Oct 27, 2024
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My Half Century With Islam, Part 2
by Doniphan Blair
Bedouin women get water, Middle East, early 20th century. photo: unknown Continued from My Half Century With Islam, Part 1
Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
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KHADIJA AND MUHAMMAD'S
reciprocal altruism reflected not only the romanticism popular in the Middle East since ancient Sumer but a cooperative relationship between equally an empowered woman and man, also evidenced by how she helped him intellectually and spiritually. After the shock of Muhammad's first revelation, when he feared he was possessed by a spirit, Khadija assured him he was hearing the one, true God, “submitted” to his new faith, and became the first Muslim. Submission may seem like a strange central metaphor for a religion based on unity, equality and justice, but it symbolizes how a ruling matriarch cedes power to an emerging patriarch, or how we mortals must accept a single, all-powerful Lord or universe.
Women organized our earliest clans, we can assume, since the men knew little about birthing, nursing and child rearing, and spent a lot of time away from camp. Indeed, as many biologists have noted, the human race is a hybridizing experiment run by women. Although the results of the research are still in dispute, a lot is known, as with goddess culture. For starters, as homo Sapiens developed bigger brains (“sapiens” being Latin for “wise”), it became harder for females to pass babies through the birth canal, requiring they be born premature, which increased the calories and time needed to bring them to maturity as well as injury to the mother, placing upon them enormous evolutionary pressure.
Since nothing can live forever, all living entities must focus on reproduction, after simple survival. That women’s bridge to consciousness and self-consciousness was reproduction is documented by both “The Bible”, where the snake in “Genesis” obviously signifies "penis," and science, from Darwin’s second theory of evolution, sexual selection, to cutting-edge brain and behavioral studies. Female homo Sapiens have language centers in both of their brain hemispheres (unlike the male’s left only), become verbal earlier as toddlers and are more talkative as adults. Instead of relying on instincts and emotions, actual data on reproduction became the first fruit on the Tree of Knowledge and triggered our cultural Big Bang, from language to art and romance. Once women could count the nine months back to conception and identify fathers, they could dispel paternity uncertainty and leverage male desire, which led to a revolution in communication—language was invented about 70 to 140,000 BCE— as well as cooperation and clan organization.
Matriarchal polytheism must have guided our evolution, both genetically and socially, for tens of millennia, at least back to the paleolithic “Venus figurines,” up to 42,000 years old. Those few-inch-long icons, often depicting fat, fantastically-breasted women, were undoubtedly fashioned by tool-using men to honor their community’s most successful mothers, who were also their leaders and priestesses as well as girlfriends. In fact, women’s research into reproduction informed the invention of both agriculture (controlling the reproduction of other species) and romance (the intellectualization of mating calls, dances and other intersex signaling, which is reproduction’s first step). Agriculture and romance, in turn, rapidly blew up small, wandering clans into tribes and towns and, after about five millennia, civilizations and empires.
During that exponential growth, however, the leading matriarchs evidently noticed diminishing returns on how they organized families with multiple fathers, inspired men to work the fields (which required a full day, not hunting’s half), or convinced them to fight to the death invading marauders. (Hunters flee overwhelming force, but farmers fight for fecund fields.) After women learned to use language to trade their services and products (sex and children) for male-provided supplies, shelter and safety (negotiations which were the first form of verbal romance), men more readily came in from the wild. (Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s boon friend, was seduced into civilization by a temple prostitute and cooked food.) Men were always instinctively and emotionally part of the reproductive process, of course, but making the universe male and them social leaders was the third big attractor, after sex and children, and arguably the most important. Indeed, getting men to renounced rough folkways, take responsibility and massively increase labor and creativity was central to their evolution from hunters into fathers, farmers, fighters and vast builders.
Necessity is the mother invention, and new circumstances beget new worldviews. Khadija believed her husband provided exactly that for her tribal group, the Arabs, who had long pined for a monotheist prophet of their own, and her city, Mecca, which was famous for poetry contests, many religions and non-violence oaths during festivals but beset by conflicting male poets and warriors as well as matriarchs and priestesses. When societies are successful, they reproduce and grow. But when they get too large, the efficacy of women’s horizontal networking fades before the efficiency of male hierarchies, hero worship and brute strength. To parse this tricky transition, Khadija granted Muhammad authority over her body, family, real estate and businesses, as well as the previously female universe and, together, they forged the Arabs’ late but fast shift to patriarchy and civilization building.
A gate to Baghdad in the 19th century. illo: Arthur Aletrilly,1882 Regendering a society is not easy, as we are learning. Christian theologians thought monotheism would be more successful if God was more loving, marriage was sacred and sex a sin (even within marriage if outside procreation). Alas, that didn’t cure Christian lust for power as well as sex, as we well know, and Muhammad must have noticed among his Christian relatives and friends in Mecca or those he met in Jerusalem, where he travelled for trade. Returning to Judaism’s more matriarchal female-male relations, he allowed for divorce and hailed sexual pleasure as natural and a gift from God, even incorporating it into Islamic heaven (a brilliant reimagining of monotheist metaphors and syncretization of polytheist perks).
Muhammad famously adored women and, after Khadija died, took a dozen wives and concubines, although he limited men to four wives (who have to be loved equally, signaling the superiority of monogamy). In fact, Muhammad can be considered a feminist for his day given “The Quran” refers to men and women as equals and that “both men and women, are guardians of one another” (Surah 9:71); it grants women property rights and half a male's inheritance; and he supported women’s right to satisfaction (to respect natural feeling but also deter polytheist revanchism), issues he must have decided in consultation with Khadija. In Christianity’s more feminized culture, however, women received no property, inheritance or pleasure privileges.
Islam reversed Christianity's separation of church and state and sex restrictions and become the most masculine monotheism, largely due to its late arrival to the civilizational project and need to raise armies as well as male social involvement and discipline. Moreover, it was determined to end matriarchal power rather than balance it, as in Judaism, or transform its romantic aspects into religious devotion, as in Christianity. Muslim men wield full authority over female family members as well as their own children, whom they retain after divorce. While Christianity forbade divorce and Jews required a rabbi’s approval, under Islam the man merely pronounces “I divorce you” three times before witnesses (which can liberate a woman, when an abusive husband does it in a fit of rage, according to Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi). This parallels Islamic conversion, which involves the thrice oath taking of “There is no true god but God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God,” and affirms the intellectual power of monotheism, wherein words are holy and a Muslim’s word is their bond.
To make peace with matriarchal polytheism, however, Christianity introduced a fertility goddess, Mary (who was considered a virgin, despite Christ’s older siblings), and the Hebrews honored women as matriarchs. Their Sabbath similar to a goddess holiday, wherein women do the first prayer (candle lighting), don’t work at all (au contraire Christian and Muslim women), and are encouraged to pursue reproduction. The stories of powerful Jewesses are recounted in “The Bible”, some of which are repeated in “The Quran”, and pre- or extra- marital sex is not a mortal sin, since Jewish familial descent is matriarchal, after the ancient patriarchal period. Matriarchy makes children inherently legitimate (“Free women don’t commit adultery,” according to Hind, the wife of Mecca’s chief and Muhammad’s main opponent, because whomever they sexually select is legal). The Christians attempted to control male sexuality by restricting sex and reverting to a virginal, pre-lapsarian philosophy, but the Jews emphasized self-control and circumcision, which they enshrined as the males’ primary sacrifice to the one, true God.
Despite claims that circumcision promotes cleanliness, especially in water-scarce environments (which it does), it is more obviously a symbol of sexual suppression, although removing the penis's protective skin also unveils and beautifies it, a body modification undoubtedly preferred by matriarchs. The Christians passed on circumcision, assuming their sex-is-sin and guilt-induction system was enough, but the Muslims embraced it, despite the fact it is not mentioned in "The Quran". Nevertheless, it’s covered in “The Hadith”, the collections of Muhammad’s sayings, and throughout “The Old Testament”, which Muslims consider sacred (“He sent down the Torah and the Gospel,” Surah 3:3), and most Muslim boys endure it during their seventh year (as opposed to seventh day, as with Jews). Unfortunately, sex was so seductive, according to Muslims with more recent matriarchal memories, a second circumcision was needed: that of women. Hence, the "mullahs" (Sunni ministers) allowed female genital mutilation (FGM), despite its absence from “The Quran” or “Old Testament”, its capacity to inflict grievous injury or death, and its reduction or elimination of an important pleasure, considered a gift from God by Muhammad. FGM is still practiced among many Sunnis, largely in Africa (highest in the Horn of Africa), and a majority of women in Egypt, despite the nation's legal ban and media campaign against it, starting in 2005.
Desert travelers stop for the night, essentially how Muhammad and his crew looked in the 7th century. illo: unknown, circa 19th century In addition to being orphaned as a child, Muhammad was probably skinny, nerdy and perhaps sickly. But he laboriously built up his body, mind and character, which was why Khadija sought him out, as well as developed his theology, during long hikes across the desert or months on the mountain, using mysticism. After ten years extensive prayer, he received visions, which he discussed with Khadija and others, and preached poetically in downtown Mecca, in front of the idol-filled Ka’aba. Muhammad’s early revelations abided Judeo-Christian stories and traditions, such as building God’s kingdom voluntarily, ethically and peacefully, in accord with from the Jewish prophets, “‘Not by might nor by power, but by my spirit,’ saith the Lord,” (Zechariah 4:6) or “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares… nation shall not lift up sword against nation,” (Isaiah 2:4). After being persecuted by Meccan authorities, fleeing to Medina and entering a war, however, he changed his mind. Instead of a slow evolution through better ideas and behavior, he reasoned, Islam could be more beneficial to more people, faster—which is one definition of “good”—by explaining in simple, local terms how monotheism works, by proselytizing aggressively, and by defending Muslims as well as by going on offense, when necessary.
Already a charismatic public speaker, Muhammad transformed himself into a brilliant politician and strategic general, who led the outnumbered and ill-equipped Muslims to heroic victories. But he was the messenger not son of God, and there were some defeats and mistakes, notably with his wives and the Jews. After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem five centuries earlier, Jews dispersed across the Middle East in the “Jewish Diaspora,” including a large and popular community in Medina. The Muslim holy day became Friday, in fact, because Jews had their weekly market then, the day before their work-free sabbath, and attending Muslims were available for mosque. Some Jews sided with Muhammad in his fight against Mecca but, during a loyalty dispute with another Jewish clan, he ordered the massacre of about five hundred Jewish men and boys.
Alas, 7th century Arabian politics were internecine and complex, as was the art of receiving a revelation, editing it into a text, and establishing a new, better adapted religion. Hence, “The Quran” has differing or contradictory dictums, just as does “The Bible”, including pronouncements for and against Jews, alcohol, gambling, murder, fate and more. Such sacred incongruities oblige monotheists to distance themselves from the letter of “divine” law and dedicated themselves to its spirit, to rationally and voluntarily decide which scripture, in a complex situation, better advances monotheism’s core concepts of compassion, equality, justice and cooperation.
