[Islam] Due to request, a "reprint"
 

In another thread, Respenus has asked me for the complete essay from which I quoted.

This is the reason why I post this again in full. There is no further agenda of mine to start mass-posting on Islam again.

Long time members may remember this essay, from 2005 or so.

Respenus, understand that this was just the first half of a planned two-part series on islamic scirpture and history, but the second part never was written, instead i had another essay on this thing called "Dialogue with Islam". This part here gives a brief summary of Muhammad'S biography, the way the Quran formed up, and the importance of the Hadith.

What does not get metioned here, but also is important, is the canon of scriptures called the Sira (also called the prophet's biography). I also do not put the term "Sunna" into relation to Sira and hadith, but ignore it completely, intentionally. Finally there is the tradition of Sharia, which is less to be understood as a closed scripture in itself, but is a network of interlinks between different parts of the other scriptures, Sira, Hadith, Sunna, and of colurse the Quran.

To understand this, an illustration. In the West we usually talk of Sharia in the meaning of a set or punishable deeds, and the according penalties. This is wrong. In fact Sharia knows five classes of desirable deeds and intentions/thoughts, deeds and thoughts that are to be avoided and are not recommended, and deeds that are forbidden and must be punished. Sharia describes the latter, the punishable deeds, but it does not list the penalties. For finding the penalty, it refers to the Quran again! It is like this with the other things, too, a constant back and forth-linking between the various departments of scripture. You now may understand why it is impossible to think of Islam without sharia, or that Sharia is open to negotiation with western values. In fact is is part of the cement that keeps the ingredients of islam together. Change or remove it, and the building collapses. Though legal schools, of which there are only six dominant, influential ones, may agree or disagree at times in interpreting Sharia, it is important to understand that there are no different traditions of sharia, like there are no different Qurans, only different lineages of juristic scholars. They all deal with one and the same Quran and one and the same Sharia.

Okay, let's go.

THE EMERGING OF ISLAM; THE FORMING OF THE QURAN; AND THE HADITH (7th – LATE 9th CENTURY)
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A) Foundation

After the splitting of Rome and the founding of Konstantinopel in 330, the Eastroman church, Byzanz, saw a period of several centuries in which a growing flood of laws, rules and reglementations had almost stunned and freezed any freedom of action in it’s inner and outer policy. There were differences between the Westroman and Eastroman half of the former empire, both in interpretation and implementation of christian religion and in ways to govern the state; the West concentrated on Europe and it’s christianization, whereas the East saw itself more and more embraced in ruinous conflicts with the Persian Sassanides, which were fought out in the territories in today’s middle East, reaching from Egypt up to Irak.

Tribes and factions on the Arab peninsula were taking benefit of this conflict, trading with and supporting (for money, and privileges) both parties at the same time, and developing inner-Arab trade as a side effect for which the city of Mekka became an important hotspot and center of organization and administration. Arab traders as well as Arab beduins during the late 6th century made it to wealth and power, while the Persians and Eastromans were bleeding physically and economically and were loosing more and more of their remaining energies. The growing wealth came at a price, traditional tribal structures and social habits saw erosion, and a splitting between the rich controllers of trade (Quraysh, also in control of the holy sites and the Kaaba of the Abrahamic cult in Mekka) and the poor (especially the beduins without own land) took place, that led to the forming of a strong feudal „caste“ which had strong sympathies for and economical ties with the two rivalling major powers, Persia and Byzanz.

In the 6th and early 7th century, and earlier, Arabia was a place were not only the Abrahamic Kaaba cult was present, but various other religious beliefs also were to be found, there was far more religious diversity than modern Islam is ready to admit today when describing the time before the arrival of the prophet, Islam today tries to give an impression that there was more tribal and ethnical and cultural cohesion and unity in the awaiting of the arrival of the prophet, but I think historical science was able to show that it knows it better. „Arabien war ein Tummelplatz der Kulte und Kulturen“, a German orientalist once said in a TV interview, and many colleagues have argued in the same direction in their own books. The reason maybe was that the Arab peninsula was the stage for intense traffic and trade by caravans that reached out to the south of the peninsula and in the north and east as far as to today’s Iran, and beyond, bringing with them not only goods and gold, but also stories about other people and their rites and habits und cultures and religions. Christians (around Mekka, northern Arabia), Jews (Medina, Jemen) , Iranian Manichaers (southern Arabia) were the most important foreign cultural groups by numbers, the Christians maybe even beeing in contact with the Kaaba cult itself, but all these traditions were of foreign, non-Arab origin and thus unable to fill the social vacuum that was left by the forming of the feudal Arab elites that let down traditional tribal communities and the social protection these structures formely had offered to the old and the weak. Arabs themselves already had started to move away from the old nature cults, and saw the presence of these foreign religions as a motivation to seek out new metaphysical constructions themselves that were focussing on the responsebility of the individual that would have to come up with a bilance of it’s good and it’s bad deeds at the end of time and would be rewareded or penalized according to this bilance. The followers of this new belief were called hunafa. They claimed to be offsprings of Abraham, who also should have been the erector of the Kaaba in Mekka. This climate of change that already was positive for the hanufa got further promoted by the presence of especially Christian and Jewish ideas which shared the accentuation of individual responsebility. But today’s Islam, trying to focus all history on itself exclusively, has labelled this era as the age of lacking insight or era of ignorrance (djahiliya) and often rightout rejects the historical realities that existed at that time, ignorring the cultural diversity that once existed in Arabia – often (not always) peacefully, for a long time.

But to put a long story short: due to the widening gap between the rich and the poor there was social tension in the air, and the time for a social revolution was ripe.

Social revolution came in the person of Muhammad, born around 571, whose parents died when he was young. Beeing an orphan, commentators describe him to have shown several psychological anomalies (maybe coming from the early death of his parents), a general hypersensitivity of his mind and physical senses, and often it is said that he was epileptic, too. But however, his intellectual and organisational talent soon became evident when he started to help out in the business of his uncle, whose family belonged to the Hashim, a sideline of the trade-controlling Quraysh, which were the elite caste controlling the trade via caravans from and to Mekka, and the complete financial system in the Western provinces of the Arabian peninsula. During his travellings and business negotiations he trained his talents in organisation, perceiving opportunities, and his obviously outstanding intellect. When he was in his mid-20s, he married a woman that with over 40 years was far older than he was, Khadidja, she was a rich business women that already had lost two husbands. Originally it was planned as an instrumental marriage to increase his monetarian basis and her profit incomes by using Muhammads intellectual and organizational and negotiating talents. Both partners later learned that there may have been more in their relation than just material gains, and so they had six children, of which only the four daughters survived childhood.

No longer depending on his original tribe and a low income for himself, but beeing secured in wealthy living conditions, Muhammad now had the freedom and time to concentrate on questions that had found his interest since longer time now, additionally motivated by the experiences of his many travellings. Beeing of high sensual sensibility and intellectuality, he realized the growing dysbalance between the growing wealth of the Quraysh and the increasing social insecurity of the poor that formerly were embedded in their functioning tribal structures, and he became aware of the growing moral and ethical vacuum that came in the wake of the material success. These personal qualities together earned him the reputation of beeing a visionary seer (kahin). He did not stop here, his business travellings brought him into contact with the ideas of the Christians, Jews and Hanufas. Especially the Christians sects, victims of deportation or expulsion by the official Byzantinian church, were struggling hard to widen their influence in the Arabian diaspora. But all the new religions Muhammad came into contact with, described the same single, allmighty, true God that would hold court over each human beeing at the end of his days and would judge him according to his individual bilance of life. That all these religions and their regions of origin had been able to create civilizations that were far superior to that of the Arabs of that time, may have had an additional effect on Muhammad that drove him into an intense examination of these religions and cultures. For one and a half decade he spend much time on sharpening his view for the social problems within Arab society, and educated himself in the teachings of the Christians and Jews.

