BRITISH people, according to polls and to ‘lived experience’, have a problem with Islam. That is not a ‘hate crime’, and we must be allowed to talk about it.
The problem is that Islam is both unregenerate and inherently resistant to regeneration. Other religions evolve, while maintaining their essence, as ‘time makes ancient good uncouth’. Islam does not do this. It cannot do this; or rather, it cannot do this without denying its foundational selling point: that the Koran is, quite literally, the word of God.
Despite the book’s contradictory passages regarding, for example, the use of wine and intoxicants, forced conversions and the treatment of non-Muslims, the correct punishment for adultery (to name only three of the many disputed points which have been taxing the brains of diligent apologists for the past 1,300 years), and despite the intellectual gymnastics which the more couth among believers must perform to explain away discrepancies and barbarities, the sanctification of the Koran as the work of God himself will always produce a hard core of fanatical believers shouting ‘Heresy!’ at any attempt to ‘change His words’.
The inevitable adjunct to this claim of divine and immutable authority is the declaration that Islam is the final, perfect religion, superseding all those that went before: an assumption outrageous to anyone comparing it with Christianity, who can hardly help seeing it as a step backwards rather than the ultimate step forwards, echoing, as it does, some of the more indigestible passages of the Old Testament (which, fortunately, do not go under the copyright of a divine author).
With Christianity, at least as preached by Christ himself, the focus was turned inward, towards the state of the soul and its individual relationship, despite its fallen and fallible condition, with a just but loving God. Six hundred years later Islam reversed the process, focusing on outward submission and blind obedience to a divine disciplinarian. It is difficult to look on this sequence as a progression, rather than a regression, in spiritual awareness.
Indeed, this must be a hard task for many spiritually orientated Muslims: witness the attractions of Sufism, a branch of Islam which turns the focus inwards towards a deeper search for the truth and personal experience of the divine.
It is intriguing to wonder how different things might be today if Sufism had become accepted as a legitimate expression of Islam and had succeeded in influencing its development, as seemed possible during the 16th and 17th centuries in the Mughal Empire.
Faced with an overwhelmingly Hindu population, plus an assortment of Jains, Zoroastrians and even Christians, the Mughal Emperor Akbar launched a series of debates among the different religions in an attempt to seek the truth behind them all.
‘The emperor,’ it is recorded, ‘having observed the bigotry of the Muslim scholars and the discrepancies among the followers of different religions, initiated discussions . . . From these assemblies arose the principle of Peace With All, by which enmity on account of religious differences was removed from the hearts of men.’ (Or so he hoped.)
With a view to promoting understanding between his subjects, Akbar even authorised the translation into Persian of Hindu religious texts, including the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
Things chugged along nicely for quite a while, with the Mughal Empire reaching the zenith of its wealth and general prosperity under Akbar and his almost equally tolerant successors, Jahangir and Shah Jahan (of Taj Mahal fame). Indeed, both Shah Jahan’s intended heir, Prince Dara, and his sister, Princess Jahanara Begum (first lady of the empire after the death of her mother, Mumtaz) were devout, practising Sufis, with the tacit consent of their indulgent parent; and both wrote texts considered heretical by the Muslim orthodoxy.
Dara not only supervised translations of the Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Vasistha into Persian; in the preface to his own translation of the 52 principal Upanishads he declared them to be ‘the hidden book’ alluded to in the Koran (56:77-78) and the source of all true monotheism; and in the most famous of his works, The Confluence of the Two Seas, he argued that the core mystical teachings of the Vedanta were essentially identical with Sufism.
It seemed that India was set fair to enter an age of increasing alignment between the religions of conquered and conqueror, leading to a continuation of prosperous Mughal rule, with a good dose of Sufism easing the narrow bigotry and urge to dominance of orthodox Islam.
However, Dara never succeeded his father. When Shah Jahan fell ill and was thought likely to die, a younger brother, the future Emperor Aurangzeb, defeated Dara in battle, and, seizing the reins of power, successfully called for his execution on grounds of heresy. Though Shah Jahan did, in fact, survive his illness, he was henceforth emperor in name only, living on for eight years as a broken-hearted prisoner in his private apartments at Agra Fort, where he was attended by the ever-faithful Jahanara.
Unlike his predecessors, Aurangzeb was a strictly orthodox Muslim. Instead of progress towards further tolerance and understanding, his reign brought a return of religious discrimination as, after years of remission, he reimposed the hated jizyah and other taxes on non-Muslims (the vast majority of his subjects) and engaged in ideological and political warfare against rebellious Hindu chieftains, sowing ever greater division and bringing the wealthy empire he had inherited to the point of bankruptcy.
Had Dara, rather than Aurangzeb, succeeded Shah Jahan, the Mughals might have retained the loyalty of their Hindu subjects and the history of both India and Islam might have been very different.
This is the problem with Islam: its truly spiritual followers, like Dara and Jahanara – the kind of people who might be aware of, and seek to redeem, its deficiencies – always seem to get the worst of things: and the rod they are beaten with is the allegedly divine provenance of the Koran.
As long as this book is held to be dictated by God himself, there will always be a fanatical minority, like Aurangzeb, who insist that it must be read literally, seizing on such passages as ‘Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day . . . until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled,’* or, ‘fight them until there is no more fitnah (nothing to tempt Muslims away from Islam) and the religion, all of it, is for Allah’.
Moderate voices are shouted down, sharia is imposed, and those who do not convert pay the jizyah or die. Almost invariably, once Islam has the upper hand, this is what happens: and, to put it simply, if the people of this country have a problem with Islam, it is because they do not want it to happen to them.
That is not hatred of Islam. It is common sense.
*Every major Islamic empire and caliphate enforced jizya on Christians, Jews, and other recognised non-Muslims until the 19th century, and the vast majority of classical and contemporary orthodox scholars, both Sunni and Shia, still regard Koran 9:29 as a permanent, universal ruling which, like sharia, will be reapplied whenever an Islamic state has the power to do so.
