God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Was Muhammad Epileptic? - 2
Religion Poisons Everything - 1
Was Muhammad Epileptic? - 2
Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion - 3
There is some question as to whether Islam is a separate religion at
all. It initially fulfilled a need among Arabs for a distinctive or
special creed, and is forever identified with their language and
their impressive later conquests, which, while not as striking as
those of the young Alexander of Macedonia, certainly conveyed an idea
of being backed by a divine will until they petered out at the
fringes of the Balkans and the Mediterranean. But Islam when examined
is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of
plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as
occasion appeared to require. Thus, far from being "born in the clear
light of history," as Ernest Renan so generously phrased it, Islam in
its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from which it
took its borrowings. It makes immense claims for itself, invokes
prostrate submission or "surrender" as a maxim to its adherents, and
demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain.
There is nothing—absolutely nothing—in its teachings that can even
begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.
The prophet died in the year 632 of our own approximate calendar. The
first account of his life was set down a full hundred and twenty
years later by Ibn Ishaq, whose original was lost and can only be
consulted through its reworked form, authored by Ibn Hisham, who died
in 834. Adding to this hearsay and obscurity, there is no agreed-upon
account of how the Prophet's followers assembled the Koran, or of how
his various sayings (some of them written down by secretaries) became
codified. And this familiar problem is further complicated—even more
than in the Christian case—by the matter of succession. Unlike Jesus,
who apparently undertook to return to earth very soon and who (pace
the absurd Dan Brown) left no known descendants, Muhammad was a
general and a politician and—though unlike Alexander of Macedonia a
prolific father—left no instruction as to who was to take up his
mantle. Quarrels over the leadership began almost as soon as he died,
and so Islam had its first major schism—between the Sunni and the
Shia—before it had even established itself as a system. We need take
no side in the schism, except to point out that one at least of the
schools of interpretation must be quite mistaken. And the initial
identification of Islam with an earthly caliphate, made up of
disputatious contenders for the said mantle, marked it from the very
beginning as man-made.
It is said by some Muslim authorities that during the first caliphate
of Abu Bakr, immediately after Muhammad's death, concern arose that
his orally transmitted words might be forgotten. So many Muslim
soldiers had been killed in battle that the number who had the Koran
safely lodged in their memories had become alarmingly small. It was
therefore decided to assemble every living witness, together
with "pieces of paper, stones, palm leaves, shoulder-blades, ribs and
bits of leather" on which sayings had been scribbled, and give them
to Zaid ibn Thabit, one of the Prophet's former secretaries, for an
authoritative collation. Once this had been done, the believers had
something like an authorized version.
If true, this would date the Koran to a time fairly close to
Muhammad's own life. But we swiftly discover that there is no
certainty or agreement about the truth of the story. Some say that it
was Ali—the fourth and not the first caliph, and the founder of
Shiism—who had the idea. Many others—the Sunni majority—assert that
it was Caliph Uthman, who reigned from 644 to 656, who made the
finalized decision. Told by one of his generals that soldiers from
different provinces were fighting over discrepant accounts of the
Koran, Uthman ordered Zaid ibn Thabit to bring together the various
texts, unify them, and have them transcribed into one. When this task
was complete, Uthman ordered standard copies to be sent to Kufa,
Basra, Damascus, and elsewhere, with a master copy retained in
Medina. Uthman thus played the canonical role that had been taken, in
the standardization and purging and censorship of the Christian
Bible, by Irenaeus and by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria. The roll
was called, and some texts were declared sacred and inerrant while
others became "apocryphal." Outdoing Athanasius, Uthman ordered that
all earlier and rival editions be destroyed.
Even supposing this version of events to be correct, which would mean
that no chance existed for scholars ever to determine or even dispute
what really happened in Muhammad's time, Uthman's attempt to abolish
disagreement was a vain one. The written Arabic language has two
features that make it difficult for an outsider to learn: it uses
dots to distinguish consonants like "b" and "t," and in its original
form it had no sign or symbol for short vowels, which could be
rendered by various dashes or comma-type marks. Vastly different
readings even of Uthman's version were enabled by these variations.
