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I first read the Koran when I was around 22 years old.
I was in London, in the first year of my career, and one of my Muslim friends at work said he wanted to tell me more about Islam.
I was a sceptical atheist but more than happy to learn new things (I had been doing philosophy classes, attending lectures on Buddhism, workshops on past life regression, become a member of the Church of Scientology to find out more about it, etc.)
So we went to a public library and started reading it together.
It was a truly shocking experience.
I was completely taken aback when my friend started reading verses that were indisputably hate speech directed at non-Muslims, to my ears at any rate, that he seemed to be completely blind to.
There were two paragraphs that I still remember, nearly two decades on.
The first one was Koran 32:13 - "Had we willed, we could have given every soul its guidance, but it is already predetermined that I will fill Hell with jinns and humans, all together."
Again, and again, the Koran seemed to say that if God had wanted he could have given wisdom to everyone but he had made some blind and deaf and put a seal on their hearts so that they could not hear his message (Koran 18:57, Koran 17:46, Koran 45:23). In fact, in some places the Koran seems to say that Allah had consciously decided who would err and who he would guide (Koran 4:143, etc.).
I couldn't understand why an all merciful God would deliberately let some people go astray when he could have enlightened them. It seemed perverse.
But worse was to come.
The second paragraph that remains stuck in my head was Koran 4:56 - "Those who reject our Signs, We shall soon cast into the Fire: as often as their skins are roasted through, We shall change them for fresh skins, that they may taste the penalty: for Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise"
Basically my friend was telling me, with no trace of awareness of what he was saying, that the punishment I deserved for my atheism was to go to hell where my skin would be burnt off my body. I would be given a new skin only so that it could be burnt off again and again for all eternity. And this had been decided by an all merciful God.
I thought he had lost his mind.
It wasn't a typo either, time and time again, the Koran said that atheists would be burnt in a lake of boiling Sulphur, etc.
I couldn't believe that this book was what hundreds of millions of small children were taught to recite around the world. Later I found out that by some estimates 61% of the Koran is about non-Muslims and how stupid, unclean, etc. they are. The word unbeliever is used in the Koran close to a hundred times… I counted.
When I pointed out to my friend that his holy book was incoherent and bizarre to the point that I could not follow, he told me, a little defensively, that I was focusing on only the bad stuff and there was plenty of good stuff too. And he told me that he was trying to save me from my fate which was inevitable if I continued on my (then) current sinful path.
I told him that a book that claims to be perfect and divine cannot afford to have bad stuff in the same way that perfect meal cannot afford to contain pieces of dog shit in it, which is my current view on all religious books. There may be some interesting stories that we can discuss in the same way we could discuss Star Wars or Harry Potter. But religious books are certainly not divine.
Very far from it.
I also told him, that although I appreciated his concern (I genuinely did get that he was coming from a place of friendship), I'd take my chances with hell.
We remained good friends and had plenty of other debates.
But I think he realized that he'd lost me to Shaitan.
The memory came back to me today because I'm just finishing Hitler's Mein Kampf, and the bewilderingly unhinged chapters on Jews reminded me of how I felt all those years ago. I started thinking of the many parallels between the two books and movements as I walked to work yesterday morning.
Hitler was an Aryan race supremacist and Mohammad was a religious supremacist.
But that was as far as the differences went as far as I'm concerned.
Both painted a picture of being threatened by cunning, untrustworthy, and evil enemies. Both masterfully used propaganda and proselytization to passionately spread their belief systems. They were comfortable using violence to spread the lands under the sway of their ideologies and were tactically brilliant at warfare.
Both wrote books that shocked me with the sheer intensity of hate and bigotry they contained.
I know today that there are several books that have large volumes of hate speech - The Manu Smriti against women and Dalits, the Rig Veda against the Godless, the Bible against homosexuals and various others, etc. But I've only read parts of those books or abridged versions. The Koran and Mein Kampf are the books of that sort that I’ve read in full.
I thought by reading these books, I might be able to understand things from the perspectives of the authors, perhaps I had been too knee jerk politically correct in my assumptions, perhaps there was some genuine wisdom there that I would recognize by reading the actual texts rather than relying on second hand reports.
But there was very little there that I could relate to except admiring the ability of the authors to rouse large numbers of uncritical people with their oration and to create large and well drilled fascist organizations that would kill traitors or apostates, or even those who questioned the ideologies too vocally, without a second thought.
My next reads are Savarkar's 'Hindutva, Who is a Hindu' and Golwalkar's 'We, the People', two staple diets for right wing Hindutvadis. I have ordered them and they should reach me in the next few days.
Again, I want to read them to understand if there's something I might be missing.
I'm beginning to suspect that I'm going to be disappointed once again.
If you paint a group of people as so different from you as to be classed as the enemy you have dehumanized them.
So either Kanishka Sinha had a Muslim friend who thought the best way to do Dawah was to present to him
the punishments of the Akhirah.
Or he has simply gone to Islamaphobe websites and decided to parrot the propaganda written in them, but to sound more authentic. He has come up with the story of having studied the Quran cover to cover with a Muslim friend... He most likley did have a friend who mentioned or showed him the Quran rest of his story seems to have been heavily embellished.
There is a whole host of these type of propagandists on the Internet..! I personally came across one who clearly had not read the translation of the Quran kept insisting he had. And also kept mentioning vs of Hell and punishment for disbelievers.
