'Proto-Islam' Rocks!
The Religion of Mohammed
We are getting good and sick of the religion of Mohammed.
Calling it 'Islam,' we believe, compliments it too much: Islam means 'submission,' or 'submission to God'; 'Muslim' means 'one who submits' - 'one who submits to God.' But we, Jews and Noahides, who follow HaShem, think of ourselves that way too: as God's servants - His slaves, even. We try with all our might to faithfully serve Allah - IF by Allah they mean HaShem.
We have some doubts about that - is Allah, "The God," HaShem? The Allah of Muhammed, as depicted in the Koran, is not much like HaShem [See 'El, God of Abraham,' in last January'sCovenant Connection] - but we appreciate that the Koran says that our God, the Creator, is their god: "The God," Allah [ahl - LAH, accent on the last syllable, as with most Arabic and Hebrew words].
Mohammed, who never learned to read or write, dictated or recited the Koran, 'the Recitation,' at least in part. The Koran itself claims that it's all Mohammed, reciting what he hears from God's angel, Gabriel. In fact, it was never finished in his lifetime but assembled from bits and pieces, written and unwritten, edited and re-edited, and fixed in its final form some years after his death. It's a collection of Arabic-language sermons, meant to be sung. It's his religion's founding text, its central text: its 'Bible.'
Koran Holy?
A little shorter than the Christian Scriptures, Matthew thru Revelation, the Koran is a work that caused Maimonides, the great Torah genius Rambam, to call Mohammed, its putative author, ha-mishuganna, "the Crazy" or "the Nut."
According to the Koran, Mohammed didn't create or invent anything and neither did the angel Gabriel. "The Prophet's" new religion wasn't new, supposedly, but basically just the 'primitive Islam,' 'Proto-Islam,' or traditional original religion of the ancient 'Peoples of the Book': Adam, Eve and Noah, Shem, Abraham, Moses, David, Ruth, Deborah, etc., and, as Mohammed said, Jesus, Mary, and John the Baptist.
The Koran claims that Mohammed was just 'the seal of the prophets,' like the cap on a bottle, but the best and greatest prophet - and by far the most important human being of all time. But all Mohammed did, supposedly, was take the Ancient Way of God, purify it, and bring it to full flower.
In truth, Mohammed made his new religion respectable by back-dating it, essentially. Instead of appearing to be the invention of one man, a new creation like Scientology, say, or Kwanza, it claimed to be "the original religion," the immediate successor and the natural culmination of - literally - all that is holy!
La ilaha illa Allah - there is no God but God (Allah) - which Mohammed's followers are supposed to recite several times a day, sounds good when sung. The Koran generally sounds nice when sung. But that doesn't improve the unsoundness of its message.
Even by ignoring or removing all the Koran's repeated calls to violent imperialism (which remain untempered by its oral tradition, the hadith) - to butcher people who don't follow Mohammed, to roast any who resist Mohammed, to drown them in blood and "slay the idolators [anyone who resists Mohammed] wherever you find them" (Chapter/Sura 9:5) - and focus only on Mohammed's spiritual and moral teachings, the Koran still attacks true Islam, the "proto-Islam" of Adam, Noah, Abraham and Moses. It defames the God of Israel.
Just for instance, contrary to the concept of Mohammed-as-true-religious-leader and contrary to the Koran and hadith:
1) The Jews do not regard the prophet Ezra ("Uzair," in Arabic) as "the Son of God" (Sura 9:30) - any more than any man can be called God's son.
To the apologists for Mohammed, who claim that he was just describing the contemporary Jews of Arabia (whom he clearly passionately hated), that bizarre claim about Ezra and the Jews is just ridiculous. No one else on earth, to our knowledge, has EVER charged ANY group or clan of Jewish people with EVER committing the sin of Ezra-worship [!], and certainly not some thousand years after Ezra's death, in Mohammed's time. But Mohammed's followers, or at least the leading teachers, still insist that the Jews of this and every era are Allah-damned idolators - guilty of the capital crime of "shirk," or falsely claiming that God is not one - because we still supposedly worship Ezra!
2) God, the God of Israel, grants people free will, the power to choose between good and evil, but the Koran repeatedly insists otherwise - that Allah decides who will do good and who will do evil (Suras 2:6-7, 6:25, 7:179, 24:40, 36:9, etc., etc. - and then punishes people, with constant torment for all eternity, for doing what He makes them do! (Muslim scholars who reject this view of Allah and free will are usually called heretics; many have been executed.) Allah, the "all-merciful and compassionate," promises quite a lot of torment - the Koran has a thing, an obsession, with hell, Satan, and torture - to every non-Mohammedan, and to every Mohammadan who strays in any way from Mohammad's doctrine.
3) Jews and Christians are not actually "swine and monkeys," nor the direct descendants, nor direct progenitors, of swine and monkeys - despite Mohammed's several assertions to that effect (Suras 2:63, 5:59, 7:166). To Mohammed's apologists, who claim that he only meant a few contemporary secular-minded Jews, Jews and Christians are still commonly called apes and pigs throughout the star and crescent countries, and - thanks to Saudi-funded "religious" charities - even in Mohammedan schools and textbooks in the West.
Every religion gets tested, eventually, by history and logic. And, even by its own standards, the religion of Mohammed does not work. This goes beyond the myriad self-contradictions in the Koran and the many obvious historical mistakes (Miriam, e.g., was not the sister of Moses as well as the mother of Jesus.) It promises that it's the best religion - particularly, the most materially rewarding, the best for "crops and cattle."
The evidence, after 1,400 years of the history of this religious culture, contradicts that promise. Mohammed's Arabs aren't the sons of the desert, as they say, but the fathers of deserts. Poverty, illiteracy, cruelty, injustice,tribalism, racism, disease, sexual immorality, sexual oppression, joblessness, drug abuse, fatalism, violence and thievery aren't the uniqueproperty of the Mohammedan world but it has more of them than almost anyone.
Meanwhile, Judaism and Jews are damnable and damned, according to Mohammed: the Jews' aim everywhere is to "spread mischief through the earth" and destroy crops and cattle. The Koran seethes with Jew hatred. So do Mohammed's followers, to the extent that they know what the Koran has to say on the subject - many do not, due to illiteracy, apathy, or because they don't understand Arabic - and accept it. As the Arab petro-sheikhs keep comissioning the distribution of more Koran-translations in all the languages of mankind (along withThe Protocols of the Elders of Zion), we can expect that anti-Semitism - and fierce hatred of Christians and the West in general - to spread.
This is a pity, particularly for anyone with any real regard for the people who have grown up believing that to follow Mohammed is to follow Allah. Many of them - the vast majority (there is 500 times more good in the world than bad, the Torah teaches) - are better and more moral people than the religion they inherited. How do they improve themselves by cursing the West, which they envy? More particularly, how do they improve themselves by cursing Israel, and the People of Israel?
Here we see an unwelcome fulfillment of clear Torah prophecy - as the Psalmist predicted, tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of so-called Muslims now speak about the Jews in exactly these terms: "Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance." [Psalms 83:5] In other words, they don't just want to destroy Israel: they hope toerase even the memory of Israel's name! Hailing from Ishmael and Edom, Ammon, Philistia and Tyre, Assyria, and, of course, Amalek, as the Psalm says,they singlemindedly make their covenant with each other, to annihilate the Jews, to " take to ourselves the possession of the habitations of God." [Psalms 83]
Clearly, if they continue on this course they are doomed. And they will certainly inflict some misery upon the rest of us in the meantime. But, despite their idea that all is determined, that free will is a myth, they can still choose life and God and goodness. They just need to open their eyes.
Someday they will recognize that the Torah-religion that they hate is not a threat to their prosperity, a destroyer of crops and cattle, but the contrary; someday they will recognize that it's the religion of Mohammed that's the mischief-maker, that makes the world poorer and more violent.
We wouldn't have so much hope for this except that we know that there is indeed a better Islam.
See: better Islam - Covenant Connection (January 2010: This is Proto-Islam, the Universal Religion
By Michael Dallen (January 2010 Covenant Connection)
