Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Religion: Understanding the Abrahamic Trilogy

In the Beginning is the End

In a world embracing superficiality and sleights-of-hand, anyone sincere can be forgiven for seeing ever-smaller areas of substance. Politics has been exposed as a reality show designed to distract voters from increasing debt levels at the same time they experience declining quality of life. Meanwhile, mainstream Christianity, especially Catholicism, appears nothing more than a political movement with tax-exempt status using public funds to advance private nepotism. Where, then, can a decent person discover pathways towards an enlightened mind? 

A young Westerner growing up pre-internet might answer "newspapers," "books," "college," and, if lucky, "parents," "coaches," or "neighbors." A teenager in 2020 might cite video streaming services, documentaries, e-books, and college. Very few would include health care workers, police departments, politicians, the military, or the majority of their teachers, despite the fact that the majority of their parents' taxes go towards some combination of the aforementioned. Accordingly, we don't need an academic to explain why Western governments have become irrelevant while multi-national corporations, especially financial and technological institutions, have risen. The technology sector's algorithms, driven by the highest advertising bids, determine what we see, while banks and venture capitalists provide the lubricant for our intellectual deadening. 

"Social media is a nuance destruction machine, and I don't think that's helpful for democracy." -- Jeff Bezos (USA, July 2020) 

As the world's current technological leader, the United States requires a reformation placing technology not above philosophy or spirituality, but beside it. Rigorous anti-trust enforcement may shift placements, but no intellectual ever credited man-made law as non-satirical inspiration, so we must examine something more fundamental than civil law to understand how we arrived at our current lopsided paradigm. As teachers, unions, lawyers, military commanders and politicians exchanged their moral duties for power and groupthink, the task of transferring institutional knowledge--for both the high and the low--is returning to institutions with the most longevity in human history: religion and its discontents. Will such reversion work? An answer requires exploring Avraham's/Abraham's/Ibrahim's influence on today's Western leaders, all of whom publicly profess spiritual backing and, even if financed by teachers' unions, will claim God a greater influence than any teacher.

I hope I have not already lost the agnostic or the atheist, and I also hope many of you equated "discontents" above with "rebels." For it is not self-professed leaders who always make history, but often the ones opposed to them; indeed, were it possible to study history through the eyes of the dispossessed, disenfranchised, and disregarded, surely we'd better understand how we arrived at our current disaffected state. However, since the victors and elites have historically been the ones with financial backing, and most of our kin illiterate for much of our history, we must train ourselves to filter existing information in ways acknowledging our existence as a product of a corrupted but successful narrative. Such training is precisely what I intend to impart here, rather than judgment or certain knowledge. But, pray tell, why religion and not science or some other more objective source? 

Wisdom in the Shadows

First, the reason technological algorithms cannot be trusted with information is because they cannot see what and who is absent. In other words, algorithms cannot and never will be able to imagine historical gaps or to extrapolate meaning by identifying missing information. For example, Frederick Douglass may be one of the smartest men to have ever lived, but it would be a mistake to consider his words the main tributary into the oceans of African-American experience. Above all, the task of learning is an exercise in humility, in realizing our information is always incomplete, and a machine, being unable to understand humility, is therefore handicapped a priori in imparting wisdom. Consequently, though we are, on our best day, sailors paddling a fjord admiring the scenery, because we are able understand the risk of drowning, our single drop of knowledge will always be superior to a machine's ability to analyze the depths of the water but not its own limits. In this way, the agnostic and the deist are better suited to the task of wisdom than anyone--or anything--certain of his or her sources of intellectual progeny. 

Before proceeding, we must address the inquisitive reader's complaint that studying Avraham/Abraham/Ibrahim is a useless endeavor, particularly if agnostics, deists, and rebels are the ones we ought to study. Two responses should suffice: 

1) We are unable to access the thoughts of a man murdered during the Spanish Inquisition, so we can stop right here, let the algorithms and academics dictate the narrative, or we can try to remember human nature has remained relatively constant since at least 2500 years ago and then examine pogroms, religion, and government overreactions generally to gain insights into human nature; and 

2) No matter how enlightened or correct we deem ourselves, all knowledge is incrementally gained. The same young man enamored with Robert Burns' poem "A Red, Red Rose" will eventually consider the poem effete in his older years without realizing it must have been a lyrical masterpiece for all ages in 1794. Even more inscrutable is the notion that listeners in 1794 would not have understood an ee cummings poem just like most Americans today cannot read Shakespeare, and so it follows that ee cummings himself was not possible in 1794 though a Shakespeare is possible today. 

"We bear the scars of patient decades and centuries' dreams... The book, too, reads its readers in real-time." -- The Booksellers (2020 documentary)

If you still follow, then you realize every piece counts, no matter how small, intangible, or incorrect, especially within an environment of incomplete information which is itself disseminated by technology unable to understand limits. We must also consider the possibility we have reached a point in human history where our information is so contrary to wisdom, we can only know what is true by shedding what is false--and, more importantly, to train ourselves to avoid making the same mistakes. 

