Fundamental Ideas Needed to Turn Normal People into Muslims 
(A 6-Part Series)

Part I:  Introduction and Metaphysics

 
Introduction

 
Islam and war have always been inseparable and indivisible.  Islam's history is one of conflict.  These days, almost all global hotspots involve Islamists "acting out" pure Islam.
 
Islamic bellicosity comes from its content, its basic principles.  The rot starts at its very roots and works itself into all of the rest of Islam.
 
In sum, Islam is a war on philosophy:
 
* War on reality (metaphysics)
* War on reason and the human mind (epistemology)
* War on the self (ethics)
* War on human freedom (politics)
* War on life itself (esthetics)
 
The terms in parentheses are the names of the five major branches of philosophy.  "Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of mans relationship to existence.  As against the special sciences, which deal only with particular aspects, philosophy deals with those aspects of the universe which pertain to everything that exists.  In the realm of cognition, the special sciences are the trees, but philosophy is the soil which makes the forest possible."  [See Ayn Rand's, Philosophy:  Who Needs It, Signet Books, 1982.]  (Emphasis is mine).  In short, when one assails philosophy as Islam does, there can be no more fundamental attack, with no more devastating consequences.
       
Islam's 1400 year existence convinces many Muslims that Islam is superior and is winning its goal of conquering the world.  There are easily understood reasons why Islam has endured and why it is attractive to some people these days and why it is currently so active in the world.  These will be dealt with later on.
 
Islam, however, is not winning.  It is in the fight for its life.  It faces extinction, and Islamists know it.  But, few of them -- or us -- know the real reason why Islam is starting to fail, and will fail completely in time.  It comes down to a very simple principle:  No one can make war on reality indefinitely.  Anyone warring against reality may win battles, but cannot win the war.  Reality always wins in the end.
 
If we get into the basic roots of Islam, we can see what makes it "tick," so to speak, as well as contrasting it with Americas philosophy as it operates in ordinary Americans and use our knowledge to accelerate Islam's demise.  Some technical terms must be used, but they will be used sparingly here and there.  A few must be defined and clarified in the interest of understanding.
 
Philosophy can and must be understood by the average citizen, because it is so vital to the life of each and every one of us.  Philosophy has five major branches, all of which can be studied independently, but which are integrated in real life.
 
The five branches of philosophy are:
 
* Metaphysics:  This is the most fundamental branch of the five.  It deals with the most basic laws that govern reality, i.e., absolutely everything that exists.  For example, physics, which is the science which studies matter, depends on the basic principles and facts of metaphysics; but, metaphysics, which is much more basic than physics, does not depend in any way on physics.
* Epistemology:  Epistemology studies what constitutes knowledge and how people acquire knowledge.
* Ethics:  Everyone has some acquaintance with ethics, i.e., the principles of right and wrong, good and evil.  Ethics is the evaluative branch of philosophy and depends on metaphysics and epistemology.
* Politics:  Politics concerns how individuals should live together in a society.  Politics is ethics applied to social behavior.
* Esthetics:  This branch deals with beauty (art), a crucial factor in human existence, and depends on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
 
These are snap-shot descriptions.  They should become much clearer as this multi-part set of articles wends its way through each branch as each pertains to Islam.

 
Root Rot (Part 1, Metaphysics)

 
Everything starts somewhere.  Certain facts are so basic that they underlie absolutely everything.  They are so basic that they cannot be avoided or refuted.  In fact, one has to use them while trying to refute them.  Philosophers call these basic facts and principles metaphysics, and metaphysics is the most basic branch of philosophy.
 
To get the "flavor" of Islamic metaphysics, it helps to note that Islam condemns life on earth and enjoyment of life on earth.  It denies pleasure, joy, and happiness during life, but provides them to those who make it into Islamic Heaven or Paradise.  Islam values the afterlife and the death needed to reach the afterlife.  Islam replaces this world, the one people perceive directly, with another world, one they do not know and cannot know.
 
If you ask people at random what reality is, people will look around and point out, with great sweeps of the arms, all of the "thises" and "thats" which are readily obvious.  Reality is this, they point out.  Ask them if they can provide any evidence for any other reality, and they may try but really cannot.
 
Islamists claim that reality is Allah, who is their god, and Allah is the source of all that exists and all that happens.  Any Muslims raison d'etre is service to Allah on earth and joining Allah at death.  In fact, the highest form of living is warring on behalf of Allah, i.e., Jihad, and dying in the process as a martyr, shahid.
 
Human beings, according to Islam, were created solely to worship and work for Allah.  However, human life and fate have been pre-determined by Allah, while each person is in utero.  One may not change ones course of life or fate; the best one may do is to accept ones pre-determined fate with grace.
 
According to Islam, Allah exists in an unknowable state, having created the universe and its contents, and determined all actions in the universe.  Allah has extraordinary qualities of omniscience, omnipotence, infallibility, and being all good.  Islam owes this part of its metaphysics to Platonic and Neo-Platonic influences.
 
The practical effect of this mystical metaphysics comes from the fact that it separates Muslims from reality.  What Muslims perceive, Islam disvalues.  Non-life, Heaven, Hell, and Allah and his qualities are what Islam values.
 
Islamic "reality" is populated by unknowable spirits, who create a nightmare universe, starting with the chief spirit, Allah.  Allah employs angels and jinni.  The Jinni create pain and suffering in human lives.  Lurking about is the evil eye also, just to keep Muslims paranoid, I suppose.  Lastly, there is the chief baddie, Satan, also known in Arabic as "Iblis."  Guess who runs Hell?  Is it Satan?  No, it is Allah himself!  Allah personally manages Hell, and he rises to his creative excellence in the numbers and varieties of Hells punishments he can inflict on mankind.
 