Arabic script itself was not standardized until the later part of the
ninth century, and in the meantime the undotted and oddly voweled
Koran was generating wildly different explanations of itself, as it
still does. This might not matter in the case of the Iliad, but
remember that we are supposed to be talking about the unalterable
(and final) word of god. There is obviously a connection between the
sheer feebleness of this claim and the absolutely fanatical certainty
with which it is advanced. To take one instance that can hardly be
called negligible, the Arabic words written on the outside of the
Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem are different from any version that
appears in the Koran.
The situation is even more shaky and deplorable when we come to the
hadith, or that vast orally generated secondary literature which
supposedly conveys the sayings and actions of Muhammad, the tale of
the Koran's compilation, and the sayings of "the companions of the
Prophet." Each hadith, in order to be considered authentic, must be
supported in turn by an isnad, or chain, of supposedly reliable
witnesses. Many Muslims allow their attitude to everyday life to be
determined by these anecdotes: regarding dogs as unclean, for
example, on the sole ground that Muhammad is said to have done so.
As one might expect, the six authorized collections of hadith, which
pile hearsay upon hearsay through the unwinding of the long spool of
isnads ("A told B, who had it from C, who learned it from D"), were
put together centuries after the events they purport to describe. One
of the most famous of the six compilers, Bukhari, died 238 years
after the death of Muhammad. Bukhari is deemed unusually reliable and
honest by Muslims, and seems to have deserved his reputation in that,
of the three hundred thousand attestations he accumulated in a
lifetime devoted to the project, he ruled that two hundred thousand
of them were entirely valueless and unsupported. Further exclusion of
dubious traditions and questionable isnads reduced his grand total to
ten thousand hadith. You are free to believe, if you so choose, that
out of this formless mass of illiterate and half-remembered
witnessing the pious Bukhari, more than two centuries later, managed
to select only the pure and undefiled ones that would bear
examination.
The likelihood that any of this humanly derived rhetoric
is "inerrant," let alone "final," is conclusively disproved not just
by its innumerable contradictions and incoherencies but by the famous
episode of the Koran's alleged "satanic verses," out of which Salman
Rushdie was later to make a literary project. On this much-discussed
occasion, Muhammad was seeking to conciliate some leading Meccan poly-
theists and in due course experienced a "revelation" that allowed
them after all to continue worshipping some of the older local
deities. It struck him later that this could not be right and that he
must have inadvertently been "channeled" by the devil, who for some
reason had briefly chosen to relax his habit of combating monotheists
on their own ground. (Muhammad believed devoutly not just in the
devil himself but in minor desert devils, or djinns, as well.) It was
noticed even by some of his wives that the Prophet was capable of
having a "revelation" that happened to suit his short-term needs, and
he was sometimes teased about it. We are further told—on no authority
that need be believed—that when he experienced revelation in public
he would sometimes be gripped by pain and experience loud ringing in
his ears. Beads of sweat would burst out on him, even on the
chilliest of days. Some heartless Christian critics have suggested
that he was an epileptic (though they fail to notice the same
symptoms in the seizure experienced by Paul on the road to Damascus),
but there is no need for us to speculate in this way. It is enough to
rephrase David Hume's unavoidable question. Which is more likely—that
a man should be used as a transmitter by god to deliver some already
existing revelations, or that he should utter some already existing
revelations and believe himself to be, or claim to be, ordered by god
to do so? As for the pains and the noises in the head, or the sweat,
one can only regret the seeming fact that direct communication with
god is not an experience of calm, beauty, and lucidity.
Was Muhammad Epileptic?
from: Christopher Hitchens
Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007, at 10:28 AM
Was Muhammad Epileptic? - 2
Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion - 3
NOTE: If this page was accessed during a web search you may wish to browse the sites listed below where this topic or related issues are discussed in detail to promote global peace, religious harmony, and spiritual development of humanity:
www.adishakti.org/www.al-qiyamah.org/
www.adi-shakti.org/ — Divine Feminine (Hinduism)
www.holyspirit-shekinah.org/ — Divine Feminine (Christianity)
www.ruach-elohim.org/ — Divine Feminine (Judaism)
www.ruh-allah.org/ — Divine Feminine (Islam)
www.tao-mother.org/ — Divine Feminine (Taoism)
www.prajnaaparamita.org/ — Divine Feminine (Buddhism)
www.aykaa-mayee.org/ — Divine Feminine (Sikhism)
www.great-spirit-mother.org/ — Divine Feminine (Native Traditions)