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." -- attributed to Mark Twain (USA)  

Having resolved the reasons to study religion as a source of historical knowledge about ourselves, we can now discuss the Abrahamic trilogy of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

The Abrahamic Trilogy: Odd Man Out

Abram/Avraham/Abraham/Ibrahim represents the story of a man equally claimed by Judaism, Christianity and Islam; however, religious scholars know Abraham looms larger in Judaism and Islam than in Christianity. More specifically, Christianity places the Messiah--and by extension the Trinity--at the center of its message of faith, whereas Judaism and Islam place humanity below a single, unmorphable higher power and never on equal terms. In essence, Christianity emphasizes a personable faith, whereas its religious cousins emphasize humility. 

"I learned I was Christian. It's the easiest thing in the world. You don't have to do anything. All you have to do is stop doing something. You have to learn to stop trying to preserve yourself." -- C.S. Lewis, as portrayed in Shadowlands (1993), comparing becoming Christian to taking a dive, or a leap of faith 

And here is where we reach, aptly enough, our next lesson. Not only is all knowledge, including science, incremental, but often a reaction to what came before. 

"Science is an incremental process of amassing information over repeated studies to slowly move towards a greater understanding. Rather than yielding sure answers, it's about reducing uncertainty." -- Eva Botkin-Kowacki (2020) 

The single largest impediment to human understanding is the inability to place one's current narrative in relation to historical ones from the ancestors' perspectives, resulting in incompleteness as well as contextual bias. Yet, upon closer examination, we have enough to form a likely narrative based on human nature once we understand the process of incremental knowledge as well as humanity's rebellious instincts. 

From the prism of a religious chain reaction, if we see ancient Jewish scholars as high-handed, arrogant, and corrupted by profit-seeking, then the existence of Jesus makes more sense, from his disregard for religious pedants to his ostracism by established community members. (The same dynamic would be repeated later with the prophet Muhammad, who railed against the elitist Quraysh tribe of which he was a member.) The pattern of hard-nosed teachers producing rebellious students is not new, and in this instance, could explain why Christianity chose storytelling over dogmatic instruction, a three-pronged God instead of a more straightforward singularity. 

[W]hen a dictatorship claims absolute authority over an idea -- in the case of Iran, Islam, in the case of Egypt, a ham-fisted brand of socialism -- frustrated citizens will run to the opposite ideological extreme. [Consequently,] The Islamic Republic was secularizing Iran; in Egypt the short-robed fundamentalists multiplied and multiplied. --  G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque (2010) 

By abstaining from a more structural belief system, Christianity as promulgated in the New Testament made itself more attractive but also more ambiguous and thus susceptible to fragmentation based on differing personal interpretations. 2,000 years later, my California community, settled by Catholic Spaniards, has a Jehovah's Witness Hall; two Korean-American churches; numerous Catholic churches, including one catering to Portuguese-Americans; a Mormon temple; and several more Christian institutions, none but the ones hosting Catholics and European history buffs aware of the reasons for such variety. 

To summarize, Christianity's multiple factions--spawned from anti-Catholic European sentiment--may reflect its ideological source code, which is itself multi-pronged; more importantly, its reliance on storytelling renders clear-cut commandments less possible, allowing authorities greater discretion and thus greater diversity of outcomes. When the engines of debt and interest are added to a culture permitting authorities in one district to rule differently than authorities in other districts, especially when no fiat or edict exists against slavery, financial Jubilees become pre-ordained. 

Facts: between roughly 300 BC and 200 AD, millions of slaves arrived in Italy, and Rome's one million inhabitants made it the largest city in Europe. In Rome, 30% to 40% of the population were slaves; in Italy as a whole, 20% to 40% were slaves. As late as 1452 AD, the Catholic Church issued a papal decree, Dum Diversas, promoting "perpetual servitude" against non-Catholics. 

So, too, is the notion of a Western Christian nation possessing the world's most destructive military while presuming to follow a hippie-like spiritual leader who never retaliated against his captors or called for war, even in self-defense. And so, too, can nations of men and women enamored with marriage hold ceremonies in churches under the literal (and often false) image of a prophet who never married. 

He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores. -- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Beyond Vietnam" (1967) 

Given such variances dislocated from logic and originalism, the Catholic Church, a centralized entity espousing the doctrine of papal supremacy, rose to power by offering to resolve such splits. From the moment it tasted power, the Church realized the shortest path towards relevance was as an intermediary between absentee rulers and illiterate commoners, especially where opportunities for personal discretion and subjective interpretation of laws existed. In such capacity, and unchecked by inbred kings mollified with self-portraits and other egotistical endeavors, it acted to supplant the court's sceptre with the papal ferula; to co-opt the military as royal advisor [Note: in chess, the bishop is next to the king and queen and equal to the warrior knight.]; to call for the Crusades; to murder non-Catholic women and children (unlike Saladin in Jerusalem); and to expel or persecute those not in line with its beliefs, whether Copernicus or common Jew. 

Warren Hinckle's If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade (1974)

Understanding the Catholic Church's methods as well as its status as intolerant political movement reveals a straight line from Pope Urban II's call for the Crusades in 1095; to Pope Nicholas V's "Dum Diversas" in 1452; to Martin Luther's "95 Theses" in 1517; to England's dissolution of Roman Catholic influence in 1536; and to America's Cardinal Francis Spellman and Joseph McCarthy, who, using the pretext of Communism, championed the Vietnam War to promote Catholic interests, including the installation of the Catholic Ngô brothers in South Vietnam, one of whom was an archbishop. 