Relief depicting Akhenaten and Nefertiti with three of their daughters under the rays of Aten. courtesy: Wikipedia, please donate hereSince the Middle East is home to some of humanity’s oldest cities, religions and civilizations, it is, therefore, the birthplace of our oldest conflicts, confusions and psychological problems. After the stoic, hedonist, intellectual and militaristic Roman empire gave way to the romantic, chaste, emotive and pacifist Christian civilization, the largely Christian Middle East was caught between the eastern Roman Christians’ Byzantine Empire, the Persian Empire, which practiced Zoroastrianism (a millennium-old monotheism with many polytheist aspects), and the persisting polytheisms of the mountain and desert tribes often excluded from civilization. Regardless of its divine origins, monotheism had to be periodically updated, from incremental adjustment and syncretic mixing to full revisions, followed by new sects or religions.
Ever since the first monotheism, Egyptian Atenism, which flourished briefly around 1350 BCE, the one-god theory has been renovated or reinvented at 300 to 500 year intervals. There was Moses, or someone like him (or someone telling stories about someone like him), around 1000 BCE; the Jewish prophets after the Jews were exiled to Babylon, starting around 500 BCE; Jesus Christ (building on John the Baptist and the Essenes); the rabbinical reform after the devastating Jewish-Roman Wars (66-136 AD); Christianity’s First Council of Nicaea (Turkey) in 325 AD (when dozens of “apocryphal” books were edited from “The New Testament”); and, three centuries later, Islam (the last major monotheism until the mid-19th century Mormons and Baha’is in middle America and Persia, respectively, although the former fled to Utah and the latter to Israel). In keeping with this chronology, Al-Ghazali’s Sufi revolution started nearly a half millennium after Muhammad, while Martin Luther nailed his “Ninety-five Theses” to a German church door in 1517, almost exactly a millennium and a half after Christ’s ministry.
Muhammad revered Judaism and Christianity and opposed the polytheist empires of the East, which makes him a westerner, but he developed many unique stories, philosophies and ceremonies. They obviously satisfied a pressing need, especially in our harsher climes, given Islam’s phenomenal expansion: over twice the size of the Roman Empire in half the time. This can be attributed to Muhammad's simple and straightforward focus on justice, equality and peace, which is highlighted by the first phrase of all 114 of “The Quran”’s Surahs (chapters), “In the name of Allah, the most compassionate, most merciful,” one-line revelations like “There should be no compulsion in religion” (Surah 2:257), the universal greeting of “As-salamu alaykum” (“Peace be upon you”), and many of “Hadith” sayings, like Muhammad's theory of jihad, wherein “the greater jihad” is against the ego but political struggle is “the lesser jihad,” or exhortations to tolerate disagreement and forgive enemies.
According to most Sufis, Sufism does not derive from ancient fertility cults, as some scholars suggest, but Muhammad’s secret oral teachings, which are thought to be more spiritual and metaphysical than his public oral or written work, “The Hadith” and “The Quran”, respectively. Although those secret teachings may be apocryphal, Sufis followed Muhammad’s lived example of having a mystical practice but also a profession and family, and of respecting women, who were excluded from most mystical fraternities. The vast majority of Sufis were men, devout Muslims and patriarchal, but many accepted women as tariqa members, teachers or saints, notably Rabi’ah Basri, from 8th century Basra (Iraq), who started as a slave or prostitute, devoted herself to charity and became the first saint of Sufism’s Religion of Love. In point of fact, Sufis developed more female and romantic values and art than almost any other religious, social or literary movement by basing their beliefs on the core tenets of monotheism, which provided a firm foundation, but then by building ornate intellectual edifices on the universal human interests in art, love and transcendence of the material world.
Scholars and pupils st Baghdad's House of Wisdom's, late Abbasid dynasty. illo: by Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti, 1237, courtesy Bibliotheque Nationale de France and Wikipedia (please donate here)The Inherent Liberalism of Monotheism
Islam’s vast conquests in under a century, which went west to southern France and east to northern India, often featuring fearsome warriors riding spectacular Arabian steeds, sometimes wielding swords impaled with copies of “The Quran”, was a wonder to behold and a world record. It could also be brutal, murderous and depraved. Nevertheless, those Arab-lead armies often abided advanced rules of war, negotiated fair surrenders—like when Caliph Umar conquered Jerusalem in 637 AD and, despite a long siege, allowed the ruling Christians to resume normal life and Jews to re-enter the city—and installed regimes with liberal aspects and economic benefits. Many communities converted to Islam voluntarily, starting with Medina, where intractable Jahiliyyah problems inspired them to invite Muhammad to move there and take over. Jews and Christians were accepted as fellow believers in the one, true God, which the former called “Yahweh” or “Elohim” and the latter Jesus Christ or “The Trinity” (a combination of Christ, Yahweh and ineffable spirit), and Muslims labelled “Allah.” Nevertheless, Christians and Jews were considered second-class monotheists, or “dhimmis,” and saddled with special taxes and restrictions, like prohibitions against riding horses or carrying weapons, although both were exempt from military service.
Islam’s conquests as well as Shari’ah Law, a precedent-based legal system, liberated many people from oppressive rulers, arcane rituals and racist caste systems. In addition, it often reduced poverty, illness and ignorance by increasing opportunity, trade and literacy. Islam was such a modernizing force and promoter of advanced Greek and Jewish ideas, in fact, some say it saved Western Civilization. Books in its lingua franca, Arabic, became the era’s internet, spreading scientific knowledge, philosophy and poetry faster than ever in history, along the many silk, spice and trade routes of an already globalized world. Communities devoted to learning, like Alexandria or Timbuktu, had law forbidding books to pass through without being copied by scribes.
Despite Islam’s impressive achievements, however, tribalism, sectarianism, wealth disparities, slavery, tyranny and war, not to mention vestigial matriarchal and polytheist practices, remained. Out-of-wedlock sex continued with gusto in rural areas (according to Dupree’s Afghan research), crowded cities (where veiling helped women have affairs), and merchant families (wherein men sometimes travelled for years). Slavery was pervasive, from the massive slave trade (almost double the European) of both black Africans (which sometimes included castration) and white Eastern Europeans (and western European sailors seized by Muslim Barbary pirates), to Islam’s ubiquitous concubines and “slave armies.”
To prevent constant palace coups, boys from tough tribes were kidnapped, educated in Islam, trained in the art of war, and sworn as “slave soldiers” to the sultan, a respected status. For related reasons, sultans often surrounded themselves with Christian, Jewish or Sufi advisors. Muhammad advocated freeing slaves, which many Muslims did, after which they could become full citizens (if they submitted to Islam), intermarry and serve in the army. Meanwhile, “slave generals” simply seized power, became the new sultans and mounted their own slave armies.
Protestors at the United Nations' 'Isaiah Wall,' featuring Isaiah quote, "They shall beat their swords into plowshares," in 2015. photo: unknownNevertheless, many monotheist metaphors, ideals and practices are inherently liberal. Each grandmother goddess physically birthed her own human species, but a single masculine lord would have to create them mentally and metaphysically, suggesting he did so simultaneously, equally and in his image, which imbued them with autonomy and reason. Allowing humans to freely choose good over evil, instead of programming them animalistically, proved God’s greatness. “The Parable of Adam and Eve”, far from depicting “The Fall” inflicted by a woman disobeying God, dramatizes how we evolved from matriarchy to patriarchy but also from genetically-governed natural and sexual selection, living au natural in the Garden of Eden, to “conscious selection” (the identification and choosing of facts and building of abstract worldviews directly tied to reality).
Monotheism failed to establish the perfect justice and cooperation suggested by divine law, but it did excel at symbolizing those values on earth and in the afterlife. Polytheist heavens were crowded, incestuous, chaotic and crime-ridden, much like the ancient towns on which they were modeled, but more so in the Middle East, after millennia of civilization, exacerbated by the end of the golden ages of Sumer, Egypt and Babylon, and the mysterious late Bronze Age collapse, in the 12th century BCE. The Middle East simply had too many cosmologies, clans and populations, per square mile, and too few men willing to take full responsibility for their communities or children to continue to prosper in the manner to which they were accustom. Monotheism may smack of misogyny to modern observers, but it was immanently logical and progressive after tens of millennia of matriarchal polytheism. Indeed, making the universe masculine and men central to it can be considered one of religion’s most important innovations, and it was orchestrated by women, as Khadija signaled with her actions.
Based on books, monotheism fostered literacy and abstract thinking but also prayer, meditation and ethical analysis. More intellectual than polytheism’s ritual spectacles, titillating stories or mystery cult metaphysics, monotheism evolved beyond sacrificing living beings, which was often how polytheists placated their deities or soothsayers (usually women) divined the future (they often examined a sheep or goat's liver for signs). Monotheism also emphasized individual souls and equal rights, rather than castes or social or priestly hierarchies (although the Catholics and Shi’a resurrected strong priesthoods). Moreover, they spoke of justice between tribes, nations and classes, favored internalized civilized guilt over external tribal shame, and were more optimistic and romantic. The one, true God must know all or at least have a plan, including for finding true love, as emphasized in the beginning of “The Bible”: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, therefore shall a man cleave unto his wife,” (Genesis 2:24). Romanticism assists the difficult chore of defending the family and community, by romanticizing hero tales but also the need to defend the family and fields from the evil doers who periodically threaten more tolerant or successful communities.
Monotheism provided an emotional and ethical foundation for liberal democracy, in fact, by establishing an overarching system that organized the prodigious intellectual and scientific work of the Greeks. The citizens of Hellenist city-states invented or greatly improved almost all the disciplines of modern civilization from democracy, math and science to theatre, architecture, realistic sculpture and the Olympics. But without a coordinating overall mechanism, by the 5th century AD, most Greek speakers had abandoned their classical achievements and became Christian peasants. The Jews, however, preserved their monotheism through extensive travails and, in the 19th century, integrated Greek thinking. All tribes practice some form of democracy, and the Norse, Native American and other groups contributed to its development through their egalitarian councils, advanced ethics and strong friendship traditions. But few tribal federations were able to expand egalitarianism and suffrage before 18th century Enlightenment Europe, where it emerged largely due to the indepth study of Judaic theology and Hellenic philosophy and science, with Muslim scholars and theologians helping preserve and expand much of both.
The Golden Rule as seen in various cultures, although the Judeo-Christian version is the best known. illo: unknownMonotheism revealed the fullness of its liberal democracy foundation in a single sentence: “The Golden Rule”. Based on the reciprocal altruism of animals and the universal practice of good friends treating each other as equals, “The Golden Rule” figures prominently in all three Abrahamic faiths: Jesus’s "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” delivered during the Sermon on the Mount; the Hebrew trying to first limit negative behavior with, “Don’t do unto others as you don’t want done unto you;” and the Muslim, from “Hadith”, “Do unto all men as you would wish to have done unto you.”
