Islam’s darker source

Being an agnostic, the conclusion that lurks in today’s brief and ephemeral post does not arise with the alacrity of an epiphany born of a certain subculture of evangelical Protestantism (or, prior to the mainstream dominance of politically correct multi-culturalism, a wider variety of Christians in general).

Nevertheless, over the years, that conclusion has nagged at me, and I confess that I am at a loss to explain the genesis of Islam—and its ongoing historical career of grotesquely ghoulish behaviors from the beginning in the 7th century A.D. right up to our present—without it. It seems to make the most sense, for all other explanations seem to beggar the phenomenon—the full, malevolent, horrific dimensions of it—which they are trying to explain.

Today, I only offer a comparison of two verses, one from the Koran, the other from the Bible—a comparison that might never have occurred to one who has not begun to think about the darker source of Islam. Perhaps in the near future, I will develop this overall comparison further.

Here is the Koran, offering to its slavish followers the ultimate enticement of what they shall receive for their fanatical submission:

And when you behold Paradise, you will see all around you delights and a vast kingdom.
(Koran 76:20)

And here is Satan trying to seduce Jesus into submitting to him instead of God:

. . . the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.
(Gospel of Matthew 4:8-9)

Some six centuries separate these two quotations—though not a signficant geographical distance: one Middle Eastern desert for another. Perhaps, it could be mused, in the terms of the Christian mythologoumena, that Satan, after the devastating blow he received—not merely when Jesus rejected his tempting offer, but also when Jesus instead submitted himself, maieutically as the “last Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45), to the Father by fulfilling the first fruits of God’s plan of the ultimate defeat of Satan, and succeeded in generating a flourishing Church that in three centuries managed to convert the Roman Empire and showed no signs of retreating, but in very deed was flourishing in the revival of a New Christian Roman Empire and a nascent Christian civilization (at which certain modern Christians wrinkle their noses)—found another way to try to entice the sons of Adam: to a Hell disguised as Paradise: a Hellish mirage in the desert, beguiling the soul thirsty for water (cf. the Gospel of John, chapter 4) by tempting him seductively with carnal pleasures, but only in reality offering the fire of damnation—found another way to try to entice the sons of Adam.

And this other way has been, over ensuing centuries, spectacularly successful in degrading, corrupting and possessing the souls of countless hundreds of millions, whose ongoing slavish pursuit of obsessive-compulsive submission to their darker source not only leads them eventually to his abode—a mirage of paradisaic gardens camouflaging infernal damnation—but also manages to wreak the havoc, mayhem and misery of a Hell on Earth in the long and winding meantime between the Beginning and the End.

Further Reading:

Islam and the Psychology of Satan: The Tragicomedy of Hell on Earth

Satan and Islam: another reverbation