ThePolitically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the
CrusadesMuhammad
vs. Jesus
"No one is good but
God alone,"
Jesus (Mark 1O 18)
"The Jews say: 'Allah's hand is chained'
May theirownhands be chained! May
they becursed for what theysayBy no
means. His han ds are bot h
out stretc hed : He bes towsas He will"
Qur'an 5;64
The idea that Allah's hand is "not
chained"isa reflection of his absolute
freedom and sovereignty, if God is good,
as Jesus says. His goodness may be
discernable in the consistency of
creation; but in Islam,even to callAllah
good would be to bind him,
even included making use of Arabic works inways
that Muslims themselves did not: Aristotle, along with
his Muslim commentators Avicenna and Averroes,
were studied in Europeanuniversities in the twelfth
centuryand after a whi le in the Isl ami c wor ld
the ir wor k was largely ignored and certainly not
taught insc hoo ls , whi ch con ce ntr at ed the n, as
no wmos tl y on me mor iz at io n and st ud y of th e
Qur'an. There were other notable Islamic
philosophers; why were Avicenna and Averroes read
in the West, but anomalies in the own traditions? Why
wasn't philosophy ever taught in Islamic schools in
those days?
Much of the responsibility for this mustla id at th e
fe et of th e Su fi Ab u Ha mid a Ghazali (1058-
1128), Although he was a great thinker, he
nevertheless became the chief spokesman for a streak
of anti-intellectualists that stifled much Islamic
philosophical and sci ent ifi c tho ugh t. Som e
phi los oph ers , as
Ghazal i noted , were a bit too hesit ant to embrac e the revea led truth s ofthe
Qur'an: Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Sabbah al-Kindi (801-873), for
exampl e, had suggest ed that religi on and philoso phy were two separat ebut
equ al pat hs to tru th, ' In oth er wor ds, phi los oph ers nee d not pay
attentio n or homage to the Qur'an, with its self-serving prophet and bordello
Paradise. Abu Bakr ar-Razi (864-930), known in the West as Rhazeseven went
so far as to say thatonlyphilosophy leads to the highest truth. OtherMuslim
philosophers pursued similarly dangerous lines of inquiry
In his Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali accordingly accused
Muslim philosophers of "denial of revealed laws and religious confes