We must take full responsibility, Muhammad felt, since each soul will have to answer for their deeds on Judgment Day, although “The Quran” does take both sides in the ancient argument between predetermined fate and voluntary free will. Desert dwellers, sailors and others living in harsh environmental or abusive societies often prefer an all-controlling fate to soften God’s will and their normal guilt over failing to alleviate suffering, which their more rational coreligionists don’t have the heart to deny them. Nevertheless, they still take fate into their own hands, starting as infants crying out, to satisfy their immediate desires but also defend their right to be treated equally to others in their family, tribe or perceived community. Ironically, whether nurture and culture or nature and biology dominate the human condition remains in dispute across modern civilization, from politics and policing to psychology and biology, with respected thinkers, like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, favoring the latter.
Emphasizing the former, however, Muhammad esteemed individual merit and rights and opposed inherited rule and kings. Hence, the four “Righteous Caliphs,” who ruled Islam after he died, in 632 AD, were chosen democratically, using acclamation (cheering), by all Muslims present—including women! The vast majority shouted to support Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s closest friend and the father of his child bride, Aisha, but a small minority insisted power be passed in the ancient manner, to a family member, which triggered Islam’s terrible civil war, 14 centuries and counting. Muhammad had no surviving sons, an obvious sign from God, but his cousin and son-in-law Ali was considered close enough by “The Party of Ali,” words in Arabic which condense into “Shi’a.”
A respected warrior, Ali served Muhammad devotedly, including during the massacre of Medinan Jews, but he was also a man of peace, who opposed power grabs—a Muhammadian democrat, in other words. Finally elected as the fourth “Righteous Caliph,” he was assassinated, at prayer no less, for being too tolerant, for not adequately punishing Muslims who committed infractions. Considered by some to be the first Sufi, he was murdered by the Kharijites, members of Islam’s first extremist sect, who were traumatized by Islam’s first civil war (656-61 AD). That grotesque, sanguinous slaughter started when the majoritarian Sunnis established a dynasty (in contradiction to Muhammad), amassed a massive army, and mercilessly massacred the minority Shi’a, including Muhammad’s grandson, Husayn. Martyr stories require spiritual leaders reinterpret reality to parse God’s will, which can stimulate sophisticated ideas and art but often leaves regular folk confused and injured.
Muhammadian democracy and Sunni egalitarianism were hard to scale up further from his charisma and leadership, as was integrating mosque and state. The Sunnis soon switched to primogeniture succession and hierarchies headed by “sultans” and “viziers” (political leaders and managers), who ran the caliphate’s armies and bureaucracies in the name of the caliph (religious leader). After the Damascus-based Umayyad Dynasty grew too fast and was wracked by divisions, the Abbasid Caliphate seized power in 749 AD and reigned supreme from Baghdad for almost exactly a half millennium, to 1258. Although reforms were attempted, often by Sufis, the Abbasid understanding of Islam was too far from a unified field theory, and the Caliphate declined into dysfunction and delusion. In 1258, they were annihilated by the Mongols, who flooded and burnt as well as butchered Baghdad. No democratic elections were held until the Sunni Ottomans started experimenting with democracy in 1877, and many Arab nations still have kings today.
Despite Islam’s tyrannical tendencies, however, Muslim life could be vastly improved by encouraging ethical leadership, everyman activism and moral suasion, as Muhammad did in his day, decent mullahs ever since, and the Sufis have done throughout Islamic history and especially during their renaissance. Islam’s allowance of four wives, to those who could afford it, deprived poor men of marriage partners and dowry requirements favored older or elderly men, but the lingering loose morays of the matriarchal era and the universal practice of situational homosexuality relieved sexual deficits. Alas, the efficacy of these workarounds faded after Islam turned a thousand and was confronted by European colonialism and modernism.
A fully outfitted Wahhabi warrior. illo: unknownBy the late 18th century, Muhammad Wahhab’s innovative if extremely conservative Islam was attracting many fanatical devotees. After conquering most of Arabia, his warriors turned north and annihilated Karbala, the main Shi’a city, which features Husayn’s shrine and is near Baghdad. They became the symbolic leaders of Islam, in fact, after capturing Mecca in 1803 but only for a few years. En route, they decimated Sufis, Jews, Christians and pagans, enforced mosque attendance and daily prayers, and took totalitarian control of women, replete with full body covering (sometimes enforced while working in the fields), public chaperoning, female genital mutilation and “honor killings,” which they hoped would reduce women’s sex magic and increase men’s ability to resist it.
Islam’s hybridizing of politics and religion made its achievements gifts from God but, by the same token, its defeats and decadence were because of sin and violations of Islamic law. Monotheism became so popular so quickly because it solved so many polytheist problems, but not “Why bad things happen to good people?”, which pagans could easily explain through polytheism’s central conceit: “You’re praying to the wrong god.” A similar theological crisis challenged Judaism, in the 6th century BCE, after the King Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Solomon’s Temple and Jerusalem, and kidnapped half its inhabitants to exile in Babylon. Although the temple was soon rebuilt, with Persian help, the rabbis still had to answer to their flock for why they were abandoned by God. Blaming increasingly subtle sin, like “coveting thy neighbor’s wife in thy heart,” they invented “guilt,” a more sophisticated style of social control than the peer pressure of tribal shame, shunning and excommunication.
Rejecting such extreme self-criticism, a few rabbis wrote and many approved of “The Book of Job”, arguably “The Bible”’s most advanced theology, which is thought to come from outside Hebrew culture (probably a polytheist tale). It was probably written in the 5th century BCE, shortly after Babylonian captivity, part of the new ideas and prophets which eventually became the Pharisees. Using big characters and drama reminiscent of “The Parable of Adam and Eve”, God bets the Devil that the famously righteous Job won’t renounce him, even after his good luck and fortune are removed. After losing his flocks, possessions and family—everyone except his wife (who recommends he admit error, unlike the supportive Khadija)—Job defies the three wise men, who insist he must have sinned, and addresses God directly. In the heat of their argument, God retorts, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4), which triggers Job’s epiphany: the universe is simply too old, large and complex to be understood. Indeed, the path toward good—which can be defined as “Good is greater benefit for more people over longer periods,” while “Evil is short term benefit for the few”—inevitably includes struggle, pain and terrible tragedy.
I dealt with Job’s conundrum personally once in a discussion with my mother (by phone in the 1990s). “If it wasn’t for the Holocaust, you probably would have stayed in Poland and not come to America, and not met my father,” I said, “which means I wouldn’t exist.” After a few seconds, she came back with, “That’s not true. You would have been your father’s son.” “But how could that be, without you as my mother?” “You would have been your father’s son with another woman,” she concluded, which would have pleased Khadija, since she ceded the traditional power of woman over birth to my father, who was also a righteous patriarch.
Honoring Thy Father While Also Hating Him
Muhammad drew on preceding Jewish and Christian stories and theologies, while adding those from his own experience, his tribe’s or Mecca’s many polytheisms. Hence, “The Quran” has the single-sentence revelation, “God speaks in parables to mankind” (Surah 24:37), which contradicts literalism, if taken literally. Christians also syncretized older polytheist themes, like gods mating with humans, while Jews incorporated Egyptian theology and Babylonian myths, like the Flood or Tower of Babel.
Attempting to integrate millennia of mystical insight, the Israelite authors exploited every known narrative device, from poetic flights of fancy to omniscient instruction from on high or proto-modern books, like the agnostic, vanity-busting “Ecclesiastes” or “Songs of Solomon”, with its eight romantic, semi-matriarchal poems, but it’s mostly a long, avant-garde novel starring the Jews. The origin of the universe, humans and their early heroes are covered in the first book, “Genesis”, but the next four, starting with “Exodus”, detail their liberation from slavery and idolatry led by Moses. Traditionally considered the author of “The Torah” (the Jewish name for those first five books), and the Hebrew’s greatest prophet, Moses was probably Egyptian, perhaps even a Pharaoh’s son. (I feel this fact is worth highlighting to offset the Pharaohs as the Biblical symbol for evil—they built the pyramids, after all—and to share with modern Egyptians the legacy of Moses and monotheism.)
There’s no archeological proof that Moses actually existed, but if he didn’t, why did the Hebrews give him an Egyptian name, have him speak through his brother Aaron (implying a lack of Hebrew fluency) and marry a Kenite woman (when Jewish decent is matrilineal)? Foundling stories, like the Pharoah’s daughter “finding” Moses floating on the Nile, were popular in the Middle East as literary tricks for tribe switching (there was a similar one about Sargon, founder of the Akkadian Empire in the 23rd century BCE). All societies are somewhat or largely multicultural, regardless of their purity claims (which are often amplified among the more mixed), which obliges their storytellers to invent intricate but believable tales establishing their heroes as blood kin.
'Moses', by Michelangelo. photo: unknown Moses was an acolyte of the Egyptian sun god, Aten, as Freud famously detailed in his last book, “Moses and Monotheism”, written in 1938, after he was allowed to flee Vienna by the Nazis, who reviled his theories of guilt, conscience and sex but feared he was too famous to murder at that time (they soon sent many of his relatives to death camps). History’s first recorded monotheism, Atenism was developed by elite priests and instituted by Pharoah Akhenaton around 1350 BCE, with support from his powerful and beautiful wife, Nefertiti, but mostly his generals, who installed the new religion by force. Alas, that enraged Egypt’s aristocrats, who rued losing their status and incomes, often from polytheist temples, and, after his 17-year reign, destroyed his statues, shrines to Aten and sacred capital city.
Recognizing the inherent conflict between religious compulsion and normal friendship and ethics, Moses (or someone like him) reinterpreted Atenism, liberalized monotheism and began building it from the ground up, through better ideals and narratives, among slaves and poor people. Indeed, Moses’ major theme, aside from monotheism, is the right to freedom and equality, just as friends treat each other. Despite the prevalence of slavery in the classical world (and its tolerance in Judaism), Moses’ signature achievement was freeing the Jews from bondage and idolatry, which symbolizes attachment to anything unproductive, and leading them to the “promised land.” Although slavery began as a primitive welfare program, which allowed starving families to sell their children to finance the survival of both parties, with the rise of civilization, it became a booty-of-war and labor system, especially the lifelong chattel slavery practiced in the Americas (in contrast to the temporary enslavement of the classical world, Judaism and Islam). Judaism started as an anti-slavery movement, liberating the laborers who built the pyramids, a process honored in their principal holiday, Passover. An egalitarian ritual, Passover is performed priest-less, in the home, using Socratic discourse, notably asking the children “The Four Questions,” and references the freeing all people (naturally, since monotheism is universal). The Christians turned Passover dinner into the Last Supper, which precedes the high drama of Easter, Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, and ostensibly frees all people from sin, but only if they accept the Christian system of metaphors.