Warren Hinckle (1974)

Having formed a cohesive picture, we can draw still further to today's presumptive American president Joseph Biden, Jr., a Catholic who supported the Iraq War and thus the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Semites and Muslims. Whether the target is Jew, Muslim, Protestant, or Buddhist, the Catholic Church's ability to use centralization to consolidate power throughout history is a feature, not a bug, of Christianity's subjective and personal ethos. Think: if everyone but you is dispersed or fragmented, who will prevail in a democratic system? And if you are the main branch from which others have split in opposition, which part will be the strongest until the bough breaks?  

"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last Catholic priest." -- attributed to Denis Diderot (1713-1784) 

(NoteSplits in Islam also occurred, not due to disagreements over Islam's (or, for that matter, Judaism's) fundamental tenets, but the bane of every corporate empire: post-succession planning.)

A Linear Reaction

If logic, peace, or objective truth are not universally binding agents in today's Christian-majority United States, then what is? If you understood the Jubilee reference above, then you know the answer. 

America is the country where not one, but two trillion dollar bailouts--with another soon coming--were needed to rescue Western-led banks post-2000. (Jan Hus and Martin Luther's complaints of Catholics "selling indulgences" continues, but in a different, more global form.) This trillion dollar machinery exposes debt as the glue yoking Christian residents and their institutions together, not ideology, education, politics, or religion. To sum up, the absence of a hard rule against interest, combined with a religious corps hell-bent on subsuming government policy to its own interests, has created, ironically, a reaction in which modern America's debt-soaked younger generation views socialism as equally favorable to capitalism

"In absolute terms, the average person in the bottom half of the US income distribution today is worse off than the average person in 1980 in the US... [But] the people at the bottom half of [Communist] China's income distribution today are four times better off than they were 30 years ago." -- Danny Quah (2019), Singaporean professor of economics

Having covered Judeo-Christianity's progression and blowback from Torah teacher to anti-Establishment rebel, we can finally discuss Islam's role. At this juncture, the Trilogy's second chain reaction resembles the "flower children" and anti-colonialists of the 1960s who became corporate suits in the 2000s: 

In many countries, anti-colonial fighters and heroes would win independence and assume power, but then fail at nation-building, because the challenges of bringing a society together, growing an economy, [and] patiently improving people's lives are very different from [rebelling against injustice and] fighting for independence. -- Singaporean PM LEE Hsien Loong (2015) 

The Ottomans/Turks (Sunni but not Arab), Omanis (Ibadis, not Sunni or Shia), and Iranians (Shia, not Sunni) would protest the label of "corporate suits," but the Arabs, as traders and merchants (hence, the famous caravans), have little argument, particularly given Khadija bint Khuwaylid's (خَدِيجَة ٱبْنَت خُوَيْلِد) status as an affluent merchant and employer of the young Muhammad (PBUH). 

Despite Islam's attempts to create a more equitable economic system, the political journey from dogma to status exploited for financial gain to equitable economic system is a recurring theme in human history, with the final step appearing more and more elusive. A bright student like Jesus Christ may realize his community's teachers or priests are full of empty bombast and more concerned with stature than wisdom, but such knowledge alone does not render him qualified to work as a teacher or priest, a situation the Catholic Church capitalized upon. Thus, from one point of view, it was left to the Arabians and Sunni branch of Islam to provide a more equitable structure to the ideas of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad under the assumption the last honest man had the advantage of the benefit of time--and incremental knowledge.

As a religion that had to influence traders while led by an orphan marrying a successful businesswoman, Islam was in a unique position to create a system (sharia, or شريعة‎) that would obviate the stories returning caravans told of Christianity's loopholes for exploitation. Today, no Islamic-majority country has citizens with trillions of dollars or dinars of consumer debt, a predictable outcome once one understands Islamic law's ban on interest (not just usury). Whereas Christianity's more subjective source code allowed interest to be charged, Islam negated the possibility of usury from the outset, realizing firsthand the coexistence of greed and business. 

September 2020

Furthermore, in contrast to America's Anglican, Quaker, and Baptist founders, Islam's prophet was never a slaveowner. 

From cover of Stephanie F. Jones-Rogers' book,
They Were Her Property (2019)

Not only did Muhammad (PBUH) never own slaves, he used his wife's money to free African slaves, including Bilal ibn Rabah; however, Muhammad (PBUH) could not immediately ban the established practice of slave-trading, which was highly profitable and as important to pre-Islamic Arab traders in 600 AD as to Christian-American Southern plantation owners in 1700 AD. That being said, from 610 AD to Islam's peak in 1511 AD, no person, whether African or otherwise, could be a slave if also Muslim, though European influence in Africa post-1511 AD made Afro-Arab Muslim slave traders (e.g, Tippu Tip aka Tippi Tib aka حمد بن محمد بن جمعة بن رجب بن محمد بن سعيد المرجبي‎)  non-oddities. (Note: the business of transporting goods across a vast landscape pre-navy required workers in the same way the tobacco or cotton industry requires manual laborers, with the main question being whether one treated such workers as minority partners or temporary chattel.) 

