Islam Unveiled: The True Desert Storm, by Robert A. Morey (Shermans Dale, PA: The Scholars Press, 1991) 179 pages, index, bibliography

Transcription

1 The Desert Pagans By T.E. Wilder Islam Unveiled: The True Desert Storm, by Robert A. Morey (Shermans Dale, PA: The Scholars Press, 1991) 179 pages, index, bibliography Contra Mundum, No. 3, Spring 1992 With the fall of communism in much of the world, the leading external enemy of Christian civilization is now Mohammedanism. The anti-communists of yesteryear were never afraid that they might hurt some commissar's feelings if they told the truth about that system. In the case of Mohammedanism, however, there is a lot of pussy-footing around the areas of clear confrontation between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan. Secular academics who do not hesitate to disparage Christianity give a cleaned up version of the rise of Allahism, as do fellow-traveling Evangelical academics. Worse than that, some churchmen seek to erase the antithesis, as has Christian Reformed World Missions, by holding joint worship services with Mohammedan religious functionaries. One is thankful, then, for the candor which Dr. Morey shows in this book. There is no nonsense about that other great monotheistic religion, etc. Instead Islam Unveiled does what the title says; it exposes the pretensions of an essentially pagan religion, the cultural squalor of it origins, and the ricketiness of its authoritative book, the Quran. It does so in clear and mostly systematic fashion with an abundance of citations to standard reference works. The result is a basic handbook of the Mohammedan religion. Part One opens up the nature of Islam with a brief characterization of its tenets, a view of its growth and influence, and examples of the undesirable traits that make this influence a menace. The second part, on the cultural background, includes a chapter on pre-islamic Arabia detailing many cultural elements, both Arab and foreign that made their way into the Mohammedan religion. For example, the author says that the term Islam only gradually evolved to mean submission but at first referred to the attribute of manliness in which one would be heroic and brave in battle even unto death. (p. 34) The constant warfare and raiding of the Arab tribes formed the moral background to the new religion. Here Morey commits a serious error when he attributes to them the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. This language expresses the principle of proportionality in the Bible's law. To state it in modern language: let the punishment fit the crime. Thus it is a serious lapse when Morey elaborates as follows: 1

2 There was a harsh penal code that was followed by the nomadic tribes. It meant nothing to them to cut off the right hand, a foot or the head of someone. The tongue could be cut out, the ears lobbed off, and even the eyes gouged out as punishment for various crimes. To sneak up behind someone and slit his throat from ear to ear was viewed as the right thing to do in certain situations and the person who did it was viewed as a hero. (p. 35) The author would have done better to stick to his main thesis that Mohammedanism is fundamentally different from biblical religion. Morey describes the pagan Arab rituals which were incorporated into Islam, such as the centrality of the temple shrine in Mecca and prayer toward it several times a day. Morey contends that Mohammed waffled on the direction of prayer, at one time specifying Jerusalem, but then reverting to Mecca to appease the religious commercial interests of that city. It is at that time that Mohammed began to kill Jews. Morey lists the foreign religions, including gnostic and other Christian heresies, which influenced Mohammed, especially by serving as sources for material in the Quran. The main point throughout is to undercut the Mohammedan claim that the Quran was simply handed down from heaven in finished form as an entirely new revelation. Of even more value is the next chapter on the Arab moon cult. According to Morey, Allah was simply the moon god, the consort of the sun goddess, and father of a number of female deities, Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Manat, whose worship formed a principle feature of the religion of Mohammed's home town of Mecca. Mohammed's father was named Abd-Allah, and his uncle Obied-Allah. The Allah idol was kept in the Kabah temple in Mecca so that it was therefore in that direction the idolaters prayed, and its symbol was the crescent moon. These practices are still part of Allah worship today. It is simply false, Morey believes, that Allah is the God of the Bible. This point is amplified in Part Four: The God of Islam. Islam does claim that Allah is the same God who was revealed in the Bible. This logically implies, positively, that the concept of God set forth in the Quran will correspond in all points to the concept of God found in the Bible, and, negatively, that if the Bible and the Quran have differing views of God, then Islam's claim to be biblical religion is false. (p. 55) Morey lists ten fundamental differences between God and the concept of Allah: GOD ALLAH Knowable Personal Unknowable Non-personal 2

