Baring Faith to Uproot Belief

Agenda for Religious Reversions

That the jihadi Islam, to paraphrase in Telugu, has become the chaapa kinda neeru (stealthily spreading water under the mat) and its fidayeen lurk in every nook and corner of the globe, is a common knowledge for long. But yet, the non-Muslim world, despite the outsider advantage, remains clueless to confront, much less contain, this unremitting scourge. That is in part, geopolitics apart, is owing to an inadequate appreciation of this debilitating Islamic phenomenon, and this is but an attempt to address that lacunae.
So as to have the measure of this Islamic menace, one may gauge it through the mindset of Ijaz Khan Hussein of Pakistan, who survived the American military campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

“We went to the jihad filled with joy, and I would go again tomorrow,’ he said. ‘If Allah had chosen me to die, I would have been in Paradise, eating honey and watermelons and grapes, and resting with beautiful virgins, just as it is promised in the Quran. Instead, my fate was to remain amid the unhappiness here on earth.” (The New York Times report cited by M.J. Akbar in his book The Shade of Swords) However, the power of the jihadi brainwash lies in the ironical fact that many a fidayeen happen to be virgins themselves, unexposed thus to the joys of sexual intercourse! The unusual sexual obsession of the believers, bordering on mania, is dealt with later in this piece.

It was Napolean, who purportedly proclaimed, “Give me forty men who are not afraid of death, and I will conquer the world”, but Muhammad dextrously perfected the psychic route to metamorphose his folks into fidayeen on Islam’s jihadi path. Though he did so in order to make them cement his political lanes, the mullahs allude the same as Allah-perfected Islamic path to paradise. Whatever, Muslims fail to realize that the Quran they revere was no more than Muhammad’s means to meet his ends that is despite Ayesha’s firsthand account, “I feel that your Lord hastens in fulfilling your wishes and desires."
Hence, it is incumbent upon the others to alert the believers that the Quranic ayahs, no matter whether they were Allah’s revelations, or Muhammad’s innovations, were the latter’s self-servings that forever bedevil their and their progenies lives. That is possible like never before in our information age but one needs a proper understanding of the Machiavellian tactics adopted by Muhammad to serve his selfish ends at the cost of his followers’ lives.

This is how it was.

After his flight to Medina, nay Yathrib, so as to sustain the nascent Islamic faith in his limited band of followers in the face of its ridicule by the neighbourhood Jews and Christians, he had set to turn the former against the latter in ayahs umpteen such as,

“The Jews and Christians say: We are sons of Allah and His loved ones. Say: Why then doth he chastise you for your sins? Nay, ye are but mortals of His creating. He forgiveth whom He will, and chastiseth whom He will. Allah’s is the Sovereignty of the heavens and the earth and all that is between them, and unto Him is the journeying.”

“O ye who believe! Choose not for friends such of those who received the Scripture before you, and of the disbelievers, as make a jest and sport of your religion. But keep your duty to Allah if ye are true believers.”

Just the same, not stopping at that, he stooped to set his greedy eyes on the wealthy Jewish hamlets to ravage which, the Spoils of War were good enough for him to egg his brigands, prompting Gibbon to dub Islam as a profitable religion. But it was when the mighty Meccans began to menace his Medina existence that he needed the dying to die ‘Napolean forty’ besides a new Quranic narrative to suit.

To start with, when his followers were a hapless bunch of seventy, his Quran in Mecca Surah, Ta Ha, 55.20, seemingly promised a promising afterlife right here,

“Thereof We created you, and thereunto We return you, and thence We bring you forth a second time.”

However, Medina’s changed circumstances made it imperative for him to downplay the inadequacies of life here and extoll the abundances in the hereafter that is besides substituting the premise of rebirth with the promise of permanence in the Paradise.

Hence, the Quranic stress,

“Naught is the life of the world save a pastime and a sport. Better far is the abode of the Hereafter for those who keep their duty (to Allah). Have ye then no sense?”

And then the Muhammadan chorus,

“O god, no good is but the good hereafter
So help the Helpers and the Emigrants.”

Not only that, not leaving the Hereafter to the limited imagination of his deprived folks, it was evocatively described in ways varied, such as,

"But those who believe and do deeds of righteousness, We shall admit them to Gardens under which rivers flow (i.e. in Paradise) to dwell therein forever. Allah's promise is the Truth; and whose words can be truer than those of Allah?"