Abraham's Origin Story

In no way do I mean to denigrate Christianity. While Islam may be incompatible with Catholicism, Catholicism is not the only branch of Christianity. If Christianity is the odd man out in the Trilogy, then Judaism and Islam are the bookends attempting to corral the excesses permissible under a storytelling system. Had law and rationality been enough, we would have stopped our religious exploration at the Torah and Talmud and suffered a shortage of brilliant authors, including C.S. Lewis. Moreover, Islam's core tenets of anti-interest and anti-slavery would be less possible without Christianity's faith in mankind, even if sometimes misplaced. So too, does Islam have much to learn from a belief system able to weave a dream any which way and then attempt the task of elevating its believers into the story, with failure not preventing another dream state. Christianity's placement of a human being on the same plane as God lends itself to egoism and the "cult of personality" but also greater ambition than belief systems more wary of mankind's limits. 

We have neglected the man responsible for this entire discussion, so let us return to his story. It is true a polytheistic religion or one allowing multiplication of an ancestor could have formed the basis for an anti-slavery, anti-debt philosophy, but not as likely. As most adults know, the difference between themselves and their younger selves is the realization possibilities exist, but probabilities dictate outcomes. Thus, the probable challenger to Christianity's three-pronged approach had to have been one that re-asserted humanity's single, unbroken bloodline back to Abraham, a common ancestor. Why is such reversion so important? Put simply, a shared common ancestor makes it harder to split humanity into racial or other factions, which in turns makes it harder to justify maltreatment of one's fellow human being. 

Once we agree human history can be traced to a single common ancestor, the unifying value of Avraham/Abraham/Ibrahim cannot be disputed. To the uninitiated, 
Islam is a monotheistic religion with five pillars at its core and a prophet who united Arabia's nomadic tribes, but if monotheism is indeed Islam's sine qua non, why not follow Judaism, which also has a prophet who united his people? While any ideology could have challenged Christianity, probabilities indicate it had to have been one that expressly opposed Christianity's embrace of slavery and interest-driven banking while appealing to a single common ancestor. Islam's overlaps with Judaism look more deliberate under this theory than accidental, further promoting the idea a common ancestor can help unite us in unexpected ways. 

Conclusion

Some of you might be wondering what will be the linear reaction to Islam. You are asking the wrong question. Civil governments should have replaced religious authorities in the same way hospitals replaced shamans. The fact that most civil governments lack credibility while religious extremism is on the rise means we have all failed, merchants, storytellers, and scholars included. My advice? Anyone searching for truly Islamic neighborhoods should look at the prevalence of guest worker dorms, payday loans, and credit card balances, not mosques. A surprising number of countries claiming to be Islamic sanction a surprising number of unIslamic practices. 

At the end of the day, if all you gain from this discussion is the idea that Jews were strict pedagogues, Christians were media-savvy, and Muslims were business-minded, you have not been paying sufficient attention. Look to Abraham to re-align your path, and stay the course. Humanity is counting on your perseverance. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

Bonus: Cultural differences relating to marriage are often highlighted in discussions comparing Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. On this topic, I am no expert, so I'll be brief. High divorce rates in Christian-majority America; relatively high poverty and inequality, especially for women, in countries once invaded by Catholic Spain;  and child molestation judgments against Catholics should give pause to anyone looking to a priest for marriage advice, but the beauty of a belief system emphasizing storytelling means we are only one positive story away from re-writing history, statistics, and, yes, your own romance. Good luck. 

Luke, on marriage: "It's a bureaucratic civil ceremony and a pretty pointless one... It's not biologically natural for people to mate for life. Animals don't mate for life. Well, ducks do, but who the hell cares what ducks do? I mean, people grow and evolve their whole lives. The chances that you'll grow and evolve at the same rate as someone else are too slim to take. The minute you say, 'I do,' you're sticking yourself in a tiny little box for the rest of your life. But hey, at least you had a party first, right?" (Gilmore Girls, Season 2, "Red Light on Wedding Night," 2001)

"Well, I’m perfectly congenial to the idea of weddings, but what I think ruins so many marriages, though, is this romantic idea of falling in love. It happens, of course, I suppose to some people who are possessed of unusually fertile imaginations. Undoubtedly it is a mystical experience which occurs. But with most people who think they are in love I think the situation can be described far more simply, and, I’m afraid, brutally. The trouble with all this love business is one or the other partner ends up feeling bad or guilty because they don’t have it the way they’ve read it. I’m afraid things went off a lot more happily when marriages were arranged by parents. I do think it is absolutely essential that both partners share a sense of humor and an outlook on life. And, with Goethe, I think marriages should be celebrated more quietly and humbly, because they are the beginning of something. Loud celebrations should be saved for successful conclusions." -- W.H. Auden (Paris Review, Spring 1974)

Thursday, May 14, 2020

Travel in Muslim Countries: To Go or Not to Go

Most Westerners are inundated with negative images of Muslims, making excursions east of Switzerland seem foolhardy. As a U.S. citizen at an American hotel in Muslim-majority Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, I'll offer my own perspective. 
Seen April 2021
First, tourism is a trillion dollar industry, and all significant economic sectors include aggressive competition.
While almost everyone has learned governments use fake news and intelligence operations (aka propaganda) against each other, not many of us realize corporate espionage is just as active. For example, during a major sporting event in the United States, a Chinese company's website went down after one of its commercials aired, depriving it of both revenue and reputation. Was it a case of too much online traffic, or something else? More recently, TD Ameritrade's website became inaccessible shortly after the United States assassinated an Iranian military leader on Iraqi soil. Coincidence? Or part of a proportionate response? 
And what of Huawei's acceptance woes internationally? 
From Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei's Lessons from Battle
Most Americans will never know the details behind such machinations; as a result, they tune out public affairs, leaving the corporate and governmental worlds to persons with more passion than common sense and no guarantee of extraordinary moral fiber. Over time, such disconnect leads to a casual acceptance of almost any kind of news relating to foreign affairs--even if the news has no basis in fact. 

