WHY IS ISLAM SO DIFFERENT?

 AN OVERVIEW 

Why is Islam so very different from the rest of us? Why can't we  all just get along? 

Its a longish story, but there is a sort of a short version, and I'd like to try to tell you about it.  

It starts in the 4^th century B.C.E., about a thousand years before Islam was created. 

In the 4^th century B.C., Greece experienced an explosion of knowledge that was unprecedented in human history. The explosion was across the board: in the arts, in the sciences, and most importantly, in philosophy. The reason that philosophy was so important is because the change it experienced is what made all the rest of it possible. The change in philosophy - the way people think about everything - was so pronounced that it produced what became known as "The Golden Age.”

In those days, "philosophy" was "the study of everything that existed," so it covered a lot of territory. It included politics, art, mathematics, meteorology, astronomy, ethics, epistemology, biology, metaphysics, and so on.  So, it isn’t hard to see that if people began to think in a totally different way about all this, that the effect would be very substantial.

It may seem hard to believe, but this was where the split between us and Islam (neither of which yet existed) was born.

What was the change? 

The Greeks had been working on philosophy for a long time, of course, but up until then, it had been a collection of some insights here, or some  facts or observations there.  The big "paradigm shift" happened around the 4^th century B.C., when the first really well integrated and systematic "study of everything that existed" made its appearance.

Up to this time, people thought that this, that, or the other thing happened because some god or spirit caused it to happen. But then Aristotle came along and said that didn’t make sense. He maintained that a fish didn’t swim because the “fish spirit” caused it to swim, but rather, it swam because of the way it was constructed. It swam because it had fins and muscles and they worked together to allow the fish to swim. In short, the fish was able to swim because it was in its nature to swim, not because some supernatural entity was pulling it around in the water.

The best known philosophers of the era were Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates was Plato’s teacher, and Plato was Aristotle’s teacher. Almost everyone has heard of them, and for good reason; their teachings, especially those of Plato and Aristotle, have led to just about everything that influences our world today.

The star of the “Golden Age,” and its prime mover, was Aristotle. He developed the “Law of Identity” and the “Law of Causality.” The “Law of Identity” spoke about the nature of things – what they were made of, the way they were put together, and so on. The “Law of Causality” spoke about the impact that their natures had on their behavior and the way, because of their natures, they related to other stuff.

That really did change everything. People began a serious search for how and why things happened instead of just accepting that they happened because of the whim of a spirit or god. Now, people could really know what was going on. When they knew how and why things happened, they could apply this knowledge to just about everything, and make rapid changes in their lives.

It was this approach that enabled people finally to be able to think about their world in a very different way. It allowed them to think about existence in an integrated way, not just as random, isolated, unrelated things. The importance of this was that it gave people the means to make sense out of our universe, something that had been very difficult before.   

There had been great contributions to the corpus of human knowledge made by many peoples prior to this time. For example, things like linear and phonetic alphabets, the concept of "zero" as a place holder, the division of a circle into three hundred sixty equal parts, etc. had been figured out, but it wasn't until the time of the 4^th century B.C. Greek philosophers, primarily Aristotle, that the great “paradigm shift” took place, that people could really think about the how and why of everything. 

Even though Plato and Aristotle knew each other very well, and had a good relationship for many years, they were very different in terms of their views of reality. In this world, you are either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, whether you realize it or not. In fact, everyone in the world has a philosophy .

Today, philosophy doesn’t include things like mathematics and biology, but its five major branches (ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, esthetics, and politics), form the basic way we think about things. If your philosophy is not valid, then a lot of things you think about won’t be valid either.

We all have a philosophy. It doesn't matter whether we are Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists, or anything else. If we are living human beings with reasonably intact minds, we have a philosophy. That's because none of us can live without one; philosophy is the "roadmap of life" for each of us. It’s just that most people don't KNOW that they actually have a philosophy.  

Most people don't know it because almost nobody ever teaches philosophy any more. Philosophy is a complex intellectual discipline like mathematics, literature, or medicine, and unless we study it, we can make a lot of mistakes trying to figure things out.  Now, I ask you, how many philosophy courses did YOU take in school? Well, you probably had more philosophy lessons in kindergarten than in 7^th grade, or even in college. That’s true because if anyone ever read "Aesops Fables" to you, those little tales, written about two thousand years ago, were composed by the author as little philosophy lessons.

The point is, unless we study a valid philosophy, we will remain dangerously vulnerable to an enemy – Islam - that is determined to destroy us. They have a philosophy which, even though it is invalid across the board, they teach their children from the moment of birth. They are very familiar with their philosophy, and apply it to everything they do. We, unfortunately, do not.

That's really what this story is all about: Showing how it is that philosophy is the real issue here, and how it is that knowing how our philosophy differs from Islam's philosophy explains the problems we are having today. It also suggests a permanent solution, which will be addressed in the future.  

So here we go:  

To reiterate, Socrates' pupil was Plato, and Plato's pupil was Aristotle. For a long time, Plato and Aristotle agreed with each other about almost everything, but then Aristotle made some discoveries that sent him down a very different road from his teacher. They argued, and the relationship, although not entirely broken, did suffer quite a bit. This has EVERYTHING to do with the current contest between Islam and the rest of the world.”

It's really important for everyone to have some idea of just what the argument was about, at least the part that had the most important effect on our lives today, including our relationship with Islam. Just knowing the fact that they disagreed won't contribute to our understanding of why the West went down one road, while Islam went down another, and the difference between us that this parting of the ways was responsible for.

It may be hard to believe, but the argument that started the whole thing had to do with trying to figure out how human beings acquire knowledge. It may seem to be a pretty unlikely reason to have a serious argument, or to be the kind of argument that can affect the history of the world, but it was and it did.

Here's how that went down: There are three to five (depending on how you classify all of existence) major branches of philosophy. The most familiar to most people is "ethics," even though a lot of us can be pretty confused about it. That's the branch of philosophy that studies what it is that makes something "good" or "not good." The branch of philosophy that studies how humans acquire knowledge is called "epistemology," and that's what Plato and Aristotle argued about. 

Plato was trying to figure out just how it was that we form concepts. "Concept formation" is the method that humans use to acquire knowledge, and humans are the only species that can pull it off.  

"Concept formation" is what our brains do with the concretes (a tree, an animal, rain, etc.) that we can touch, see, feel, hear, smell -- you get the picture. We take a tree, which is something we can touch, and somehow, when we see "corn" or a "rose," we form a concept -- a PLANT. We take a horse, a cat, or a mouse, and somehow, we form a concept -- an ANIMAL. We take a chair, a bed, or a table, and somehow, we form a concept -- FURNITURE.

Plato wanted to know about the "somehow." Exactly how did we get from a "chair" and "bed" to "furniture"? From a "horse" and "cat" to "animals"? From a "tree" and "rose" to "plants?" He was even more intrigued when he tried to figure out how people got from a concrete that you could touch, all the way to something like "justice." How on earth could you get from concrete things all the way to something like "justice?"

