Islam Is Not A Mystery
Judge the religion for yourself by reading the texts.
January 25, 2016
Hugh Fitzgerald
Originally posted on Jihad Watch.
Islam is not a spiritual mystery, which only the initiated, a special priesthood, can possibly understand. It is, rather, sufficiently grasped by more than a billion people who, save for a handful, have been born into it, and have grown up in societies suffused with it, societies where it is impermissible to question Islam, to ponder whether its directives make moral or intellectual sense, and where any open display of questioning is punished, and any putative blasphemy or any open admission of apostasy, can result, in many cases, in a death sentence carried out not only by the Muslim state, but also by the informal meting out of Muslim justice by Believers who can, on their own, enforce Islamic law.
The written accounts upon which Islam rests are three: first, the Qur’an, believed by Muslims to be outside of history, exempt from any historical study (which can be punished), Uncreated and Immutable; second, the collections of stories of what Muhammad said and did (and these have been assigned levels of authenticity after careful study by the muhaddithin - Muslim scholars who centuries ago studied the chains of transmission, or isnad-chains, of each story, and on the basis of such study assigned ranks of “authenticity” to each Hadith); third, the Sira, that is, the biography of Muhammad, which of course overlaps the Hadith considerably (and may have been woven out of the Hadith, or vice-versa). Together the Hadith and the Sira constitute what is called the Sunnah, that is, the manners and customs of the earliest Muslims, that offer a gloss or guide to the meaning of the Qur’an, and to the way a Muslim should behave in every aspect of his life. Some believe, or claim to believe, that the Sunnah is more ferocious than the Qur’an, and responsible for the co-called “radicalisation” of Muslims. There are those who claim that the way out for Muslims is to somehow jettison both the Hadith and the Sira, and – as one young Turk, Mustafa Akyol, a self-consciously Brave Young Reformer, used to argue - Muslims need to keep only the Qur’an, that is, rely on “sola scriptura.” (Akyol is not alone in trying to assimilate terms taken from the history of Christianity and the Reformation, and misleadingly apply them to the case of Islam.) To this notion of doing away, in Islam, with any reliance on the Hadith and Sira, to getting a billion Sunnis (a word derived from the “Sunnah”) to accept this, one can only reply: Fat Chance.
These written works - Qur’an, Hadith, Sira, and commentaries on all three - are easily available. You can find them online, a click away, and can also find online hundreds or thousands of websites, in English and other European languages, as well as in the languages most associated with Islam and Muslims (Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, various forms of Bahasa) devoted to answering queries of all kinds, websites where ordinary Muslims ask questions of clerics - about all the matters of daily life, food, dress, personal hygiene, sexual behavior, family law. You, too, can eavesdrop on these. And you can find out, again by such eavesdropping, how Muslims are taught to regard, and to treat, Unbelievers, especially in the pronouncements on Infidels from high-ranking clerics, including the Sheik Al-Azhar, from Saudi clerics, from Iranian clerics, from Muslim clerics from all over the world. All of this is available. You might start online with the excellent translation services of Muslim material - including what political figures, clerics, diplomats, officials from the Muslim world are saying to their own people - to be found at
www.MEMRI.org.
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Islam Is Not A Mystery