Well, in Muhammad’s medieval period, maybe all this could have been an irresistible incentive but why should Muslims of the day deprecate their lives here that are better than the one pictured in Islamic paradise, is the puzzle.

Nevertheless, having altered the Islamic character of life and death, Muhammad rewrote its jihadi grammar thus:

“Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you; but it may happen that ye hate a thing which is good for you, and it may happen that ye love a thing which is bad for you. Allah knoweth, ye know not.”

“Think not of those, who are slain in the way of Allah, as dead. Nay, they are living. With their Lord they have provision.”

So be it, but hypothetically speaking, can the followers of the other faiths be motivated to become martyrs based on the above premises, with their scriptures being what they are?
The answer would be an emphatic nay, and herein lies Muhammad’s ingenuous cunning in preparing the carnal ground for the fidayeen.

Well, Quran had unambiguously positioned him,

“Verily in the messenger of Allah ye have a good example for him who looketh unto Allah and the Last Day, and remembereth Allah much.”

And Quran hath it that Muhammad had given vent to his unbridled libido, laying bare his innate sexual urge that was after the aged Khadiza’s demise, resulting in multiple marriages culminating in the keeping of Mariyam. So, it is no wonder that sexual indulgence has endured as Islamic chivalry in the Muslim psyche. If anything, Allah allures the martyrs to His paradise thus,

“Enter the Garden, ye and your wives, to be made glad.”

“Reclining on ranged couches. And We wed them unto fair ones with wide, lovely eyes,”

And for the rest of his part, Muhammad further whetted the Islamic appetite for martyrdom by fixing the quota of these houris at seventy-two per head. What’s more, to make the heavenly bountiful meaningful to the sexually sceptical, he granted each one of them the strength of hundred men!

No denying, all that worked well for him in hoisting the Islamic flag in Mecca and the rest of the Arabia, and sadly, for much of the humanity, its latter-day flagbearers coerced many a cultured nation into its coarse order. What’s worse, overtime, the ummah came to be so structured as to make Islam ironclad that its hostility towards the others is perpetuated, sans scope for retraction and space for accommodation. And that made the cult a cureless virus to the world.

Nevertheless, with the laudable objective of modernizing this regressive cult that undeservedly acquired the religious tag, India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi had mooted the idea of the Madrasas with Muslim kids holding the Quran in one hand and a computer, an emollient replacement of the Islamic Sword, in the other. Well-meaning though, given the Quranic affect, in effect, it would be immensely damaging, as it could usher in multitudes of technically savvy fidayeen, leading to large scale manslaughters, aptly reminded by the flydubai episode. The fact that this fanatic cult strives to make all religion for Allah and aims to bring the world under a Caliphate, if ignored by the non-Muslims, it is bound to be catastrophic to the humanity at large.

So, it is high time to give up on ‘moderate’ Muslim hogwash of, Islam is a religion of peace, terrorism has no religion, all Muslims are not terrorists, Ummah is the worst victim of terrorism etc., and get real to the Quranic reality that it won’t let the believers live in peace and allow the others to live in harmony. However much the left-liberals wish, there can never be a via media in Islam – either one is a believing Mumin or a sceptical munafiq, with no in between moderate. Given that banning the Quran is academically implausible (restricting it in Masjids and Madrasas is eminently possible), baring the Islamic faith to uproot the Quranic belief is a viable proposition. Needless to say, all non-Muslims should join hands to lend their voices for exposing the Islamic inanities that give rise to Muslim abnormalities. Eventually, the body of munafiqs that such a campaign creates within the Ummah can be expected to bring the hegemony of the mullahs to a welcome end.

Just the same, the idea is not to make way for the evangelists into the Munafiq arena to harvest the disaffected Muslim souls but for them to return to Gibbon’s pre-Christian order of “the facility with which the most different and even hostile nations embraced, or at least respected, each other’s superstitions.” So, the agenda of religious reversions is for the potential renegades to revert to the religio-cultural dispensations of their respective progenitors, say, the subcontinental category to Sanatan Dharma and the Iranian variety to Zoroastrianism.

Author’s ‘Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife’ is a free ebook in the net.

