I used to be one of those skeptics who think Obama is not Muslim, but I'm coming around. One thing suddenly struck me when I heard Spencer say on his post-election interview with Michael Coren of Sun TV, something to the effect of "I don't think Obama is a Muslim -- I don't think he's a believer in anything" (meaning anything religious).
What struck me is the idea that as long as people think Islam is a
"religion" in the Western model, then if someone seems to be decidedly
agnostic and secular (as Obama seems to be, replacing the "opiate of the
masses" with the New Drug of Marxist-Leninist Revolution -- watered
down deceptively as the more PC-friendly "Hope & Change" and
"Obamacare"), it seems logical to conclude they can't be a Muslim.
However, I've become more and more convinced that Islam is less of a
religion, and more of a geopolitical ideology. I.e., perhaps the titular question is best approached with another question: "What is Islam?"
To flesh out that rather banal designation, we can describe it as a militarized supremacist expansionist totalitarianism: a global criminal gang with an obsessive idolization of their OOG Mohammed, with the
primary fixation of all their emotional, physical and intellectual energies on
lust for power,
lust for supremacy,
lust for bullying,
lust for abusing,
lust for thievery,
an obsessive-compulsive disorder about regulating all aspects of life,
an obsession with 'purity' as part of their general OCD about control,
an obsession of fear and loathing with 'enemies'
blood-lust,
and, last but not least,
a serpentinely wily awareness to adopt stealth and deception when Muslim weakness vis-a-vis surrounding Infidels militates against pursuing the above "virtues" openly.
and, last but not least,
a serpentinely wily awareness to adopt stealth and deception when Muslim weakness vis-a-vis surrounding Infidels militates against pursuing the above "virtues" openly.
(Involved in the train of all these lusts and obsessions is a general
breakdown in individual psychology and community sociology, where
disorder and mental disease becomes the norm in families, workplaces and general society, characterized by endemic
pathologies like near-constant lying, as well as paranoia,
rumor-mongering, and hatred of the other, et unfortunately cetera...)
Meanwhile, the religious paraphernalia and claptrap Islam has which
makes it resemble a "religion" (heaven and hell, jinns, prayers, houses
of worship, pilgrimage, etc.) are really just ways to organize and brainwash people militarily (as Hitler seemed to recognize, which is one reason why he admired Islam). Additionally, all that theologoumena and liturgoumena may well reflect the fact that in ancient times (after all, Islam began prior to our MIddle Ages), there was no secular model of totalitarianism to draw from, and it would have been a strange anachronistic feat to come up with such a model when no else had to date. And so, Muslims simply fashioned a supremacist totalitarianism out of ideological materials available to them -- a religion: even better, the "final" religion superior to all other religions. And this vehicle for their totalitarianist-expansionist ambitions, woven of a constellation of religious symbolisms and practices proved, moreover, more conducive to inspiring and galvanizing followers with an enduring record of 1,400 years and spanning the globe, than did the cobbled-together ersatz-religions of Nazism and Communism, born late and died young in flames.
Thus, their "god", Allah, is not a divinity as defined in the West,
but is more of a psychic vortex that symbolizes and channels these
various lusts and obsessions. And we all know how Muslims Orwellianly
redefine concepts like "justice" and "peace" -- in a way analogous to
the way Marxists-Leninists do, as simply symbolic instruments geared to
enable, and to reflect meaningfully (for the purpose of
self-brainwashing), the aforementioned lusts and obsessions; though with a far more compelling psychological hold on its slaves.
For those who've been reading me over a long period of time, you may notice this seems to contradict previous positions I've defended regarding Islam as a "religion". I argued rather forcefully (e.g., in my essay Islam as a religion) against those who try to "de-religionize" Islam by fiat ("stop calling Islam a 'religion'," they say, "that's why people keep giving it a free pass!"). However, I have recently undergone that strange experience that sort of feels like you've swallowed some warm lumpy buttermilk: it's called changing your mind. My position now about this is not necessarily diametrically opposed to my previous position. It's more that while I recognize the ostensible religiousity of Islam, I now tend to contextualize it in a larger, more important framework of a militarized supremacist-expansionist-totalitarianism expressed in the form, but not the substance, of a religious semiotics.
(Just a few months ago, I think I was beginning to reorient my thinking on this, as I worked it out in my essay Understanding Islam anthropologically.)