It is worth noting that Allah, the jinni, and the evil eye come from pagan sources.  Iblis and angels come from pagan as well as Christian and Jewish sources.  These spirits were imported whole cloth into Islam by a superstitious Muhammad.  Allah was a moon god who lived in the black meteorite in the Kaaba and was one of 360 pre-Islamic gods.
 
In all things, Allah acts by whim, to do or to undo anything, at anytime, independent of human understanding, wishes, prayers, or desires.  Allah wants doubters and apostates of Islam killed by decapitation.  Allah demands full obedience by Muslims, or He will punish them severely.  Threats, punishments, Hell, Fire, and torture consume Allah's attention, and create the mood of Islam for Muslims.
 
The Islamic world is malevolent, and it is filled with fear and terror.  It is run by unknowable spirits who can make anything happen to anything at any time.  Nothing is stable.  Nothing is predictable.  Surprise horrors can come unsummoned.  Any deviation from obedience to Allah by deed, by thought, or even by desire or dream merits severe punishments.  If you are illiterate and ignorant, as most Muslims are, the Islamic world runs rife with bizarre and unpredictable identities and events.  Such a universe creates chronic, inner terror.
 
Contrast this view of Islamic metaphysics with a truly reality-based metaphysics.  Technically, this is called the primacy of existence metaphysics.  In this real reality, identities are inherent in each thing and things are caused by the entities acting only as their identities or natures allow, not by some spirits whim.  The primacy of existence metaphysics means that reality, existence, i.e., all of the universe, reigns supreme over any entity's desires, whims, wishes, will, etc., i.e.., consciousness.  Reality is first, last, and always.  Reality is everything, and it is all there is it is the universe.  There is nothing outside the universe.  There is nothing which is unknowable or omnipotent or omniscient or infallible or all good.  What is, exists, and if it exists, it has some specific identity.  Nothing that exists is without identity, without a specific nature; as Ayn Rand stated, "To be is to be something specific."  If it has an identity, it can do only those actions which its nature permits.
 
America is a culture based on a primacy of existence metaphysics, which, of course, includes mans nature.  America fulfills Aristotle's famous dictum:  A is A, which was his way of expressing the metaphysical Law of Identity.  Sir Francis Bacon, hundreds of years ago, made the statement:  "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."  Capitalist America and Americans have followed Bacon's law better than anyone.  Contrast America to Islam, to any of Islam.
 
Islam has a very different metaphysics.  Islam takes Aristotle and twists his saying into something like, A is not necessarily A; it can be whatever, whenever.  For Islam, existence is not stable.  Identities shift worse than sand dunes; they are like lava lamp contents.  The only consciousness that counts is that of Allah, which accounts for absolutely all of everything.  Technically, this is called the primacy of consciousness metaphysics.
 
Allah is unknowable, has no identity, and has qualities which are mutually contradictory as well as internally contradictory.  Islam creates a nightmare universe which succeeds beautifully in instilling metaphysical terror in Muslims.  That is its goal.
 
Such metaphysical terror serves the important purpose of paralyzing Muslims minds in order to make them tractable.  The purpose of Islam is to rule mankind.  First, mankind needs to be made rule-able.  Islam starts by rendering man's ties to reality useless to him.  Only then will men shift conscious control over themselves to something outside themselves.
 
But, Islam has just begun.  It shakes man's certainty by shaking his reliance on reality.  This step is necessary, but it is not sufficient.  What must be done next is to destroy is only tool of survival:  his mind.  Islam attacks man's mind by means of its epistemology, which we will cover next.
 
[Any short article, such as this, which deals with such a complex subject as the metaphysics of Islam must leave out a number of points.  In addition, many arguments for Allah, such as First Cause, and elaborations of Allah's extra-ordinary qualities must be saved for more detailed presentations.  The single best recommendation for further reading is Leonard Peikoff's, Objectivism:  The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Meridian Books, 1991.]

Broken Tools (Part 2, Epistemology)

 
The principles underlying Islam are only the beginning of the process of creating Muslim robots out of normal humans. 
 
In  Root Rot , we showed how Islam substitutes Allah's nightmare universe for the normal one that any Muslim can look around and see, touch, smell, taste, and hear in short, experience directly on his own skin.  This step is necessary, but it is not sufficient; it is just a beginning.  To make Muslims truly tractable, Islam must take over Muslims' (human) means of survival their minds, the greatest of all threats to Islam.  To achieve this, Islam attacks knowledge and the means by which it is acquired.
 
Those things which constitute knowledge and how it is acquired make up the second branch of philosophy, which is known as "epistemology."  In the real world, knowledge is solely a product of human consciousness, and it always begins with sensory input.
 
By contrast, Islam asserts that knowledge comes from Allah by revelation, a claim which bypasses every human means of acquiring knowledge and understanding.  Revealed "knowledge" arrives by some unknown and some unknowable means.  As a result, no human brain can make sense of revelation.  Revelation bypasses reality.
 
Revelation requires faith, which requires acceptance of that for which there is no evidence or proof.  Faith and reason are opposites.  Islamists cover their behinds by saying that such faith illustrates the mysterious and wonderful ways that Allah works.
 
Most Muslims are brainwashed by Islam during childhood in order to derail normal childhood mental development.  Normally, babies deal first in early life with metaphysics:  What is, what is not; object constancy; etc.  As they acquire language, their emphasis shifts to learning.  They love asking and getting the answer to "What is this?"  They identify everything.
 