Which he had no doubt taken from them Islamaphobe websites on how to counter a Muslim in 7 easy steps.
You find articles on these professional Islamaphobe websites, comparing Islam to Nazism, and Quran to Mein Kampf.
Anyway here is an extract with the Anti_Islam Propagandist I went back and forth with and as you will see his remarks are eerily similar to the aforementioned Mr Kanishka Sinha.
He stated..."I have read the Quran. A large amount – I think at least 10%, possibly significantly more – is devoted to saying what will become of unbelievers (even if they are good people). They will burn in hell for eternity simply because they don’t believe. If that is not bad enough there is even more sadism involved.
Not only are unbelievers made to be unbelievers by God himself, but “If they ask for showers, they will be showered with water like to molten lead which burneth the faces. Calamitous the drink and ill the resting-place!†[18:29 Pickthall translation]
Needless to say after along and protracted discussion and being exposed, this individual now refuses to engage with me.
Mr Kanishka Sinha are a new breed of more sophisticated Islamaphobes highly educated and often belonging to the cult of "New Atheism", they take propaganda from anti-Islam websites and repackage and articulate in a more eloquent manner, whilst creating some sort of allusion of authority and expertise and personal insight.
Unfortunately this is leaving many our own youth who have never read the Quran, confused, and with
doubts about Islam.
He is from the modern Indian liberal atheistic disposition and amongst those who do write on FB if injustice is met to Muslims of India. In the present times it takes lots of courage and Kanishka and people like him say those things that even I hestitate to utter for fear of retribution.
Should we not be wary, of the fact these individuals themselves have a deep dislike and fear of Islam. We have had quite a few of these types in the west who stood up for Muslims, at one time and who then completely switched and became even more Islamaphobic then the people they were criticising.
The first time I saw Christopher Hitchens, was on TV criticising Indians for burning and tearing down Mosques.
Piers Morgan was an Editor of a Newspaper spoke out against foreign policy, stood of for Gaza, spoke against Iraq war, spoke against the Islamaphobia and demonisation of muslims.
This is the problem that I face every moment in my dealings with non-Muslims in India today.
The speak against those who do injustice to Muslims in India and then later on they extract a price
that is excessive.
I am trying my best to keep my spirits high and feelings positive but it is now without significant toll on my emotional energy. Please do not interpret it as any sign of desperation. That is not Islamic and I have not intention or mood to enter that frame. I am merely putting on record the stress the current status of Ummah has put us in. Having said that here is the couplet I posted on Facebook a few moments ago.
Bahaar-e-Taaza Kab Aayegi Tu?
Khizan Ka Mausam Guzar Chuka Hai
Oh the fresh spring, when shall thou come?
The season of autumn is long gone by now
Here is the background. A very perceptive and serious young Muslim put out a newspaper clip on Facebook that lists the verifiable figures of killings of Jewish people in the concentration camps. It is about three hundred thousand. What can be the total actual figure after we add the numbers that we might have missed? that is any body's guess. Somewhere someone decided that we should believe that the figure is six million. If you question this figure then by the churning of the legal wheels spread the world over you will end up in a serious trouble.
So my two kind friends commented on my posts and asked, not advised, me to remove it. I folllowed suit. That is the status of the world as of now. This when I wrote a post with above couplet.
Basically even I am waiting for the scenario to change favour of Muslims. To admit the truth I was expecting that this would happen when the US and NATO forces will leave Afghanistan thinking that the Afghans will teacha lesson to the retreating Americans. It did not happen. Nothing happens without we doing it - except for earthquakes and floods and other calamities. In this case there were no worthwhile Afghans to teach a lesson to the intruders. Afghans had not implemented 9/11 and OBL, after all, was not hiding there and hence technically they did not deserve the hell that was inficted upon them.
Samuel Huntington had written in 1993 that US as a world power has declined. How come US has been destroying Muslims countries even now? The reason is that we Muslims have not atken our affairs into our own hands. Till that happens we shall continue to be on the receiving end.
We Muslims should take our affairs into our own hands. After that even if we make compromises with the west that are worse than western atrocities on Muslim countries we shall be better off. That is the magic of having your strings in your hands.
By the grace of Allah SWT the west has lost a lot of her bite and might and it is merely a matter of Ummah organising herself to oust the western encroahers from the place of power that they have been maintaining themselves in all this time - for five centuries.
The sad thing is that if the west has lost its air then so has the Ummah. Pathetically it even did not try.
At the academic level I can count only two people who stand on their own feet - Professor Mahmood Mamdani and journalist Mehdi Hassan. If some academicians from the Muslim world would have arisen to augment these two brave people and support their views then we would have seen the things changing right before our eyes.
This is a boy writing from Bihar. I was surprised by the post. I keep digging into the history of Muslims and yet I was not aware of many of the personalities he mentions in his post. I can tell you that most my colleagues at the university are worse off than me. It is wonderful to see a Hindi medium boy having so much of information. Even Dr Israr Ahmed did not include so much in his assessment of resistance movements in Muslim world.
The word Islamism is an offensive word. The real word is Islam. People using the term Islamism are acting out Islamophobia. Yet we have to be very careful when we say this to the offenders.
This cannot be undone and I am sure it will be greatly appreciated.
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