Whether Moses saw “god” or made “god” up, or someone else did, is immaterial. Why did the Hebrews write that Moses carved “The Ten Commandments” into stone tablets on Mount Sinai only to have him break them shortly thereafter? Or, if that actually happened, why didn’t they edit it out? Narratively, it was to express Moses’s sorrow upon seeing his adopted tribe revert to polytheism by praying to the Golden Calf, even as he struggled mightily to bring them monotheist law. Meta-narratively, however, it highlighted “no compulsion,” an oft-revisited theme in monotheism, like when Moses’s first cousin, Korach, led a rebellion and was punished by God. “The Bible”’s authors realized ethical evolution is personal and voluntary, and the best way to promote it was through stories with colorful characters arguing and reasoning out the issues, at multiple symbol levels.
In fact, eliminating idol worship also refers to transcending the material world, money and power to focus on spiritual values, responsible relationships and psychological and social health. This established the intellectual environment which birthed dozens of monotheist prophets, a few of whom got their own Biblical chapters, and thousands of activists, preachers, intellectuals, theologians, humanists and saints, as well as the prophets of two new monotheisms, Christ and Muhammad.
Solomon's original temple in Jerusalem. illo: unknownReligion Inevitably Involves Politics
No coercion was the Jewish religious position, but to flourish on a continental crossroads—the homo genus had been hiking out of Africa and across the Israeli isthmus for over a million years—they fashioned two tiny states around the ancient city of Jerusalem. First born was to its north, the Kingdom of Israel (900-720 BCE), but shortly thereafter around the city itself, the Kingdom of Judah (850-586 BCE and then 530 BCE-70 AD). That poorer, smaller state was also called Judea, which gave us the words “Judean,” “Judaism” and “Jew,” after its residents were kidnapped to Babylon in 586 BCE and the Babylonians inquiresd as to their origins and faith. The larger, stronger Israel had more farmers, traders and solders, and provided the name for their political state (until today), but the Judeans surpassed them through sheer intellect. It was probably King Josiah, ruling from 648 to 609 BCE, who instituted major theological reforms, like eliminating all lesser gods, and hiring rabbis and scribes to compile, edit and publish “The Torah,” the first five books. They also composed the additional books of “Kings” and “Chronicles” to describe Josiah’s doings. Their powerfully-worded texts became the first 14 chapters of the greatest bestseller in history, and established Jerusalem as a religious, scholarly and publishing center, as well as the world’s only Jewish metropolis.
So respected was Jerusalem’s religion, intellectuals and mystics, it was never made the capital of any other state or imperial district in the course of three millennia and over three dozen conquests. Polytheists of all persuasions pilgrimaged to petition its all-powerful god, which was why the liberal Persian king, Cyrus the Great, helped rebuild the Temple in the 6th century BCE. In Christ’s time, the moneychangers in front of the Temple he so objected to were there to serve foreigners in need of local currency to buy devotional oil. Muhammad ascended to heaven from Jerusalem, which made it Islam’s third sacred city, after Mecca and Medina, although he probably only visited a couple of times and certainly never lived there. And the city retains that status today, including mental institutions with people of all faiths afflicted with “Jerusalem Syndrome” (messianic psychosis).
Atenism, Judaism and the late Bronze Age collapse also inspired a radical new philosophy among the Babylonians, which came to be called “Babylonian Science.” A combination of ancient soothsaying and myths, cutting-edge astronomy and monotheism, it came to be revered by the Greeks, Egyptians and others and called astrology. Indeed, it is one of the our most popular unified field theories, along with Judaism, Christianity, Islam and science, with horoscopes featured in many newspapers and magazines and now online.
Forty-eight years after Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Judea, it resurrected and ran ‘til 70 AD, not a bad reign, although Judaism was ripe for reinterpretation by then, in keeping with monotheism’s half-millennium update cycles. Conquest by the Roman Empire in 63 BCE complicated the already fraught relationship between the Pharisees, the populist, mystical and anti-Hellenist Jews, who emerged from Babylonian captivity and attempted to integrate fate and free will, and the priestly, upper-class Sadducees, who rejected predestination and the newer prophets and abided only “The Torah”. Indeed, there was soon a plethora of radical new prophets with fanatical followers, like the cult of crossdressing Zealots, who terrorized Jerusalem killing and looting, and the Sicarii (which still means “hit man” in Spanish), who enacted expert assassinations (although they fled attacks instead of standing and praying like Hashasheens).
Jesus was a peaceful hippie type, who embodied Judaism’s highest ideals, but he was also a maverick mystic in the mode of the great Hebrew prophets, who often criticized Jews or the Judaism of their day. Jesus’s pacifism contradicted David, in fact, the most revered Jewish sage after Moses, who started as a young, romantic shepherd and musician but killed Goliath and became their greatest king (although “The Bible” cites some crimes, notably dispatching to battle Bathsheba’s husband in order to seduce her). Given David supposedly co-authored “The Psalms”, still some of humanity’s most profound poems and wisdom literature, he exemplified the wedding of the sword, spirit and word, which came to be considered mandatory for messiahs (in seeming contradiction to Zachariah). David was probably just a local chieftain, not the second king of the mythical Israel-Judah Kingdom, but his existence was confirmed in the 1990s by archeologists unearthing a stone bearing the inscription “The House of David” (at Tel Dan, Israel). Either way, someone must have led the establishment of Jerusalem around the 9th century BCE and their son or grandson, perhaps named Solomon, must have built its temple, even if the details were embellished by Josiah’s writers in the 7th century BCE.
The authors of “The New Testament” undoubtedly invented Joseph and Mary’s journey from Galilee to Jerusalem around Christmas in order to connect Christ to David’s royal lineage as well as the pagan winter solstice festival. While Christ’s rejection of political power precluded him from being the long-predicted messiah, according to most Jews, some liked separating church and state, hence Christianity’s phenomenal growth. It allowed them to follow the new Judaism with less persecution, interact with converts from other tribes in church, and enjoy romantic devotion to a personal God, the spiritual hero who unraveled the secret of death as a mental construct. While Gilgamesh had to hike to the end of the earth to learn about death from a male mystic, after he rejected the goddess Ishtar, and Jews focused on terrestrial ethics, without mentioning heaven much, Christ celebrated celestial life, which could be made eternal through the infinite reach of abstraction. Indeed, heaven was a perfectly logical, religiously-imagined reward for doing right by the Lord. With its hero-martyr protagonist, “The Gospels” was a biography told from four perspectives, the books of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John (written about 70 to 100 CE), which contradicts divine dictation, although “The New Testament” includes 26 additional books. Fourteen are attributed to Paul, a Pharisee Jew from Turkey, who probably penned only half and persecuted Christians until his epiphany on the road to Damascus.
Islam’s theology is more Jewish than Christian, given it didn’t endorse the central thesis of Christ as God, although it mentioned him by name over a hundred times and indirectly almost two hundred (only Moses is more esteemed, with 136 by-name listings). It also rejiggered Jewish and Christian stories, such as making early Bible characters Muslim. Abraham and his first son, Ismail, father to Muslims (while his second son, Isaac, generated the Jews), are said to have carved the Ka’aba Stone, which polytheists later defaced with their “yoni” symbol. Other sagas are synopsized, like turning Moses’s sister, Miriam, into Jesus’s mother and subtracting a millennium. The Jews were the Muslim’s forbears, but they disobeyed God, misinterpreted his prophets and grievously sinned, hence the need for Islam to replace Judaism.
“The Quran” was also recorded by scribes, since Muhammad didn’t write—although he emphasized the importance of literacy to monotheism—but his personality suffuses the text, making it an autobiography. As we read its nonchronological Surahs, arranged from longest to shortest, we can hear him preaching in front of the Ka’aba, explaining or pleading with his fellow Meccans and the town’s many visitors to join not only his new monotheism but monotheist civilization, and its promise of a more just, functional and loving society.
The Romans became massively multicultural after conquering Greece, which they copied wholesale, and then many other tribes and civilizations, from which they borrowed deities, knowledge and practices. Such assimilation was impossible with monotheism, however, especially since Roman emperors insisted on being worshipped as gods, an abomination to monotheists. While many Jews respected Greek and Roman amenities, like roads, aqueducts, and amphitheaters, plus their science and Olympics (in which Jews competed naked, after tying their foreskins to look uncircumcised), the polytheism versus monotheist fight had reached a breaking point. It escalated rapidly after the Romans crucified Christ, Caligula installed a statue of himself in the Second Temple, and subsequent emperors destroyed it outright and then Judea in its entirety. Using their traditional tactic of severe repression, the Romans brutally put down three Jewish rebellions between 66 to 136 AD. Indeed, Rome was obliged to destroy the Jews because they stood for freedom of religion and speech—proto-liberal democrats, in other words.
After Rome killed as many as half a million Jews, many emigrated (the Diaspora), although some remained in Jerusalem or the region. Since monotheism solved so many polytheist problems, those wandering Jews (mostly men) were often respected. In fact, they sometimes married into ruling families, taught Judaism or their interpretation of Mosaic Law and built philo-Semitic communities as far afield as Nigeria, Samarkand and Bangladesh, a few of which are extant today. Jews and Christians also spread out across the Roman empire, the Christians preaching but the Jews discussing their faiths, as well as scribing their texts and building synagogues and churches. Focusing on analysis and commentary, the Jews produced “The Talmud” (200-500 AD), about “The Torah”, and “The Zohar” (written in 1275 AD, by Moses de León of Spain, although he claimed it was an ancient Israelite manuscript).
In this way, the Christians and, to a lesser degree, the Jews converted much of the Middle East, North Africa and southern Europe (all the way to Spain), using spirit not the sword, greatly assisted by the fact that those populations were civilized and often viewed monotheism as the next logical step. The Romans themselves gradually converted to Christianity, culminating when it became the state religion in 380 CE. Three hundred years later, however, when warrior preachers accompanied Muslim armies into Central Asia and North Africa or their Christian counterparts entered northern Europe, religious compulsion traumatized tribal members, from the Berber and Turkic tribal groups to the Celts and Goths. As one Goth said after converting, “I hear my father crying out from the grave.”