Their knowledge starts with data from the world, including themselves, taken in through their senses.  When mature enough, children create concepts, i.e., information, out of the data they take in.  As they get older, they increase the complexity of concepts, thus increasing their knowledge.  Their minds use processes summed up under the term "reason," which is the exclusively human means of acquiring and using knowledge.
 
Since philosophy was first systematized by Plato and Aristotle, there have been two radically different approaches to knowledge.  Aristotle's has been correct, but Plato's has been the more influential throughout history.  Aristotle started with humans born without innate knowledge.  To gain knowledge, humans explore the real world, gather sensory input, and turn data into information or knowledge.
 
The other approach came from Plato.  To Plato, all knowing was fundamentally a process of "remembering."  I.e., humans are born knowing, but not knowing that they know.  People undergo a life-long process of "remembering."  Knowledge itself exists in another, unknowable world (a world of forms, he said).  As nuts as that is, it greatly influenced Islam.  Islam's variation was that all knowledge came from the other world by revelation from Allah to a human prophet, Muhammad, who then passed it on to other humans.
 
Islam's greatest enemy is the unfettered human mind.  Such minds inquire, deliberate, debate, compare, doubt, and validate, among many other mental operations in short, they reason, i.e., correctly identifying and integrating input from the senses.  All operations of reason threaten Islam.  So flimsy are Islam's structure and content that inquisitive minds can quickly cause it to collapse.  Nobody feels that more than Islamists, and exposing Islam was a favorite sport of free-thinkers in early Islamia.  Thus, Islamists have dedicated themselves to undercutting the human mind in their fellows.
 
Recall that Islamic metaphysics start by devaluing reality and valuing unreality.  In that unreality are Allah and other unseen spirits, who create a controlling, unpredictable, unknowable nightmare universe.  Accepting an idea like this builds fundamental doubt into Muslim believers.  If people can be made to doubt reality, or at least lose certainty, that doubt can be extended to the uniquely human means of survival the mind and its ability to reason.
 
Spirits, like Allah, angels, jinni, and Satan, make people doubt their senses:  Anything can be anything else, and nothing is necessarily what it seems.  Revelation is unlike anything people know or understand.  Revelation by-passes the senses.  It is a product of some "unknowable" source.  No human mind works this way; revelation negates human cognition.
 
Islam assails the validity of the senses, but it leaves its biggest assaults for human thinking, its greatest danger.
 
By 900 A.D., reason had been banished from Islam.  Islamists forbade all doubt about Islam.  Apostasy was met by death, then and now.  All forms of doubt and most manifestations of hypocrisy met with death as well.  Islamic doctrine has always required Muslims to spy on each other and report any intellectual deviance, which to this day meets with swift, severe punishment.
 
Fear of force, particularly death which is metaphysical extinction -- is used to shut down Muslims' minds, and to shut them down on principle.  It works quite well:
 
"The virtue of rationality requires one to think, and then to be guided by his conclusions in action.  Force clashes with both these requirements.  Force used to change a man's mind acts to stop his mind (and thus make it inoperative as the source of his action).  Force used to change a man's action shoves his mind (and thus its process of cognition) into the junk heap of the purposeless.  In the one manifestation, the brute works to detach his victim's consciousness from reality and therefore from life; in the other, from life and therefore from reality."[1]
 
Fear of the universe, fear of using one's mind, and fear of those who might turn one into authorities who in turn will inflict severe punishment, including death, haunts any Muslim who dares to thinks.  If he does not think, he lives at a sub-human level of function, and misses all that life has to offer.  If he thinks, he lives in chronic fear of discovery.  Hell in the afterlife meets Hell in this life:  All Muslims live in fear, whether they admit it or not, and fear paralyzes the mind.
 
Apostacy is the greatest sin of Islam.  Speaking critically of any aspect of Islam is a close second.  Even if one escapes Islamia, literally and physically, one may have a fatwa (a legal warrant) issued for ones death for apostasy.  Leaving Islamia provides no safety, if they want to find you bad enough.  Fatwas for death, carried out in non-Islamic countries, merit ostentatious reward back home in Islamia.  The method of Islam is to sustain fear world-wide.
 
Ignorance and illiteracy add to this attack on the mind.  Education is valued in Islamia only as a means to render one able to carry out the dictates of Islam.  Too much education endangers Islam because such is likely to induce the educated to think.
 
For centuries, Islamists have claimed that the Quran holds all knowledge possible.  Anyone who is not an apologist for Islam and who has read any version of the Quran sees the lie in this assertion.  But Muslims do as they are told:  They believe.  They have no need for curiosity their minds have been Islamized.
 
Now all Islam needs to complete creating its robots is a code of action for each Muslim robot (an ethics) and social code to guide the mass of Muslim robots (a politics).


[1]  [From Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism:  The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Meridian Books, 1991]
 
 

Obedience Training (Part 3, Ethics)

 
Nobody can escape the need to "feel right" about what he does.  Nobody can escape the need for ethics.  Ethics is the study of what is "good."  It helps people choose a moral code, a set of values to guide thinking and behavior.  Of all of the five major branches of philosophy, ethics is the most important on a personal level -- it does not matter if someone knows nothing whatsoever about philosophy, ethics, or for that matter, whether he or she can even read or write:  No one escapes the power of ethics.
 
Islam's philosophy is not consistent with the demands of reality.  Islam commands Muslims to behave in certain ways, whether these ways help them in life or not.  The Islamic moral code requires that Muslims be obedient to Islam, even at the expense of themselves.  The ethics of Islam creates Muslims who serve and defend Islam as their sole raison d'etre.
 
Islamic ethics imposes an identity on Muslims that makes them see themselves as part of a large "Muslim collective."  Being part of the "collective" is the only identity possessed by each individual.  The individual has no identity outside the "collective."  Individual moral choices are forbidden by Islam.
 