Plato's big stumbling block was that he was convinced that only the things that we could touch, see, smell, and hear etc., the concrete things, were really "real." He knew that "furniture" and "justice" existed, but he was having a very hard time accepting the idea that things that you couldn't touch, see or hear, were quite as "real" as the things you could actually touch. For example, we can touch a table, a chair, or a bed, but you couldn't touch "furniture." "Furniture" was an idea, a concept, not a concrete thing. It was just as impossible to touch the concept "justice" as it was to touch the concept "furniture." And that's what he wanted to figure out; how did we get from a "touchable" concrete to an "untouchable" concept?

"Justice" and "furniture" and all those concepts really existed; he knew that. It's just that they didn't exist in a form you could touch. Plato thought about it, and finally decided that the answer was this: since “furniture” and “justice” were real, and since “real” things were touchable, then there must a place where things like furniture and justice did exist in a concrete form that you could touch, and not merely in the form of an untouchable idea.

Since we couldn't touch or see concepts anywhere here on this earth, he thought that they must exist as concretes in another reality altogether, a reality that was very different from the one we all live in. It would have to be different, if you could actually touch "justice" there, after all. And because these untouchable things were "real" there, it must be the most "real" reality of all. It certainly had to be a far better reality than our little ol' reality where you couldn't even touch "justice."

In fact, Plato thought that such a reality was so good that it must be "perfect." He explained that everything we experienced in our reality was just an "imperfect reflection" of all the nifty "perfect" things that existed in a concrete form in that other, perfect reality, which he called the "World of Forms." That's what Plato thought concepts were, the touchable concrete forms of untouchable ideas. There was a Perfect Person in that Perfect World of Forms too, of course. All the rest of us, naturally, were just imperfect reflections of that Perfect Person. Because the World of Forms and the Perfect Things in it were, well, perfect, and we humans here in our (imperfect) reality WEREN'T - well, perfect - then naturally, we poor imperfect humans with our imperfect little minds could never HOPE to completely understand that Perfect World or any of the Perfect Things in it. At least, we couldn't hope to understand it perfectly. Our imperfect minds just weren't up to the job so, we'd just have to accept the whole package without being able to understand it.

In fact, Plato thought we were so intellectually incompetent that the best way for us to muddle through our lives was to have a ruling elite with the least imperfect among us in charge to tell the rest of us what to do and think. In other words, we "Imperfects" needed a Totalitarian Elite to micromanage our lives.

Well, if that all that doesn't really make much sense to you, you are PROBABLY an Aristotelian. It didn't make sense to him, either. 

Aristotle thought Plato's idea about concepts was a bunch of hooey, and he didn't mind saying so. The way Aristotle figured it, there was only one reality, the one we live in. There was no “Other World” with “Perfect Stuff” of which we were pale reflections.

The whole notion of how we human beings formed concepts in our minds was of great interest to him too. He worked on it, and he made a lot of progress. For example, one of his important discoveries was called genus differentia. This was a way of classifying things by their similarities (genus) and then separating the similar things from each other by their differences (differentia). “Dog” is the genus, and “Collie” is the differentia. Even our names go by this system – “Jones” is the genus, distinguished from other “Jones” with the differentia, “Tom.” This is one of the early steps we take when we form concepts; the further up the chain we go, the more complex it gets, but the process follows the same general rules, and it’s a very important step in figuring out how we get from concretes to the most sophisticated concepts. Aristotle didn’t make it all the way, but he got a lot further down the road than his teacher did.

That’s what Plato and Aristotle fought about. There were other fights too, like the different view they had about the competence of the human mind, but that was one of the biggies. As an aside, the whole genus differentia development gave rise to the dictionary, another of Aristotle’s inventions.

Aristotle didn't figure out the whole process of concept formation – that had to await 20^th century philosopher Ayn Rand - but he knew that it really didn't matter too awfully much if he couldn't figure out exactly how we did it during his own lifetime, much as he'd like to. He didn't consider the fact that nobody yet knew the whole story of how concepts were formed, or any other lack of knowledge, was evidence for “imperfections” of the human mind. He knew that learning of all kinds took time. Little by little, we would figure it all out. Our minds were perfectly (no pun intended) capable, by their nature, of working it all out across time; we just had to work hard and be patient. 

He was right about that, of course. To this day, we are catching on to more and more. Nowadays, if we really want to know, we can actually learn how we get from a "chair" and a "table" all the way to "furniture," and even how to get to "justice." Most people don't particularly care about the process, since it's not something they use in their everyday lives, after all.

That happens a lot in our lives; I can drive, but I don’t care to know how to build a car. I can’t remember the simple formula for trajectory motion, either, but some basketball players, gunnery sergeants, and baseball players find it useful. So long as someone is interested in that sort of thing, we have that knowledge available to us and we can use it whenever we do need it – for example, when we want to figure out what a “right” is when we are writing our constitutions, it’s really important, and it has an effect on every single one of us. It’s only with that kind of understanding that we can prevent the erosion of everything in our Constitution.

The point is, we humans, with our human minds, have managed to do it, just as Aristotle predicted we would. The bigger, even more important point is, Aristotle was right, and Plato was wrong.

Aristotle thought that Plato's "other reality," his "perfect world of forms," was nothing more than some sort of worthless "intellectual junk room" where Plato was trying to put all the stuff he didn't know, but didn't want to admit that he didn't know.

Aristotle also disagreed with Plato about the notion that we needed a committee of self-appointed experts with the authority to micromanage our lives.

So:

1) Plato thought our minds were fundamentally incapable of knowing; Aristotle said our minds are just fine, and that we are capable of figuring out everything that exists. Just because we don't know something right this minute doesn't mean our minds are fundamentally incapable of ever knowing it. 

2) Plato said there were two realities, one imperfect one (ours), and one perfect one (you know, the one we could never hope to understand, since we were so imperfect). Aristotle, on the other hand, said there was just one reality, the one we live in, and furthermore, we can understand it very nicely, and we should enjoy our lives while we lived in our reality.  

3) Plato said we needed all the direction we could get from our "betters," even if they were also imperfect, just in order to survive. Aristotle said we could achieve wonderful things and be happy in our lives without some “panel of experts” telling us how to live our lives, thank you very much.

4) Plato focused all his attention on another "reality," while Aristotle focused all of his on this, the one and only reality, and the happiness that we could achieve in this life, our one and only life, here on this earth, the one and only earth. Aristotle said our universe was a knowable place where we could achieve happiness, while Plato said it was a fearful place that we couldn't see or understand.

They argued about other things too, but these, about how we acquire knowledge via concept-formation and the totalitarian thing, were the biggies, and they had the greatest effect on people not yet born.