The year 610 marks the time when Muhammad is said to have received teachings and educations by an idea of a higher divine entity that he named „Allah“, and that from now on should have send him regularly visual visions and verbal inspirations („Eingebungen“), that are named ayat (that means: signs of miracles, Wunderzeichen). He used these to start doing threatening, powerful preachings, in which he made it more and more clear, that this entity named Allah was speaking through him and that Muhammad himself for that simple reason rightfully claimed the status of beeing God’s prophet, a „call to duty“ that was delivered to him by the archangel Gabriel in an appearance that almost should have crushed him to the floor and pressed all breath out of his body (sign for his epilleptical disease?) so that he almost feared that he must die and lost allmost all control over his mind, body and senses.

The divine inspirations did not stop, a cousin of Muhammad, who was of Christian belief, thought of them as “namus“ in the understanding of the Jewish law and Thora. With time passing by, the growing number of Muhammad’s preachings and inspirations started to circulate under the term „qur‘an“, an Arab word that means „recitation“, while there is a link to an old Arameic word as well, „quiryan“, which means „liturgy“. With growing intensity Muhammad was focussing in his preachings on the social dysbalance in society, on the need to turn and put all trust and faith in the source of his inspiration, Allah, and on the responsebility each individual has for his life when there will be his judgement day at the end of his existence. That he also targeted the criminally and/or illegimately accumulated power and wealth of the rich class both earned him the sympathy of more and more people, and reminds me of the constellation 14 centuries later:

In the beginning of his activity as a preacher and prophet, Muhammad was willing to make compromises concerning the content of his sermons, to avoid too much friction with his social and religious environment in the form of the old traditional gods of tribal structures in his place, of which there were namely three in the main (and a large number of minor ones). That gave him the peace and freedom to act that was needed as long as his position was still weak and uncertain. But beeing told by Allah, that these false gods were only creations of Satan, he gave up to display tolerance towards them, what exposed his position somewhat. In a non-Muslim understanding: he showed strong signs of weakening tolerance for ideas opposing his own’s, and acted with mounting intolerance against them to overcome their resistance. This, in combination with his critizism of established power structures of the Quraysh, finally led him to have raised the attention of the feudal elite - that became aware that he started to become a threatening problem for their privileges. His verbal attacks on their trading monopoles and privileges showed the moral and spiritual deficits of the new social order they had established. Of course they reacted. Muhammad’s few followers became subject to expulsion, torture, murder and prosecution. The unique power monopole and influence on trade the Quraysh had, allowed them to even put pressure on traditional tribal social structures that were trying to protect their members to some degree. The conflict became a serious issue. Muhammad, who had spend so much of his life in Mekka, of course knew the power constellations, and that the reserves for his followers to hold out were thin. Long before the conflict escalated, he had started to form contacts with Medina and Abbyssinia, to learn if it was possible to evade into these regions, if Mekka should happen to become too dangerous to stay. Short before the Quraysh were able to extinguish his rebellious teachings completely by killing him and all of his followers, he left Mekka with a small group and escaped to Medina. This escape in 622, named hidjra, is usually agreed on to mark the beginning of an independent Islamic identity. Usually the move to Medina is interpreted by modern Islam not as a sign of weakness, but pragmatism that is a key charcteristic in Muhammad’s life and personality. They evaded not because of fear, but to ensure they can keep trying on. Having left the reprisals of the Quraysh behind, the small community in Medina now had the freedom to bolster their status, to raise their own profile, to strengthen their community, to win new followers. Literature knows them as muhadjirun (exiles, emmigrants), where as their helping sympathizers in Medina are known as ansar. The climate in Medina was helpful for Muhammad, the local religious cults had been exhausted by decades of rivalry and fight to become the dominant dogma, and so had not only little strength left to resists the convincing power of Muhammad’s new revolutionary ideas, but even showed to be all too willing to follow him under his own rulership and give up their own cults.

The attractiveness of Muhammad’s teachings, heavily influenced by the monotheistic ideas of Christians and Jews, need to be explained, else the question remains, why he was so successful and where Islam was getting it’s convincing and high „cultural penetration power“ from. Until Muhammad, Arab society was ruled by cults based around nature phenomenons and tribal gods that acted as guardians for the tribe and thus saw themselves in conflicts with other gods as often as tribes waged wars against each other (which was no rare event at that time). People‘s mind did not realize that it was their own acting – the world of man, not the world of gods - that was leading to the twistings and conflicts they experienced in their history, and that their gods were just projections of their own states of mind and of human flaws, drives and motives. So people focussed on their gods as creators of war, suffering and conflict, which gave them the impression that life was ruled by the will of gods, whose intentions often remained a mystery and thus, life was an event ruled by random chance and man’s inability to influence it. There was the only answer to subjugate to the tribe’s god, assuming that he hopefully would be stronger than that of the others, and to trust in the belief that beeing a follower of his cult saves one from harm that was projected into man’s world from conflicts taking place on the level of the gods.

But now came Muhammad: and his idea of man beeing the deciding factor himself that creates each individual‘s fate (all life, punishment or reward) by his own responsebility - that was revolutionary. Because it freed people from the canon of many gods and their conflicts that led to human suffering, and brought order and foresight to a world that before was experienced as a „labyrinth“ of random chances, in which everything was unsecure and no anticipation of a secure future seemed to be possible. The subjugation to Allah caused law and order, structure and insight to enter man’S world: a fair bilance between one own’s good and bad acts and doings, and one’s resulting fate after death, and these deed‘s consequences (in form of Allah’s judgement) decided the design of desirable ways of behavior to avoid bad consequences and to help good consequences. If man was living a life that was pleasing to Allah, if he was obedient in other words, he now had all reason to trust in his mercy and getting his reward, giving him peace of mind and a sense of certainty and security that before was unthinkable, because what Allah expected from him was preached by Muhammad: an ever-growing set of more or less strict rules, that left little space for misinterpretation and misstepping, and a codex of behavior that assisted man in finding his way to Allah’s mercy and let him in no more existential fear and doubt. That sounds like a fail-safe method for guaranteed ticket to paradise. Man had all reason to feel arrived in life now, to be fulfilled by having a duty in life for which he will be rewarded, to be held by the hand of someone who was bigger than it all. „Success“ at the end of his life – in the understanding of avoiding an empty, dark void after death, or a hellish penalty - was now within man’s own reach and responsibility, it was no longer a lottery that was manipulated by selfish, fighting gods, or the arbitrariness of nature’s phenomenons. The forming and regulating authority of Allah, the destroyer and the mercyful („Vernichter und Erbarmer“), should end the increasing disorder of mislead behavior of man, the ratio of monotheism replacing man‘s former fatalism in the face of god-made random rule in life, so that man could start to act with a sense of responsebility for himself, and awareness of Allah’s final judgement as a motivation for that. Divine arbitrariness was replaced with human ratio. And that was a revolutionary idea in the Arab world of that time indeed.

Nevertheless, although having been influenced by Jewish ideas, his knowledge of their religion was far from beeing complete, so his contacts to the Jewish tribes, that had a very strong presence in and around Medina, necessarily ended in the exposure of his theological deficits. That the Jewish theologists, aware of their superior theological agility, also met him with condescension and hurting irony, necessarily must have offended a strong and dominant personality like that of Muhammad. Realizing that the Jewish disrespect threatend his postion in Medina, he took drastical consequences. In 624 he attacked and drove away two Jewish tribes, and three years later he took on the last remaining one, the Quaryza, who were sort of allies of the Quarysh in Mekka; he ordered a two days-lasting massacre, in which up to 800 male tribe members got executed in his very own presence, while all girls and females were traded into slavery or ended in the harems of his followers, or his own.

For the population sizes of that time the size of the massacre was immense. The years 624 to 627 saw Muhammad’s radical extinction of Jewish opposition and any opposition in general. Several short wars and predatory raids against all other tribes settling in his neighbourhod, to strenghten his economical power, were accompanied by the systematical hunt on artists, writers and poets, intellectuals, who did not fully support his rulership and that were killed by a growing dedicated subgroup of murderers amongst his followers. The acting-option to use the later so-called fatwa to call for the killing of an unwanted critics has seen it’s tradition beeing founded in these years and still is a valid option until today. As a matter of historical fact, murder always has been a legitimate tool of securing Islamic power throughout all centuries of it’s existence. Murder was also acceptable in the powerpolitics of Western civilization, but here it never was raised into the official status of beeing religiously acceptable, where a fatwa not only means that it is acceptable according to religious rules, but that it even is allowed to actively order it.