Islam's code is burned into the minds of children very early and with great intensity until it crowds out everything else, and the brainwashing continues throughout life.  It is reinforced five times a day through ritual behavior of prayer.  It reignites Muslims' raison d'etre when the imams refresh Muslims' purpose in life every Friday.  Emotional fuel comes from creating scapegoats to hate.  Every day and in every way, Muslims reinforce each other, in families, tribes, and what passes for society.  Belonging to the greater community of Islam is everything, AND deviance from Islamism is too terrible to contemplate.  Compliance is bliss.
 
Islam's personal code tells Muslims (1) to follow Islam's rules without deviation in order to further Islam, and (2) to protect Islam at all costs.  An individual has value only with regard to these two guiding principles.  Compliance requires complete obedience and forbids questions.  Every thought and every activity of daily life must be carried out solely to serve Islam; how to serve Islam has been spelled out in excruciating, micro-micro-managerial detail.
 
One's life has no value beyond one's unquestioning service to Allah.  This is the GOOD.  Everything else is EVIL.  The most honorable, most morally pure action a Muslim can perform is self-sacrificial service to Islam.  The glorious end, which is venerated by all Muslims, is shahid, or martyrdom, or, death while fighting for Allah.  That is why loony mothers in Palestine feel such pride when their children complete their missions as suicide bombers.  Everybody glories in their actions.  Upon receiving news of his death, the parents really believe that the blown-up kid has joined Allah in Paradise where he is as drunk as a skunk and is fornicating his brains out with all the houris.  Great social honor befalls the family.  And, note:  the family questions only whether their teenager was assigned too soon, whether the Jihadists should have waited until he was a little older.  Beyond that, the parents are just pleased as punch that their son has disintegrated himself.
 
Second only after Allah, Muslims pay service to and allegiance to other Muslims, and no one else under any conditions.  This "community of Muslims" transcends all nationalities and races as well as geographical locations.  It is called the ummah.  Selfless, in fact, self-sacrificial, service to Allah and the ummah = the Good.  Everything else = the Evil.
 
In a reality-based ethics, man's life is the standard of value, and the life of each individual is his purpose.  The "good" is that which is consistent with the requirements of that which furthers life. Reason, purpose, and self-esteem are the cardinal values, with corresponding virtues of rationality, productivity, and pride. 
 
Compare these values and virtues to those of Islam.  Reason and rationality are anathema to Islam.  As for purpose and productivity, remember that this value-virtue set applies solely to the support of Islam, not the life of the individual.  To see their philosophy in action, look at Islamia:  It makes almost nothing, and it perpetuates squalor and backwardness.
 
As for self-esteem and pride, members of Islamic societies reflect none.  Islamia is populated with "wall-to-wall," unhappy, frustrated Muslims.  They have been made that way by Islam, but they are brainwashed since early childhood to blame others, not Islam or the ummah, for their plight.  That is why they never correct anything.  To have self-responsibility, one must begin with self.
 
Many people confuse what they see in Islamists with self-esteem and pride.  What they see are poor substitutes for the real things.  Theirs are "pseudo-self-esteem" and variations of "false pride."  In fact, the Arab-Islamic "code of Honor: Shame," viewed psychologically, reflects that these are the shallowest people on earth.  They experience "shame" and "dishonor" over any offense, whether real or imagined.  Their mentalities scan the environment for anything that might be interpreted even as a slight offense.  Anything interpreted as an offense results in a rage response and a quest for revenge.  It goes back and forth endlessly.  Honor, the other side of the same coin, comes from how their fellows regard each other.
 
In the Arab-Islamic culture, honor and shame depend on the consciousnesses of others, not on one's self-evaluation:  "If you like me, then I am worthy; If you slight me, then I am unworthy unless I kill you or my family or tribe extracts blood revenge to restore face with my fellows."  These are the ethical standards and psychodynamics of intellectual midgets.  Such midgets have no concept of self, no self-esteem, and certainly no rational pride.
 
Islam decides what constitutes good and evil.  Whatever Allah does is good.  Obeying Islam under all circumstances is good.  Islam itself is quintessential good, because it is the will and word of Allah found in the Qur'an, the Ahadith, and in the Shariah (laws).  Everything else is evil -- absolutely everything else.  As astonishing as this seems, it is how Islam operates, and over a billion Muslim robots obey because they believe.
 
Ethics exerts enormous power over all humans, and Islamists know this implicitly from the experiences of their lives as Muslims.  The power of ethics comes from the profound human need to be morally right.  People must feel that they are living right, behaving right, and are right with life at large.  Islam replaces life as the standard by which humans should determine the "good."  As a result, all of Muslim thoughts and actions function to support Islam, not life.  Whatever system of ethics someone adopts, he uses it to feel right by its standards.  This is why a rational ethics is needed so badly.  In America, their ethics explains so much of why liberals do what they do, and why conservatives do what they do.  Not many people are aware of epistemology and metaphysics, but they are all aware of ethics -- of right and wrong, of good and evil.  Whether anyone understands his moral code explicitly or whether his code is a blur of implicit principles which he cannot articulate, he will follow it, and it will be his life-imperative.
 
We have seen that Islam's metaphysics isolates Muslims' minds from reality.  Islamic epistemology shuts down Muslims' minds.  This allows Islam to program intellectual-emotional robots, who will live lives of self-sacrificial obedience.
 
The robots have been created.  All they need are instructions telling them what to do en masse, as a collective.  The next branch of philosophy, politics, explains what that is.
 
