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Title: The Misery of Islam
Author: Al-Djouhall
Date: 1989
Language: en
Topics: Islam, religion
Source: Retrieved on March 17, 2009 from http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/misery_of_islam.html][www.geocities.com]].  Proofread online source [[http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=4674, retrieved on July 6, 2020.
Notes: First published by Fast Camel Press, Feb. 1989. Scanning, proofreading and HTML by Jack Campin

Al-Djouhall

The Misery of Islam

When I was lying in my warm, damp bed these questions did not interest

me one jot and at such a time it did not matter to me whether God really

existed or whether He was nothing but a personification of the mighty

ones of this world, invented for the greater glory of spiritual values

and the easier spoliation of the lower orders, the pattern of earthly

things being transferred from the sky. All I wanted to know was whether

or not I was going to live through to the morning. In face of death, I

felt that religion, faith, belief were feeble, childish things of which

the best that could be said was that they provided a kind of recreatian

for healthy, successful people...

(The Blind Owl. Sadegh Hedayat.)

God gives nuts to the toothless.

(Spanish proverb)

Strange, is it not that of the myriads who

Before us pass’d the door of Darkness through

Not one returns to tell us of the Road,

Which to discover we must travel too.

(Rubáiyát. Omar Khayyám)

Enter and learn the story of the rulers,

They rested a little in the shadow of my towers

And then they passed.

They were dispersed like those shadows

When the sun goes down;

They were driven like straws

Before the wind of death.

(Inscription at the City of Brass)

Go and tell my friends that I have set off for the high seas

And that my boat is dashed to pieces;

It is in the religion of the gibbet that I shall die; Mecca

And Medina no longer mean anything to me.

(Al-Halladj, 858–929 AD)

The challenge of our times — for us proletarians who live in countries

where Islam is part and parcel of the status quo — is to criticize this

“religion of the desert”, not for God’s sake but for our very own. So

that we don’t have to worry anymore about anyone coming back from the

dead to tell us if there is life after death. It seems more human to

find out whether there is life before death.[1]

The ruling classes in countries in which Islam still holds sway have

enforced a silence on Islamic matters, to the extent that even a simple

critique cannot be allowed, because those who rule in the various

feudo-bureaucratic dictatorships, use Islam to maintain their hideous

grip on the wretched populations. Here we can see a similarity with

Eastern bloc countries where truth and freedom of expression are

muzzled, stalinism and Islam have a lot in common. Recently the Salman

Rushdie affair has brought up to the surface a wealth of materials for

analysis. One minute the President of Iran, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

declared that the death order would be rescinded if Mr Rushdie

apologised, a few hours later the Ayatollah-in-Chief Khomeini declared

that even if Mr Rushdie repented it was the duty of every Muslim to put

him to death. Iran today is a tweedeldum and tweedeldee country. The

rulers of that devastated part of the world constantly need an external

enemy in order to keep the minds of its people away from the mounting

daily miseries at home. Mr Rushdie’s book was a Godsend opportunity to

unite the flocks. But for how long?[2]

The Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia passing through Algeria,

Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Irak, straight over to Pakistan and down to

Nigeria etc... is a real cauldron of misery and possible change.

Different forces are at work to make this world collapse. First, the

dispossessed no longer want to suffer Allah’s “Law” are those who

squander the wealth which is the fruit of their exploitation and who are

imposing harsher and harsher conditions.[3]

The reason for this pamphlet is quite simple, to make sure that past[4]

and present struggles against bloody rulers in Islamic countries are not

forgotten. Often it is only in books, pamphlets, posters, newspapers or

radio from abroad that we manage to know what goes on elsewhere, or when

we meet someone who has been involved directly in some actions, because

most often “our” press reports nothing but trivia. For example for the

last five years or more they have been showing the same pictures of

Allah’s Deputy on Earth, the one and only Khomeini. If they announced

that he had gone to met his maker, things might take a different turn in

Iran. I heard that a few people in London have been saying that he was

dead for many years, but no one in the media has taken up this story.

Journalists are a sorry lot, the more satellite dishes you have, the

less news you get. Or you’ll get news in the sky when you die. Tha

decomposition of the Press in the completion of media alienation is in

full swing, this being the sub-title of a book recently published in

Paris, called The Crude Lie.[5]

It is with sorrow and pleasure that we can remember the riots of Cairo

(Ist January 1977) or the ones in Tunis (26^(th) January 1978), or the

uprisinqs which made those in power tremble in Algeria (from the 10^(th)

March to the 24^(th) April 1980), and more recently in that same poor

country people took to the strets against the dreaded regime, more than

five hundred people were killed by the Algerian army and police. There

was widespread torture on those arrested. These uprisings are like a

fire that will not go out, just as everywhere else since the conditions

in which almost everyone.is forced to live under, ensure that the flames

of discontent will not die, proletarian revolution is like Mount Etna,

it erupts, and Allah and those in power can do nothing to prevent it. No

wonder Mohammed the Holy Profit declared that anarchy, “fawda” that is

to say sedition was even graver than assassination. This saying was

quickly inscribed into the Koran in order to make sure that those who

had power would retain It for ever. Many specialists of Islam cannot

criticize this, maybe they are too hypnotized by it.