This policy of displaying a tyrannic ammount of power, and using it without scruples or mercy, did it’s part to intimidate his enemies and to silence those who were in doubt. In Mekka people started to look in deep sorrow towards Medina. There were no doubts left about who was in control of rulership. The ursurping of power was complete. The political and economical success and the many raids Muhammad conducted, raised the wealth of his community and raised the convincing power of his example (that’s one reason why it is called the Medina modelm the other reason beeing that the community of Medina for later generations of Muslims served as a model that taught them how to orgnaize their communal life, identity and self-understanding). In 628 he surprised his old enemies in Mekka by using the financial prey from his raids to form and lead an impressively big army to Mekka „for pilgrimage“, by that he left the city no other choice than to accept a dictating of conditions during so-called „negotiations“, that led to a peace treaty that should last for ten years – so said the treaty. But in fact just two years later (in which he conducted a series of more raids throughout the region to fill his community’s treasure chest), in 630, he again attacked Mekka with an even bigger army and broke the peace treaty, and enforced the handover of the city. Bribery, generous gifts and distribution of his prey from former raids were used to calm the hostile sentiments in the city, which led to some anger amongst his followers from Medina. Muhammad now was in control of the Kaaba and changed the cult around it so that it was focussed on Abraham and reflected the monotheistic belief in Allah. New followers joined the community by the thousands. It just took two more years to secure Muhammads conquest of the complete Arabian pensinsula, this part of history ended with the last independent tribe surrendering to the new authority of Muhammad’s rite. Administratively Arabia now was controlled by close and trustworthy followers of Muhammad, who were responsible both for preaching and strengthening faith, and to control the regular payments of taxes: state and religion essentially were united in the same hands.

Two years later, in 632, Muhammad died in Medina.

Just two decades had been enough for the envoy of Allah, to lay the basis for the coming book of Islam in a developement process that took place on two levels, a spiritual and a political one; and at the same time imprinting the thinking and behavioral patterns onto the Umma (the community of believers) that would be of dominating and deciding importance for all it’s future developement until today.

This included especially

- the unconditional subjugation under the law of Allah,
- the unconditional loyalty to the community of the Umma,
- the unconditional devotion of all one’s personal life to the practicing of the rites,
- the rigorous enforcing of Islamic interests including all needed levels of force and violance,
- and the collecting of the biggest possible ammount of possessions and monetarian means for supporting the Islamic authorities and the weak and poor ones amongst the believers.

With the takeover of Mekka, Muhammad ended the most important phase of Islamic developement during his lifetime. He had molten his new religion with the old sacral habits and rites, and embedded it in the new idea of a super-tribal Arab identity, that accentuated the fellowship and unity of all Arabs. By ingenious perception he recognized the religious and political needs of his time, and displayed a reliable instinct for the right deeds at the right time, and for the opportunistic use of possebilities that were existant in a given situation. Step by step this enabled him to implement means, that made use of his inspiring personal charisma to transform the former spiritual vaccum left by the corrupt elites into new spiritual-political dynamics. Looking back at it from the modern present, the life of Muhammad shows an unusual, integral, mystical-rational ripening, that enabled him to acchieve a synthesis of the social and religious situation of society in his time. Spiritual accentuated inspirations from his time in Mekka, and preachings aiming at practical every-day-life in Medina already reflected the double function of raising Islam as a concept of both religious and political nature. (...) Even in this early forming phase of the Islamic principle of subjugation („Unterwerfungsprinzip“), the unbreakable synthesis of faith and rulership, with political and fiscal consequences, already was obvious. The tribes of Arabia surrendered, because – impressed by Muhammad’s successes – they wanted to participate in the emerging immense political power of Islam. The taxes they had to pay were minor in their eyes, compared to reprisals that were avoided by that, and the chances to be part of a new and superior order, which seemed to have an obvious, natural claim for rulership – but which allowed tribal chiefs a regional, mostly untouched freedom of action

Only 80 years later Islam would have made it from the Arabian peninsula to the street of Gibraltar (711: Islamic armies cross the street and defeat Roderich), and conquer the better part of Spain against Christian resistance in the years following – not bad for the limited speed and range of transportation of that time. It illustrates what I call the high „penetration power“ of Islamic ideology.

The number of teachings that circulated under the summary of the qu’ran had grown constantly during Muhammad’s life, because what originally was meant as general guidance on a principle level, soon exploded into an inflationary number of more and more detailed and explicit advises and/or commandments for increasingly smaller and more profane details of every-day-life. The monumental rigidness and inflexibility of Islam, that can hardly be ignored, finds it’s root in this. A growing regulation of more and more acts and issues of people and regular life replaced the freedom, that the idea of monotheism originally had given to the human mind (in the form of beeing free to consider the consequences of one’s deeds in the light of one’s own life-bilance, and then make a choice). It all became a more and more totalitarian man-made regulation, and uniformity.

Inspirations by Allah and the status of Muhammad’s preachings as actual revelations of Allah, helped Muhammad to secure the privileges that he wished for himself and for those he wanted to reward, because privileges he demanded (for example concerning women) were unavoidable for critizism - because such demands came in the form of divine inspirations indeed. „The difference between the revelation of God’s will and man’s manipulation of material reality, between objective missionary spirit (of Muhammad) and it’s subjective relation to every-day life, began to dissappear“, T. Nagel writes short, but correct. Muhammad’s secretary Abdallah Ibn Sa’ad lost his trust in Muhammad, when one day he realised, that text blocks that Abdallah himself added in order to fill gaps in the transcriptions of Muhammad‘s revelations, were given as the original divine inspirations by Muhammad at the next opportunity, as if they had not been added by Abdallah, but given by Allah. Abdallah turned his back on Islam, and fled before he could be killed. Islam’s dogma, that the revelations of Muhammad, in the form of the Quran, are untouchable and are the will of Allah (his word, that never was created, because it always was there), was never questioned, never examined, is unbroken until today. The expansive identity of Islam, that had been created by the way Muhammad was pushing the propagation of Islam, had already fixed into stone Islam’s determination to overcome everything that was not Islamic even in these early years.

We better learn that this expansive identity remained unchanged and still is as valid as ever today. The consequences of this cannot be overestimated. Expansion and the overcoming of everything that is non-Islam, is part of the inner essence, nature and self-definition of Islam. Like Muhammad evaded from Mekka to Medina and understood this act pragmatically as no retreat by weakness, but forming the occasion to keep carrying on, phases of a standstill in expansion of Islam must be understood as beeing enforced by current conditions that hinder it - and thus must be understood as phases of a waiting to carry on with the expansion of Islam when the conditions are more helpful to allow that. There is no sense of giving-up, that‘s why attempts of taming and appeasement towards Islam do not work well. To think here in terms of tolerance causing a halt (on a historical level) is absurd.

B) The Quran
As far as the content and verbal style is concerned, generally a split is perceived in the Quran, separating the scriptures of Muhammad’s time in Mekka (beeing more metaphysical in content and style, focussing on ethical and spiritual questions) from those scriptures that are basing on his preachings in Medina, that shows more pragmatical relation to situations and problems of practical life, and are said to be of less prosaic language. It is undisputed amongst Quran-researchers, that the better part of the book without doubt is basing on Muhammad at least actively helping to shape it’s content. The academical voices that defended an opinion that without doubt ALL it’s content is „Muhammad pure“ nevertheless are said to have become rare since a longer while now.

The Quran is regarded as Allah’s revelation to mankind and thus is the basis of Muslim belief. It’s creation must not be explained, because Allah always have been existent and so the Quaran as his word and will cannot have been created by man – as an idea it has always been there. The many doubts that are existent about the tradition that influenced and conserved it’s form and made it to what it is today, are therefor ignored and considered to be irrelevant. Pragmatical from a Muslim point of view, but hardly acceptable for a less metaphysical mindset.