Christians attack Frankfurt’s Jewish ghetto, the Fettmilch riot, 1614. illo: Matthäus Merian/Wikimedia Commons Why Christians and Muslims Began Punishing Jews
As Jews used their book learning and intellectual training to grow from traditional work as shepherds, farmers, merchants and rabbis, they became doctors, diplomats, moneylenders, international traders and other professions central to civilization but easy to blame when health, politics or finances went bad. Hence, despite scriptural directives to be ethical, help strangers and respect fathers, including spiritual fathers, Christian and Muslim authorities decided to demote them to third class status, although many people did maintain friendships, partnerships and marriages (as proven by the similarity look of Jews with non-Jews from their lands of origin, as well as DNA tests). There was even more cooperation with some elites, which is well documented from Morocco to India but personified by the Jews of Baghdad, originally brought by Nebuchadnezzar. Through Muslim conquest, Mongol annihilation and Ottoman resurrection, they lived alongside their neighbors, often working in the diamond, spice or commodity businesses, but, starting in the 19th century, going into newspapers, railroads and other modern enterprises. Baghdad had the world’s largest urban Jewish population (90,000), outside of Europe and New York, until their expulsion in 1948.
The front stage rationale for repressing Jews was: If they can be pressured into accepting to Christianity or Islam that proves those faiths’ superiority. Just as the Jews were “chosen” as the first monotheists (aside from Atenism), subsequent monotheists saw themselves as chosen, entitled to take over. Backstage and subconsciously, however, many Christians and Muslims were angry, confused and in desperate need of psychological or political relief both of which could be achieved by having villain around which to build the standard system of scapegoating, which is now called conspiracy theories. Given the Jews were an ancient people who started travelling the world in the 2nd century AD and were present in many nations, including times of historical difficulty, they made convenient scapegoats.
Freud detailed how scapegoating works in “Civilization and its Discontents” (1928): “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, as long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness… In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately all the massacres of the Jews of the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows… Once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence.” Similarly, once the Goths converted to Christianity, their tribal law essentially made all Christians their fellow tribalists, leaving only the Jews, Gypsies and witches as blameworthy. In fact, “the dream of a Germanic world-dominion called for antisemitism as its compliment,” Freud wrote, before Nazism was even a decade old, and added presciently, “the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization [finds] its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois.”
Although Freud nailed the basic psychology of scapegoating, based on his concept of the “narcissism of minor differences,” there were bigger problems in my opinion. The failure of tribes, cities, nations and civilizations is mostly due to stupid, repressive or corrupt leaders, compounded by the often unavoidable occurrence of war, weather and pestilence. Since those failed leaders are peoples’ fathers and (sometimes) mothers, blaming them openly is difficult, especially in a patriarchy, where fatherly respect is required and criticism can offend community members as well as authorities. This primordial conflict between respecting ones’ ancestors and correcting their errors can be alleviated either through honesty, courage and the bold action of a mature or what I call “repressed father hatred syndrome.” That mental disorder occurs when people continue to revere dysfunctional forbears but transfer their rage at being deprived of the care or functional society they see others enjoying to scapegoats.
Article continues at My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker who can be reached .
Posted on Oct 26, 2024 - 03:58 PM
by Doniphan Blair
Bedouin women get water, Middle East, early 20th century. photo: unknown Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
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KHADIJA AND MUHAMMAD'S
reciprocal altruism reflected not only the romanticism popular in the Middle East since ancient Sumer but a cooperative relationship between equally an empowered woman and man, also evidenced by how she helped him intellectually and spiritually. After the shock of Muhammad's first revelation, when he feared he was possessed by a spirit, Khadija assured him he was hearing the one, true God, “submitted” to his new faith, and became the first Muslim. Submission may seem like a strange central metaphor for a religion based on unity, equality and justice, but it symbolizes how a ruling matriarch cedes power to an emerging patriarch, or how we mortals must accept a single, all-powerful Lord or universe.
Women organized our earliest clans, we can assume, since the men knew little about birthing, nursing and child rearing, and spent a lot of time away from camp. Indeed, as many biologists have noted, the human race is a hybridizing experiment run by women. Although the results of the research are still in dispute, a lot is known, as with goddess culture. For starters, as homo Sapiens developed bigger brains (“sapiens” being Latin for “wise”), it became harder for females to pass babies through the birth canal, requiring they be born premature, which increased the calories and time needed to bring them to maturity as well as injury to the mother, placing upon them enormous evolutionary pressure.
Since nothing can live forever, all living entities must focus on reproduction, after simple survival. That women’s bridge to consciousness and self-consciousness was reproduction is documented by both “The Bible”, where the snake in “Genesis” obviously signifies "penis," and science, from Darwin’s second theory of evolution, sexual selection, to cutting-edge brain and behavioral studies. Female homo Sapiens have language centers in both of their brain hemispheres (unlike the male’s left only), become verbal earlier as toddlers and are more talkative as adults. Instead of relying on instincts and emotions, actual data on reproduction became the first fruit on the Tree of Knowledge and triggered our cultural Big Bang, from language to art and romance. Once women could count the nine months back to conception and identify fathers, they could dispel paternity uncertainty and leverage male desire, which led to a revolution in communication—language was invented about 70 to 140,000 BCE— as well as cooperation and clan organization.
Matriarchal polytheism must have guided our evolution, both genetically and socially, for tens of millennia, at least back to the paleolithic “Venus figurines,” up to 42,000 years old. Those few-inch-long icons, often depicting fat, fantastically-breasted women, were undoubtedly fashioned by tool-using men to honor their community’s most successful mothers, who were also their leaders and priestesses as well as girlfriends. In fact, women’s research into reproduction informed the invention of both agriculture (controlling the reproduction of other species) and romance (the intellectualization of mating calls, dances and other intersex signaling, which is reproduction’s first step). Agriculture and romance, in turn, rapidly blew up small, wandering clans into tribes and towns and, after about five millennia, civilizations and empires.
During that exponential growth, however, the leading matriarchs evidently noticed diminishing returns on how they organized families with multiple fathers, inspired men to work the fields (which required a full day, not hunting’s half), or convinced them to fight to the death invading marauders. (Hunters flee overwhelming force, but farmers fight for fecund fields.) After women learned to use language to trade their services and products (sex and children) for male-provided supplies, shelter and safety (negotiations which were the first form of verbal romance), men more readily came in from the wild. (Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s boon friend, was seduced into civilization by a temple prostitute and cooked food.) Men were always instinctively and emotionally part of the reproductive process, of course, but making the universe male and them social leaders was the third big attractor, after sex and children, and arguably the most important. Indeed, getting men to renounced rough folkways, take responsibility and massively increase labor and creativity was central to their evolution from hunters into fathers, farmers, fighters and vast builders.
Necessity is the mother invention, and new circumstances beget new worldviews. Khadija believed her husband provided exactly that for her tribal group, the Arabs, who had long pined for a monotheist prophet of their own, and her city, Mecca, which was famous for poetry contests, many religions and non-violence oaths during festivals but beset by conflicting male poets and warriors as well as matriarchs and priestesses. When societies are successful, they reproduce and grow. But when they get too large, the efficacy of women’s horizontal networking fades before the efficiency of male hierarchies, hero worship and brute strength. To parse this tricky transition, Khadija granted Muhammad authority over her body, family, real estate and businesses, as well as the previously female universe and, together, they forged the Arabs’ late but fast shift to patriarchy and civilization building.
A gate to Baghdad in the 19th century. illo: Arthur Aletrilly,1882 Muhammad famously adored women and, after Khadija died, took a dozen wives and concubines, although he limited men to four wives (who have to be loved equally, signaling the superiority of monogamy). In fact, Muhammad can be considered a feminist for his day given “The Quran” refers to men and women as equals and that “both men and women, are guardians of one another” (Surah 9:71); it grants women property rights and half a male's inheritance; and he supported women’s right to satisfaction (to respect natural feeling but also deter polytheist revanchism), issues he must have decided in consultation with Khadija. In Christianity’s more feminized culture, however, women received no property, inheritance or pleasure privileges.
Islam reversed Christianity's separation of church and state and sex restrictions and become the most masculine monotheism, largely due to its late arrival to the civilizational project and need to raise armies as well as male social involvement and discipline. Moreover, it was determined to end matriarchal power rather than balance it, as in Judaism, or transform its romantic aspects into religious devotion, as in Christianity. Muslim men wield full authority over female family members as well as their own children, whom they retain after divorce. While Christianity forbade divorce and Jews required a rabbi’s approval, under Islam the man merely pronounces “I divorce you” three times before witnesses (which can liberate a woman, when an abusive husband does it in a fit of rage, according to Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi). This parallels Islamic conversion, which involves the thrice oath taking of “There is no true god but God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God,” and affirms the intellectual power of monotheism, wherein words are holy and a Muslim’s word is their bond.
To make peace with matriarchal polytheism, however, Christianity introduced a fertility goddess, Mary (who was considered a virgin, despite Christ’s older siblings), and the Hebrews honored women as matriarchs. Their Sabbath similar to a goddess holiday, wherein women do the first prayer (candle lighting), don’t work at all (au contraire Christian and Muslim women), and are encouraged to pursue reproduction. The stories of powerful Jewesses are recounted in “The Bible”, some of which are repeated in “The Quran”, and pre- or extra- marital sex is not a mortal sin, since Jewish familial descent is matriarchal, after the ancient patriarchal period. Matriarchy makes children inherently legitimate (“Free women don’t commit adultery,” according to Hind, the wife of Mecca’s chief and Muhammad’s main opponent, because whomever they sexually select is legal). The Christians attempted to control male sexuality by restricting sex and reverting to a virginal, pre-lapsarian philosophy, but the Jews emphasized self-control and circumcision, which they enshrined as the males’ primary sacrifice to the one, true God.
Despite claims that circumcision promotes cleanliness, especially in water-scarce environments (which it does), it is more obviously a symbol of sexual suppression, although removing the penis's protective skin also unveils and beautifies it, a body modification undoubtedly preferred by matriarchs. The Christians passed on circumcision, assuming their sex-is-sin and guilt-induction system was enough, but the Muslims embraced it, despite the fact it is not mentioned in "The Quran". Nevertheless, it’s covered in “The Hadith”, the collections of Muhammad’s sayings, and throughout “The Old Testament”, which Muslims consider sacred (“He sent down the Torah and the Gospel,” Surah 3:3), and most Muslim boys endure it during their seventh year (as opposed to seventh day, as with Jews). Unfortunately, sex was so seductive, according to Muslims with more recent matriarchal memories, a second circumcision was needed: that of women. Hence, the "mullahs" (Sunni ministers) allowed female genital mutilation (FGM), despite its absence from “The Quran” or “Old Testament”, its capacity to inflict grievous injury or death, and its reduction or elimination of an important pleasure, considered a gift from God by Muhammad. FGM is still practiced among many Sunnis, largely in Africa (highest in the Horn of Africa), and a majority of women in Egypt, despite the nation's legal ban and media campaign against it, starting in 2005.
