of sources. Furthermore, the body of literature from which the vast majority of Islamic law is derived from is in as much a state of chaos as the Bible is; and finally, the historicity of the prophets is very much in question.
I suppose the historical lives of the heroes of the Abrahamic folklore is the subject I am most interested in. Some of this was touched on in Warraq's Why I Am Not a Muslim24 when the discussion turned to the school of thought that holds that Jesus may not have been an historical character. To the Muslim, the question of Jesus' existence is absurd, but we must really call into the question the intellectual foundation of a religion that cannot present even the slightest bit of evidence to back up their fantastic stories.
The more I discuss prophet historicity, the more I begin to seriously doubt the existence of the heroes of Islamic folklore. While there is seemingly no evidence for the existence of the Jew named Jesus who is the center of discussion in the New Testament, there is even less evidence to support the existence of the Islamic Jesus, Eesa Ibn Marvam. Muslims have been so unable to come up with evidence that some have resorted to strange language games, asserting that the name Eesa is more historically accurate considering the fact that it sounds like the Aramaic Eesho.25
Jesus aside, I firmly believe that the further back you go in the prophetic line, the greater the chance that the hero in question never existed. Do you really believe that Moses was a real person? Why is it that despite the fact that the Egyptians wrote so much about their history and culture, they never recorded the existence of the amazing yahoodi who lived within their borders? Moses had a command over nature, freed a huge number of slaves, and even drowned a pharaoh and his army, yet the Egyptians seemed to have never heard of him!
Of course, the Muslims believe with all their hearts that these characters existed, taking a literal interpretation of nearly every tale found in their literature. There is even no question in their mind that Abraham or Adam (who was sixty cubits tall according to the ahadith) existed. The Muslims are so used to debating Christians that they are never prepared for an atheist who would question their myths in a way that no Christian ever would. One Muslim I have debated, who happened to have a Ph.D. from Cambridge,26 was so exasperated by his inability to present evidence for the existence of Abraham that he threw logic out the window and shifted the burden of proof. He demanded that I justify my doubts by proving that his heroes did not exist !21
Of course, prophet historicity becomes a moot point when one is an atheist. The very existence of God for me seems unreasonable. The existence of Allah, the provincial sky god of the Semites, is even harder to accept. Tribal war gods are something for primitive persons to believe in. No rhetorical question about the origin of the universe will ever prove that there is a mighty phantasm on the throne28 recording our every move. To answer the questions about how the universe came to be, let me just say that even if there is a question we cannot answer, this does not mean that the sky god hypothesis automatically wins by default!
One could dedicate a whole book to atheist objections to Islam, but I shall not go into this subject much more at this time. The only thing I am trying to do here is add my name to the short but growing list of apostates from Islam. I believed that there was no God but Allah, and I believed that Muhammad was a messenger of Allah (so maybe I recited the full shahada in my heart and deserve that death sentence after all). However, I woke up one day and abandoned this grotesquely ludicrous system of myths.
With a list of testimonies from the apostates we can encourage the others who have left Islam to come out of the closet. We are at the forefront of the first Western rationalist attack on Islam in history. While the Muslims assume their religion has withstood attacks from all comers, the reality is that it has never faced the kind of beating Christianity and its scriptures have.
This is why people like Ibn Warraq are so highly respected. He is a pioneer in this new genre of Islamic criticism. While centuries from now there will be scholars who will write criticisms superior to anything produced by Warraq or his contemporaries, it is brother Warraq who will go down in history as one of the key names in this battle.
The Muslims are already on the ropes when the fight has just begun. They have nothing left except a less-than-spectacular ability to fabricate stories to be later used as ad hominem attacks. I expect in the future there will be Muslims who will say Warraq is really a Jew, a Hindu posing as a Pakistani apostate, a Berber nationalist beer salesman, a Free Mason, Jochen Katz's brother, John Wansbrough's nephew, or some other obvious enemy of Islam. I promise you they will be reduced to name-calling.