During Muhammad’S lifetime his prophecies had been conserved by verbal delivery and fixing in writing, using palm-leafs, leather, and whatever material was used for that purpose. The effort to do so was unsystematical and unorganized, so that the tradition was scattered around somewhat. Parts of these preachings additionally got lost, when close followers of Muhammad, who had learned to memorize „their“ part of the always increasing collection of preachings, had been killed in one of the many battles they went through. The first Kalif after Muhammad’s death, Abu Bakr (who also was Muhammad’s father-in-law), therefor ordered Muhammad‘s last secretary to collect all written and verbal material that was circulating, to bring it into an order and to fix it in a final writing. The result was a first version of the Quaran about which we know almost nothing today. After Abu Bakr’s death two years after that of Muhammad, his successor, the second Kalif, Umar, is said to have given this version to his daugther Hafsa, Muhammad’s fourth wife, because she should have had such a splendid memory that she seemed to be ideally fitted to become the guardian of a Quaran that now was hoped to see no more changes added to it by circulating different fragments and contents, whose originality was uncertain. However, orientalists raise serious doubts that it could have been like this. It seems to be untrustworthy that the most important document of Islam‘s faith should have been given into the hands of a woman, that – although beeing Muhammad’s wife - was of relatively minor importance in history.

Not that this question is of much importance, because this version of the Quran found no general acceptance, and few years later again complaints were raised, that in the provinces still a growing diversity of different versions of the Quaran were circulating, most or all of them adding new things or reinterpreting it towards a higher level of political relevance, or reinterpreting it in other ways that did not seem to be acceptable, or did not have any authenticity. So the new, third Kalif, Uthman, again ordered Muhammad’s old secretary to collect and form a new version of the Quaran, which he did and compared it with the first version that still was in possession of Hafsa. He also reworked and translated all material into the dominat Arab dialect, that of Mekka, because the fragments that had been scattered around were written or memorized in various different languages. Of this new version he created, only five numbers were written down and were given to the five centers of Islamic knowledge in Mekka, Medina, Damascus, Basra and Kufa.

Scientific research asks some very serious questions about this course of the whole story. It is assumed that there was no single authority, no agreed institution of competence for the Quran existent. That there were two main versions created may have been a sign that there may have been at least two rivalling traditions of interpretation. Criterias for what was accepted for both of these main versions, and what not, are unknown, also who rasied these criterias, if this should mean there were no central figure of evaluationg it all, then this may be interpreted as arbitrariness deciding the second form of the Quran, or choices made that were born out of political opportunism. And why was the first version without influence, why was the number of different versions beside that first collection of writings constantly increasing? All this is in contradiction to Islam’s understanding, that the Quaran was from the very beginning of Islam’s history what it always had been in later times. It cannot have been like that. Islam ignores these questions, and says that all this is unimportant. Despite all the obvious changes it must have gone thorugh, it should have remained unchanged since the beginning. A miracle? But, as P. Raddatz points towards an important question that kept Quran reseach before second world war very busy, how was it possible that during 25 years an ever increasing number of many followers memorized all verbal inspirations and preachings of Muhammad (and that was quite an impressive lot of material!!) , spreading them around all over their living places, giving them to others, so that thousands of passages went through thousands of ears and mouths – and nevertheless all of it shouldn’t have changed the smallest bit, and should have seen no faults and no adulterations (Verfälschungen) of even a minor kind? It is difficult enough to learn the whole Quran from fixed writing only, to learn it without faults by hear-say only seems to be beyond ability of man.

As if this not already raised doubts in the complete originality of today’s Quaran, an even greater problem existed – the changes in written language during the two- or threehundred years after Muhammad’s death. Not before the 10th century the introduction of diacritic punctuation („diakritische Punktierung“) to Arab writing was completed, which changed vocalisation and meaning of words of Arab dialects significantly. I must blindly follow the linguists here, since I do not have any knowledge of that on my own, but they say that the translation of the second Quran version into the new version of Arabic writing necessarily must have increased the level of misinterpretations or changes of understandings of given words, and very drastically so. The new punctuation caused the changes of letters into different ones, and due to the inner nature of Arab language this meant, that words and complete sentences could transform into complete new meanings and understandings. This is the main reason, probably, why the number of different versions of the Quaran, with sometimes very dramatic changes in meaning and content of complete passages, grew constantly in the two hundred years after Muhammad’s death. A caste of professional Quran-readers had been formed by this, and they had high political influence, since due to the unity of religion and politics in Islam their individual interpretations of the Quran really made a difference in local policies. - Even today preachers at the traditional Friday prayers are having high political influence and a significant power to mobilize their community. - They also implemented up to seven differing major traditions of interpretation, that took quite some time to get reduced to a smaller number of traditions again. Like especially radical preachers today, they also may have had personal ambitions, coming from the power that they had to influence the crowds. The impression Islam is giving, that it only were different styles of verbal recitation, has been proven wrong by science, it has not been that simple and harmless and this claim holds no ground. It was not only different styles in presentation, but different conclusions by different styles of interpretation of the Quran, and different versions of Quaran itself. Today’s diversity in possible Quran interpretation, that allows both fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists to justify their deeds by the Quran and find coverage from it, may have found it’s reason in this chapter of history.

Caliph Uthman obviously made a wise decision to concentrate the interpretation of Quaran on the five centers of knowledge that were delivered the only five existing issues of the second official collection of the Quaran scriptures. He made a cut and accepted that an uncertain ammount of falsified, wrong material, that was lacking any authenticity, found entrance into the official Quaran. Anything was better than to allow a further spreading of different traditions to interpret the Quaran that only could have led to an increasing diversity in faith – exactly what Islam ideology does NOT want. The Quran-readers that made their living by interpreting the Quaran, and twisted it to the liking of the political needs of those who ordered and payed for their services, or to their own ambitions, lost their jobs and political influence. The centralization of interpreting the Quaran ended the regional political agitation and strengthened centralized, superregional powerstructures.

Due to lacking knowledge of myself I must blindly point out that linguists are able to illustrate how the origin of the word qur’an links parts of the Mekkanesian (?) scriptures of the Quran to the traditon of Christian liturgy, and Christian tradition and languages. This is critical, because Muslims think of the Quran to have been send down to man in Arab language – the Arab language that is known today. But that form of language did not exist before twohundred years after Muhammad’s death. So how could his preachings have been conserved and delivered, if not by accepting that the first and original version of the Quran had not been send down to man and fixed in punctuated Arabic, but more likely in a mixture of the dialect of the Quraysh and Arameic language, or Syrian dialects? Some commentators say that the Quran originally may have been a liturgic reading for Christian services, and that up to one quarter of the Quran’s content until today raises verbal problems with Islamic interpretations of passages that seem to point more towards Christian tradition and the Old and New Testament than towards the usual Muslim interpretation of this stuff. They also argue that the Quran may not have been a document of it’s own value and religious right, but may have been something like a comment to the writings of the Christians, focussing on them as the main word. These authors argue that the Quran probably has no original identity of it’s own, but was more an added comment on the basis of a foreign religious scripture, which most probably may have been the Bible.

Islam’s claim that the original language of the Quaran has been Arabic is highly questionable from an academical point of view, and it’s belief of the Quran’s delivery in that language (despite the well-documented changes the Arab language went through between the 7th and 10th century) as a miracle does not add anything valuable to discussion. The Quaran’s claimed originality is highly speculative, seen that way.