So here, thanks to a couple of ancient philosophers and an argument they had about how people acquire knowledge, we have two very different views of humans and existence. Plato's was filled with anxiety and doubt, while Aristotle's was filled with confidence and encouragement. These attitudes, poles apart, were supremely important to people who were yet to be born.

The reason it's important to know why they argued and why that matters is because we mostly followed Aristotle, and Islam, among others, was influenced more by its (relatively brief) brush with Plato. As you can see, they were different from each other, so all of us who followed one or the other are different from each other too.

Now we pick up on the part about how all this got from the Golden Age of Greece to today, and why it made it impossible for Islam to live in peace with everyone else.

After the argument, Aristotle left and worked in several different places and was ultimately hired to tutor the young son of King Philip II of Macedon. Guess who that turns out to be? It was Alexander, later known as "The Great." When Alexander grew up, he conquered a goodly portion of the known world at the time, and of course, the conquered lands were heavily influenced by Greek culture. The process was called "Hellenization," since Greece's name at the time was "Hellas." And since Aristotle was Alexander's teacher, Aristotle's ideas were a big part of "Hellenization." Mostly, though, it was the freedom to think and debate ideas that was such a boon to progress. Eventually, because competition of ideas was possible, the best ideas eventually won, resulting in progress.

Very soon after the conquest of the new lands, great centers of learning, not unlike Athens, began to spring up. They became great centers of learning for the same reason Athens had become a great center of learning – Greek (especially Aristotelian) philosophy. The best known of these centers of learning were the cities of Byzantium, Pergamum, and Alexandria. There were "Alexandrias" all over the Hellenized world, although today, the map will show you towns with names like "Iskander" or something like that. I'm talking about the Alexandria in Egypt.

These cities had temples that housed magnificent libraries and research institutes, the forerunners of today's universities, in their compounds. Scholars gathered in them from all over the world, inventing all kinds of things, making all sorts of discoveries, and studying mathematics, medicine, physics, astronomy, and, of course, philosophy.

The greatest library and research institute of all was in the compound of the Temple of the Muses in Alexandria (although some argue that the best was the Serapeum, another temple library in Alexandria). Whenever a traveler entered the city, any books he had with him were confiscated, taken to the Library on the temple grounds, and copied. The copies were returned to the owners, while the originals were kept in the temple library. It became the greatest collection of knowledge on the face of the earth.

Greek influence spread to all the peoples around the Mediterranean, including the Romans. The Romans are often unfairly thought of as boors, mainly because of the nasty "games" they adopted from their Etruscan neighbors’ funeral rites and enjoyed so much, and because of the persecutions of the early Christians. But they were awfully good at a lot of things. For example, they had the most liberal view of slavery in the ancient world. The means by which a free person could be made a slave were severely restricted, and the manumission of slaves was so frequent that it became limited by law (Roman slave owners got around that restriction with several informal forms of manumission which, although they didn’t carry the same legal weight as formal manumission, carried enormous moral authority). Gratuitous cruelty and excessive punishment of one’s slaves were socially unacceptable. Forms of punishment were legally limited early in the Empire. Sanctuary and automatic freedom were provided for sick and old slaves who were abandoned by their owners. Freed slaves of Roman citizens automatically became Roman citizens themselves, something unheard of elsewhere in antiquity, and freedmen often achieved great wealth, high office, and respect. In legal disputes involving questions about whether a person was slave or free, the law favored freedom. There were even romantic plays of the "Cinderella" type, where a girl was initially thought to be a slave, but later discovered to be a princess.

The Romans were excellent at things like the law, engineering, literature, military organization (they were the first to have physicians on the battlefield, for example, and military hospitals for their wounded), public health, general governance, and made significant advances in medicine and surgery.

Very importantly, they had a tremendous admiration for Greek culture, including Greek philosophy, which they went to great lengths to preserve. The Roman marketplaces were home to many vendors selling books, and the Romans were the first to establish a truly public library system. The works of Plato and Aristotle et al. were widely available in these libraries, as well as in private collections.

In the 4^th century C.E., when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, problems began cropping up for the pagans. The religions of the pagans were, of course, competing belief systems, and Christianity, while the official state religion, was still a minority belief system. Christians felt threatened by the continuing influence of the pagans. Before long, pagan temples were being destroyed, along with everything (including the libraries) in their compounds.

Plato, though, was one of the few pagans to be admired by the new religion. His two "realities" corresponded nicely with Christianity's view of earth (not very nice) and heaven (really nice). Plato's "imperfect" earthly inhabitants corresponded nicely with Christianity's views of a (sinful) humanity, while his "perfect person" corresponded nicely with God. In a sense, he was accorded almost “honorary Christian” status.

Its not difficult to see how easy it is to change Plato's explanation of how we form concepts into something that has a very religious feel to it, and somebody did just that. Plato's epistemological problem (epistemology is one of the five major branches of philosophy, the one that deals with how we acquire knowledge) was converted into a theological problem by a Roman philosopher named Plotinus, who lived in Alexandria in the 3^rd century C.E. He was strongly influenced by Hellenistic Judaism, and took the "two realities, perfect world," idea of Plato to a level very different from anything Plato himself had ever thought of. Instead of being a guess about how humans formed concepts, it became an extremely mystical vision of existence as an Infinite, Unknowable, Perfect Unity, from which Pure Intelligence was created; the souls of human beings were generated from this Pure Intelligence (although the product was imperfect). You can see the similarity between the two notions. There's more, but you get the picture, and I'd be willing to bet that this even sounds kind of familiar to a lot of people today.

The product of the evolution from Plato's epistemological problem to Plotinus' theological one was called "neoplatonism." “Platonism,” the pagan version, was based on a notion that reality was real, it just came in forms where one version of reality was more real than the one we live in. Neoplatonism, on the other hand, openly stated that there was a mystical place that was entirely different from our reality, and which lay outside of it.

Before long, Neoplatonism was even more popular around the Mediterranean than Plato's own original philosophy was.

Knowing this, it's not really all that hard to understand why it was, when the barbarians invaded the Western empire in the 5^th century C.E., the Christian clerics grabbed their books by Plato, Plotinus, and other neoplatonists, and headed for the hills to escape the terribly barbaric behavior of the barbarians. The fortified mountain monasteries that the monks built to protect themselves can still be seen to this day. Since they didn't think Aristotle's books were as valuable as Plato's and Plotinus' et al., very few of them were taken with them. The work of Aristotle that they did take were some of his work on logic (another of Aristotle’s inventions), and some medical texts.

The barbarians didn't care about books. They didn't hate what was in them and go around burning them or anything; they just didn't care. In their own societies, they had long believed that any time someone wrote something down, it could be used against people by the more malicious gods. This belief extended even to the use of proper names, so they acquired the habit of giving nicknames to use with people, so that the real name (and the person who had it) could be hidden from unfriendly gods.