 

Muslim Identity and Purpose (Part 4, Politics)

 
 
Humans live gregariously; we are "herd animals."  We prefer to live among our own kind, even when we treat each other poorly.  There is a problem with living in groups, however.  It is the fact that, as individuals, animals (including human beings) compete with each other for resources, whether it is food, territory, or mates.  When animals live in groups, there must be some means of moderating the competition so that the group can function in an orderly manner, without unremitting chaos.
 
In a wolf-pack, the moderation is accomplished by a strict mating hierarchy.  Among humans, there also exists a hierarchy:  A president, prime minister, or monarch, for example, is at the top, with other individuals filling a variety of mutually advantageous functions, from CEOs to doctors to day-care workers. 
 
Human beings achieve the moderation of disruptive competition through politics.  Politics is one of the five major branches of philosophy.
 
Politics applies ethics to social behavior.  For example, if you are alone on a desert island, you would need an ethics, but you would have no need for a politics.  But, let at least one other person come to that island, and you would both need guiding principles for living together successfully.  You would need to apply ethics to social behavior.  You would need a politics.
 
Politically speaking, Muslims identify themselves as belonging to a global collective known as the ummah.  This collective transcends all nationalities, races, and geographic boundaries.  The ummah includes all Muslims, everywhere, as a single unit.  The ummah has value, according to Islam, but the individual Muslim is expendable.  He has value only with respect to his ability to serve the ummah.  Muslims owe allegiance first to Islam and second to the ummah.
 
It is a one-way system one-for-all, and all-for-all.  Islam is pure collectivism.  It is structurally identical to communism and the "organic theory of state."  In this "organic theory," the group is the "organism," while the individual is the "cell."  The organism survives at the expense of the cell.
 
Islam concentrates its collective power in a three-way political-social-religious triangle.  Whatever state exists throughout Islamia (dictatorship, Islamic "republic," etc.), that state is totally fused with and subordinate to Islam.  Shariah, Islamic law based principally on the founding documents of Islam, is the only system of law.  Islam is a complete system:  It is the state; it is the politics of the state; it is the religion.
 
Life in all of its details -- is totally fused with Islam.  Not one single aspect of Muslim life, down to the tiniest detail, including the proper way to clean yourself after defecating, escapes Islamic control.  Life must contort itself to fit into Islam, not the reverse.  Life exists to serve Islam;  Islam does not exist to help life.
 
Muslims have no rights.  In Islamia, people live only by permission.  In America, our rights are recognized as being derived from our nature as human beings.  The fundamental rights are the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. 
 
In America, individual citizens live because it is their right to live;  it is the government that exists by permission.  In Islamia, religion, which is the state, has all of the power, while the individual has none. 
 
Americans have the freedom, freedom to exercise their rights on their own behalf.  As long as they do not transgress the rights of anyone else, Americans are mostly free to do whatever they want.  Muslims have only the freedom to do what the clerics and warlords permit them to do, and almost every detail of how each Muslim is to live his life has been spelled out by Shariah.
 
Islam is at war against rights.  Since rights are part of the very nature of human beings, Islam wages war on human nature.  Islam is a closed circle of death; it is anti-life and anti-human being.  Or, as one of the most evil men who ever lived, Ayatollah Khomeini, said:
 
"We must break those pens that teach people there is something other than divine law.  We must smash those mouths that tell the people they are free to say whatever they please, regardless of right and wrong with commands of the Almighty."  [Amir Taheri, Holy Terror, Hutchinson, 1987, p. 204] 
 
And,
 
"We have to wage war until all corruption, all disobedience of Islamic laws cease [throughout the world].  The Qur'an commands:  War, war unto victory." [ibid, p. 113]  (All emphases are mine).
 
"Pagan" America threatens Islam severely by its very existence, since Americans exercise their rights.  Others around the world find that rights and freedom are very attractive, to say nothing of the happiness and prosperity which protection of rights permits.  The reason they find these attractive is, quite simply, because they are consistent with the nature of life and humankind, and support rather than suppress them.
 
What is the purpose of the Islamic collective?  It serves Allah, as spelled out in Islam's founding documents.  Imams mold objectives by stressing one Islamic commandment over another, and there are many commandments.  What, then, does Allah want Muslims to do individually and collectively?
 
The overarching commandment requires that Muslims fight for Allah.  They are to spread Islam where it is not, and to keep Islam pure where it is.  They are to engage in continuous "holy" warfare or "Jihad."  They are to be completely selfless, so that they may thrust themselves fully into Jihad without consideration of their own desires, plans, or lives.
 
Death in Jihad makes a Muslim a shahid, or martyr.  Islam, as someone once indicated, is the only religion which requires death of the worshipper in order to reach martyrdom, which is his ticket to Paradise.  Death has resulted for followers of other religions, but death was not the goal of the other religions.  Allah, Muslims are told, takes them straight to Paradise as their reward for shahid.  Muslims, we must note, live their earthly lives in a nightmare universe, where life on earth has been declared evil, yet where worldly temptations abound.  Fear destroys the integrity of their minds, then gives them purpose as cogs in the wheel of a political entity.  Death gives them Paradise, an endless reward. 
 
Beings in a malevolent universe, forbidden to use their minds, blindly obedient to Islam and stripped of their identity as humans, these are the Islamic robots primed for self-sacrificial service.  [Please note:  "Sacrifice" means giving up something of greater value for something of lesser value.  Thus, sacrifice is not a good thing.]  Since no individual has value, many individuals must merge into a mass, like the cells in an organism, to achieve any meaning or identity.  The mass, the collective, fights for Allah.  If one individual Muslim falls during the fight, another selfless servant steps forward.  They are the Army of Allah, and they live only to die.  Islam makes them dependent.  Then it gives them a reason for being alive:  Jihad.
 
As a group-living species, humans always create hierarchical social orders.  Islam does this as well, but, as it does with so much else, the hierarchy impedes life.  In Islamia, men count, and almost every concern of Islam focuses on men.  Muslim women can count for no more than one-half the value of Muslim men.  If they are unmarried, their value approaches zero.  Muslim men are the only Muslims eligible for Heaven, or Paradise, relatively freely.  Muslim women may go to Muslim Heaven if they have been wives, and if, as wives, they have never displeased their husbands not even once.  Even the Qur'an indicates that some three-quarters of Muslim women are bound for Hell, no matter what.  According to the metaphysics of Islam, women are human beings only by permission of men.
 
Slaves -- yes, slaves -- count no more than one-half the value of Muslim women, and the value of the slave is further degraded by gender.  At the bottom of the hierarchy is the non-Muslim.  Non-Muslims count for nothing.  They are "low-hanging fruit," so to speak, to be conquered, enslaved, robbed and pillaged, murdered and raped.  Slaves, particularly sex slaves, bring good money, and Muhammad gave the green light to Muslims to go "get em."  Whatever Muslims do to non-Muslims, well, who cares?
 
Muslims can admit conquered non-Muslim religious persons into dhimmitude, if the Muslims are so inclined and do not want to use the conquered peoples for anything else.  These dhimmis may keep their religion, but must pay a stiff head tax, jizya, which supports Muslim goals.  Dhimmis may practice their religion, but they must do so discretely, more or less out of sight, and in near secrecy.  At all times, dhimmis must obey Muslims as their lords and masters, who hold all power over them.  In fact, dhimmis are subject to mass extinction by Muslims for almost anything, including a single whim.  Talk about a nightmare universe!
 
Islamic ethics gives Muslims the moral authority to do all the horrors we read about, see, and hear about in the news today.  According to their moral code, these acts, which we consider atrocities, are virtues.  All of these atrocities are not only excused and permitted by Islam but are actively encouraged.
 
Americans' preeminent political-social system is capitalism.  In that social-political system, individuals are supremely important, and each has rights which its government has been chartered to protect.  America values life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  These are the values of people who love life on this earth, in this world.  Americans are free, prosperous, and happy.
 
Islam is a theocratic totalitarian system that combines the worst features of fascism and communism, both of which are collectivist systems.  Only the collective counts, and individuals have value only through their sacrificial service to the collective.  They have no rights, no freedoms, and no personal liberty.  Muslims live by permission of the Islamic state.  Islam hates life on earth and worships death as a gateway to another, ineffable, world.  Muslims live as sub-humans because of ISLAM.
 
Thus far, in this series, we have presented how Islam makes war on each branch of philosophy, and produces the indescribably horrible culture of Islam.  Islam makes wars on reality, reason, self, and liberty.  What could be left for Islam to make war on?  The answer is that there is one door to the human spirit that has not been bolted shut.  This door concerns the role of art in the lives of humans, and Islam conducts war on it also, because it is life itself.  It shows too much.  It shows life as it could be, and as it should be.
 
 

Erasing Life (Part 5, Esthetics)

 
 
Art speaks volumes about a culture, particularly about its dominant ideas, its philosophy.  In this regard, Islamic "art" screams the agony of that culture.
 
The primary function of art is not to teach, but to show.  While teaching us is not art's primary purpose, it is an unavoidable by-product of what happens when it "shows."
 
The following statements[1] summarize the functions of art that we need to know in order to diagnose what Islamic art teaches us:
 
         "An art work tells man that something is important."  (p. 424)
         "...Art is a need of the mind."  (p. 414)
         "The basic purpose of art is to hold up to man a concretized 
           image of his nature and his place in the universe." 
           (pp. 422-423).
         The role of art is " to provide man with a definite experience
             of seeing 'This is what reality is like.'"  (p. 423)
         "Art converts abstractions into the equivalent of concretes
             open to direct perception."  (p. 419)
         "[Man] needs a concrete that can become an object of
              direct experience while carrying with it the meaning of
              his whole view of life."  (p. 417)
         "...A man needs the integration, the all-embracing sweep,
              the vision of the universe."  (p. 416)
         "The result is a universe in microcosm."  (p. 417)
 
Before we can apply these principles, we need to identify what passes for art in Islamia:
 
* In literature, there are few, if any, novels.
* Some poetry exists.
* In the visual arts, there are few human subjects.
* In sculpture, there are few, if any, human statues.
* Music is largely a monotonous cacophony.
* Islam's greatest expression of beauty is its architecture, and there are some lovely buildings.
 
The most conspicuous aspect of Islamic art is its poverty.
 
Note the absence of anything human.  In fact, note the absence of anything living.  Islam has strong prohibitions against representing living things in art.
 
Art, by its very nature, defies Islam.  Literature requires stories about people who have volitional consciousnesses and face choices.  Such freedom is impermissible in Islam.  The visual arts produce canvases and murals capturing profound values of the artist, for contemplation by the viewer.  Islamic visual art finds expression solely in things like colored tiles having various geometric designs.  However pretty these may be, they are no more than skilled crafts. 
 
Music bypasses most of our intellectual mechanisms to reach our emotions directly.  Islamic music is at best boring, and, at worst, unpleasant.
 
Architecture allows the greatest artistic expression in Islam, and even that is greatly truncated.  One can only imagine the incredible frustration that builders and artisans -- the descendents of the engineers, architects, and artists who created such structures as the famed "Hanging Gardens" -- must have felt over the centuries about having the expression of their talents, interests, and creativity held down to the level of decorations.
 
Islam killed art when it killed philosophy around 900 A.D, and both were killed for much the same reason.  Both art and philosophy stimulate the mind, and active human minds threaten the very existence of Islam.
 
Islamic art barely exists at all, and, as we have indicated, what does exist is devoid of anything living:  There are no paintings of people, no novels about human values and conflicts, no statues, and no music that celebrates life.
 
However, living beings value life.  Human beings need art to present life's deepest values.  Art puts these profound values in a form that enables you to see, to experience, and to contemplate them.  For example, we cannot directly see "justice," but we can use art to represent it, often with a statue of a blindfolded woman holding a scale.  In this way, we can contemplate the essence of "justice."  Humanity's need for art is deep and real, and it is not an "extra," not "fluff."
 
But, what about all of those photographs of mullahs carried by teeming Muslims in demonstrations?  They offer human representation, don't they?  Aren't they art?  Photographs may present human images, but they are not art.  The definition of art is that it is a selective recreation of reality, according to the artist's metaphysical values[2]. 
 
Today in America, we have much terrible art that reflects modern philosophy: It is terrible in its choices of subjects, terrible in artists' deepest values, and terrible in qualities of presentations.  Too many movies emphasize violence, sex, and special effects, instead of value clashes.  Too much popular music is noisy, puerile, and amateurish.  Too much painting and statuary are "non-objective," i.e., without fundamental value.  Too much literature and movies are "slice of life," and they slice lives not worth knowing about.  Too much contemporary art in modern America blunts the appreciation of the best that is possible in life.  Life, however, has not been banned from mainstream American art, and it is flourishing anew in non-mainstream American art.
 
Consider the following works of Western art.  Compare them to any equivalent category in Islam.
 
* Literature:  Compare Gone with the Wind, a soaring, tour de force novel about the entire value-base of a culture and its permanent destruction over a few short years, necessitating huge value reformulations.  Where in Islam is there such a profound clash of cultural and personal values?
 
* Painting:  Compare Botticelli's Birth of Venus to what in Islam?  Islamic painting hardly exists.  There is, however, one Western painting which captures the metaphysics of Islam (and maybe the thieves have taken it to Islamia):  Edvard Munch's The Scream.  This painting is great art.  Everyone who sees it immediately experiences the values that the artist wants to communicate -- fear, tension, anxiety, helplessness, and feelings of being lost.  As art, it is light years ahead of anything in Islamia.
 
* Sculpture:  Compare the elegant, uplifting Victory of Samothrace to what in Islamia?
 
* Music:  Compare the thrilling works of Rachmaninoff, John Williams, Bach and so many composers to the annoying sounds of Islamic music.
 
* Architecture:  Here we can compare vast numbers of Western buildings to Islamia, but we recognize that Islam has a structure second to none:  the Taj Mahal.
 
In Islamia, art -- sparse, poor in quality, and dull -- presents non-life.  It is as though life does not exist, but, it is worse than that.  Islam disvalues life, and its esthetics reflects the hatred for life.  Islamic art tries to wipe out all traces of life itself.
 
In the articles of this series, we have discussed how Islam makes war on anything important to human beings:
 
* War on reality, existence, this world
* War on senses and knowledge, on reason, on the human mind
* War on values, individuals, and the self
* War on freedom of action, of voluntary assembly, on a society which protects its citizens from the initiation of physical force
* And, war on life itself.
 
What could possibly be more evil than this?
 
In Islam, the mind exists at subsistence level.  All avenues which can offer men and women the way to a human level of existence, at the conceptual level, with progress, productivity, prosperity, and happiness, have been cut off by Islam.
 
Islam is totally evil. 



[1]   Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism:  The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Meridian Books, 1991, Chapter 12 "Esthetics."
[2]   ibid

Summary: Pulling It All Together

 
 
In this series, we have examined what Islam contributes to the five branches of philosophy which are known as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and esthetics.  To minimize any difficulty for readers who are new to this type of analysis, only the most basic themes of each have been presented, and these have been stripped to skeletal form.
 
The themes in these five presentations show why Islam is what it is, and they show how Islamic philosophy creates Muslims out of normal human beings.  Later, we will use these principles to demonstrate how Islam produces those killer robots (kill-bots) known as "jihadists."
 
In practice, the branches of philosophy Islamic or otherwise -- do not act as five independent units.  They work together and depend on each other, and they have produced Islamia in its entirety -- the culture and its practitioners, the Muslims. 
 
Philosophy is intensely practical, and all of its elements fit together.  The philosophies we refer to are the philosophies actually adopted by people, not some academic gobbledygook, which is taught in so many universities.  In fact, philosophies are not only intensely practical, but they are absolutely unavoidable.
 
How each person comes by his philosophy is usually sadly haphazard and totally implicit.  People pick up their philosophies from their parents, schools, and culture, and most people leave these vital guiding principles in their unidentified, and often contradictory state. Muslims as well as Americans reap the consequences of the ideas they have accepted, whether they know in so many words what their ideas are -- no one can escape his or her own philosophy. This is unfortunate, since philosophy is not "self-evident," and like any other discipline, can and should be taught, just as mathematics, literature, or biology can and should be taught.
 
What we view, hear, and read about the state of Islamic culture today describes Islamia as it has been for fourteen centuries.  Islamia is dreadful because its ideas -- its philosophy -- is dreadful.  It is Islamic philosophy that manufactures jihadists, not the usual liberal-Marxist excuses of poverty, lack of opportunity, and environmental conditioning.
 
The facts which underlie absolutely everything are called "metaphysics."  When philosophers refer to "metaphysics," they do not mean any of the stuff which "New Agers" call "metaphysics." New Age "metaphysics" is nothing more than low quality mysticism, contributing nothing to anyone's understanding of anything.
 
Everything in the universe -- absolutely everything, all of existence -- depends on these basic metaphysical facts, and people adopt either a realistic or an unrealistic relationship with them. 
 
The realistic relationship accepts the universe "as is."  Whether they think about it at all or not, realists know that the universe is what they see, touch and feel, taste, hear, and smell.  This relationship permits the acquisition of knowledge, and it has made possible the many benefits of Western civilization.
 
Islam devalues this relationship with reality.  It attributes everything in the universe to its unknowable "super-entity," named Allah. 
 
Allah instills fear and uncertainty.  The universe, all of existence, is portrayed as something unpredictable, uncertain, and incomprehensible to the human mind.  Allah runs the universe solely by means of whim.  He is a mean, jealous, and utterly sadistic being.  In fact, he runs Hell all by himself and  punishes and punishes and punishes.  Muslims, cut off from reality, live in abject fear of Allah and of life.
 
Islam views human kind as corrupt by its nature:  Everything that promotes joy and pleasure on this earth is regarded as evil, as a "temptation," a distraction from their "true" goal, the spread of Islam.
 
This Islamic approach to life, to existence, and to all knowledge, pulls the rug out from under the Muslim mind.  It replaces a knowable universe with a demon-infested maelstrom of Allah, Iblis, jinni, angels, and evil eyes.  Islam gives Muslims an unknowable, unpredictable, and terror-filled world because their minds have had reality, their frame of reference for everything, taken from them.  Islam detaches Muslim minds from reality.
 
Islam goes on next to attack the human mind through its mystical epistemology.  It does so by asserting that knowledge comes from Allah by means of "revelation."  "Revelation" refers to knowledge attained by mystical, non-sensory, non-cognitive means.  However, in reality, no one learns or knows anything whatsoever by means of revelation.  In fact, there is no such thing as "revelation."  To prevent exposure of the truth arising by those who would question Islam, it outlaws reason, and it literally orders the death of anyone who dares to question.
 
To be a Muslim, you must abandon reason and accept faith, which means that you must shut off the uniquely human characteristic, the reasoning mind.
 
We are through only two of the five branches of philosophy, and Islam has already accomplished the feat of destroying reality and reason for its believers.  Such believers would be helpless, as Islam intends for them to be, and would be desperate for some way to guide their lives.  In fact, the Islamic assault on reality and the mind renders Muslims ready to be programmed according to the requirements of Islam.  They are given the ethics of Islam, which are so detailed that they govern every aspect of every Muslims life "24/7."  There are "rules" on everything from the proper time and way to trim one's nails, to how to wipe oneself after defecating.
 
Islamic ethics holds self-sacrificial service to Allah and Islam to be the highest good.  Surrender, submission, and obedience prepare the Muslim to be programmed to die for Allah.  No choice is possible for the Muslim, according to Islam.
 
In three branches of philosophy, Islam takes reason and reality away from Muslims, and its ethics takes away any individuality.  Duty and sacrifice replace choice and individuality.  Still, the Muslim is an empty vessel.  Islam takes this empty vessel, and, through its politics, turns him into a something altogether inhuman.
 
Islamic politics fuses Islam with every detail of the state and even life itself.  Islam builds a collective of all Muslims, called the ummah.  Muslims must practice allegiance to Allah, to Islam, and to the ummah.  The collectivist politics of Islam designs and constructs an identity for believers, and blends them into a seamless mass, a syncitium.
 
To this collective, this mass, this syncitium, Islam provides not only an identity, but also a purpose in life for Muslims en masse.  That purpose is perpetual jihad, or holy war, waged against all non-Muslims globally.  The goal of jihad is to create a Muslim planet, a totalitarian Muslim collective, which Islamists intend to run.  The methods Islam has used to attain this objective have been conquest, murder, theft, pillage, rape, and enslavement, facilitated by the Islamic belief that non-Muslims have no value.  Death during jihad for one of these Muslim "killer robots" means that he has achieved Islam's highest value, and he goes to join Allah's Paradise in the unknowable world which he has accepted on faith.
 
The final major branch of Islamic philosophy, esthetics, pulls together all of Islam's importance for Muslims and it reflects what our lives would mean under Islamism.
 
Art should show what might be and ought to be in life.  However, Islamic art is devoid not only of anything human, but it is devoid of anything living.  Islamic art is lifeless.  This is because Islam is anti-life in every important way, and humans do not even register so much as a flicker of importance in Islam, except as cogs working on behalf of the collective.  No beauty, no fun, no celebration, no grandeur are allowed in Islam, and its art reflects Islam's sterility.  It is the stillness of death.
 
Islam is the great destroyer, and its philosophy causes the destruction.  Millions of humans over 14 centuries have had their lives sterilized and squandered by Islam.  The luckier ones died or were killed early in their existence.  All the rest have endured living hell.
 
These are the main currents of the ideas we must fight with  better ideas.  Our ideas and our civilization are superior in every way.  If we do not come to appreciate this superiority and to use it shamelessly for our own good, we could well succumb to the evils of Islam.  We cannot fight with political correctness, cultural relativism, multiculturalism, epistemological and ethical relativism, or by embracing any of the collectivist political philosophies we find ourselves sliding into by default.
 
Our cause has not been lost.  It just has not been won.

[This presentation of Islamic philosophy and its contrast to ours has been kept intentionally short.  Much additional material about this subject deserves discussion.  For that, I strongly recommend Leonard Peikoff's, Objectivism:  The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Meridian Books, 1991.]