3 Spiritual Trinitarian Immutable nature Trustworthy Love Enters history Attributes Saves by grace (pp ) Non-spiritual Unitarian No definite nature Capricious Remote Uses intermediaries only No attributes Saves by works After Islam's god comes Islam's prophet. Morey presents us with Mohammed the unwanted child, the epileptic, the murderer, the thief, the liar, the polygamist, and the child-molester. He includes as well the Satanic Verses episode that did so much to make Salman Rushdie famous. In these Mohammed conceded to the traditional pagans the right to continue the worship of Allah's daughters. These verses were latter retracted, and the matter is explained as a deception of Satan who is supposed to have inspired them. Compare the fallibility of Mohammedanism's greatest prophet with the biblical requirements for true prophets! After a view of his career is it no surprise to find that the next chapter Mohammed and Jesus Christ finds tremendous differences. A recent Pakistani action movie ended with the Quran dropping from heaven looking like the starship Enterprise and zapping Salman Rushdie with its phasers. This gives some idea of status of the Quran as a sacred object in its own right within Mohammedanism. The Quran was supposed to have been delivered to Mohammed in the form in which it had existed in heaven. It is not supposed to be the case that Allah worked though human authors in terms of their situation and culture, using them as active agents as did God in the case of the Bible. This puts the Mohammedan in a uniquely difficult position in defending his sacred book. Not surprisingly the longest section of Islam Unveiled is devoted to debunking the claims of the Quran together with those made for it by its believers. When anyone who is familiar with the Bible picks up a Quran and begins to read it through, there is an immediate recognition that he is dealing with an entirely different kind of literature than what he finds in the Bible... In fact, the very way that the Bible is structured, being a library of 66 books, reveals that it is ordered according to chronology, subject and theme. 3

4 But when you turn to the Quran, you find a jumbled and confused ordering of individual Suras. As Morey cites one scholar: The matter of the Koran is exceedingly incoherent and sententious, the book evidently being without any logical order of thought either as a whole or in its parts. This agrees with the desultory and incidental manner in which it is said to have been delivered. (p. 104) In fact the manner of delivery is itself a problem in the Quran, in that there are four contradictory accounts: 1) Allah came to Mohammed in the form of a man, 2) the holy Spirit came to Mohammed, 3) angels came down to Mohammed, 4) the angel Gabriel came to Mohammed. What actually happened, according to many accounts is that Mohammed fell into fits from time to time and reported revelations. These were memorized or written down on whatever was handy: a scrap of parchment, a stone, palm leaf, board, mat, bone, tree bark, etc. Some of the memorized material perished in battle with the memorizers. Some texts were eaten by animals, or lost because the stones were too big to carry around, or were simply destroyed. At times Mohammed kept a scribe such as the unfortunate Abdollah. Finding that Mohammed too readily accepted his suggestions for improvements to the revelations, Abdollah decided that Mohammed could not be a prophet after all and left for Mecca. Naturally, upon conquering Mecca Mohammed had him killed, along with a woman who had been pointing out that Mohammed had plagiarized from her father's poems. Some of the revelations deal with incidental matters. For example, to get his many wives to stop quarreling Mohammed would have a revelation instructing them to desist. When he desired his adopted son's wife, Mohammed received a revelation authorizing him to take her. The result was that after Mohammed's death the Quran had to be put together from fragmentary remains and conflicting memory. This was done by the Caliph Uthman who decided what he would accept and then arranged it by the order of the size of the fragments. Uthman then used death threats to impose his text and destroy rival versions. The Shiites claim Uthman left out one fourth of the available material for political reasons. The Quran contains a mass of internal contradictions, mistakes due to gross ignorance (e.g. putting the Samaritans in the time of Moses), contradictions with the Bible, contradictions with secular sources, etc. The Quran in Sura 41 says it took God eight days to create the world and in Suras 7 and 10 agrees with the Bible that it was six days. Morey offers a well organized survey of the problems. In addition he treats the tremendous 4

5 textual problems due to variants, and later additions and deletions from the text, such as the Satanic Verses. Throughout, the religion's problems are illustrated with anecdotes from Morey's discussions with Mohammedans. These show the absurd lengths to which Mohammedans will go in arguing for their religion. Two appendixes, on English translations of the Quran, and on the Black Muslim movement, round out the book. Dr. Robert Morey and his staff constitute an apologetics industry. They have produced basic handbooks on a wide range of problems. Unlike most academic apologists, he tries to catch trends early, rather than waiting for them to be forced on him. The book under review is one such basic popular handbook. It suffers somewhat from lack of focus. It is not clear for whom Morey thinks he is writing. Sometimes he addresses the Mohammedans and asks them to consider the evidence and arguments rather than taking personal offense. More often, he speaks of we in the West as though he were addressing secularists, if not atheists, in danger of conversion to Islam. At other points the book could be taken as a manual for Christians. It is this last group that I think will be best served by it. Islam Unveiled is written at a high-school level, is concise and clear, and covers a broad range of pertinent facts about Islam. The lack of focus causes it to fall short in a few areas. For example, if it had been directed to Christians or Western secularists entirely, it would have had a chapter introducing modern Mohammedan rituals, observances, and religious authorities. As it is, a few of these things are mentioned only, and only in passing. There is also quite a bit of repetition because so many facts fit several categories of Morey's systematic presentation. Nevertheless, the book is so full of honest information that is suppressed by almost everyone else that it serves as good introduction to Mohammedanism for both the man in the pew and the Christian school student. Islam Unveiled could be used in a class on world religions or in a world history survey. The book is easy, one evening reading. It is far too elementary and repetitious to serve as a college text. A new edition is in preparation. 5