Second, negative news is an effective economic weapon because it is cheaper to issue a press release that biases consumers against foreign products than it is to spend money on positive advertising (aka building a consistent brand). Whatever the proclaimed political platform, every government has the same goal: attracting investors and deposits in order to expand the economy and to lower unemployment. Malaysia in particular has received bad press because its leader, Tun Mahathir Mohamad, is unapologetically pro-Asian, pro-Malay, and nationalistic. 
From A Doctor in the House (MPH Publishing)
Some examples of negative news involve Malaysia's hotel policy prohibiting unmarried couples from staying together. Setting aside the fact that states like Sarawak and Sabah are known to be fiercely independent from authorities in Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya, people fail to read the fine print: such policies are applicable only to Muslims and no one else. Since no front desk hotel clerk has ever asked me to state my religion, one can see obvious enforcement problems. In fact, none other than Tun Mahathir has said, "Islam does not ask us to find fault in people to the extent that you breach into other people's homes. That is not Islam." Why, then, do such policies exist? 

Here's the short version: after 1945, Europe could not afford to occupy countries east of the Suez, which it had done since Portugal controlled the Straits of Malacca in 1511, signaling Islam's decline in SE Asia. Despite overreaching--even WWII's "winners" had crushing debt--European leaders believed they could successfully resist or co-opt anti-colonial movements threatening private property interests. In one particularly brazen example, the Dutch, intending to stymie independence efforts, seized the future Indonesian president. (See Operation Kraai/Crow.) Though Westerners are taught WWII ended in 1945, in reality, battles continued worldwide over two additional decades to expel European colonists, especially the British. 
As European influence waned, newly independent countries--eager to counter vestiges of colonialism but with little experience building economies--had to discover new ways of governing diverse populations. In Malaysia and other majority-Muslim countries, politicians decided to restrict full benefits of citizenship to those presumed to be loyal to new governments, which in practice often meant Muslims (rather than Buddhist Chinese or Indians). 
By Tun Mahathir Mohamed
At the same time, Islam's reformation of slavery over a thousand years before similar movements in the West; lack of centralized structure (no Holy See); and absence of racial categories made Muslim-majority countries susceptible to hostile foreign infiltration and fraud, generating an ironic outcome: SE Asian governments, some still under European military protection, used anti-colonialism to justify identifying residents with greater specificity, thus mimicking British colonialists' "divide and govern" strategy. 
Later, Tun Mahathir refers to British colonialists' racialized division of labor.
In the United States, few people are willing to accept identity cards disclosing their religion or race, but such cards are common in SE Asia in order to better administer governance, including minimum diversity levels in government-subsidized housing. Mindful of an Animal Farm outcome in which new rulers become as corrupt as old ones, Muslim-majority governments began drafting laws applicable only to Muslims in order to respect non-Muslim minority residents. An unintentional result of using separate systems and/or governmental hiring preferences--whether in Hindu India, Muslim Malaysia, or now politically-Catholic-dominated USA--is that governments ceded the more dynamic private sector to non-majorities (e.g., Punjabis and Sikhs in India; Chinese in Malaysia, etc.), making themselves less relevant. 
Today, when Christian Westerners discuss sharia law, they bypass historical context: namely, that some religious minorities seek independent legal systems to resolve marriage, divorce, child-rearing, and inheritance issues because of Western colonialism's abuses and a rational distrust of legal systems in which Christian governments made and interpreted rules against politically-powerless minorities without input from non-Christians

Let's fast-forward to modern-day Malaysia. The country continues to struggle with corruption, even as its private sector appears healthy and citizens of all races and religions have experienced steady, sustainable improvements in quality of life. Meanwhile, politics in Malaysia--just like in several Western and Christian countries--has become an arena in which to signal moral purity rather than seek effective solutions. 22 years after opposition candidate Anwar Ibrahim was arrested on allegedly pretextual sodomy charges, former PM Najib Razak will face trial for his alleged role in the 1MDB scandal

Such political jousting isn't novel. When Tun Mahathir became president of Malaysia's now-most powerful political party in 1978, Tun Harun Idris had been investigated for corruption and jailed. After Tun Mahathir rose to power, he helped pardon Tun Harun. Lest you believe Muslim-majority countries are unique in using legal maneuvers against political opponents, you may want to review impeachment proceedings (Bill Clinton, Dilma Rousseff, Donald Trump); corruption convictions (Brasil's Luis "Lulu" da Silva, Spain's José Antonio Griñán); politically-motivated detentions without trial (Singapore's Operation Coldstore); FBI investigations before and during USA President Donald Trump's term; and President Trump's military-related pardons, plus dismissed prosecutions, including one where a lieutenant general pled guilty to lying to the FBI. (The only logical reason for such a lie would have been because statements requesting a foreign country not to escalate were code for an eventual quid pro quo that didn't happen only because of the FBI's investigation.) 
From USA's Mueller Report
In 2020, many voters see democratic elections as a game in which the ruling party uses all available tools to crush political opposition so as to cement power over the common purse, a power it wields to reward friends and destroy enemies. Sadly, they're not wrong. The level of incest--figuratively as well as literally--within political families is so prevalent, one has to wonder why voters didn't catch on earlier. See, for example, Belgium's Anciaux and Spaak families; Bolivia's Siles family; Brasil's Bolsonaro family (and many others);

In Brazil, 20,000 families control 80% of the wealth. -- Clark Winter's The Either/Or Investor (2008), hardcover, pp. 123.

