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The Traps of Islam:
A commentary on the testimony of Never a Dhimmi

By Ali Sina

In a recent correspondence that I had with Rev. Bassam Madany, an ardent critic of Islam, he blamed Secularism and the weakening of religious belief of the Westerners for the conversion of some Europeans and America ns to Islam.  

I disagreed and said that the contrary is true. In fact religious people are more vulnerable to fall into the trap of Islam than secularists, rationalists and atheists. Generally, people who fall prey to Islam have already been indoctrinated by other beliefs, have lowered their critical shield and have embraced the irrationality of faith.  

Once that happen, once the defensive shield of reason is lowered, all sorts of irrational beliefs slowly creep in the mind of the believer and gradually render him vulnerable to dangerous beliefs, including Islam. It is the belief in God and religion that lower one’s intellectual immunity and make him more susceptible to Islam not rational thinking or atheism.

People do not decide to become terrorists, hate and kill others, commit mass suicides or become suicide bombers overnight. The metamorphosis from rationality to irrationality is gradual and the brainwashing is imperceptible and incremental.  

It starts with accepting the notion of a god as a loving and caring being that tries to reach out to humans and wants to guide them. This seemingly harmless belief propels one into a never ending quest for “divine” guidance and the "right" religion. Once this unsubstantiated belief is accepted as fact, the believer steps into a descending escalator of irrationality. From there on, he gradually suppresses his critical-thinking and little by little, substitutes reason with faith.  

Faith is belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. Once faith is given credence as a valid mode for attaining the truth, people become liable to succumb to any absurdity and irrational beliefs including Islam.  

Islam is the pinnacle of irrationality. Rational people are not attracted to Islam. It is the people who have already accepted the irrationality of faith and do not demand logical proof or material evidence to accept the validity of a claim that are in danger of contracting Islam.  

Islam is an utterly asinine and distasteful belief system. But it gradually becomes palatable to those who have been indoctrinated in other religions and accept the basic elements of faith that are common to all of them, such as the existence of a deity that cares about us humans, tries to guide us, answers to our prayers, meddles in our lives, rewards us and punishes us.  

Rev. Madany was not pleased of my counter argument. But the testimony of Never a Dhimmi vindicates my claim.  

It wasn’t the secular, scientific and rational upbringing of Never a Dhimmi that impelled him to embrace Islam. In fact those were the foundation that eventually allowed him to get rid of Islam. It was his flirting with Catholicism and his subsequent fascination with religion and spirituality that led him into this tortuous path that eventually ended in the cull-de-sack of Islam. Then again he was not attracted to the real Islam but a camouflaged and sugarcoated version of it called Sufism.  

Many people who are drawn to Islam and fall into its trap are at first attracted to Sufism and its mystical and relatively tolerant teachings.  

The fact is however that Sufism that was created during the eighth and ninth century A.D. was a reaction against the unenlightened, impersonal and draconian nature of Islam. It was then that many Persian thinkers, dismayed with the inhumane nature of Islam, tried to reform it by searching for deeper mystical meanings in apparently asinine assertions made in the Quran.      

The problem with Sufism is that it lacks legitimacy. As William VanDoodewaard says: “For, if the Sufi spiritual quest is to be viewed as legitimate, even within Islam itself, it must be rooted in the Quran and the sunna of Muhammad.”  [1]

Andrew Rippin, in his work Muslims: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, also states that “Sufis.. in their search for legitimation of their spiritual quest [must show] whether Islam as a religion contained within it a spiritual-ascetic tendency from the very beginning.” [2]

But the Quran is a manual of terror and the sunna depicts Muhammad as a terrorist. Islam is bereft of any spirituality. Sufism is a borrowed ideology and invented by the catholically  ingenious but hopelessly sycophant bootlicking Persians who did not have the temerity and the insight to denounce Islam as an idiotic cult of a crazed man and reject it in its entirety as an stupid cult but instead sheepishly tried to reinterpret this graceless doctrine of ignorance, dress it with rationality and sugarcoat it with alien un-Islamic philosophies taken from all kinds of sources, Zoroastrian, Christian, Jewish, Gnostic, Neo-Platonism, Hinduism and even Buddhist to make it toothsome to their own refined mystical palate.

What escaped the ken of the benighted Sufi sages is that Islam cannot be reformed and the Quran is a clear book of violence and hate that cannot be reinterpreted differently from its obvious meaning. And that it is better to spill the poisonous drink than try to sweeten it to mask its bitter taste.  

What the Sufis did was a crime of foolishness. They taught a different religion but fearing rejection, they claimed it to be the inner message of Islam. Sufis claim that Sufism is the kernel of Islam while the Sharia is its outer shell. The truth is the opposite. The kernel and core of Islam is the Quran, which is poison of mind and spirit. Sufism is only a gloss that masks it. 

Far less people would have fallen into the trap of Islam had it not been camouflaged with exotic Sufi interpretations. The Sufis could not reform Islam or make it more humane. All they did is to conceal its ugliness and thus make it even more dangerous trap for the unwitting victims. 

Religions take their followers through slippery paths of faith. Because faith is belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence, no matter how good and benign a religion is, and notwithstanding how confrontational it is towards Islam, it legitimizes Islam and provides justification for its irrationality, making the acceptance of this most benighted of all the religions a little easier.  


1- William VanDoodewaard, Sufism: The Mystical Side of Islam, unpublished article, The University of Western Ontario, London , Canada : 1996

2- Andrew Rippin, Muslims: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (New York: Routledge, 1990), 118.  

 

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