We are the modern-day jahiloonytoonies29 and we are reviving the war between al-Ikwaan al-Muslimeen Wa'1-Ikhwaan al-Mushrikeen30 to have polytheism, idolatry, and blasphemy practiced within the borders of the Arabian Peninsula (well, not quite). This is, however, the call to join al jihaadul-kuffaa- the infidel holy war.
However, I must reject and condemn all right-wing anti-Islamists who call for violence against Muslims. One of the greatest criticisms of Islam is that the tenets of the religion promote violence and intolerance towards polytheists, homosexuals, women who express their sexual freedom, and various other oppressed groups. Trying to meet violence with more violence only completes a viscous cycle, and removes one's right to criticize. For those of you who have a tendency to chant something awful like "Death to Muslims," please stop it now! I am in favor of death to Islam, and death to monotheism, but never death to Muslims. The practitioners of Islam are human beings, plain and simple. Fagtulul- laah! Kill God!
Please jump on the kufr bandwagon and enjoy the ride. A market for criticism of Islam is rapidly opening up at a time when a critic of Christianity can go totally unnoticed, even among his infidel comrades. In the future these early Western criticisms of Islam will be seen as classics, much the way we now look back on Celsus' On the True Doctrine, or Julian the Apostate's Against the Galileans. I am a Murtad; I am al-Kaafir al-Akabr, the greatest infidel. My keyboard is my sword, and I'm off to battle. Won't you join us? Takhir!
NOTES
1. The Submitters are a sect that find their origin with Rashad Khalifa and his translation of the Koran that was obviously hostile to the use of ahadith collections as a source of guidance for Muslims. It should be noted that the murdered (martyred?) Khalifa and his followers were not the first Muslims to reject the extracanonical Islamic traditions, and other contemporary Submitters do not align themselves with Khalifa.
2. The Noachide faith is a sort of Christians for Moses, Govvim for Torah theology where gentiles live by the Hebrew scriptures and the Noachide Mitzvot (commandments given to Noah), rejecting any notion of salvation through Jesus. Noachides are often quick to convert to Judaism, or sometimes become atheists or Muslims, thus their actual numbers are always small.
3. Muslims believe that every person is born a Muslim, but their environment causes them to renounce Allah at a time when they are just learning to walk and talk; thus, anyone who converts to Islam has actually "reverted" to the faith of his birth.
4. Muslims refer to proselytizing as "giving dawa," but such oft-repeated propaganda has been accurately termed dawaganda. This is a term that was originally coined by the great apostate from Islam Sadiqi az-Zindiki.
5. Actually, this is more along the lines of the internal consistency of the Koran. The Islamic literature overall is wholly inconsistent, with blatant contradictions between Koran and hadith, and even contradictions within the ahadith collections themselves.
6. The bifurcation fallacy occurs when a person assumes there are only two possibilities when really there are more. An example might be the Christian line about "either Jesus was God or he was lying...."
7. Don't be fooled by the size of an English translation of the Koran you may have seen at a bookstore. The Arabic text of the Koran is roughly the same size as the Hebrew text of the book of Psalms. In fact, the book of Psalms has thirty-six more chapters than the Koran, and while no chapter of Psalms is as long as the longest Surah (al-Bagarah), no chapter of Psalms is as short as the shortest Surahs (al-Ikhlaas, al-Falaq, an-Naas, etc.).
8. Association of partners with God, anthropomorphism, polytheism, etc.
9. This is generally the official Muslim club at any college in the United States, including Jesuit schools like Fordham!
10. A play on W Allaahu 'Aleem! My version could best be translated, "And Satan knows best" or "And Satan is knowledgeable."
I I . I'm using the term "logic" here rather loosely, though I imagine, given the proper interpretation, the following is a valid syllogism:
(I) The Koran tells me what I have to do.
(2) The Koran does not say I have to pray like that.
Therefore, I do not have to pray like that.
12. "These are the ayaat of Allah, which We recite to you in truth. Then in which hadith [story, tradition, tale], after Allah and His ayaat will they believe?" (XLV.6) While it may seem obvious to some, other Muslims take a drastically different approach in coming up with an interpretation of this verse. One Shi a friend I knew tried to explain that this verse is talking about the reliability and authority of the Ayatollahs compared with any other religious source. I suppose the Sunni Kuffaar still dispute Ali Khamenei's alleged theological superiority despite this obvious sign from Our Lord.