So anyway, most of the books that were saved for Western posterity were the ones that the monks took with them. Since they didn't select much in the way of the works of Aristotle to save, and since the barbarians didn't care, Aristotle's works, being biologically degradable, essentially just vanished in the West, along with so much other knowledge of pagan origin. A few books from the pagan era made it past the barbarians, and were inadvertently saved by Christian clerics who recycled the pagan works by resurfacing them to write on again (writing material was very expensive). From time to time, we still discover some long-lost work unintentionally preserved in this way.

Meanwhile, back in 4^th century Byzantium, Christianity flourished. Pagans were becoming less and less welcome, and life could be pretty unpleasant for "idea-mongers" whose ideas competed with those of Christianity. The "idea-mongers" were the philosophers, of course. So when the formerly pagan Greek city of Byzantium became the Christian city of Constantinople, and the rest of the old pagan cities that had been Greek centers of learning became Christian too, the pagan philosophers left for areas where they felt less threatened. As in the remnants of the Western Empire, Plato was the exception to the "no pagans" sign that had been hung out.

The less threatening regions that the pagan philosophers emigrated to were the still largely pagan Arab lands of Mesopotamia, and non-Arab pagan Persia. There, once again, great centers of learning sprang up, and once again, they appeared for the same reason as first one had in Greek cities, then later in Byzantium, Pergamum, and Alexandria. That reason was Greek philosophy.

Among the most famous of these new centers of learning established under the influence of the Greek philosophers were Baghdad and Damascus in Mesopotamia, and the Persian city of Nisibis.

There, for about another three hundred plus years, Greek-style scholarship flourished. The pagan Arabs and Persians were intelligent, energetic, and curious, and the Greek way of thinking found fertile ground among their populations. By the time Islam took over in the 7^th century, there were well-established, intellectually active communities that had been thriving there for several hundred years, the Muslim bureaucrats were not yet actively opposed to learning, and scholarship continued to thrive in these areas for about another two and a half centuries, with a “tail-out” lasting somewhat longer.

The reason that the Muslim administrators didn't concern themselves with opposing scholarship is that Islam hadn't yet been codified and written down, so there was little in the way of anything the bureaucrats could refer to that condemned learning, scholarship, or even (gasp!) debate. The Islamic canonical texts, including the Koran, wouldn't be complete until sometime in the 9^th century, when Muslim clerics got together and decided what Islam was to "look like" from that time forward. It wasn’t a pretty picture, as we know all too well today.

The purpose of getting all that material down on paper was to establish just how the conquered peoples were to be kept in submission, and the rules that everyone was to follow. So, up until then, there wasn't too much of a problem with learning.

So, until then, real scholarly progress was made in these Arab and Persian sanctuaries of the Greek philosophers; very important contributions were made by Muslim scholars who had inherited the new centers of learning. It was a brilliant society, a true "Golden Age," full of invention, discussion, and the aforementioned debate. Competition in the realm of ideas was permitted, and little attention was paid to any sort of restriction on the intellect. Al-Kindi, a Muslim philosopher of the 9^th century who admired Aristotle, openly acknowledged the Muslims' debt to the pagan Greeks. He said that without the Greeks, it would have been impossible for the Muslims to have accomplished everything they had achieved, even if they had spent their entire lifetimes working as fast as possible and trying as hard as they could.

Islam is given unearned credit for many things. Even the famous "onion dome" that so characterizes the architecture of Muslims originated with the pagans and Christians, not the Muslims. The Romans had invented concrete, and built the first domes. Their domes were on a round base, which made the engineering problems less difficult than the one that confronted the architects of Constantinople. There, the Emperor Justinian wanted a dome on a square base for religious symbolic reasons, and that involved solving very complex engineering problems involving lateral forces on the walls supporting the dome. The problems were brilliantly solved with the construction of the Hagia Sophia, the "Church of the Holy Wisdom" in Constantinople, and the practice of building domes on holy structures was adopted in places as far away as Vienna and Moscow. When the Muslims conquered Constantinople, they incorporated the onion dome into so much of their architecture (including the famous Taj Mahal) that we tend to forget it was not their accomplishment.

It wasn't just in Mesopotamia and Persia where Aristotle and the other Greek philosophers were studied. Their works were carried to the westernmost reaches of the conquered lands, to Spain. There, in the 11^th century, a Spanish-born Muslim in Cordoba, named Ibn Rushd, became fascinated with Aristotle. There is some thought that his mother may have been a convert to Islam.

Ibn Rushd was a genius. He was an accomplished physician, jurist, and philosopher. He was utterly enchanted with Aristotle, and studied his works extensively. He wrote extensively about them too, so much so that he became famous for his writings about Aristotle. He was called "The Great Commentator" (the commentaries being about Aristotle and his philosophy, of course). Ibn Rushd wrote at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels, and it was thought that much of his work was aimed at students.

Shortly before his death (which may have been under suspicious circumstances), Ibn Rushd was denounced and banished, and his Muslim colleagues attempted to destroy his works. About a hundred years earlier, when Islam was codified and the Koran and Traditions had been written down, the clerics had maintained that all knowledge worth knowing had already been “revealed” to Mohammed by Allah, so they slammed the doors shut on any possibility of change or debate.

Ibn Rushd crossed that line. For example, he complained that Muslim progress was greatly impeded by its attitude towards women, who were treated like possessions and ornaments instead of being allowed to participate in productive work and intellectual activity. Ibn Rushd's support of women, as well of Aristotle's view of the human mind and of the importance of reason, of knowledge, were considered "un-Islamic." The mullahs knew this was a threat to their “frozen-in-time” policy, and punished Ibn Rushd for holding them.

Despite all this, Ibn Rushd was “rehabilitated” and when he died, he was properly credentialed to enter paradise.

About a hundred years before Ibn Rushd's death, another Muslim philosopher, al-Ghazali, was "credited" with being the original "founding father" of Islamic fundamentalism. Many consider him to be second in importance only to Muhammad in matters of Islamic thought. 

Al-Ghazali was born in Persia, where he was a well respected scholar, and was appointed to teach at Nizamiya University in Baghdad. The founding documents of Islam had already been completed and were well established, along with the restrictions they imposed on independent thinking. Still, there were still some scholars around at the time who didn't toe the line. Al-Ghazali was conflicted, and began to experience a period of intense religious doubt. He left his family to take a ten-year "leave of absence" to practice asceticism and meditate. By the time he came back, his doubts had vanished, and he dedicated his life to making the literal word of Islam stick.

He had a hard row to hoe. Al-Ghazali properly interpreted the works of the Greek philosophers and their Muslim followers as a dangerous influence that could lead all the way from serious doubt to heresy and even total disbelief with rejection of Islam, if people were allowed to think independently. The inhabitants of the region, from scholars to tribesmen, weren't particularly dedicated to the literal interpretation of the Koran and the prohibitions on knowledge that Al-Ghazali was promoting.

Now the war between reason and revelation began in earnest.