Semitic Faiths ‘n Sanatan Dharma: 

A Simple Study of Contrasts

While Christianity and Islam are hostile to the Jews but not to Judaism per se, their followers are antagonistic towards Hinduism, the Sanatana dharma of the Hindus, and for a good reason. Judaism being the father of the Abrahamic  faiths, denouncing it amounts to theological self-deprecation but as Hinduism is outside their monotheistic Semitic fold, running it down runs no such risk. Besides, weakening its polytheistic hold on a billion souls would soften the path of harvesting them for their bottomless religious granaries.

Even taking their proselytising urge in good faith – the Christian belief that without faith in Jesus, people stand condemned and the Islamic relief of a final truth to guide humanity - are their religious credos any better than the Sanatana dharma that postulates ekam sadviprā bahudhā vadanti (what is right is One only, describe it wise variedly) is the question that needs to be addressed for any rational study of contrasts among these diverse dispensations. Whatever, if Hinduism is a ‘Way of Life’, as ruled by India’s apex court, then it can be said that Christianity and Islam are the by-lanes of Moses’ Semitic Path, and  to comprehend the former, one has to go through the latter. However, it’s not much known that the oft-quoted "seeing is believing’ is the rational part of clergyman Thomas Fuller’s full quote, “seeing is believing, but feeling is the truth," that underscores this simple study of their contrasts.

To begin with, when the Ten Commandments were first proclaimed, Jehovah spoke audibly to Moses from Mount Sinai amid smoke, fire, thunder, and lightning, so that the assembled Israelites heard His voice. When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.” Then Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.” Though this Biblical account is not up to Fuller’s seeing is believing, the Jewish belief about its happening makes them hold Jehovah’s diktats in dread. Whatever, in their God’s scheme of rewards and punishments there was no provision for recompense from sins through repentance.

But even when it comes to hearing,  it’s one thing for Jesus himself to claim to be the Son of God, that he never did, and yet another for his apostles to proclaim so, what with the innovative immaculate conception, added much later after his demise. So also, Jesus’ teachings, including the Sermon on the Mount as well as his “Go specifically to the lost sheep of Israel; don't enter Gentile, Samaritan towns” during his ministry and “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them” that was after his resurrection (what did change in the meantime for his change of mind!), as cited in Mathew 10 and 28 respectively, have no evidentiary value whatsoever. It's thus, the entire Biblical legend of Jesus that is the fulcrum of the Christian faith is totally based on hearsay or improvement, as the case may be, but yet, the belief of the Christians in this regard is the gospel truth.

When it comes to the Islamic narrative, Gabriel, in incognito, met Muhammad in a cave of Mount Hira and made him say after him: “Recite in the name of thy Lord who created! He createth man from a clot of blood etc.” But as he fled from the cave in panic and was half-way down the hill, he heard a voice from above, “O Muhammad, thou art the Messenger of God, and I am Gabriel.” So, for his followers,  Muhammad’s word became the basis of their devotion for him and eventually the truth of Islam. Not only that, the guidance he said he received from Allah, the Arabic  avatar of Jehovah, became the ayats of the Quran to forever rule the minds of the Musalmans, for good or bad.

Just the same, it is this Semitic dogma that became its dictum; ‘the God’ revealed to their prophet the right ‘path of life’ for them to unquestioningly follow so as to stand the believers in good stead on the Day of Judgment. Besides, but for Judaism, in its religious offshoots of Christianity and Islam, the messiah is believed to be endowed with the power of intercession on behalf of the faithful on that Fateful Day. It’s thus, intended or otherwise, the prophet became the fulcrum of the faith as well as the icon of the Christian and the Islamic religious credos, relegating the otherwise haughty God to the fringes, never mind the pretence to the contrary.

It's another matter though that the Christians became antagonistic to Jews on the grouse that they were collectively responsible for Jesus’ death resulting in their persecution over the ages, culminating in the holocaust. That apart, so as to keep his flock together in the face of the Jewish mocking at his prophethood, Muhammad incited them against his detractors, the God’s chosen people. Not only that, so as to insulate his followers as well from the Christians, the acolytes of His son, he ordained them to keep away from the latter on the pretext that he (Jesus)  sought to partner with  Him along with Mary, his mother. Whatever, it is ironical that while the Unitary God had divided his flock into three mutually antagonistic factions, the Hindu gods and goddesses amalgamated the amorphous Sanatana  societies in their dharmic fold!