Desert travelers stop for the night, essentially how Muhammad and his crew looked in the 7th century. illo: unknown, circa 19th century Already a charismatic public speaker, Muhammad transformed himself into a brilliant politician and strategic general, who led the outnumbered and ill-equipped Muslims to heroic victories. But he was the messenger not son of God, and there were some defeats and mistakes, notably with his wives and the Jews. After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem five centuries earlier, Jews dispersed across the Middle East in the “Jewish Diaspora,” including a large and popular community in Medina. The Muslim holy day became Friday, in fact, because Jews had their weekly market then, the day before their work-free sabbath, and attending Muslims were available for mosque. Some Jews sided with Muhammad in his fight against Mecca but, during a loyalty dispute with another Jewish clan, he ordered the massacre of about five hundred Jewish men and boys.
Alas, 7th century Arabian politics were internecine and complex, as was the art of receiving a revelation, editing it into a text, and establishing a new, better adapted religion. Hence, “The Quran” has differing or contradictory dictums, just as does “The Bible”, including pronouncements for and against Jews, alcohol, gambling, murder, fate and more. Such sacred incongruities oblige monotheists to distance themselves from the letter of “divine” law and dedicated themselves to its spirit, to rationally and voluntarily decide which scripture, in a complex situation, better advances monotheism’s core concepts of compassion, equality, justice and cooperation.
Relief depicting Akhenaten and Nefertiti with three of their daughters under the rays of Aten. courtesy: Wikipedia, please donate hereEver since the first monotheism, Egyptian Atenism, which flourished briefly around 1350 BCE, the one-god theory has been renovated or reinvented at 300 to 500 year intervals. There was Moses, or someone like him (or someone telling stories about someone like him), around 1000 BCE; the Jewish prophets after the Jews were exiled to Babylon, starting around 500 BCE; Jesus Christ (building on John the Baptist and the Essenes); the rabbinical reform after the devastating Jewish-Roman Wars (66-136 AD); Christianity’s First Council of Nicaea (Turkey) in 325 AD (when dozens of “apocryphal” books were edited from “The New Testament”); and, three centuries later, Islam (the last major monotheism until the mid-19th century Mormons and Baha’is in middle America and Persia, respectively, although the former fled to Utah and the latter to Israel). In keeping with this chronology, Al-Ghazali’s Sufi revolution started nearly a half millennium after Muhammad, while Martin Luther nailed his “Ninety-five Theses” to a German church door in 1517, almost exactly a millennium and a half after Christ’s ministry.
Muhammad revered Judaism and Christianity and opposed the polytheist empires of the East, which makes him a westerner, but he developed many unique stories, philosophies and ceremonies. They obviously satisfied a pressing need, especially in our harsher climes, given Islam’s phenomenal expansion: over twice the size of the Roman Empire in half the time. This can be attributed to Muhammad's simple and straightforward focus on justice, equality and peace, which is highlighted by the first phrase of all 114 of “The Quran”’s Surahs (chapters), “In the name of Allah, the most compassionate, most merciful,” one-line revelations like “There should be no compulsion in religion” (Surah 2:257), the universal greeting of “As-salamu alaykum” (“Peace be upon you”), and many of “Hadith” sayings, like Muhammad's theory of jihad, wherein “the greater jihad” is against the ego but political struggle is “the lesser jihad,” or exhortations to tolerate disagreement and forgive enemies.
According to most Sufis, Sufism does not derive from ancient fertility cults, as some scholars suggest, but Muhammad’s secret oral teachings, which are thought to be more spiritual and metaphysical than his public oral or written work, “The Hadith” and “The Quran”, respectively. Although those secret teachings may be apocryphal, Sufis followed Muhammad’s lived example of having a mystical practice but also a profession and family, and of respecting women, who were excluded from most mystical fraternities. The vast majority of Sufis were men, devout Muslims and patriarchal, but many accepted women as tariqa members, teachers or saints, notably Rabi’ah Basri, from 8th century Basra (Iraq), who started as a slave or prostitute, devoted herself to charity and became the first saint of Sufism’s Religion of Love. In point of fact, Sufis developed more female and romantic values and art than almost any other religious, social or literary movement by basing their beliefs on the core tenets of monotheism, which provided a firm foundation, but then by building ornate intellectual edifices on the universal human interests in art, love and transcendence of the material world.
Scholars and pupils st Baghdad's House of Wisdom's, late Abbasid dynasty. illo: by Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti, 1237, courtesy Bibliotheque Nationale de France and Wikipedia (please donate here)Islam’s vast conquests in under a century, which went west to southern France and east to northern India, often featuring fearsome warriors riding spectacular Arabian steeds, sometimes wielding swords impaled with copies of “The Quran”, was a wonder to behold and a world record. It could also be brutal, murderous and depraved. Nevertheless, those Arab-lead armies often abided advanced rules of war, negotiated fair surrenders—like when Caliph Umar conquered Jerusalem in 637 AD and, despite a long siege, allowed the ruling Christians to resume normal life and Jews to re-enter the city—and installed regimes with liberal aspects and economic benefits. Many communities converted to Islam voluntarily, starting with Medina, where intractable Jahiliyyah problems inspired them to invite Muhammad to move there and take over. Jews and Christians were accepted as fellow believers in the one, true God, which the former called “Yahweh” or “Elohim” and the latter Jesus Christ or “The Trinity” (a combination of Christ, Yahweh and ineffable spirit), and Muslims labelled “Allah.” Nevertheless, Christians and Jews were considered second-class monotheists, or “dhimmis,” and saddled with special taxes and restrictions, like prohibitions against riding horses or carrying weapons, although both were exempt from military service.
Islam’s conquests as well as Shari’ah Law, a precedent-based legal system, liberated many people from oppressive rulers, arcane rituals and racist caste systems. In addition, it often reduced poverty, illness and ignorance by increasing opportunity, trade and literacy. Islam was such a modernizing force and promoter of advanced Greek and Jewish ideas, in fact, some say it saved Western Civilization. Books in its lingua franca, Arabic, became the era’s internet, spreading scientific knowledge, philosophy and poetry faster than ever in history, along the many silk, spice and trade routes of an already globalized world. Communities devoted to learning, like Alexandria or Timbuktu, had law forbidding books to pass through without being copied by scribes.
Despite Islam’s impressive achievements, however, tribalism, sectarianism, wealth disparities, slavery, tyranny and war, not to mention vestigial matriarchal and polytheist practices, remained. Out-of-wedlock sex continued with gusto in rural areas (according to Dupree’s Afghan research), crowded cities (where veiling helped women have affairs), and merchant families (wherein men sometimes travelled for years). Slavery was pervasive, from the massive slave trade (almost double the European) of both black Africans (which sometimes included castration) and white Eastern Europeans (and western European sailors seized by Muslim Barbary pirates), to Islam’s ubiquitous concubines and “slave armies.”
To prevent constant palace coups, boys from tough tribes were kidnapped, educated in Islam, trained in the art of war, and sworn as “slave soldiers” to the sultan, a respected status. For related reasons, sultans often surrounded themselves with Christian, Jewish or Sufi advisors. Muhammad advocated freeing slaves, which many Muslims did, after which they could become full citizens (if they submitted to Islam), intermarry and serve in the army. Meanwhile, “slave generals” simply seized power, became the new sultans and mounted their own slave armies.
Protestors at the United Nations' 'Isaiah Wall,' featuring Isaiah quote, "They shall beat their swords into plowshares," in 2015. photo: unknownMonotheism failed to establish the perfect justice and cooperation suggested by divine law, but it did excel at symbolizing those values on earth and in the afterlife. Polytheist heavens were crowded, incestuous, chaotic and crime-ridden, much like the ancient towns on which they were modeled, but more so in the Middle East, after millennia of civilization, exacerbated by the end of the golden ages of Sumer, Egypt and Babylon, and the mysterious late Bronze Age collapse, in the 12th century BCE. The Middle East simply had too many cosmologies, clans and populations, per square mile, and too few men willing to take full responsibility for their communities or children to continue to prosper in the manner to which they were accustom. Monotheism may smack of misogyny to modern observers, but it was immanently logical and progressive after tens of millennia of matriarchal polytheism. Indeed, making the universe masculine and men central to it can be considered one of religion’s most important innovations, and it was orchestrated by women, as Khadija signaled with her actions.
Based on books, monotheism fostered literacy and abstract thinking but also prayer, meditation and ethical analysis. More intellectual than polytheism’s ritual spectacles, titillating stories or mystery cult metaphysics, monotheism evolved beyond sacrificing living beings, which was often how polytheists placated their deities or soothsayers (usually women) divined the future (they often examined a sheep or goat's liver for signs). Monotheism also emphasized individual souls and equal rights, rather than castes or social or priestly hierarchies (although the Catholics and Shi’a resurrected strong priesthoods). Moreover, they spoke of justice between tribes, nations and classes, favored internalized civilized guilt over external tribal shame, and were more optimistic and romantic. The one, true God must know all or at least have a plan, including for finding true love, as emphasized in the beginning of “The Bible”: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, therefore shall a man cleave unto his wife,” (Genesis 2:24). Romanticism assists the difficult chore of defending the family and community, by romanticizing hero tales but also the need to defend the family and fields from the evil doers who periodically threaten more tolerant or successful communities.
Monotheism provided an emotional and ethical foundation for liberal democracy, in fact, by establishing an overarching system that organized the prodigious intellectual and scientific work of the Greeks. The citizens of Hellenist city-states invented or greatly improved almost all the disciplines of modern civilization from democracy, math and science to theatre, architecture, realistic sculpture and the Olympics. But without a coordinating overall mechanism, by the 5th century AD, most Greek speakers had abandoned their classical achievements and became Christian peasants. The Jews, however, preserved their monotheism through extensive travails and, in the 19th century, integrated Greek thinking. All tribes practice some form of democracy, and the Norse, Native American and other groups contributed to its development through their egalitarian councils, advanced ethics and strong friendship traditions. But few tribal federations were able to expand egalitarianism and suffrage before 18th century Enlightenment Europe, where it emerged largely due to the indepth study of Judaic theology and Hellenic philosophy and science, with Muslim scholars and theologians helping preserve and expand much of both.
The Golden Rule as seen in various cultures, although the Judeo-Christian version is the best known. illo: unknownWe must take full responsibility, Muhammad felt, since each soul will have to answer for their deeds on Judgment Day, although “The Quran” does take both sides in the ancient argument between predetermined fate and voluntary free will. Desert dwellers, sailors and others living in harsh environmental or abusive societies often prefer an all-controlling fate to soften God’s will and their normal guilt over failing to alleviate suffering, which their more rational coreligionists don’t have the heart to deny them. Nevertheless, they still take fate into their own hands, starting as infants crying out, to satisfy their immediate desires but also defend their right to be treated equally to others in their family, tribe or perceived community. Ironically, whether nurture and culture or nature and biology dominate the human condition remains in dispute across modern civilization, from politics and policing to psychology and biology, with respected thinkers, like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, favoring the latter.