Canada's Trudeau family (and many, many others); Colombia's López family... I could continue, but the list is extensive worldwide, and just the "U" countries (U.S., U.K., Uruguay) could fill a novella. (Note: Americans lived under a Bush or Clinton presidency from 1989 to 2009.) All available evidence indicates politicians are merely stand-ins for ruling families (Rockefellers, Gettys, Vanderbilts, Hearsts, Rothschilds, Morgans, etc.) which hearken back to a time when trading houses, along with their private militaries, ruled trade and therefore the world. 
We may know about the House of Bourbon, House of Bonaparte, and House of Saud, but though we're told "Hong" means "fragrant"--marketing so inapplicable to Hong Kong, one wonders if they're even trying anymore--in fact the "Hong" in Hong Kong refers to British trading houses. 

In the first half of the 19th century, the largest single industry in the United States, measured in terms of both market capital and employment, was the enslavement (and the breeding for enslavement) of human beings... Over the course of the period, the industry became concentrated to the point where fewer than 4,000 families (roughly 0.1% of the nation's households) owned about 1/4 of this 'human capital,' and another 390,000 (call it the 9.9%) owned all of the rest. -- Matthew Stewart (2018) 

Once one connects political power, military power, and trade (economic power), politicians are exposed as pretenders to a throne established centuries ago and protected by governmental inefficacy relating to offshore tax shelters that utilize complexity to provide anonymity. Within such a landscape, we can understand 1MDB as a misguided attempt to attract foreign direct investment, plus its corollary: zealous enforcement against the rise of patrons, especially in the informal sector, that might inspire unaccountable competitors. Perhaps we can now see some arrests are publicized to rally a political base; harass supporters of political opponents; gain advantages within a trillion dollar industry; or signal moral superiority by casting opponents as insufficiently religious. Admittedly, such a paradigm brooks no winners except would-be conformists and no prizes but internal rot, but if "all's fair in love and war," why not politics also?  

Native-born citizens and Hollywood aficionados forget America is an idea, not a specific place, and much of America's appeal comes from the eternal idea of refuge (including from political instability). In other centuries "America" was called the New World, and though I do not speak enough languages fluently to tell you more names, considering Justice Sotomayor's dissent in Trump vs. Hawaii (2018), Canada may now be more "American" than its downward neighbor. And so, to those Americans and Christians avoiding Muslim-majority countries because of inconsistent executive enforcement, discrimination on the basis of religion, and criminals run amok, rest assured: the United States has become like every other country, but with superior marketing. Welcome! May your children someday experience sunset gates and glows worldwide. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

Bonus I: "Tun" is a term of respect placed in front of a distinguished Malay's name. It is similar to "Mahatma." (Gandhi's first name is not Mahatma, but Mohandas.)  

Bonus II: Modern Western politics is in its current miserable state because everyone from Diego Rivera to the Workington Man has realized Western liberal values were mere covers for theft and supplanting of local institutions abroad rather than a sincere attempt to bring Enlightenment to all. -- Matthew Rafat (2019, after Britain's general election)

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Superpowers, Prophets, and Religion

Travel causes even the least observant to re-learn history. I began reading Ehsan Masood's Science and Islam (2009) last week, and I highly recommend the book. 
From what I gather so far, a world with two primary superpowers is not new. Masood mentions the Greek-Persian rivalry several times. (From my museum visits, I know the hatred between these two empires was so fierce, the Greeks engraved faces of defeated/dead Persians on their mead mugs.) 

Less predictable is the path of a new superpower. As America and the Soviet Union continued a costly rivalry from 1945-1991 and then from 2000 until 2016, China took advantage of their inattention, becoming a new superpower in just twenty years (1995-2015). No country can maintain supremacy if it expends energy and wealth fighting multiple fronts over an extended time period, a lesson every empire seems to forget. 

The Persian Sassanids and the Byzantine (Orthodox) Christians were similarly occupied with each other, allowing the untrained Arab Umayyad tribes and Bedouins to eclipse both empires within thirty years. Interestingly, such victories against outsiders occurred after Muhammad's (PBUH) death. For all the talk of the Prophet Muhammad's (PBUH) strategic prowess, his military career--as opposed to his economic and philosophical one--lasted only ten years, towards the end of his life, from 622 to 632, and after his first wife's death. (The Prophet Muhammad () was born in 570 A.D.) 