So, what of the peerless Hindu phenomenon, which the monotheists dismiss as idolatrous polytheism, that too even as the crosses with Jesus and his baby self in Mary’s arms abound in the Churches, and the Hajis fall over each other to kiss Hajar al-Aswad (Black Stone) at the Kabbah! If only the uninitiated realise, what they mistake as Hindu idol worship in essence is an obeisance to the deities in their distinctive vigrahas, in which their gods and goddesses get manifested (pranaprathista) through Vedic rituals, formulated in enchanting Sanskrit mantras.

Set aside their credos, what if we measure these four on the scale of gender justice that today’s man’s world pretends to hold dear. Whereas the Semitic dispensations are dictated by the Lord God (as already seen, Christianity had added Mary and Jesus in its pantheon to the chagrin of Islam), the Sanatana dharma is governed by spouse gods galore. Not only that, while the Semitic God is stern and aloof, Vishnu, the sustainer, (the creator Brahma and the destroyer  Shiva  being the others in the Trinity) in his avatars on earth, mingled with the Hindu folks. Won’t that fulfil Fuller’s twin criteria of seeing is believing, and feeling is the truth. What’s more, in respect of cultural aspects, while the solemn, even sombre, Semitic events, centred around the God and his prophets, for the most part that is, can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand, the numerous Hindu festivities, with mirth and music, associated with the gods and goddesses, nearly need a calculator to account for. And for those who experience it, that’s life, the blessed one at that.

All the same, for the discerning minds, the vital difference between the Sanatana dharma and the Semitic faiths lies in the concurrent philosophical stream of the former and the abject absence of the same in the latter that the Roberto Baggio episode amply underscores. Inconsolable at letting down Italy in that FIFA world cup final with his over-the-crossbar kick in the penalty shootout against Brazil, that too as its captain, and not finding any solace in ‘Jesus shedding his blood to save sinners’, he turned to Buddhism, a spiritual offshoot of Hinduism, for good effect.

What is amusing is that Christians and Muslims, whose God is not clear about the creation of man (see the tailpiece) seek to emancipate the Hindus whose progenitors had propositioned that it’s man who created the god, in theories many, as expostulated in the Brihadāranyaka Upanishad, composed around 700 B.C.E. Here’s is an excerpt from Valerie J. Roebuck’s The Upanisads, just to cite one such.

“He knew: “I am creation, for I created all this.” So he became creation. Whoever knows this, come to be in this, his creation.”

“When they say, “Sacrifice to that one!”, “Sacrifice to that one!”- some god or other, that is his varied creation, and he himself is all the gods.

Then he created from seed whatever is moist, and that is Soma. All this is just food and the eater of food. Soma is food, and Agni is the eater of food.

This is the higher creation of Brahma, since he created gods who are better than he: and also because, being mortal, he created immortals, it is his higher creation. Whoever knows this, comes to be in this, his higher creation.”

That’s not all; the Hindus have the Bhagavad-Gita, which according to the Prussian philosopher, William von Humboldt, “is the most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical song existing in any known tongue.” The author’s translation in verses, Bhagvad-Gita: Treatise of Self-help, is in the public domain that can be perused as free ebook, the essence of which is –   

“The Supreme Spirit through Nature causes the birth of all beings. Thus, the indwelling spirit in the beings is a divisible part of the same Indivisible Supreme Spirit. The spirit lying within beings is subject in degrees to virtue, passion and delusion, the three attributes of Nature. It should remain the human endeavor to free the indwelling spirit from these nature-induced influences. This, however, is not possible for any in a single birth, and indeed, it would take the sustained effort of lot many births for that. Thus, in the end, the soul could be tended towards that state of purity, which matches with that of the Supreme Spirit. As and when this happens, the indwelling spirit merges with the Supreme Spirit which is nothing but moksha.”

It's thus, the god is truly within man (aham brahmasmi) so also the so-called Satan, the salvation is not as simple as being or becoming a Christian or a Musalman, and the entry into heaven or the hereafter, as the case may be, is not based on the intercession of the messiah on the Day of Judgement. So, one may wake up and smell the coffee.  

The Tailpiece  

Clueless Creation,

A Satirical poem by the author.  

Told God man In Genesis One

Him He created in form of His

Not when asked as how He did

Thought He fit in Genesis Two

To tell He used the dust for that

But to change tack after that,

So in time Muhammad told

Made Jibrail recite him

In the name of One who makes

Man on earth from clot of blood,

Failed as he then to enquire

Wherefrom He gets all that blood

And since God hath sealed His mouth

Knows not man the true roots of his.