Back To The Dark Ages?

by Les May

A WEEK or so ago Imran Khan, Prime Minister of Pakistan said that his government was spearheading efforts to get countries to sign upto an ‘International Convention on Preventing the Defamation of Religions’. Given that he is the head of a country which has perhaps the vaguest and most draconian blasphemy laws in the world, this is not good news.

The depth of Pakistan’s commitment to religions other than Islam can perhaps best be judged from the fact that in May the Punjab assembly passed legislation with the title Compulsory Teaching of the Holy Qur’an Bill, which makes it mandatory for children to learn the Muslim religious text in schools. The bill incudes the passage ‘Being an Islamic country, the free and the compulsory teaching of Holy Qur’an will definitely be a source of the establishment of a society based on the teachings of Islam’.

No alternative programme has been announced for non-Muslim students of Punjab.

Khan’s real intention seems to be to protect both religious and political Islam from criticism in an effort to maintain peace in his country where rioters have taken to the streets to demand that a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, be hanged for blasphemy.

The notion that his words ‘There were prophets of Allah other [than Muhammad], but there is no mention of them in human history.  There is negligible mention of them. Moses is mentioned, but there is no mention of Jesus in history.  But the entire life of Muhammad, who was Allah's last prophet, is part of history.’ might be offensive to Christians and indeed to anyone who, to paraphrase Tom Paine, ‘refuses to have their lives willed away by the manuscript authority of the dead’, does not seem to have occurred to him. (If you are offended you’ll just have to do as I have had to do, ‘get over it’.)

Modern scholarship has a different view of the origins of Islam which throws doubt on Khan’s claim that Muhammad is ‘part of history’.  This is what Amazon has to say about the book The Hidden Origins of Islam: New Research into Its Early History;

Despite Muhammad's exalted place in Islam, even today there is still surprisingly little actually known about this shadowy figure and the origins of the Qur'an because of an astounding lack of verifiable biographical material.  Furthermore, most of the existing biographical traditions that can be used to substantiate the life of Muhammad date to nearly two centuries after his death, a time when a powerful, expansive, and idealized empire had become synonymous with his name and vision - thus resulting in an exaggerated and often artificial characterization of the prophetic figure coupled with many questionable interpretations of the holy book of Islam.

On the basis of datable and localizable artifacts from the seventh and eighth centuries of the Christian era, many of the historical developments, misconceptions, and fallacies of Islam can now be seen in a different light.  Excavated coins that predate Islam and the old inscription in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem utilize symbols used in a documented Syrian Arabic theology - a theology with Christian roots.

Interpreting traditional contexts of historical evidence and rereading passages of the Qur'an, the researchers in this thought-provoking volume unveil a surprising - and highly unconventional - picture of the very foundations of Islamic religious history.

https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Origins-Islam-Research-History/dp/1591026342?tag=firstthings20-20#customerReviews

This book would undoubtedly fall foul of any international convention which enacted what Imran Khan is proposing, because it strikes at the beliefs of many Muslims, by questioning the origin of their faith.  That would mean that the authors and the publishers would be liable to prosecution.  The answer is not to ban it, but to provide the evidence that it’s conclusions are wrong.

Sadly Khan is only takIng to its logical conclusion a trend which is already well established in the West.   Increasingly we have people trying to grab the moral high ground by claiming that something they read or hear, and do not like, is racist, anti-semitic, islamo-phobic, mysoginistic, trans-phobic, homo-phobic, patriarchal or in the latest catch all phrase, ‘hate speech’, and should not be said.

These terms have become the first response of people who seem to think they have the right never to be offended, but are seemingly unwilling to engage in any kind of debate which might change their perceptions. It is not just ‘activist’ groups which behave like this, it is the default position of many columnists in the mainstream press.

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