Although Uthman had made sure that the Quran was no longer to be mixed and watered by contacts with foreign teachings, there was still the chance that it would be „misinterpreted“ by the simple fact, that the Arab conquerers, when they started to leave the Arab peninsula and spread Allahs word outside, would somewhat mix and water it when coming in contact with the traditions in Egypt and Syria, here factions were living that were hostile to Byzanz and for that reason tend to sympathise with the Arabs - who could not avoid to be influenced by these foreign religions in return, because their leaders even demanded them to treat friendly those that were hostile towards Byzanz – which now was the Muslim Arabs’ enemy. Although it took until late into the 8th century until the Quaran as we know it today had strengthend in structure and content, one thing was undisputed and beyond doubt for every Muslim from the beginning: that it was the word of Allah, without fault, without doubt, without wrong, without any reason to ask, examine or critisize it, always existent, never changing. This „hard belief“, immune to changes, even more consolidating itself in the more than 1300 years to come, made it impossible for Muslim religion to establish a tradition of self-critical examination of it’s own basis of beliefs, as we have seen it in the developement of Christian tradition, that led to the splitting into different Christians churches and sects, eventually, but nevertheless helped to gain a more modern understanding of Christianity‘s own faith, that considered the many changes the mental evolution of western man during the diffrent phases of Western cultural history went through. The raised levels of knowledge and insight changed Christian religion, growing education lowered the need for religously motivated regulation, the implementation of legal laws replaced the enforcment of religious commandments. But Muslim theology did stop to develope very early in Islam’s history in an understanding of critically examining itself (if the heretic’s writings are not counted as part of the official theology), and seen that way one could even say that it does not exist in a western understanding. There also is only a very limited, often non-existent interest in interreligious and intercultural exchange, whereas the West’s Christianity has developed a theological and academical highly differentiated science of comparing cultures and religions, as well as analysing it’S own history of developement, and origins of scriptures. Paradoxically this lacking ability to adopt to changes, that makes it so tough for Islamic communities in Arab countries to arrive in the modern era, is the basis for Muslim argumentation that Islam, unchanged since long, is superior to any other idea: it did not change because it did not need to do so: as the word of Allah, the basis of it’s faith – the Quran - was perfect from the beginning and thus any correctional change could only have meant: weakness, and falsification of the truth. One needs to reflect this if one wants to understand why the simple export of Western ideas to Islamic countries usually do not trigger the effects one expected (social and powerpolitical structures being also a factor, but not the deciding one). It’s the religiously founded mentality and it’s influence on cultural climate. I always said that the American way of trying to enforce changes by example-setting, military force and/or materialistic corruption, as well as the European „critical dialogue“ to convince Islamic partners by reason or to simply buy their agreement, was doomed to fail from the very beginning - for exactly these reasons. Muslim history does not work this way. Aid project workers having spend a longer while in the muslim part of the third world can sing a song of the Muslim resistance to changes. There is more than one ex-worker who was driven crazy by this. They often proove to be immune to any changes that would touch and affect the basis of their belief.

Quran is understood by Islam as beeing the renewal of the faith (a faith that needed to be restored time and again by a long chain of prophets (Noah, Moses and Jesus beeing just three of them), which in form of Islam itself had found it’s final and unquestionable and most superb expression to which the scriptures of Christians and Jews are inferior, and sinful aberration only of the only true book there is - Quran. Followers of these false doctrine could only win God’s goodwill by giving up their false beliefs and surrender to the superiority of the Quran. Quarn as an Arab word means „recitation“, a repeating and endless recitation of the word of Allah so that it is not to be forgotten ever again, neither by individuals, nor by mankind. It is structured into 114 Sures, in a sequences of presenting the longest in the first, and the shortest at the end (with the only exception of the opening Sure). The single verses (aya=signs of wonder) change by lingual style and prose, depending on wether a given Sure had it’s origin in Muhammad‘s time in Mekka, or Medina. After the second main version of the Quran had been fixed in writing by order of Calif Uthman, seven or eight traditions of conformal recitation builded up, from which – in combination with the increasing introduction of punctuation to Arab language - finally the version of the Quaran emerged that is known today. While the different recitation styles already were collected by Ibn Mudjahid until the first half of the 8th century, the process of verbally transforming the Quran into it’s present form hardly could have been finished until the late 9th or maybe even 10th century.

The undestanding of the Quran as being beyond doubt and question also is the reason for the enormous uniformity of traditional Islam society, and the streamlining of Muslim’s mental world in congruency with the dictate of the Quran. The diversity of Western arts, and it‘s changes, never had a chance to find an equivalent in Muslim culture. Raddatz calls it the „cocoon“ of uniformity that encapsules the members of Muslim communities, that was created by the understanding of the Quran of beeing beyond doubt, beyond change, beyond any human scale and reason. I often felt like trying to break into a social cocoon myself when beeing there. A very old, rocksolid cocoon, that was. Cocoon is the word that is a very good description of muslim society. Protecting, creating sense of community by encapsuling – but also keeping the foreign, the outside, the new far away, allowing no growth beyond the size of the hull, raising unpassable barriers in both directions. Usually all this is referred to as the Islam’s strong sense for orthodoxy. This is somewhat a contradiction, because when looking at the sense of realism and clever opportunism, the pragmatism and lacking scruples that dominated Muhammad‘s life and enabled him to acchieve his successes, one would think of his system as beeing of high flexibility and dynamics, an ability to quickly adopt and pick up the new, and agility in the widest sense of the word. How far away from that energy is Islam’s orthodox regidity and lacking mental agility today! I find this to be one of the biggest contradiction within Islam’s history, and never found a truly satisfying explanation to it. If it cannot develope and transform into new and bigger forms itself – is this the reason why it projects so much expansive power to it’s outside then, changing and transforming others that are not itself? The expansive phases of Islam’s history always seemed to me as having a quantitative dimension only, no qualitative dimension. Specific characteristics of conquered cultures often did not feed back on the culture of their Arab conquerors, instead often simply molt into the Islamic collective of the Ummh without adding a new quality to it (not always, though, for example with regard to Pesia). I think this is what explains the economicalbackwardness and lacking future investments in especially the Arab countries although they have the potential wealth to do so. Islam grew bigger by it‘s conquests, but it did not grew better that way. Other people and cultures often took over what was good or superior in their defeated enemy’s societies, they learned by that, and chnaged themselves a bit that way. Best example for this Islamic inability to learn from others was the Ottoman empire, that was unable to copy the Western power’s administrative and fiscal systems even when it’s own power-conserving method of projecting brute force in form of a – at times – superior land army had lost it’s lead in battle toughness and other tools to secure the empire’s competitiveness would have been needed. Copying the Western system and procedures of administration maybe would have been the only way to prevent the corruption in the governmental structures and growing decadence of the Ottoman Pashas. The empire was rotting from within that way, and finally died by itself.

Initially Muhammad had been perceived as a seer (kahin), or an obsessed (=mad) man. During this early phase he had to counter this tendency by using a more and more intimidating or impressing language, which made more and more use of predicting the penalty by Allah if one was not living according to his will, and oaths and swearings. The more initial scepticism he faced, the more increase in using legitimation of divine nature (up until his report of having been subject to the presence of archangel Gabriel) became apparent in his preachings. By that he tried to counter critizism of his opponents in the early time and claimed the status of beeing the rightful prophet of Allah indeed. From a seer he turned into a warner.

He was preaching against the rule of materialism, that money and the craving for possession was ruling man’s mind, and that there was too little or no awareness for the presence of Allah, and no thankfulness for having been given the chance to live his life in the presence of his face, that was revealed in nature’s aspects as well as in the fact of life itself. The idea of doom for disbelievers and the day of last judgement, that he leased from the Christians and Jews, started to make impression on his listeners. His critics became more and more silent. The Quraysh became target of increasingly ferocious attacks of his. And while the first basis of Quran emerged from these preachings, his own person as beeing the prophet telling of it increasingly moved into the center of interest and pointed towards his own importance that indirectly he claimed for himself. The neverending projection of final doom for the followers of ungodliness especially impressed those who were the vicitms of social „deconstruction“ in the changes of society that came in the wake of the Quraysh. The poor and the weak were amongst his most convinced believers. Acccordingly, Quran points at charity as an important virtue. It adressed the social conditions, and pleased his early followers.

Belief was strengthened by the increasing number of successful raids after Muhammad moved to Medina, and the failure of Mekka to battle back successfully – Mekka’s failure and the growing wealth by raidng neighbouring tribes (or massmurdering the Jews‘ critical opposition) was seen as a sign that Allah was with them. After he finally won Mekka, he destroyed the old cults, implemented the monotheistic Abrahamic cult in the Kaaba, and by defeat of the Quraysh he also tamed the beduins, who were too weak anymore as if they could have come into his way. In coming centuries Islam showed a tendency to control territories by concentrating on major settlements, not by controlling all the country. The basis for this characteristic of centralized, city-focussing rulership maybe was laid with the fall of Mekka and the following ignoration of the rest- and homeless beduins that moved between the cities – they were no threat anymore. Since they also were hard to control, they were spared from regular tax payings and attempts to implore the rule of the Quran onto them to the same degree this was done with settled tribes and villages.