A diversion: Muhammad (PBUH) initially fled to Medina to escape assassination attempts; however, the polytheistic elites, his brethren in Mecca, continued to pursue him. Only after he moved from Mecca, his birthplace, to Medina in 622--when he was approximately 50 years old--did he authorize violence under the express limitation of self-defense:

Permission [to fight] has been given to those who are being fought, because they were wronged. And indeed, Allah is competent to give them victory. (Qu'ran, 22:39) 

Furthermore, Muhammad (PBUH) testified he was visited by the angel Gabriel/Jibril in 610 A.D.--at the age of 40--meaning he opposed elites and their excesses before receiving divine revelations, even though he belonged to the influential Qurayshi tribe. Like most changemakers, he was a rebel early on, disgusted by materialism (see Jesus's actions, overturning tables of moneychangers at temple), making friends with outsiders, including but not limited to African slaves. (FYI: though Abu Bakr, Muhammad's successor, was said to have light skin, we don't know if "light skin" referred to light brown or some other color.) 

Thus, for most of his life, Muhammad (PBUH) gained influence and protection through two sources: first and foremost, his older wife, an affluent, established merchant who trusted the younger Muhammad in part because he disdained materialism; and second, the poor, especially slaves, whom he freed, co-opted, and elevated into positions of authority (see stories of Bilal ibn Rabah, Salman Al-Farsi, and Suhayb ar-Rumi aka Sohaib ibn Sinan). ["Many of those who fought for Islam in the early years were among the poorest in the region." (Masood, pp. 24)] Regarding the second source, Muhammad's (PBUH) openness to outsiders surely arose because he was orphaned at a young age. 
The Bible's New Testament is starkly different than the Koran on the matter of slavery.
See 1 Peter 2:18.
As for other historical topics, Masood doesn't cover the Sunni-Shia split in depth, but I'll try to summarize here: some Shia scholars argue Muhammad (PBUH) united the numerous tribes and peoples of Arabia under a monotheistic and Abrahamic banner, only to have his work destroyed after his death in a military coup defying his succession wishes as set forth in his Ghadir Khumm speech. The Sunnis, for their part, see no conflict because Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad's chosen successor, was eventually made into a Caliph and was too young to command a leadership position at the time of Muhammad's (PBUH) death. (Ali was eventually murdered in 661 in present-day Iraq.) 
Being too young didn't stop the Europeans from choosing successors,
perhaps their way of ensuring the military's influence.
If they want to pursue the matter further, the Shias might argue Umar/Omar--the same person who pledged allegiance to Ali at Ghadir Khumm--altered the Prophet's intended inheritance (the Fadak estate) to his daughter, Fatima Zahra, allegedly causing her to suffer a miscarriage and death less than three months after Muhammad's (PBUH) death. (Muhammad once said, "Fatima is a part of me. Whoever makes her angry, makes me angry.") The Sunnis may counter by saying succession is rarely a smooth process--almost every caliph after Muhammad (PBUH) and Abu Bakr was assassinated or poisoned, not just Ali ibn Abi Talib. Additionally, the Fadak estate was eventually returned to Fatima's heirs by an Ummayyad caliph. 

[Timeline: Abu Bakr (632 to 634AD), includes Ridda Wars (Arabic: حروب الردة‎) aka the Wars of Apostasy from 632 to 633; Umar I (634 to 644); Uthman (644 to 656); Ali (656 to 661)] 

Furthermore, while Husayn ibn Ali, Muhammad's (PBUH) grandson, was murdered under the Sunni Ummayads, their ancestors did not specifically target the Shias--after all, the Ummayads lost to the Abbasids, direct descendants of the prophet Muhammad, who were also Sunni. According to Professor M. Umaruddin of Aligarh University, the "Abbasids put to death not only all the members of Ummayad family but also all their supporters. They disillusioned the Shi'as by killing them wholesale." (The Ethical Philosophy of Al-Ghazzali) 
Succession and internecine feuds were common in Europe, too.
In fact, both the Sunnis and Shia can point to a third interloper, the Khawarij group, as the source of division within Islam. The Khawarij (aka the Seceders) were about 12,000 people, a hardline sect that refused to accept Ali's governance, eventually assassinating him. 

In any case, after 755 A.D. and after the end of Ummayad rule, "Persian culture and civilization asserted itself dominantly and triumphantly in the Muslim world." (Id., pp. 10) "Shi'ism in particular appealed to the Persians, who further developed the Shi'ite doctrines of the Imamate and evolved most of the transcendental theories about it. The two main sects of the Sh'ias, the sect of the Seven and the sect of the Twelve appeared during this period," a split once again caused by the familiar issue of succession. The Sixth Imam, Ja'far Al-Sadiq, disinherited his eldest son Isma'il, nominating his younger son Musa al-Kazim instead. It seems the Twelvists chose incorrectly, disappearing circa 873 AD, leaving the "Seventies" to follow the son of Is'mail, a man named Muhammad who favored allegories, storytelling, and even wine to interpret the Quran. (Id.) (Were Rumi, born around 1207, and his mentor Shams, born around 1185, influenced by the Seventies? I don't know.)  

As I was reading Masood's book, I realized another pattern in power replacement: the presence of a single unexpected defeat leading to the collapse of a long-standing empire. We've all heard of Napoleon's Waterloo and Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union (starting in June 1941, with the winter in November 1941 destroying Germany's morale), but what about the battle of Yarmuk in Jordan in 636, where about 35,000 Arab Muslims defeated a Byzantine force of 100,000? Or the Battle of Badr in 624, where Muhammad's army of 313 men defeated almost 1,000 Arabs from Mecca? 
I'm reminded of Ernest Hemingway's quote about bankruptcy/collapse coming gradually then suddenly, a sentiment that seems to apply perfectly to empires in decline after an unexpected military defeat. 

Another pattern discussed in Masood's book is the speed by which a center of commerce or influence can shift. The Ummayads moved the center of operations from Mecca to Damascus, and Baghdad's intellectuals also seem to have moved to Damascus. Similarly, Constantinople immediately became an important city after the Byzantines moved the center of Christianity away from Rome. 

Yet, all empires drove away distinguished minorities even as they attracted intellectuals and new residents. For example, the Byzantines excluded Nestorians, who were Christians, but who had a different interpretation of Christ's role. Masood describes the Byzantines as fundamentalists who insisted on "a single interpretation of the nature of Christ," displacing minorities and non-conformist Christians as far away as China. 
It got me thinking: for most of human history, groups of minorities were rarely able to tell their stories in documents that survived intact, so we lack full knowledge about declining social cohesion and the numerous escalations that led to expulsions. Such gaps make it almost impossible to study complete patterns in historical displacement, rendering history books woefully incomplete. Consequently, when studying history, remember: you are learning a sliver of a sliver of a moment in time. Be humble. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2019)

Bonus 1: Europeans were not scientifically advanced until they came into contact with post-Islamic Arab civilization. See https://bahai-library.com/cobb_islamic_contributions_civilization#7 

"[V]irtually all the science and technology of the classic world had already been passed on to Europe by the Arabs - a process which had begun before 1100 and was completed by the time Constantinople fell. Although this Arab revival of classic learning was the chief influence in Europe's scientific awakening, this fact has been popularly disregarded." 

Algebra is an Arabic term. (So is mocha, in case you didn't know.) As for freedom, the first declaration of human rights comes from the Persians. See http://www.persepolis.nu/persepolis-cyrus.htm 

"The Declaration of Human Rights written by Cyrus the Great has been hailed as the first charter of human rights, predating the Magna Carta by nearly two millenniums." 

Finally, one reason the Persian Empire lasted around 430 years (224 to 651 A.D.)--longer than the Greeks and Romans (14 to 395 A.D.)--is because it was one of the most tolerant empires in the history of the world. 

Bonus II: Lisa Ling, in 2019, unintentionally showed a significant overlap between Arab Islam's and Genghis Khan's military success: "I think also in this period of class divide is really a moving one, because he was this character [Khan] who was a slave at one time himself, went on to conquer two thirds of the population of the earth, because he elevated people, he elevated slaves, and the lowest level of human to rise up in his army." 

Sunday, September 23, 2018

A Muslim in Japan: Interview with Engineer Noman Md Ariful Haque


Born in Bangladesh, Noman studied computer science in the University of Dhaka. He knows C++ and now programs in Android Java. He has lived in Japan for 10 years and currently works in product management for a well-known Japanese company. I met him while we were both in transit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 

Q: What’s been your experience being a Bangladeshi Muslim engineer in Tokyo?

NH: Most people [immigrants like me] come to Japan for higher education or to find work. People with science backgrounds don’t have as many job opportunities in their own countries, and Japan offers opportunities.

Q: You are a pious Muslim and visibly so. Have you ever experienced discrimination in Japan?

NH: Many Japanese don’t like people outside of Japan, and it is still a very closed society. Nevertheless, there are over 300 mushollas [informal prayer places] in Japan. I speak Japanese, but it’s difficult because the Japanese [people] are not direct in their communications. They don’t like making direct demands, and their communication style is indirect. At the same time, no one bothers anyone else because of religious or other differences. I have heard in the USA, some people might bother you because of the way you look, but in Japan, no one bothers you. Personally, I’m an introvert, and Japan is a good fit for me.

I suppose the older Japanese generation is less friendly than the younger generation. When I've sat next to senior citizens on the train, they've assumed I don’t speak Japanese [and made derogatory comments], and sometimes they've gotten up and walked to a different seat.

Q: What do you like about Japan, as someone who’s lived there for 10 years?

NH: It’s very clean, and most of the people are very gentle. In general, the Japanese are very disciplined, very honest, and good at customer service. I also like Tokyo’s train system very much. And of course, no one bothers you if you’re different.

Q: What attracts you to Islam?

NH: I was born into a Muslim family, and my parents would talk to me about Islam. They would talk about the Creation. I was very impressed when I asked questions about the Creation from scholars at several mosques, and they provided me with the answers I was seeking. Let me try to explain. Think about the soul. The physical body passes away or atrophies. Islam helped me understand everything is there even after the physical body has departed, and even if we do not actively see it. That something is the soul, which enters into a different world.

So this world is very short, and there are really two worlds: one we live in now, and an afterlife. We humans can be remembered at most for three or four generations, so the purpose of life, if we are humble enough to admit it, is to act in a way that comes from true intentions. If we think of ourselves as having a purpose of worshipping Allah, it can give us a different perspective. For me, no other theory explained what happens when the physical departs. This world, the one we live in now, is a time for being tested. God has made different kinds of people, white, black, rich, poor. This is Allah’s way of giving us an exam and finding out which souls are more obedient to Him.