13. Al-lat willing. This is a play on Insh'allah (God willing), only the future is attributed to the will of Al-lat (the daughter of Allah, according to stories about the beliefs of pre-Islamic Arabs).
14. Kufr = disbelief. Kufrous is another word coined by Sadiqi az-Zindiki, as in "my writings are kufrous in extremis."
15. I take refuge in Satan Ito protect met from the accursed Allah.
16. Jochen Katz was a Christian who put together a very popular Internet site called Answering Islam (answering-islam.org), which served as an early resource for kuffaar from all walks of life. The debates he had online created a web of names, both friend and foe to akhoona Katz, who would later build on a reputation from that time.
17. Mohamed Ghounem has written books based on his debates with Katz. He is also the president and founder of the Jews for Allah organization, a missionary group dedicated to converting the Yahoods to Islam. While his group is obviously quite similar to the Jews for Jesus movement, Mr. Ghounem attributes the idea to me!
18. A. Gnosh's "If Jesus Could Walk on Water, Why Could Not Hanuman Overfly It?" was a response to Christian missionary ridicule. Though I have never seen a version of this article in a published journal, many copies of it exist on the Internet.
19. I use the word "Abrahamic" only because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all find their origin with the mythical Abraham and his belief in one God.
20. Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1995), pp. 142-44.
21. "Brotherhood of disbelievers," although there's a slight abuse of Arabic here.
22. J. Searle, Mind, Language, and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1998), p. 35.
23. The "farthest Mosque," which is now in Jerusalem. The fact that the Koran makes reference to this place leads us to conclude one of two things: (1) The verse (XVII.I) is an interpolation that was inserted after the creation of this mosque, or (2) the story of the night journey is a sort of Islamic Midrash that was constructed to make sense of this wholly ambiguous verse.
24. Warraq, Why 1 Am Not a Muslim, pp. 147-53.
25. As far as I know, this theory finds its origin with a brilliant Islamic polemicist out of Houston names Shibli Zaman. While Zaman has a command of Semitic languages that many would envy, his claims about Eesa and Eesho seem to have very little etymological evidence upon deeper consideration of the roots of these names.
26. However, I must concede that his Ph.D. was in something like metallurgy, so my bragging about inflicting an intellectual defeat on the good doctor while I was still an undergrad is akin to boasting about being undefeated in Sumo wrestling matches against anorexics.
27. For those who don't know, the burden of proof is on the positive claimant. If I claimed there was a three-hundred-pound carnivorous mouse living in the Amazon, and you doubted my claim was true, who should be required to shoulder the burden of proof?
28. It should be mentioned that all of the Muslim criticisms against the Judeo-Christian scriptures on the grounds that anthropomorphic descriptions of God are a sin can be launched right back at the Koran and Sunna. The description of the throne of Allah leads one to believe that the anthropomorphic grandfather of Islam has a very physical backside to place in it. Muslims will try to claim the throne is metaphorical, but the Islamic literature depicts it as being very physical. It has a location (XI.7), it is held up and surrounded by angels (XXXIX.75; XXXX.7), and it was even mounted by Allah after the creation of the heavens and the earth (VII.54). While Muslims will try to claim that we cannot speculate on the divine meaning of istawaa (how exactly it is that a deity mounts something), the ahadith offer even greater examples of a physical throne. The traditions are filled with descriptions of Moses holding very specific parts of the throne, like the legs, the side, etc.
29. Yet again, this is a word coined by Sadiqi az-Zindiki. Like Voltaire's description of Dr. Pangloss as an expert in "cosmoloony-ology," akhoona Sadiqi has added "loony toony" to the name of the people of the Jahiliyya (pre-Islamic time of pagan Arab "ignorance").
30. The brotherhood of Muslims and the brotherhood of "pagans" (polytheists, asso- ciators, idolators).