One of the most basic differences between Christians and Muslims is that in Muslim understanding man is not subject to original sin, but to flawed ways of believing. Consequently it concentrates on lecturing what the right way of believing really is. Since the Quran is seen as the infallible revelation of Allah, it represents Allah’s ultimate will. This excuses the using of every means necessary to enforce the faith in Allah at all costs and by all means necessary. If today’S western Muslims claim Islam to be tolerant towards other religions, than this is a watering of one of the most basic elements of Islam’s self-perception, seeing the revelation of Allah as obilgation to enforce it’s existence everywhere amongst mankind – at all costs. Where in later historical events Islamic rulers showed such tolerance, it more was an issue of pragmatical calculation of efforts needed and expected benefits, than an acceptance of the foreigners false beliefs (that’s how I see it with regard to the Ottomans on the Balkans and in Hungary who concentrated on economically and financially exploiting the country; and the Ummayade’s Califat in Grenada, both beeing the most often quoted examples in defense of Islam‘s tolerance).

My personal opinion may be controversial and may raise angered opposition, but I think this kind of tolerance is a falling-off from one very basic principle of Islam. Muslims that by heart really agree to it maybe are not that much Muslim than they think. I have difficulties to think of tolerant Muslims as „real“ Muslims. If their tolerance is heart-felt, than they are more tolerant than Muslim. The more tolerant, the less Muslim they are, maybe. On the other hand, if a confession to tolerance is only made by opportunism, to avoid hostile reactions, it just displays the pragmatism that Islam also can display, but it is no real tolerance. Tolerance for Non-Islam is a state of mind and heart that Islam, aware of it’s superiority and infallibility – has no real tolerance for – and does not need to have . This does not rule out pragmatism, that for opportunistic reasons hides this attitude eventually - even from the mind of a believer, sometimes
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Allah embedds man in a two-level-developement: the constant recreation of life, and by that the constant sharpening and developement of an attitude that is oriented more and more towards the presence of Allah. In Islamic understanding, evolution is not about diversity, survival of the fittest, or growing systemic complexity, but an ever-growing of Muslim faith and awareness for the omnipresence of Allah. Evolution necessarily creates the Muslim man of the future, this as a natural law of evolution excuses any attempts to help in that, by peace or by force: because man’s turning towards a more Muslim state of mind is considered to be always a natural case, the attractor of evolution: one only helps in what without doubt would take place anyway. Islam’s certainity that the future will be his cannot be brought into doubt, for that reason, and this is one of the explanations for it’svery great patience: it is founded on absolute confidence. This can be strength and weakness at different times. It can make Muslim people act very energetic , or it can make the fall victim to passivity that reaches the level of fatalism. The confidence that all evolution necessarily leads towards an Islam future feeds back on the missionary spirit of Islam and it’s expansive identity.

Since all events are linear and nothing can be made undone, the believing man subjugates to the will of Allah and allows his life beeing ruled by the Quran, because the constant checking of one’s faith and life is one of the most important and dominant demands in Muslim religion. The many rules governing social life and individual’s deeds and acts are meant to help keep them on the right path. Nevertheless, it tends to be a totalitarian social control. Nature itself, as one of the faces of Allah’s omnipresence and revelation to man, cannot be understood by man, it is only the stage on which events unfold that help man - or are a chance - to refocus his mind onto Allah time and again. Trying to understand it is impossible, trying to analysize it by the use of reason and logic is even heretical, and necessarily it cannot gain any knowledge of value, for the only valuable insights can be gained by blind belief in Allah. The truly reasonable mind, in Islamic understanding, is a mind trying to gain knowledge by blindly believing (in Allah’s revelation in the Quran). Islamic reason is belief, for that matter, whereas Western reason is ratio, analysis and logic. Seen that way it is somewhat surprising that Arab medicine and some scientic fields, especially mathematics, were superior to the Western knowledge during the medieval. It is not surprising, however, that it stagnated on a certain level and that the scientific revolutions and technical developements that led to the modern present – did not take place in the Islamic sphere, but in the West. Without the unique mental and intellectual evolution in the West it couldn’t have taken place. In this moment of writing this i do not have it on my mind to what degree the Arab superiority in science during the medieval had seen a basis in the time before Muhammad, and Islam.

The cult of the Kaaba, the monotheistic reorientation focussing on the founding figure of Abraaham, helped to enforce Islam’s demand to be the absolute, ultimate truth beside which there is no other. Christians and Jews may be „people of the book“, but this term has two meanings, something that most Westerners do not know. Because it also is linked to the term „script-holder“ („Schriftbesitzer“) Not only does „people of the book“ point towards an assumed nearness between all three religions, because all three people are three tribes beeing mentioned in the „book“ (the West beeing very eager to point this out in an attempt to let the differences appear more harmless and raising acceptance for what it calls it’s dialogue with Islam), it also means this: „people of the book“ are also „owners of scriptures“ and script-holders, people that „possess“ their religion as a material good, a script, only, and thus fall victim to their craving for material possession of things: they do not focus on the content of their religious message, but on the material scripture itself, the rites and dogmas raised from that by the caste of priests and pharisees, they get distracted from the essence (in principle the critizism that later was raised again by various Christian mystics). In the language of Zen: they did not look at the moon, but concentrated on the finger pointing at it, and wanted to own it. The sin of these wrong-believers is that they concentrate on a religion of priests, not on the essence of the religion itself – of which Islam thinks itself is the purest form there ever has been. Muhammad himself was unable to read or write. By this new ideology that made a difference between script-owner and those whose religion did not have a written script (Islam so far) he nevertheless was able to overcome theological resistance coming from the script-owners more easily (people that had a holy book already, and had learned to read). The encounters with the Jewish theologists showed that Muhammad had not the knowledge to dispute with Jewish and Christian theologists on equal terms, and his bloody revenge shows how much he felt annoyed („gekränkt“) by that. Later Muhammad attacked the script-owning people also for that these scriptures were the reason why their faith was splitting up in more and more subbeliefs and sects (of which there were plenty), a process that was born by self-reflecting analysis and examination. Thus Islam’s immunity to self-reflection and self-analysis. In it’s understanding this can only lead to weakening the unity of the Ummah. Strength comes from ignorance, insight means: having no doubts, so to say.

The number of authors that point out that infidels, that have been reached by Islam’s message and do not subjugate, have forfeit their life, is impressive. There is wide consenus on that original Islam left little doubt on that the infidels almost were worth to find death by whatever means to acchieve that. Islam has to be seen through, at all costs. The West would be well-advised if he pays a little bit more attention to this minor annoying detail. Islam did not always do like this, but it is deeply anchored in it’s self-understanding as beeing superior and beeing on a natural, God-wanted mission. It makes me laughing to see time and again how easy Western commentators are to play down this most elemental detail, because someone gave an according Quran quote. The Quran has such a diversity of verses that one can use it to find quotes for everything, even contradictory things. One only needs to know them all...

In later years, Muhammad’s critizism of infidels shifted more and more away from the Jews, and towards the Christians, whose teaching were misled by too many unjustified addings (shirks) and thus gave a wrong understanding of the one and only God. The trinitary concept of Christian faith is highly suspicious for Islam, and a serious sin in it’s eyes. That Christian priests often tried to gain influence beyond the field of their religious duties, and fought for political power and influence for themsleves, made Christians even more suspicious. That Christian priests also claim to be the mediators between God and believer added a third most serious point to the list. In principle Islam hasn’t changed it’s position and views on any of these three major points of critizism until the modern era.

An interesting position Islam is holding on the question of material wealth. Earthly goods are not considered to be of evil, but their possession only can lead to any spiritual worth if it is understood as that man has to use them to to good deeds in the name of the Umma, and help it’s weaker members. Not possession of material wealth is sinful, but the sticking to it. The different distribution of wealth amongst rich and poor people is understood to be a „testing“ grade for man, so that the poor are challenged not to allow themselves to fall victim to greed and envy, and the rich shall not allow to get possessed by their possessions. The existence of material goods that way could lead to a behavior that is pleasing to God and will help for a more positive judgement of the individual life at the end ot it’s days.