Al-Ghazali used just enough of Aristotle's invention of logic to make a book he wrote, called The Incoherence of the Philosophers, look really convincing. Actually, despite its disguise, it was an attack on everything Aristotle stood for. Aristotle had invented the art of definition, the dictionary, logic, the Law of Causality, the Law of Identity, etc., and had established that reason was the means by which human beings acquire knowledge. But pretty soon, under pressure from the growing influence of fundamentalism, the community of Arab scholars and philosophers who had routinely "thought outside the fundamentalist Islamic box" began to shrink, and finally they disappeared altogether. During this period of conflict between the rationalists and the fundamentalists, there was the Muslim version of the later Spanish Inquisition, called the “mihnah.” This was initially a tribunal of judges who screened candidates for office and jobs by imposing a religious “litmus test” on them, but which soon degenerated into a means whereby beliefs were imposed with coercion of all sorts, including torture. It was used by both sides, as favor teetered first to one side then the other.

Al-Ghazali's use of a hated invention of the hated Greek philosophers, logic, as a weapon against them, is quite reminiscent of the present day terrorists’ use of the hated philosophy and technology of the hated West as a weapon against them. It was a morally sanction tactic to use stolen ideas then, and it remains one now. 

The logic that Al-Ghazali stole (and distorted) from Aristotle went beyond its use as a weapon; while Al-Ghazali attacked all the Greek philosophers, including Plato, as "foreign enemies of Islam," he was nevertheless heavily influenced by the mystical beliefs of the neoplatonists. You wouldn't ever catch him acknowledging it though, even though the evidence exists to this very day.  

Remember, in those days, "philosophy" included the sciences, so scientific inquiry, along with everything else based on reason, was doomed under the influence of Al-Ghazali.   

By about one hundred years after Ibn Rushd's death, "ossification" of intellectual life in the Islamic world was well underway. In its rejection of Ibn Rushd and Aristotle, Islam lost an opportunity to continue to participate with the rest of the world in intellectual accomplishment. Instead, they lost their Greek-inspired "Golden Age," and sank into a "Dark Age" that has continued with fanatical persistence to this day. 

About the same time, in the 12^th century, the Christians began to push the Muslims out of Spain. Remember, Aristotle’s works had been brought to Spain by Muslim collectors, while the Europeans had all but forgotten that he even existed. Because of this, Europe experienced a "Dark Age" too.  

The Christians didn't rid Spain of the Muslims entirely until 1492, but for about three hundred years before that, during the long effort to recover their land from the invaders, they slowly regained territory. As a result, they also regained access to many of the formerly Muslim centers of learning. 

The Archbishop Raymundo of Toledo was so excited by what was found in the Muslim libraries of Spain that he founded a "translation center," and invited scholars of all backgrounds, disciplines, and religions to work there. To the great credit of his intellectual integrity, he didn't try to censor any of the material to fit his own beliefs. 

The extensive material included the works of Aristotle (and those of his Commentator, Ibn Rushd) that had survived the vicissitudes of time, including the efforts of the Muslim authorities to destroy them. Unfortunately, not everything had survived, but a lot of it had. Bits and pieces of Aristotle’s work had leaked into Italy to the university students there from time to time over a period of some years, but now, instead of fragmentary bits and pieces, whole treatises, including Ibn Rushd’s Commentaries, began to flood them. A school of "Averroists" (the Spanish name of Ibn Rushd was “Averroes”) was formed at the University of Padua, where his work on Aristotle breathed life into the empirical and inductive approach to the sciences. The light was shining in Europe again.

Since the thinking of the Church was so much more in tune with Plato and the neoplatonists than with Aristotle, this wave of Aristotelian influence made the Church quite uneasy. St. Thomas Aquinas, also a genius of the first order, stepped up to the plate. He was a neoplatonist himself, but he tried to reconcile the works of Aristotle (whom he admired despite his neoplatonism) with the beliefs of the Church (there are those who believe that Aquinas, although publicly a dedicated neoplatonist, may have been something of a “closet Aristotelian.”).

Ultimately, Acquinas’ mission to reconcile neoplatonism and Aristotelianism failed. The argument that the two philosophers had in their lifetimes was no more amenable to reconciliation in Aquinas' time than it had been in the time of Plato and Aristotle themselves. The fundamental ideas -- one reality vs. two, competent minds vs. incompetent minds, a benevolent universe vs. a fearful one, totalitarian rule by elites vs. self-management of one’s life etc. -- were mutually exclusive, and even St. Thomas couldn't pull off the “miracle” of reconciling these opposing views.  

Although St. Thomas ultimately failed in his attempt to reconcile Aristotle and the Church, his efforts had a huge effect on the Italian students. You know how university students get when they're excited.  Aristotle, once lost to the West, was now available to them on a widespread basis, and in Latin, no less! Just as had happened in Athens, Byzantium, Pergamum, Alexandria, Baghdad, Damascus, Nisibis, Cordoba, Toledo, etc., Aristotelian thinking invigorated the intellectual life first of Italy, and then of the rest of Europe, in a way that hadn't been seen for a thousand years. It was the beginning of a period of thunderous philosophic growth and intellectual progress that resulted in another great paradigm shift - from malaise, dysphoria, and intellectual stagnation, to enthusiasm, hope, and intellectual growth.  

The path back into the light wasn't without its rough spots; even Socrates, Plato's teacher, had been condemned to death for "rocking the boat," and many thinkers who did the same in the West were cruelly oppressed. The neoplatonists weren't gone, either, and they continued to have a strong say, especially in Continental Europe. But the djinn was out of the bottle, and the Renaissance, followed by the Enlightenment, then by the Industrial Revolution, and then by the Age of Information, could not be put back in.

A chain of philosophers and philosophically sophisticated thinkers from Aristotle to Ibn Rushd to Thomas Aquinas to Locke to Madison and Jefferson, changed the world forever; it led to a burst of creativity, confidence, prosperity, and respect for human nature that had been unprecedented in human history. 

But Plato continued to exert a strong influence in Europe too. His philosophic and intellectual descendents included Kant, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Hitler, and much of the philosophy of the 20th century.  

Meanwhile, back in the Middle East, the Fundamentalists had won, mainly by using the same violence that had been so instrumental in their successful territorial conquests up to that time. The Koran and other founding documents of Islam were fast becoming the constitution of the conquered lands.

A "constitution" describes the relationship between an organization and its membership, so the Koran, which the Fundamentalists insisted was the unquestioned and literal word of Allah, was law. The body of law derived from the Koran was called “sharia.”

The intellectual windows had been closed. No deviation from the sacred documents was permitted. No questions about Islam were tolerated. The religious authorities were in total control of every aspect of the lives of the individual human beings within their sphere of influence.  The "Golden Age" was gone; Muslims had become "conservatives" in the worst sense of the word. Plato's "totalitarian elite" was firmly in charge. 

"To conserve" means "to keep something the same, to prevent change." That's fine, if you have something great to begin with, like the Portland vase, the works of Shakespeare, a magnificent breed of horses, the music of Vivaldi, or a wonderful family recipe, and you want to preserve it. But if it involves the freezing of knowledge, that is a BIG problem. And that's what Islam did. All five branches of the Koranic philosophy -- ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, esthetics, and politics -- were frozen in time, in the 9^th century, no less, and what’s even worse, they were frozen in the context of its primitive desert tribal mentality. 

Islamic ethics wasn't based on life; it was based on death.  Its epistemology wasn't based on reason; it was based on revelation.  Its metaphysics didn't regard the universe as a benign place, but rather, as a place of fear and uncertainty.  It's art wasn’t free to express anything that valued life; it was restricted it to the portrayal of the non-living, and prevented any non-verbal expression of potentially threatening values from sneaking in. Its politics wasn't founded on the protection of individual rights, but on absolute totalitarianism. 

There, in a nutshell, you have the contrast and comparison of Aristotelian philosophy with the neoplatonist-tainted tribal philosophy of Islam; Islamic philosophy has not changed over time. There, you have the explanation for the differences in the directions taken by the West, especially Britain and the English-speaking world.

The differences between Islam and the West are particularly strong in the United States and the English-speaking world. The pre-eminent philosophers of the Enlightenment were British, and not unlike Alexander the Great, who spread Greek philosophy to the lands he conquered, the values of the British Enlightenment were spread with the expansion of the British Empire.

There were a few contributors to the Enlightenment on the Continent – people like France’s Voltaire – but relatively speaking, they were few and far between, and ultimately had less influence on the course of history there. 

So we (mostly) went along with Aristotle. Continental Europe (mostly) went along with a mix of a lot of Plato and some Aristotle. Islam (mostly) went along with the thinking of the original desert tribes, flavored with a sprinkling of Plato via the neoplatonists.   

These are significant value differences indeed! Not only do they keep Islam worlds apart from us, they explain why we have been the most resistant to the current attempt by Islam to establish a worldwide caliphate. Continental Europe, which is not as intellectually well armed with Enlightenment thinking as the English-speaking world is, is rapidly succumbing to the Islamic invasion. 

Now, given that the human mind, because of the way it is constructed, "wants to know," how on earth do you achieve the process of "freezing knowledge?" Aristotle had argued that it was the very nature of human beings to be curious, to investigate, to innovate - in short, to bring about and participate in change as knowledge increased. Its just what human brains DO. Hearts beat and pump blood, while brains think and learn. 

Except, the Muslim clerics insist, in the Islamic world. Remember, the "sacred documents" of Islam had been completed, and according to the clerics who had done the work, all knowledge worth knowing had been "revealed" to Muhammad, so in the Islamic world, new knowledge is not only not needed, it is a threat to the very existence of Islam, and is therefore evil. 

If it is in the nature of the human mind to pursue knowledge, just how is it possible to prevent it? 

It’s not easy, since you are "swimming upstream" with respect to the nature of the human mind. You have to have total control of every aspect of thought and behavior. You perform that nasty little trick by declaring anything you deem dangerous to the status quo to be immoral. 

A "moral code" is a set of values chosen to guide your thoughts and behaviors. So you proclaim thinking, which leads to questions, which lead to knowledge, which lead to change, to be immoral.   

If you can pull it off, declaring thinking to be immoral actually works. That's because there is virtually no human being on the face of the planet who has an intact mind who can tolerate the notion that he might be "immoral." It's bad enough when we think we've committed an error of knowledge or judgment, or made an honest mistake, but it's a whole lot worse when we think we've done something immoral. That's why, when we think we've really done something immoral, we feel rotten; we try to deny awareness of it by making excuses or pretending it's the other guy's fault. If we know we've been immoral and can't hide it from ourselves, we try to expiate our guilt by confessing and making amends. This goes on all the time, because to feel immoral is as intolerable as experiencing intense pain, nausea, or depression. People will do almost anything to avoid feeling immoral.

So, if you want to keep things from changing, you outlaw intellectual inquiry. You prohibit questions; you prohibit innovation; and you impose certain highly prescribed behaviors. If you deviate, if you rock the boat, if you change, you are pronounced immoral. And of course, since immorality is a bad  thing, you will be punished. But since thinking is in the nature of humans to do, when it is outlawed, they become frustrated, they do not progress, and life becomes is miserable. Just as it is really uncomfortable for us to experience limitations in the function of the heart, it is really uncomfortable for us to experience limitations in the function of the mind.  

Of course, if you comply and manage to live with the frustration and misery, there is the promise of complete happiness after death. That's one of the reasons that Muslims who practice the purest form of Islam claim not to fear death, and in fact why some live only in order to achieve death. How much worse can death be than life? It's their only escape from the misery and frustration of a miserable, frustrating, life on this earth. 

Remember the definition of a moral code? It's a set of values chosen to guide our thoughts and behaviors. "Chosen" is the operative term. Not all people have the same moral code, because not all people have the same values.

Most of us in the West, and in many other parts of the world, have at least some recognition that the "standard of the good" by which we judge the value of things is human life. We judge those things which tend to support life as "good," and those things that tend to threaten it as "bad."

But Islam didn't choose life as its "standard of the good." It chose the “spread of Islam” as its “standard of the good.” Any thinking or behavior that supports the spread of Islam, up to and including murder and mayhem, are “good,” while anything that obstructs it is “bad.”

"Aha," I hear you ask. "It can't be so bad to forbid questions if they are restricted just to religion itself, can it? After all, it doesn't have to affect our daily lives to insist that just the religion itself remain immune to questioning, can it?" 

If the religion itself is not a legally binding constitution, then different parts of it can be selectively applied to different aspects of one's life without major interference with the ways we prefer to live. The Amish are an example. In fact, it is precisely such selections and applications that have given rise to a variety of different religions, and sects within religions. Different people see different aspects of a particular belief system as supportive of the kind of life they want to lead, so they select what they like and create another belief system that incorporates just those aspects they see as desirable.

That's what happened with the Reformation and the rise of many other Protestant sects; it’s how  Reformed Judaism came into being, as well as the numerous other sects of numerous other religions. Even the Roman Catholics, among the most conservative of Christian religions, has experienced variations in belief.

Such change is a sort of means of "updating" a religion to comply with the requirements of changing circumstances. But for these differences to be possible, there has to be freedom to think and change, there has to be competition permitted in the realm of ideas; where a religion is both rigid and legally binding, the rigidity is enforced by law, so the freedom to change doesn't exist. Attempts have been made by some within Islam to have some variety, but violence against them has been an ongoing policy for 1400 years, ever since the quibble between the Shia and the Sunni about who should succeed Mohammed. It goes on in the streets of Iraq to this day. 

The entire body of Islamic belief applies to every aspect of one’s life, and it has a profound effect on the quality of life of Muslims. Here are some everyday examples of ways the Islamic prohibition against thinking, knowledge, and change affects Muslims:  

1) In the Muslim world, the illiteracy rate, depending on your source, is between 50% and 80%.  

2) In Europe, the number of books per person is ten times greater than the number of books per person in the Muslim Middle East and Africa combined.  

3) The number of books translated into Arabic in the last ONE THOUSAND (1000) years is equal to the number of books translated into Spanish alone in ONE (1) year. 

4) Between 1980 and 1999, the number of patents from Arab countries registered in the United States was 370. During that same period, the number of patents from South Korea alone was 16,328.  

5) At Google headquarters in Silicon Valley, there is a large map with lights that show the number of searches going on at any particular moment. The whole world is bright, except for the region stretching from Morocco to the border of India, where it is almost dark. 

6) In the Arab world, the number of computers per 1000 people is 18; the number of computers per person world wide, including poor nations, is 78 per 1000. 

7) When the "outsourcing" of hi-tech jobs were discussed at a meeting in Davos, Switzerland, countries as diverse as India, China, Mexico, and Ireland were mentioned. Countries in the Arab world are not considered, because they don't have the infrastructure or the educational level to support such work.

8) The Nobel Prize has been awarded, at the time of this writing, to 116 individuals and groups (many of whom have been the hated Jews). Of these, only 8 have been Muslims, despite their claim that of the approximately six billion people in the world, Muslims comprise two billion. You do the math.

9) The Fields Prize (often called the “Nobel Prize of mathematics”) began to be awarded in 1936, and is given every four years to outstanding mathematicians under the age of 40. So far, 48 awards have been given, representing Australia, Belgium, China, Finland, France, (West) Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Russia/USSR, Sweden, the UK and the USA. There is not a single Muslim in the bunch.

In short, Islam, with its pronounced antipathy for change, is the most profoundly, ferociously, and viciously anti-intellectual, anti-knowledge, anti-reason philosophy in the world. As a result, the minds of its followers are in an intellectual high-security prison. They can't think, ask questions, or pursue insights, for fear of being declared immoral and punished as such. 

Muslims are caught between a rock and a hard place; they can't accept the responsibility for their own failure to progress, because to do so would necessarily call into question what the real reason for their failure is. It would point the finger of blame straight at Islam and its hatred of change and the knowledge that drives change. To point that finger is an action fraught with danger. Yet, they want to have what so many of the rest of us have.- but, as the old saying goes, “If you like what you’re getting, keep doing what you’re doing.”  There’s not much of a chance of doing anything different in a mummified society like that! 

Unable to examine the real source of their unhappiness for fear of being called "immoral," they use a classical psychological defense mechanism to protect themselves against mental anguish. Instead of accepting the responsibility themselves for their failure to progress, they adopt the role of "professional victim.” Conspiracy theories abound about how the Jews and their Christian puppets put obstacles in the way of their progress. In fact, the most popular book in the Islamic world, after the Koran, is “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a hoax written in the now deceased Soviet Union in an attempt to point the finger for their own failure at the Jews.

The attempt by Muslims to avoid feeling immoral about their failures is a major reason why we see so much whining and complaining by Islam, and their insistence that the West is “oppressing” Muslims and “preventing” them from making progress.

Up to the time of the Industrial Revolution beginning in the late 1600s, the Muslims had been successful in their imperialist expansionist ambitions. Success in warfare was the major source of their distorted version of what constitutes “self-esteem.”

Up to that time, militarily, the “playing field” had been more or less level, and so they could point to their success in conquests as a source of pride, even as evidence of “cultural superiority.”

However, with the Industrial Revolution, with its foundation solidly in the Enlightenment, the West surged ahead; Muslim expansionism ground to a halt and began to fray at the edges; both the intellectual and material achievements of the West completely outclassed anything that the Islamic world could point to, present or past.

Even today, with the mass communication of ideas available, Islam’s stultifying moral prohibition against independent thinking prevails in the majority of the population – and so does its failures.

In the early part of the Iraq war, it was seen that we and the rest of the Western nations weren’t faring well in opinion polls in Islamic nations. Advertising companies were asked to see what might be done about our image, and to see how we could “win their hearts and minds.” Brief educational campaigns were designed, and focus groups were formed in Islamic countries like Egypt. The participants were asked to respond to some points being made in the ads. Questions involved freedom, prosperity, and the like. Were these the kinds of things that Muslims wanted? The members of the focus groups responded affirmatively. When asked what was needed  for Muslims to benefit from these things, they consistently said that the Jews would have to go first, that nothing could be achieved by Muslims until the Jews were gone.

So, Instead of pointing their fingers at Islam, they point their fingers at those who have changed, who have progressed, and they project the blame onto them. "They oppress us," they cry, "that’s why we are prevented from progressing." "They are the enemy," they insist, "because they oppress us."  "The only way for us to succeed is to rid ourselves of the Infidel through conversion or death.  That way, we will no longer be oppressed!"

As a result of its paranoia, Islam is the most vigorous producer of “conspiracy theories” of any community on earth. It creates these “theories” in order to explain and excuse their lack of achievement, while at the same time allowing them to escape awareness of their own responsibility for their failure.

Of course, that does not succeed in providing them with relief from their frustration, misery and anger. Even if they rid the planet of every last non-Muslim, as they wish to do, all they would accomplish would be to destroy reminders of what they might have become. They would still be miserable and frustrated, and they would still make an effort to discharge their misery and frustration through violence against others, including Muslims, just as they are doing today in Iraq.

However, change happens. That's just the way reality is, and if Islam does not change, it will face extinction. The same thing has happened to others of our kind who could not or would not adapt; for example, the Vikings settled Greenland during a time when the climate was reasonably mild, and they did well. However, with the advent of the “Little Ice Age,” they refused to change, even though they had the example of the Inuit, who had thrived in Greenland for centuries. The Vikings would not change the way they dressed, the way they sheltered themselves, the way they hunted, or what they ate, and when ships were no longer able to reach Greenland with supplies from the homeland, they died out, leaving only archeological remains. 

For many of us in the United States and in other parts of the world, the statement that the "standard of the good" by which all other values are measured is life does not seem strange. 

It does seem strange in the Islamic world though, where life of the individual is not a value, and where many are actively encouraged to seek death, not only of others, but of themselves, through martyrdom. 

It’s of use here to understand how Islam was created. Very briefly, here’s how it happened:

Early in his life, Mohammed actually admired the spiritual qualities of the religions of the Jews and Christians of the Eastern Mediterranean, whom he had encountered on trade missions with his uncle. After he experienced his famous “vision” and “night voyage” to Jerusalem (it was the “night voyage” that forms the basis for today’s Islamic claim to ownership of Jerusalem), both of which were, in my opinion, the products of a sleep disorder known as “sleep paralysis,” he formulated Islam and began to proselytize. As time passed, he grew frustrated that people did not more readily accept his views, and began to use force to “persuade” them. Among the most obstinate resisters to conversion were the Jewish tribes of Arabia, and before long, he was engaged in active warfare against them and against Jews and their religious offspring, the Christians.

Like everyone else in the world, past and present, he wanted the stamp of moral approval placed on his actions. What better way to do that than by creating for his new religion the kind of moral code that would do precisely that - morally justify whatever it was he wanted? And that was exactly what he did. As time passed, he began to have convenient “revelations” from Allah that granted him “permission” to do anything he wanted, some of which was permitted to him alone, and not allowed to his followers.  

The spread of Islam was costly; early on, he financed much of his project by confiscating a profitable business venture which had been established by his great, great, great grandfather Qusayy. The business catered to the needs for food, shelter and souvenirs of the still pagan Arabs who came to Mecca to engage in a variety of religious rituals. Other relatives had inherited the business, but Mohammed wanted it, so he took it over. Later, war on wealthy societies – a bigger, better organized, and deadlier version of the common practice of desert tribesmen of acquiring riches by raiding each other - became a major means of acquiring riches. 

There really wasn’t very much that was "new" about the new religion. It was formed by banning all gods but one in the large pantheon of pagan gods. He was the moon god, whose proper name was "Allah." Even the banning of all gods but Allah wasn’t new; his cousin Khadijah, who became his first wife, belonged to a religious group called the “Hanif.” The Hanif had been established not long before the time of Mohammed’s birth, and by the time Mohammed had his first sleep paralysis experience, the famous first “vision” that started it all, he was very familiar with the notion of a single god and all the major features of Judaism and Christianity. After his initial “vision,” he even consulted with his wife’s Christian relatives.

Most of the important traditions of the pre-Islamic pagan rituals and rites were retained; for example, the crescent moon, the special symbol of the moon god Allah, was retained, as was the habit of praying multiple times a day while bowing on the floor facing Mecca, and the habit of circling around the Kaaba, which housed a “sacred” black stone (probably a meteorite - scientific examination is not permitted, of course). Ramadan, a major festival among the pagans, was kept. Even the so-called “pillars” of the Islamic faith, which are certain acts that are to be accomplished regularly, harken back to the pagan era. At that time, pillars were literally placed in the earth to designate a sacred area.  

To flesh out the "new" religion and give it a fresh look, he took elements from both Judaism and Christianity, put them all together, incorporated them into selected portions of existing pagan religions, and called the concoction "Islam." Some of the Jewish and Christian figures that were included in Mohammed’s new religion included Gabriel, Moses, Jesus, and Mary.

To top it off, every time he wanted something, he conveniently had a "revelation" from Allah, who always seemed to give him the "moral go-ahead" to do whatever he wanted. Many years after his death, these “revelations,” quotes, and sayings were gathered up and written down as the Koran and the Traditions. The material had been written down on all sorts of things – leaves, sheep skin, and so forth, and stored for many years in a box, in no particular order. They were not written down by Mohammed himself, since he didn’t know how to read or write.

Moral approval was granted by Allah the moon god for just about anything that Mohammed wanted. Most of all, he wanted to promote the spread of his new religion, so anything that furthered this cause was sanctioned, even if included murder and mayhem. His methods, and their moral justification, continue to this day. Remember, Islam doesn’t like change.

It uses all the tried and true methods, such as the traditional practice of sawing off the heads of individuals whose only crime is not to be a Muslim, along with newer methods, such as blowing up school buses,  flying planes into buildings and killing thousands,   imprisoning diplomats in their embassies, and so on, and on, and on. It hasn't stopped for over 1400 years, and it isn't going to stop any time soon.

The limiting factor on their violence isn't some sudden change in the view that maybe some of the things they have been doing to spread Islam may be morally wrong, it is money. The only that Islam has been at peace with the infidel has been when there was insufficient money to carry out jihad. During the earlier part of the Industrial Revolution, we produced enough energy with coal, oil, and hydroelectric power to serve all our energy needs. When Western scientists discovered oil in Arabia and other parts of the Middle East, we developed it, paid the Arabs for it, and used it for even greater productivity. The Muslims soon seized the wells and nationalized the companies. That’s when the Big Bucks started rolling in, and that’s one of the major means that jihad is being financed now.  

In objective terms, it can be demonstrated that much of what the moon god Allah gives his moral approval to is morally invalid. Blowing up a school bus full of innocent children serves as an example. How is that morally justified? Well, you just maintain that no one who is an infidel is “innocent,” including children on a school bus. See how easy it is?

If Islam were to be stripped of all those aspects of its tenets that were inconsistent with life as the standard of the good, we would barely be able to recognize it. However, if it were stripped of all of those morally invalid values, all of us could live in peace with each other. 

Unfortunately, that kind of change would be unacceptable to the present crop of imams, mullahs, ayatollahs, etc. Competition in the realm of ideas cannot be tolerated; the threat from all of us who are Aristotle's descendants must be silenced. All the evidence of what can happen when human beings are free to think, as they are in the United States, must be eliminated.  If the elimination is not successfully accomplished, the Islam we are familiar with will, indeed, be altered right out of existence. If they fail to destroy all of us and every vestige of what we have done, our continued example will erode and eventually destroy their power base. 

Already, many Muslims who wish to be selective about which aspects of Islam they want to incorporate into their lives live in fear. Some must even live in hiding, because "fatwas," which in these cases are sort of religiously sanctioned "hunting permits," have been issued against them. Many dissenters have died, murdered under the guise of a moral commandment of Islam. 

We are at war, but this war is not a war against primitives who engage in pagan throat-slitting rituals, kill indiscriminately with improvised explosive devices, commit genocide with chemical weapons, or kill school children aboard their school buses. It's a war where the most important weapon of all is philosophy.  

It is the "Clash of the Titans" -- Aristotle and Plato. It is the clash between life and death; between reason and revelation; between a benign universe and a capricious one; between individual rights and totalitarianism; between the glorification of life and its prohibition. 

Aristotle and his heirs are the greatest threat ever faced by Islam. The Muslims knew it when they saw Aristotelian thinking at work in Mesopotamia and Persia, and they know it today. It is for this reason that they have carried out unceasing conflicts with non-Muslims, most of whom are at least "tainted" with Aristotelian thinking, from the very moment of the conception of Islam right to the present day. The threat Islam feels from Aristotle and reason is very much like the threat Herod felt when he heard that a baby had been born that would take his place as king, and the response is much the same – kill them all.  

Unfortunately, far too few of us know it. Until and unless we finally recognize the importance of philosophy, the lights on the map at Google may well go out, not just across the Arab world, but all over the entire world, in a paradigm shift that we will regret for many generations.  

Why don't we know it? It's the story of the American system of education -  a story for another day. 

"Resistance is futile," chant the little Units in the schools in the Borg that is Islam, swaying back and forth as their minds are slowly killed by Muslims who are terrified of reason, and all that it subsumes.