This doesn't mean one can't find Muslims who seem calm and relatively
intelligent even as they are, beneath that moderate exterior, deep into their fanaticism -- e.g., bin
Laden; or, perhaps, Obama. It only means that one shouldn't confuse the surface with the interior.
7 comments:
Hesperado:
1389 Blog linked to an article that I think you would really enjoy reading.
http://1389blog.com/2012/11/01/a-searing-albeit-unintentional-indictment-of-the-arabists-at-the-us-state-department/
Horan picks up another strand: Islam was revealed in seventh-century Arabia, a world of political anarchy and social degeneracy. "Mohammed—unlike Jesus, whose mission could assume an ongoing classical order—had to propagate not just a religious message but a social and political one. So Mohammed, in effect, created a supertribe, based not on consanguinity but on a common belief. This social invention proved more practical than Mohammed's political one: his political system broke down with the assassination of the fourth caliph. From then on Arab regimes lacked legitimacy. They had only expediency to fall back on." Alienated from politics and gravitating for linguistic reasons toward the ideal and the abstract, the intellectual energies of the supertribesmen began focusing on religion and on shari'a law, "a universe," Horan says, "of splitting hairs and infinite refinements." Politics was ignored, so there are "no legitimizing precedents for political life as it is lived in contemporary nation-states." Socially, Mohammed's message "was progressive in the Middle Ages but not now." So the existence of a supertribe, stirred by the most idealizing and artistic of languages and employing a medieval social code, yet operating in a complete political vacuum—a real Darwinian universe of survival of the fittest—"makes the Middle East a dangerous place not only for Christians and Jews but for all nondominating minorities, even Muslim ones like Kurds and Palestinians."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1992/08/tales-from-the-bazaar/305012/?single_page=true
Oh yeah, it was me who recommended the article.
Egghead
One needs to think whether a doctrine can have a "sacred status" attached to it, hence designating it as a religion, when in practice it doesn't differentiate at all from likeminded doctrines as Nazism, Communism, Fascism, Maoism and a whole array of other totalitarian -isms.
When the "moral imperative" only exists in the mind of the adherents and enables them to justify and mobilise horrible forces with which they obliterate those people they consider degenerates (as Islam does), than in reality there IS nothing of sacred or moral value to be found in it.
Indeed, I have resolved the question a long time ago: Islam is a manual of attrition war, a totalitarian doctrine.
Thanks for your comments Egghead, and thanks for that link. I'm not sure if Horan may be unduly complicating the issue with a possible lack of knowledge of Voegelin's framework concerning the same problem (articulated at great length in his book The Ecumenic Age though, regrettably, giving rather short shrift to Islam). But I will check it out.
"My position is that Westerners need to remove religious status from Islam and persecute the practice of Islam as sedition against existing governments."
I don't think we have to so much remove its religious status as simply see that while it seems to fit taxonomically under the species religion, it doesn't really. What I'm trying to get at in my essay I think is not so much that Islam is "not" a religion, or that it's somehow less than a religion (by being "just" a political or tribal entity) -- but that it is actually more than a religion.
"However, I believe that Islam is a Satanic religion in which Muslims worship evil itself."
I don't see this as excluding other views of Islam. Which just gave me an idea: Someone should write a study called "Satanic" as a political science subcategory. Maybe I'll at least write an outline for it.
Anathematic Action,
Well, regardless of whether Islam is actually sacred, Muslims believe it is attuned to the sacred, protecting the sacred, and advancing the sacred in a context of a wicked blind and inimical world which needs to be subjugated by force because it's profane.
As I suggested in a few previous essays, Islam is not barbaric or evil in a simplex way, where its adherents celebrate evil like Satanists: Islam inculcates an Orwellian inversion whereby its followers believe they are following and protecting God's commands when they are precisely doing the reverse. As I wrote in one of those essays:
...through Islam, Man is seduced not so much to hate God directly, as to -- through the wickedly ingenious trick ot being fooled into thinking he is worshipping the true God -- hate himself, hate Creation, and hate all other humans who do not join this cult of supreme self-hatred.
Satan and Islam: another reverberation
That is a very astute observation, Hesperado, very eloquently put. I couldn't have put it any better than that.
Thanks, Anathematic Action.
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