What is said about material goods, finds an equivalent attitude towards nature and creation, of which man is understood to be not an owner, but a trustee/administrator, and he is allowed to temporarily and cautiously use it as a basis to found his life and that of future generation upon. It is not his possession. The balance of serving nature and creation, and beeing aware of that it could also lead man on the dark path when wanting to abuse it for egoist means, like a rich man is possessed by his material goods, is Islam‘s ideal of human dignity. And I cannot critizise anything in it. Islam’s thoughts on the role of wealth, nature and creation is in no serious way much different than what Christian mystics, Taoists or Buddhists are thinking, and trying to express. But the traditions are strongly differing in their ways that led them to think the way they do – this is where the conflict between them must start again.

Life is a constant search of man for the right and the good (God-pleasing), his freedom is that he can choose between desperately craving for depening his trust in Allah to avoid eternal doom, or give in to Satan, who was given his evil quality by Allah (like Christians, Islam thinks of Satan as a fallen angel). The faith of the community is the best basis to increase the individual’s chances that it will not be misled, and will find the right choices to do, so that it’s way to a God-pleasing life is more probable as if it would live alone, withiout the support of faith by the Umma. Since the Umma that way has a decisive importance, it must kept clear of any distracting or heretical influences. Thus Islam’S uncompromised rejection of infidels, changes, new ideas, self-doubt. Isolating oneself strictly from non-Muslims is – in Islam understanding – a most essential basis without which Islam community can no longer serve it’s supporting function to the individual’s quest for faith in Allah. Cultural exchange with infidels thus is doing damage to it, and showsng disrespect for Allah with all the negative consequences on final judgement.

The bilance between good and bad deeds only lists so much of these, the outcome is not completely calculated by these factors alone. Allah reserves a certain space of arbitrariness, whose wisdom and reason is beyond man’s insight and understanding. In the end man is just at the mercy of Allah again, even if he tried hard to live a good life and to avoid evil deeds. Human thinking is useful only where it enables man to gain knowledge and insight about positive influences on his life-bilance by tailoring thinking and reasoning towards puting all faith and trust into Allah and to realize the right in his commandments.

Muhammad’s system of religion was quite a rigid philosophy, that enabled a community to strengthen it’s „structural and social integrity“, to focus it’s energies and to add orientation for people‘s life at the price of weakening tolerance, diversity, and strengthening uniformity, and totalitarian tendencies. It is a system of high inner tensions and contradictions, stagnation and almost fatalism in the inner, aggressiveness and expansion on the outer side (which not necessarily is leading to military or vioant forms of agression all the time, but a keeping-up of a softer, but constant pressure on foreign cultures and constantly trying to transform them into Islam-friendly societies).

The rigidity of Islam as well as the personal cult that formed up around Muhammad time and again raised resistance of intellectuals, for example in form of the famous three heretics of Islam, or it’s mystic tradition before it got wiped out in the complete annihilation of Bagdhad and massacre of it’s population by the Mongoles in 1256. For every name remembered today, a great number of unknown „heretics“ got killed, even as early as during Muhammad’s life. In this Islam did not act much different than Christian churches later in Europe, that fought against and hunted down and often killed heretics and false dogmas, as they called it, and caused terrible progroms amongst whole people at times, assisted by political opportunists in the feudal elites. How equal people are when it comes to elemental questions of power and control! For reasons of completeness I mention these Islamic rebels here, but will not go deeper into them. The writings (with much flawed historical information) by Ibn ar-Rauandi (9th century), or the infamous Al-Ghazali (12th century) or Rumi (13th century) may be mentioned here. I want to limit the size of this writing, so I refuse to dive deeper into these peoples’ works, that I have red a little bit, nevertheless.

c) The Hadith

As was said about the Quran, the number of rules it created by the ever growing number of divine inspirations of Muhammad, caused a growing set of comments that had to say something on almost everything, and the group of the first Quran-readers at least was able to interpret the Quran on the basis of their own experience of Muhammad, whom many of them at least once have seen in real life, by that they had a living impression of him. From their reports and descriptions of him a second canon of writings emerged over time, forming the socalled Hadith (=tradition, message).

The Hadith expresses the Umma’s identification with the figure of Muhammad and illustrate it’s willingness to always orient itself backward to this historical figure. That is why Islam seems to be so uncompromisingly backward-oriented: whereas Jesus showed man by his example how man could find freedom and fulfillment of his spiritual existence by his own effort (he did not die in our place, but for the sake of teaching us by example how to acchieve that ourselves), Muslim faith lies in identifying the Ummah with Muhammad, and trusting in that doing like Muhammad did will be sufficient that man will be freed from the pain of life by Allah and find reward in paradise. The Hadith originally were a number of voiced opinions, comments and statements by Muhammad, their authenticity in the beginning was testified by a chain of trusted followers („Gewährsleute“), and most of what Quran was not adressing and regulating, found it’s answer in the Hadith (or was expected to find it there). The level of detail and the sheer numbers of hadiths very early grew into the sphere of sheer absurdity, at the height of this the numbers of hadiths was in excess of 600.000.) The better part of these many scriptures must have been fakes, and the first and most important collection and summary of the Hadiths in the late 9th century was including only some 7.000 of these former 600.000 statements.

The fact that there was a willingness to accept 600.000 hadiths illustrate the high willingness of Muslim communities to exclusively and completley focus on and organize themselves by the example of the life of the prophet alone: this acceptance to do so was even so high, that the questionable authenticity of much what was ciruclating in written material for most people had no importance, meaning and relevance as long as it in any way referred back to the prophet. Authenticity both of the Quaran and the Hadith are of no relevance as long as the material is in congruency with the general direction Muhammad was pointing at, something that he even have said himself: „When I have died, the number of sayings that claim to be related to me will increase. What they tell you to be a statement by mine you must compare with the book of God: what is in congruency with that should be understood to be coming from me, no matter if I have said it or not.“ (my own inadequate translation from German, quoted by Goldziher, and Raddatz).

This attitude in principle has not changed until today. Islam‘s interest in clearing questions about originality and authenticity of passages in the Quran and the Hadith is close to zero, when ignoring the heretic’s writings. In a way it is not Muhammad that is focussed on, but a virtual, imagined fantasy people have of him, and any material that is supporting this imagined and virtually created image of Muhammad is accepted and believed of as „authentic“.

This already started in the early years of the forming of the Hadith canon. With the Quran-readers dissappearing, people that taught the Hadith, more and more started to compete in their claims to lead back their personal and family origin to the bloodline of Muhammad himself. Was it enough in the early years to earn fame and reputation by saying that one has once met the prophet and saw him „live“, later, with the number of rivals increasing, one had to claim one were a relative of his family to acchieve the sdame level of attention and fame. That way the geneological tree of self-declared family-members over the years went into the thousands and tens of thousands – which of course was absurd. That they have so many thousands of princes in the Saudi kingdom, is a popular result from this.

The Hadith was brought into congruency with the needs of the Umma – not only by forming itself according to it’s need, but also by redefining the object of it's self-verification and self-authentication. That way it was a strategy of two-way problem-solving: finding answers to an original problem, and/or redefining the original problem or replacing it with a virtual representation until fictional answers seemed to fit in again. But the authenticity of the problem itself was gone that way. It was a virtual representation only. This is one of the main characteristics of Islam, in my opinion: the lack of originality, leading to a very agile opportunism to justify itself and it’s positions. Islam is not focussing on the real prophet, but on it’s imagination of Muhammad: not the real man, but what it wants the man to have been. Not the historical object is the center of interest, but one’s own conception of it. And both can be very different. The community focusses on identifying itself with the virtual prophet figure that it had constructed itself that way. Many authors point out that the renunciation of authenticity hampered mental and philosophical flexibility very serverly and replaced it with a rigid and backwards-oriented self-definition and a totalitarian isolation of the community against influence from the outsside of it’s cultural context - at the cost of exactly that energetic drive that helped Muhammad to see his religious ideas through and realize them towards ultimate success so drastically.