The essence of Islam is resignation, submission to the order of things,

and the will of God, the temporal and spiritual powers are one, as we

said earlier there is a similarity between stalinism and Islam, no

wonder there is trouble in the Eastern bloc countries. People have had

enough of the Kremlin Big Brother telling them what to think and do. The

Islamic religion is part and parcel of the State, and the same with

stalinism. In Christian countries, the bourgeoisies which rose out of

the feudal dark ages could not afford such luxuries such as an all

powerful Church which went hand in glove with the State. From then on

the bourgeois made sure only the commodity would rule and it would be

the next God to be worshipped. What we have today proves it. Nothing is

sacred, only things with price tags. In other words the society of the

spectacle, havin reached its integrated spectacular stage as Guy Debord

recently wrote in his Commentaries.[6]

I am certain that a wider critique will continue to move from country to

country, because what is said here many feel deeply in their hearts and

they whisper truths about the misery inflicted upon them by those who

live well. As in the time of the Old Man of the Mountain, no one is safe

in power. This is why I hasten to pen this little treatise on Islam. It

has taken 148 years for an ex-Muslim to jump into L. Feuerbach’s shoes.

A few years ago I had the chance to read his Essence of Christianity

when I was abroad. Among all the titles I literally devoured, since you

could not find anything critical under Pahlavi, ironically you can find

even less under the Khomeinists. Only the Koran seems to be allowed. It

is like having an iron mask on one’s head. It is truly barbarous.

Therefore it is not Allah which knows and sees everything — that Cosmic

Voyeur — since ‘he’ does not exist, but well and truly those eyes and

ears of the police aided by their sordid informers who always want to

know if anyone knows more than they do about the rule of their masters,

that is to say the whole of the misery which rests on economic and

religious alienation, in order to persecute those who fight back. All

this reminds us of the Spanish Inquisition. The Islamic “revolutionary”

guards and the different kinds of police in countries where Islam

prevails are what George Orwell called the “thought police” in his 1984.

The critique of Islam necessitates taking apart everything that this

legislation stands for. And because: the signs of the decay of this

religion are all but apparent. Islam offers nothing but the acceptance

of the status quo, that “Heavenly Body” resembles a capsizing ship.

Islam is archaic, reactionary in all aspects. The respect for those in

power is enshrined in the Koran, as of property, as of the family,[7]

and the Koran is the infallible word of God. All this to ensure that

“the exploitation of one class by another is the basis of civilization”

as Engels remarked in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the

State. Indeed Mohammed himself must have bean rich since he could afford

more than one wife.[8] Mohammed started with the idea of giving to the

poor, but once in power — as did Luther and Lenin — quickly forgot to

continue on this golden path. Later he reinforced his power and that of

Islam by building mosques in towns “where the basis of Islamic communal

prayer” could take place. The Bedouin tribes were truly dispersed and

weakened by these new developments. Mohammed scorns the Bedouins in the

Koran. The 10 commandments, the Talmud, the Koran are laws. The

lawgivers are the ruling class.

Once this goddam pamphlet starts to circulate from dawn till dusk the

wheel of change will never stop spinning, just as Khomeini’s cassettes

kept arriving from outside Paris when he was in exile on a main street,

so other gestures of protest, critique and anger will keep contradicting

those who believe that “God is that which does not pass away”, that is

to say traditions. The various ruling classes in Muslim countries are

besieged on two fronts:

The bourgeoisie (by the rapid improvements of all instruments of

production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws

all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization. The cheap prices

of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down

all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarian’s intensely

obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on

pain of extinction to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels

them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to

become bourgeois themselves. In other words, it creates a world after

its own image”. (Communist Manifesto).

No wonder some already speak of the petrobourgeosie. So Ibn Saud,

probably never realised what he was getting into when he boarded that US

warship to meet the New Deal, i.e. Roosevelt wayback in 1945. Frank even

allowed him to bring a few sheep for his meals! Roosevelt knew all the

way what quagmire Ibn Saud was plunging into, i.e. the capitalist mode

of prouction. The other front is proletarians who are fed up!

So Mohammed once said: “Whoever monopolizeth is a sinner”, it obviously

did not apply to him, no more than it applies to all those who exploit

us. Those who stole and who were caught had their hands cut off, and

often their heads, Mohammed the Holy Profit ordered this. It went down

in the Koran for future generations. After all Mohammed had God’s word.

I hear that the present Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain is taxing

those who live in sin. It is really disgusting.

Speak not of fate: Ah! change the theme,

And talk of odours, talk of wine,

Talk of the flow’rs that round us bloom:

‘Tis a cloud, ‘tis all a dream.

(Hafiz)

Pour us wine to make us generous

And carelessly happy in the old way

(Ibn Kolthúm (6^(th) century)[9])

About this table

Sat hawkeyed kings

With many one eyed kings

To bear them company;

But now all sit in the dark and none are able

To see.

(The Thousand and One Nights)

A critique of Islam is but a necessary contribution to a new world. with

no commodity, no State and the rest that stands in our way. The tongue

of the hiden has started to speak, the Pax Islamica is dissolving like a

piece of ice in the midday Mecca sun! Islam is “the arbitrary having

broken loose” as Hegel once pointed out. The second part of this

document will follow shortly...

Down with the spectacular-commodity economy!

Down with Allah!

Down with the Koran!

Down with all the marxist-leninists who don’t criticize religion (Islam

in particular)

Long live all those who fight tyrannies in Muslim countries!

Long live all those who are fighting the other ruling classes elsewhere!

Written in a still Muslim country on February 18^(th), 1989. By

Al-Djouhall

In the hour of adversity be not without hope

For crystal rain falls from black clouds

(Nizami)

[1] [...] “The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion,

religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the

self-consciousness and self feeling of man who has either not vet found

himself or has aIready lost himself again. [...] “Religion” is the

fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has

no true reality. The struggle against religion is the spiritual aroma.

Religious distress is at the same time the sigh of the oppressed

creature, the heart of the heartless world, just as it is the spirit of

a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of

religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their

real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition

is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. The critique

of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the

halo of which is religion. [...] Religion is the illusory sun which

revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself. [...]

K. Marx, Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,

1844.

[2] Mr Rushdie should have never apologised to the ayatollahs. He forgot

what Junius once said: “The liberty of the Press is the palladium of all

the civil, political and religious rights of an Englishman.” Still it

was a brave attempt to criticize Islam. As Lord Acton once taught us:

“Nothing is safe that does not show it can bear discussion and

publicity.”

[3] [...] “On the 21^(st) of June 1981, the youth from the popular

districts of Casablanca rose up. By means of the general strike decreed

by the CDT (Democratic Confederation of Labour), ten of thousands of

young Casablancans, each in their district, occupied the streets, looted

and committed areon and finally flushed out the forces of law and order

for a period of several hours. Afterwards, thousands of policemen, of

“merdas” (turds) (name given by the people to the auxiliary forces) and

soldiers supported by light and armoured cars undertook to reduce the

riot in an unequal combat. They did it in the sole manner that befits

them: the pure and simple assassination of all those who dared to shout

that they were fed up with being hungry. “If they haven’t got any bread

in their etomachs, we will fill them with bayonets”. These words by a

manufacturer from Lyons on the eve of the Canute insurrection surely

were the intimate thoughts of those who on the 20^(th) of June, gave the

order to fire on the children of the Beb Msik quarries, of Derb

as-Sultan, Sbata, Derb al-Fida, etc. “Sixty dead killed by confounding

objects”, the Ministry of the Interior lies outrageously, the people

itself, knows that it has been mourning more than 600 dead, killed by

bullets and buried clandestinely in pauper’s graves. [...] In this year

1981, the droughts added to five years of war and of economic crisis,

(which have already bled white Morocco’s economy) and placed the poorest

zones in the countryside on the edge of famine. The most varied and tho

most dreadful rumours began to circulate in the souks and from there to

the popular districts; tongues unleashed themselves and people began to

express out loud their worries and discontent. The powers that be just

as quickly mobilised thir police forces and their ulemas (the body of

professional theologians, expounders of “The Law”, in a Mohammedan

country), “in order to explain to those seeing the origins of their

distress driving round in Mercedes and building sumptuous villas, that

God had so wished up and that one cannot rebel against God’s will, for

he punishes those who have strayed from his religion and from the

precepts of his Prophet. There are for sure numerous faithful in the

mosques, but the preachings of the appainted imams h3ve few listeners

[...]”. In Casablanca steeped in blood, Sou’al no 1, Paris 1981. These

riots took place at the same time as the British proletarian carnival

and yet not a word was spoken about them in the so-called “free” press.

[4] My aim is to bring back the memory of all the past struggles against

the dead hand of Islam. Like for example the Qarmatian movement which

was a revolutionary movement which swept through the Muslim world from

the 9^(th) to the 12^(th) centuries AD. This movement organised itself

on the bases of a system of communism into which initiation was

necessary. They challenged the power of the caliph of Baghdad. In 931 AD

the Qarmatians sacked Mecca and took the Black Stone of the Ka’ba to

Mu’aminiyah for thirty years. Their only mistake was not to have

destroyed it. In Khurasan, in Syria and in Yemen, they formed lasting

hotbeds of discontent The Qarmatians also introduced Greek philosophy

and by so doing helped many minds to free themselves from the clutches

of Islam. Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato and the masters of Hermetism

were presented as divine prophets. Other sources were also brought in,

notably from Persia and India. Al-Halladj whom we mentioned to start

with was a remarkable man, he set up in his own home a model of the

Ka’ba and said: “The important thing is to proceed seven times around

the Ka’ba of one’s heart”, those in pawer therefore accused him of being

a Qarmati rebel who wished to destroy the Ka’ba of Mecca. Al-Halladj was

mocking the ludicrous spectacle of having to run seven times round the

black cube. In fact he was helping to demystify the whole Islamic death

machine which rested in the hands of those who ruled. “Thus for having

rejected the discipline of the arcana with which his predecessors and

his contemporary shrouded themselves, far having indulged without

restraint to the call of God’s love, for having revealed that the union

of love with God was possible, for having sung this union up to crying

out in a moment of ecstasy: “I am God” (ana al-haqq), he provoked a

“crisis of consciousness” in the Muslim Community. Al-Halladj was

flagellated, mutilated, hung upon a gibbet and finally decapitated, his

body was burnt and his ashes thrown into the Tigris. Those who ruled at

the time of Al-Halladj did not forgive him for bringing god down to

earth. There are many similarities between Al-Halladj’s “programme” and

Thomas Münzer’s who “demanded the immediate establishment of the kingdom

of God, of the prophesied millennium, by restoring the Church to its

original condition and abolishing all the institutions that conflicted

with this allegedly early-Christian, but, in fact, very novel church. By

the kingdom of God Münzer understood a society in which there would be

no class foreign to the members” of society”. (cf The Peasant Wars, F.

Engels, 1850). The Anabaptists and Münzer were a direct threat to the

Princes of Germany, the Pope, and to Luther and they paid with their

lives. For Münzer Christ was a mere man. Luther had started his career

on the side of the insurgents but soon found out that they went too far

for his thick head, years later Lenin would follow the same path. Don’t

follow leaders....

[5] Le Mensonge Cru, Mezioud Ouldamer & Remy Ricordeau. (Editions Siham,

Paris, 1988)

[6] Commentaires sur la Société du Spectacle, Guy Debord. (Editions G.

Lebovici, Paris, 1988). Some idiots in London writing in Marxism Today

about May 1968, came up with the conclusion that the dream was over,

really! It seems rather that their nightmare is continuing. As usual

stalinists enjoy spreading confusion.

[7] The following should please all those who have an interest in

keeping private property, the family in other words the State going:

“The Old Testament contains a certain number of traces which seems to

indicate that among the ancestors of historical Israel the matriarchate

was in force — that is a child was considered to belong, not to the

father’s clan or family, but that of the mother. In these primitive

times the father was not definitevely known. Polyandry prevailed — i.e.,

a woman was visited by various men. Strabo (Geographia, XVI) mentions as

prevalent among the Arabian peoples akin to Israel. Under such

conditions only the mother knows her child, and therefore it is she who

gave it its name. This practice Iasted in Israel far down into the

historical period, although the reason for it had long disappeared and

was forgotten [...] A further surviving trace of an earlier matriarchate

is seen in the fact that the tent belonged to the woman [...] Among the

Arabs when a woman had grown tired of a man she simply reversed her tent

— i.e. — she turned the door to the other side. When the man returned

and found the tent thus reversed he knew that she wished to have nothing

further to do with him. [...] Finally, there is another piece which is

not without value. There is reason to suppose that the word for “class”

mishpachach is connected with shipcha; in the ‘Old Testament’,

shiphchach means a female slave, or even a concubine, but under the

matriarchate, it had meant the matriarchate wife. In the nomadic period

the mishpachach seems to have been the ultimate social unit! In the

settled period “the Israelite family has now passed from the earlier

stage of the matriarchate [...] to that of the patriarchate — the wife

is her husband’s property. To have many wives, therefore, means to be

rich!! In Israel the main purpose of marriage was the procreation of

children. [...] The wife is of secondary importance. All that we hear of

her makes it impossible for us to forget for an instant that her husband

is her lord and master.” A History of the Hebrew Civilization. A.

Berthelot (Payot, Paris 1926)

[8] Another case of primitive accumulation!

[9] “The ancient poetry of Arabia, immediately before the advent of

Mohammed, is the most delightful wild flower of literature the Eastern

world can show...” Notes to The Anthology of World Poetry. (1929)