Emphasizing the former, however, Muhammad esteemed individual merit and rights and opposed inherited rule and kings. Hence, the four “Righteous Caliphs,” who ruled Islam after he died, in 632 AD, were chosen democratically, using acclamation (cheering), by all Muslims present—including women! The vast majority shouted to support Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s closest friend and the father of his child bride, Aisha, but a small minority insisted power be passed in the ancient manner, to a family member, which triggered Islam’s terrible civil war, 14 centuries and counting. Muhammad had no surviving sons, an obvious sign from God, but his cousin and son-in-law Ali was considered close enough by “The Party of Ali,” words in Arabic which condense into “Shi’a.”
A respected warrior, Ali served Muhammad devotedly, including during the massacre of Medinan Jews, but he was also a man of peace, who opposed power grabs—a Muhammadian democrat, in other words. Finally elected as the fourth “Righteous Caliph,” he was assassinated, at prayer no less, for being too tolerant, for not adequately punishing Muslims who committed infractions. Considered by some to be the first Sufi, he was murdered by the Kharijites, members of Islam’s first extremist sect, who were traumatized by Islam’s first civil war (656-61 AD). That grotesque, sanguinous slaughter started when the majoritarian Sunnis established a dynasty (in contradiction to Muhammad), amassed a massive army, and mercilessly massacred the minority Shi’a, including Muhammad’s grandson, Husayn. Martyr stories require spiritual leaders reinterpret reality to parse God’s will, which can stimulate sophisticated ideas and art but often leaves regular folk confused and injured.
Muhammadian democracy and Sunni egalitarianism were hard to scale up further from his charisma and leadership, as was integrating mosque and state. The Sunnis soon switched to primogeniture succession and hierarchies headed by “sultans” and “viziers” (political leaders and managers), who ran the caliphate’s armies and bureaucracies in the name of the caliph (religious leader). After the Damascus-based Umayyad Dynasty grew too fast and was wracked by divisions, the Abbasid Caliphate seized power in 749 AD and reigned supreme from Baghdad for almost exactly a half millennium, to 1258. Although reforms were attempted, often by Sufis, the Abbasid understanding of Islam was too far from a unified field theory, and the Caliphate declined into dysfunction and delusion. In 1258, they were annihilated by the Mongols, who flooded and burnt as well as butchered Baghdad. No democratic elections were held until the Sunni Ottomans started experimenting with democracy in 1877, and many Arab nations still have kings today.
Despite Islam’s tyrannical tendencies, however, Muslim life could be vastly improved by encouraging ethical leadership, everyman activism and moral suasion, as Muhammad did in his day, decent mullahs ever since, and the Sufis have done throughout Islamic history and especially during their renaissance. Islam’s allowance of four wives, to those who could afford it, deprived poor men of marriage partners and dowry requirements favored older or elderly men, but the lingering loose morays of the matriarchal era and the universal practice of situational homosexuality relieved sexual deficits. Alas, the efficacy of these workarounds faded after Islam turned a thousand and was confronted by European colonialism and modernism.
A fully outfitted Wahhabi warrior. illo: unknownIslam’s hybridizing of politics and religion made its achievements gifts from God but, by the same token, its defeats and decadence were because of sin and violations of Islamic law. Monotheism became so popular so quickly because it solved so many polytheist problems, but not “Why bad things happen to good people?”, which pagans could easily explain through polytheism’s central conceit: “You’re praying to the wrong god.” A similar theological crisis challenged Judaism, in the 6th century BCE, after the King Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Solomon’s Temple and Jerusalem, and kidnapped half its inhabitants to exile in Babylon. Although the temple was soon rebuilt, with Persian help, the rabbis still had to answer to their flock for why they were abandoned by God. Blaming increasingly subtle sin, like “coveting thy neighbor’s wife in thy heart,” they invented “guilt,” a more sophisticated style of social control than the peer pressure of tribal shame, shunning and excommunication.
Rejecting such extreme self-criticism, a few rabbis wrote and many approved of “The Book of Job”, arguably “The Bible”’s most advanced theology, which is thought to come from outside Hebrew culture (probably a polytheist tale). It was probably written in the 5th century BCE, shortly after Babylonian captivity, part of the new ideas and prophets which eventually became the Pharisees. Using big characters and drama reminiscent of “The Parable of Adam and Eve”, God bets the Devil that the famously righteous Job won’t renounce him, even after his good luck and fortune are removed. After losing his flocks, possessions and family—everyone except his wife (who recommends he admit error, unlike the supportive Khadija)—Job defies the three wise men, who insist he must have sinned, and addresses God directly. In the heat of their argument, God retorts, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4), which triggers Job’s epiphany: the universe is simply too old, large and complex to be understood. Indeed, the path toward good—which can be defined as “Good is greater benefit for more people over longer periods,” while “Evil is short term benefit for the few”—inevitably includes struggle, pain and terrible tragedy.
I dealt with Job’s conundrum personally once in a discussion with my mother (by phone in the 1990s). “If it wasn’t for the Holocaust, you probably would have stayed in Poland and not come to America, and not met my father,” I said, “which means I wouldn’t exist.” After a few seconds, she came back with, “That’s not true. You would have been your father’s son.” “But how could that be, without you as my mother?” “You would have been your father’s son with another woman,” she concluded, which would have pleased Khadija, since she ceded the traditional power of woman over birth to my father, who was also a righteous patriarch.
Honoring Thy Father While Also Hating Him
Muhammad drew on preceding Jewish and Christian stories and theologies, while adding those from his own experience, his tribe’s or Mecca’s many polytheisms. Hence, “The Quran” has the single-sentence revelation, “God speaks in parables to mankind” (Surah 24:37), which contradicts literalism, if taken literally. Christians also syncretized older polytheist themes, like gods mating with humans, while Jews incorporated Egyptian theology and Babylonian myths, like the Flood or Tower of Babel.
Attempting to integrate millennia of mystical insight, the Israelite authors exploited every known narrative device, from poetic flights of fancy to omniscient instruction from on high or proto-modern books, like the agnostic, vanity-busting “Ecclesiastes” or “Songs of Solomon”, with its eight romantic, semi-matriarchal poems, but it’s mostly a long, avant-garde novel starring the Jews. The origin of the universe, humans and their early heroes are covered in the first book, “Genesis”, but the next four, starting with “Exodus”, detail their liberation from slavery and idolatry led by Moses. Traditionally considered the author of “The Torah” (the Jewish name for those first five books), and the Hebrew’s greatest prophet, Moses was probably Egyptian, perhaps even a Pharaoh’s son. (I feel this fact is worth highlighting to offset the Pharaohs as the Biblical symbol for evil—they built the pyramids, after all—and to share with modern Egyptians the legacy of Moses and monotheism.)
There’s no archeological proof that Moses actually existed, but if he didn’t, why did the Hebrews give him an Egyptian name, have him speak through his brother Aaron (implying a lack of Hebrew fluency) and marry a Kenite woman (when Jewish decent is matrilineal)? Foundling stories, like the Pharoah’s daughter “finding” Moses floating on the Nile, were popular in the Middle East as literary tricks for tribe switching (there was a similar one about Sargon, founder of the Akkadian Empire in the 23rd century BCE). All societies are somewhat or largely multicultural, regardless of their purity claims (which are often amplified among the more mixed), which obliges their storytellers to invent intricate but believable tales establishing their heroes as blood kin.
'Moses', by Michelangelo. photo: unknownRecognizing the inherent conflict between religious compulsion and normal friendship and ethics, Moses (or someone like him) reinterpreted Atenism, liberalized monotheism and began building it from the ground up, through better ideals and narratives, among slaves and poor people. Indeed, Moses’ major theme, aside from monotheism, is the right to freedom and equality, just as friends treat each other. Despite the prevalence of slavery in the classical world (and its tolerance in Judaism), Moses’ signature achievement was freeing the Jews from bondage and idolatry, which symbolizes attachment to anything unproductive, and leading them to the “promised land.” Although slavery began as a primitive welfare program, which allowed starving families to sell their children to finance the survival of both parties, with the rise of civilization, it became a booty-of-war and labor system, especially the lifelong chattel slavery practiced in the Americas (in contrast to the temporary enslavement of the classical world, Judaism and Islam). Judaism started as an anti-slavery movement, liberating the laborers who built the pyramids, a process honored in their principal holiday, Passover. An egalitarian ritual, Passover is performed priest-less, in the home, using Socratic discourse, notably asking the children “The Four Questions,” and references the freeing all people (naturally, since monotheism is universal). The Christians turned Passover dinner into the Last Supper, which precedes the high drama of Easter, Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, and ostensibly frees all people from sin, but only if they accept the Christian system of metaphors.
Whether Moses saw “god” or made “god” up, or someone else did, is immaterial. Why did the Hebrews write that Moses carved “The Ten Commandments” into stone tablets on Mount Sinai only to have him break them shortly thereafter? Or, if that actually happened, why didn’t they edit it out? Narratively, it was to express Moses’s sorrow upon seeing his adopted tribe revert to polytheism by praying to the Golden Calf, even as he struggled mightily to bring them monotheist law. Meta-narratively, however, it highlighted “no compulsion,” an oft-revisited theme in monotheism, like when Moses’s first cousin, Korach, led a rebellion and was punished by God. “The Bible”’s authors realized ethical evolution is personal and voluntary, and the best way to promote it was through stories with colorful characters arguing and reasoning out the issues, at multiple symbol levels.
In fact, eliminating idol worship also refers to transcending the material world, money and power to focus on spiritual values, responsible relationships and psychological and social health. This established the intellectual environment which birthed dozens of monotheist prophets, a few of whom got their own Biblical chapters, and thousands of activists, preachers, intellectuals, theologians, humanists and saints, as well as the prophets of two new monotheisms, Christ and Muhammad.
Solomon's original temple in Jerusalem. illo: unknownNo coercion was the Jewish religious position, but to flourish on a continental crossroads—the homo genus had been hiking out of Africa and across the Israeli isthmus for over a million years—they fashioned two tiny states around the ancient city of Jerusalem. First born was to its north, the Kingdom of Israel (900-720 BCE), but shortly thereafter around the city itself, the Kingdom of Judah (850-586 BCE and then 530 BCE-70 AD). That poorer, smaller state was also called Judea, which gave us the words “Judean,” “Judaism” and “Jew,” after its residents were kidnapped to Babylon in 586 BCE and the Babylonians inquiresd as to their origins and faith. The larger, stronger Israel had more farmers, traders and solders, and provided the name for their political state (until today), but the Judeans surpassed them through sheer intellect. It was probably King Josiah, ruling from 648 to 609 BCE, who instituted major theological reforms, like eliminating all lesser gods, and hiring rabbis and scribes to compile, edit and publish “The Torah,” the first five books. They also composed the additional books of “Kings” and “Chronicles” to describe Josiah’s doings. Their powerfully-worded texts became the first 14 chapters of the greatest bestseller in history, and established Jerusalem as a religious, scholarly and publishing center, as well as the world’s only Jewish metropolis.
So respected was Jerusalem’s religion, intellectuals and mystics, it was never made the capital of any other state or imperial district in the course of three millennia and over three dozen conquests. Polytheists of all persuasions pilgrimaged to petition its all-powerful god, which was why the liberal Persian king, Cyrus the Great, helped rebuild the Temple in the 6th century BCE. In Christ’s time, the moneychangers in front of the Temple he so objected to were there to serve foreigners in need of local currency to buy devotional oil. Muhammad ascended to heaven from Jerusalem, which made it Islam’s third sacred city, after Mecca and Medina, although he probably only visited a couple of times and certainly never lived there. And the city retains that status today, including mental institutions with people of all faiths afflicted with “Jerusalem Syndrome” (messianic psychosis).
Atenism, Judaism and the late Bronze Age collapse also inspired a radical new philosophy among the Babylonians, which came to be called “Babylonian Science.” A combination of ancient soothsaying and myths, cutting-edge astronomy and monotheism, it came to be revered by the Greeks, Egyptians and others and called astrology. Indeed, it is one of the our most popular unified field theories, along with Judaism, Christianity, Islam and science, with horoscopes featured in many newspapers and magazines and now online.
Forty-eight years after Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Judea, it resurrected and ran ‘til 70 AD, not a bad reign, although Judaism was ripe for reinterpretation by then, in keeping with monotheism’s half-millennium update cycles. Conquest by the Roman Empire in 63 BCE complicated the already fraught relationship between the Pharisees, the populist, mystical and anti-Hellenist Jews, who emerged from Babylonian captivity and attempted to integrate fate and free will, and the priestly, upper-class Sadducees, who rejected predestination and the newer prophets and abided only “The Torah”. Indeed, there was soon a plethora of radical new prophets with fanatical followers, like the cult of crossdressing Zealots, who terrorized Jerusalem killing and looting, and the Sicarii (which still means “hit man” in Spanish), who enacted expert assassinations (although they fled attacks instead of standing and praying like Hashasheens).
Jesus was a peaceful hippie type, who embodied Judaism’s highest ideals, but he was also a maverick mystic in the mode of the great Hebrew prophets, who often criticized Jews or the Judaism of their day. Jesus’s pacifism contradicted David, in fact, the most revered Jewish sage after Moses, who started as a young, romantic shepherd and musician but killed Goliath and became their greatest king (although “The Bible” cites some crimes, notably dispatching to battle Bathsheba’s husband in order to seduce her). Given David supposedly co-authored “The Psalms”, still some of humanity’s most profound poems and wisdom literature, he exemplified the wedding of the sword, spirit and word, which came to be considered mandatory for messiahs (in seeming contradiction to Zachariah). David was probably just a local chieftain, not the second king of the mythical Israel-Judah Kingdom, but his existence was confirmed in the 1990s by archeologists unearthing a stone bearing the inscription “The House of David” (at Tel Dan, Israel). Either way, someone must have led the establishment of Jerusalem around the 9th century BCE and their son or grandson, perhaps named Solomon, must have built its temple, even if the details were embellished by Josiah’s writers in the 7th century BCE.
The authors of “The New Testament” undoubtedly invented Joseph and Mary’s journey from Galilee to Jerusalem around Christmas in order to connect Christ to David’s royal lineage as well as the pagan winter solstice festival. While Christ’s rejection of political power precluded him from being the long-predicted messiah, according to most Jews, some liked separating church and state, hence Christianity’s phenomenal growth. It allowed them to follow the new Judaism with less persecution, interact with converts from other tribes in church, and enjoy romantic devotion to a personal God, the spiritual hero who unraveled the secret of death as a mental construct. While Gilgamesh had to hike to the end of the earth to learn about death from a male mystic, after he rejected the goddess Ishtar, and Jews focused on terrestrial ethics, without mentioning heaven much, Christ celebrated celestial life, which could be made eternal through the infinite reach of abstraction. Indeed, heaven was a perfectly logical, religiously-imagined reward for doing right by the Lord. With its hero-martyr protagonist, “The Gospels” was a biography told from four perspectives, the books of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John (written about 70 to 100 CE), which contradicts divine dictation, although “The New Testament” includes 26 additional books. Fourteen are attributed to Paul, a Pharisee Jew from Turkey, who probably penned only half and persecuted Christians until his epiphany on the road to Damascus.
Islam’s theology is more Jewish than Christian, given it didn’t endorse the central thesis of Christ as God, although it mentioned him by name over a hundred times and indirectly almost two hundred (only Moses is more esteemed, with 136 by-name listings). It also rejiggered Jewish and Christian stories, such as making early Bible characters Muslim. Abraham and his first son, Ismail, father to Muslims (while his second son, Isaac, generated the Jews), are said to have carved the Ka’aba Stone, which polytheists later defaced with their “yoni” symbol. Other sagas are synopsized, like turning Moses’s sister, Miriam, into Jesus’s mother and subtracting a millennium. The Jews were the Muslim’s forbears, but they disobeyed God, misinterpreted his prophets and grievously sinned, hence the need for Islam to replace Judaism.
“The Quran” was also recorded by scribes, since Muhammad didn’t write—although he emphasized the importance of literacy to monotheism—but his personality suffuses the text, making it an autobiography. As we read its nonchronological Surahs, arranged from longest to shortest, we can hear him preaching in front of the Ka’aba, explaining or pleading with his fellow Meccans and the town’s many visitors to join not only his new monotheism but monotheist civilization, and its promise of a more just, functional and loving society.
The Romans became massively multicultural after conquering Greece, which they copied wholesale, and then many other tribes and civilizations, from which they borrowed deities, knowledge and practices. Such assimilation was impossible with monotheism, however, especially since Roman emperors insisted on being worshipped as gods, an abomination to monotheists. While many Jews respected Greek and Roman amenities, like roads, aqueducts, and amphitheaters, plus their science and Olympics (in which Jews competed naked, after tying their foreskins to look uncircumcised), the polytheism versus monotheist fight had reached a breaking point. It escalated rapidly after the Romans crucified Christ, Caligula installed a statue of himself in the Second Temple, and subsequent emperors destroyed it outright and then Judea in its entirety. Using their traditional tactic of severe repression, the Romans brutally put down three Jewish rebellions between 66 to 136 AD. Indeed, Rome was obliged to destroy the Jews because they stood for freedom of religion and speech—proto-liberal democrats, in other words.
After Rome killed as many as half a million Jews, many emigrated (the Diaspora), although some remained in Jerusalem or the region. Since monotheism solved so many polytheist problems, those wandering Jews (mostly men) were often respected. In fact, they sometimes married into ruling families, taught Judaism or their interpretation of Mosaic Law and built philo-Semitic communities as far afield as Nigeria, Samarkand and Bangladesh, a few of which are extant today. Jews and Christians also spread out across the Roman empire, the Christians preaching but the Jews discussing their faiths, as well as scribing their texts and building synagogues and churches. Focusing on analysis and commentary, the Jews produced “The Talmud” (200-500 AD), about “The Torah”, and “The Zohar” (written in 1275 AD, by Moses de León of Spain, although he claimed it was an ancient Israelite manuscript).
In this way, the Christians and, to a lesser degree, the Jews converted much of the Middle East, North Africa and southern Europe (all the way to Spain), using spirit not the sword, greatly assisted by the fact that those populations were civilized and often viewed monotheism as the next logical step. The Romans themselves gradually converted to Christianity, culminating when it became the state religion in 380 CE. Three hundred years later, however, when warrior preachers accompanied Muslim armies into Central Asia and North Africa or their Christian counterparts entered northern Europe, religious compulsion traumatized tribal members, from the Berber and Turkic tribal groups to the Celts and Goths. As one Goth said after converting, “I hear my father crying out from the grave.”
Christians attack Frankfurt’s Jewish ghetto, the Fettmilch riot, 1614. illo: Matthäus Merian/Wikimedia CommonsAs Jews used their book learning and intellectual training to grow from traditional work as shepherds, farmers, merchants and rabbis, they became doctors, diplomats, moneylenders, international traders and other professions central to civilization but easy to blame when health, politics or finances went bad. Hence, despite scriptural directives to be ethical, help strangers and respect fathers, including spiritual fathers, Christian and Muslim authorities decided to demote them to third class status, although many people did maintain friendships, partnerships and marriages (as proven by the similarity look of Jews with non-Jews from their lands of origin, as well as DNA tests). There was even more cooperation with some elites, which is well documented from Morocco to India but personified by the Jews of Baghdad, originally brought by Nebuchadnezzar. Through Muslim conquest, Mongol annihilation and Ottoman resurrection, they lived alongside their neighbors, often working in the diamond, spice or commodity businesses, but, starting in the 19th century, going into newspapers, railroads and other modern enterprises. Baghdad had the world’s largest urban Jewish population (90,000), outside of Europe and New York, until their expulsion in 1948.
The front stage rationale for repressing Jews was: If they can be pressured into accepting to Christianity or Islam that proves those faiths’ superiority. Just as the Jews were “chosen” as the first monotheists (aside from Atenism), subsequent monotheists saw themselves as chosen, entitled to take over. Backstage and subconsciously, however, many Christians and Muslims were angry, confused and in desperate need of psychological or political relief both of which could be achieved by having villain around which to build the standard system of scapegoating, which is now called conspiracy theories. Given the Jews were an ancient people who started travelling the world in the 2nd century AD and were present in many nations, including times of historical difficulty, they made convenient scapegoats.
Freud detailed how scapegoating works in “Civilization and its Discontents” (1928): “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, as long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness… In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately all the massacres of the Jews of the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows… Once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence.” Similarly, once the Goths converted to Christianity, their tribal law essentially made all Christians their fellow tribalists, leaving only the Jews, Gypsies and witches as blameworthy. In fact, “the dream of a Germanic world-dominion called for antisemitism as its compliment,” Freud wrote, before Nazism was even a decade old, and added presciently, “the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization [finds] its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois.”
Although Freud nailed the basic psychology of scapegoating, based on his concept of the “narcissism of minor differences,” there were bigger problems in my opinion. The failure of tribes, cities, nations and civilizations is mostly due to stupid, repressive or corrupt leaders, compounded by the often unavoidable occurrence of war, weather and pestilence. Since those failed leaders are peoples’ fathers and (sometimes) mothers, blaming them openly is difficult, especially in a patriarchy, where fatherly respect is required and criticism can offend community members as well as authorities. This primordial conflict between respecting ones’ ancestors and correcting their errors can be alleviated either through honesty, courage and the bold action of a mature or what I call “repressed father hatred syndrome.” That mental disorder occurs when people continue to revere dysfunctional forbears but transfer their rage at being deprived of the care or functional society they see others enjoying to scapegoats.
Article continues at My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker who can be reached .
Posted on Oct 26, 2024 - 03:58 PM