This does not mean the Hadith is irrelevant, by far not. It’s present form of around 30.000 entrances cannot be overestimated in it’s historical importance. It illustrates the way Muslim community is searching to find a united identity, even if this identy is not based on a historical reality, but a fictional one. The estimation to what degree the current canon of 30.000 Hadith is authentic or faked are widely varying, some say one quarter is not original, others say it is even up to three quarters that is not authentic. If one argues that that sounds not reasonable, one has to remember that the canon once already included 600.000 entries – and then was reduced to it’s smallest size ever, 7.000. I personally even think it is possible that not a single thing in today’s Hadith is authentic – there was much to much „chaos“ during forming of it’s current shape as if this chance could be ruled out. Political interests and opportunism influenced the tradition of Hadith additionally, much the same way like they influenced the many different styles and ways to interpret the Quaran, leading to at least seven or eigth main lines of interpretation. After the death of the fourth Calif Ali, a real flood of opportunistic Hadiths saw birth, that tackled especially political opponents and helped to strengthen and justify the regime of those that were in political power at a given time.

The importance of the Hadiths is not so much the content, but lies in the collective meaning it has for the finding and defining of the identity of the Ummah. Raddatz writes of it as a „collective medium in which Islam’s community is orienting itself towards the Medina model in the understanding of a selfdynamic self-reproduction“, and Goldziher, whose „Muhammedanische Studien“ in two parts are a standard work and an essential and most basic reading on Islam, wrote of the Hadith as displaying
The strict orientation back onto a fictional construction that is thought of as having been the historcially true Muhammad is a highly critical issue, in my opiniojn, and again I want to closely follow Radatz‘ conclusion on this detail:

Like the Quaran, it took the Hadith until the late 9th century to get collected, the canon selected and fixed in writing, because of the ongoing changes in Arab written language, which was undergoing massive changes until then (punctuation). The ammount of faked traditions must have been immense, and the number of people who illegitimately claimed to be offsprings of the prophet’s bloodline must have been immense, too. Additonal to political opportunism and personal corruption, the number of Hadiths increased according to the expansion of Islam beyond it’s original regional borders of origin (Arabia). Such an expansion brought it into contact with new people and new cultures, all of which presented new challenges and problems that Islam needed to find answers to. Since Islamic attitude is not very potent to creatively find ways to adopt to new surroundings (seeing itself in the center instead), it was only possible by inventing new Hadiths that ordered how to act towards these new problems by centralized authority – so Hadiths were given, legitimizing actions and behavior by saying that they have an example in the life of the prophet himself to do this way, and not different. Again, authenticity was and is not important here as long as the Umma is accepting that the content of a Hadith is reflecting the spirit of the Quaran and/or the prophet. Since these two aspects are virtual constructions themselves and thus can be changed, as explained above, Islam was and is able to give justification for it’s attitude towards others very much to it’s current interests in a given situation. But this opportunism to serve and justify it’s interests should not be mistaken with inner flexibility.

During the 9th and until the early 10th century a series of different canons were selected, sometimes by scholars that honestly tried to collect hadiths of trustable authenticity, but also often by people whose only reputation was that they have blindly copied their work from someone else, thus carrying on a faked tradition. The first Islamic tradition of a legislative system of laws was created in Iraq during the 8th century, like somewhat as a side-effect of the canon-creation of the hadith. The most important Hadith canon probably is that of Ahmad Ibn-Hanbal (9th century). He plays a major role for Sunni orthodoxy.

Conclusions on the Hadith must take into account, that this traditon from the beginning was „pleagued“ by the immense tendency to implement faked traditions in it’s canons, while at the same time Christians and Jews were discreditted as forgers/falsifiers of scriptures. This is also disturbing with regard to the Quaran, who also cannot claim to be the revelation of any truth from the very beginning, and nevertheless insists it must not explain the many contradictions in it’s history.

Islam saw a long birth over several centuries, and it’s main scriptures took as much time as well (inclusive the prophet’s biography, Sira, which did not appear earlier than 200 years after Muhammad’s death in a form that found general acceptance). What Islam calls it’s authentic fundament can be demonstrated to have been created over a long period of time. While Islam has retreated from any analytical attempt to understand it’s own history and how it’s form got affected by that, it necessarily has no other choice than to isolate itself in this always-changing world and withdraw it’s thinking to it’s self-created image of the Prophet and the Medina community as it’s primary focussing point, thus the immense importnace of rites by which a reassurance for the presence of the past is reached. Islam does not share the concept of time that dominates Western thinking. In a way it directly links the subjective present to Muhammad and Medina. That way old myths, like that of the missing Imam, can dominate the thinking in the present to a very extreme degree - and then it is beyond understanding for Western reason. Westerners then can only agree on that the phenomenon of this state of mind is there, no matter why, no matter how. It is here where the high-spiking emotions of Muslims concerning certain holy shrines has it’s roots. These shrines does not only exist in the present, so to speak, but being in contact with them means to go back in time and directly link with the historical events or figures they are related to – the history becomes a real-existing reality in the present (time) of their minds. That way any touching of their shrines means touching the very basic centre of their belief, Muhammad, Medina model, or the shrine-related historical event or figure, provocating hostile reactions and flaming sentiments.

The „why“ of the belief, that every other major religion is asking for in it’S major lines – is not really asked in Islamic tradition. It would reveal the time gap between the historical Muhammad, and the present, but it cannot be what shall not be. Change, adopting and developement is not easily possible under such conditions. This leaves the endless repeating of the same never questioned sacral rites and profane rituals on every level as the only option available to „live“ this faith. Creativity, forming of content, analysis, expression of dynamics and processes, differing between different ammounts of qualities is not possible in Islamic thinking. It only knows an absolute, that is Allah, and knows of only two additional extremes: Islam, and non-Islam. If seen in this light, the immense redundancy of Islamic societies, their sometimes stoic, sometimes furious resistance to changes, the extreme, cocoon-like self-isolation and strict definiton between „us“ and „them“, can be explained and in this meaning: understood. That way the West can reach out to learn about Islam, but Islam is hindered to do the same in return. It also lacks the interest to do so, for it saees no reason why one should want to do so. That way it’s aggressive expansion is like an autonomous reflex: it is beyond Islam‘s control by reason, and this is what makes this ideology so dangerous and incalculable for the culture in the West.

How about a sixth (?) thread about some racist topic that you could fill with your racist ramblings? If you run out of energy just copypaste some of your older ramblings.

Dont like it, dont read it.

Thank you for the kindly assistance and decision to post the essay, Skybird. I'll read it in full later on, yet just the first post was informative.

Oh, and you call that the first half on an essay? 16.500 words. The full "essay" would had been an "old" (pre-Bologna) diploma paper in Slovenia. Just shows how academic standards have fallen.

@OTH:

Could you please read the first post. He posted it at my request and that is the only thing he did. No deeper motives, not needs or wanting to write about Islam again. It is an academic essay, which he has, and I again thank him, posted for me (us) to read it.

Well there is this invention called PM. Don't know if you've heard of it down there in Slovenia.

Respenus,

word numbers are no academical standard, at least none i would trust in. Think of the above as a reasonable argument that explains some of my opinions, not more.

Quite well aware of it Skybird. I'm frankly irked by the limitations imposed to us. I've just been writing a really short essay on Islam, human rights and glocalisation, and I'll have to cut parts from it to fit the demanded "form".

As for OTH:
16k+ is too big for PM, plus I'm sure certain other members of Subsim community would like to read this. If you don't want to, your personal choice.

Do you really fail to see the irony on labeling something as being racist, when you have not even read an iota of it? You replied 3 minutes after sky had reposted the essay.

Also academic criticism (or any criticism for that matter) of religion is not racism, and has nothing to do with it.

You beat me to it. People often forget that Islam is NOT a race.

tldr :yawn:

+1

PM broken?

I guess it was too hard read post 8 by Respenus ?

I read the first post, then it was tl:dr.

That is all.

Gee, yes! Just what this community needs, some discussion on Islam! It's not like there's 100 000 threads on it already, and an additional 500 000 derailed from totally unrelated topics.

There also do not exist countless sites where you can dump large amounts of text, nor has anyone ever invented e-mail.

FFS.

:nope: