fighting words: A wartime lexicon.
God Is Not Great
fighting words
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1 PopulateMultipartArray("0","Religion Poisons
Everything","from: Christopher Hitchens","null","Wednesday, April 25,
2007","0");
2 PopulateMultipartArray("1","Was Muhammad Epileptic?","from: Christopher
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from: Christopher Hitchens
Was Muhammad Epileptic?Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007, at 10:28 AM ET
This week Slate is publishing three excerpts from Christopher Hitchens' new
book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
There is some question as to whether Islam is a separate religion at all. It
initially fulfilled a need among Arabs for a distinctive or special creed, and
is forever identified with their language and their impressive later conquests,
which, while not as striking as those of the young Alexander of Macedonia,
certainly conveyed an idea of being backed by a divine will until they petered
out at the fringes of the Balkans and the Mediterranean. But Islam when
examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of
plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion
appeared to require. Thus, far from being "born in the clear light of history,"
as Ernest Renan so generously phrased it, Islam in its origins is just as shady
and approximate as those from which it took its borrowings. It makes immense
claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or "surrender" as a maxim to
its adherents, and demands deference and respect from
nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothingabsolutely nothingin its
teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.
The prophet died in the year 632 of our own approximate calendar. The first
account of his life was set down a full hundred and twenty years later by Ibn
Ishaq, whose original was lost and can only be consulted through its reworked
form, authored by Ibn Hisham, who died in 834. Adding to this hearsay and
obscurity, there is no agreed-upon account of how the Prophet's followers
assembled the Koran, or of how his various sayings (some of them written down
by secretaries) became codified. And this familiar problem is further
complicatedeven more than in the Christian caseby the matter of succession.
Unlike Jesus, who apparently undertook to return to earth very soon and who
(pace the absurd Dan Brown) left no known descendants, Muhammad was a general
and a politician andthough unlike Alexander of Macedonia a prolific
fatherleft no instruction as to who was to take up his mantle. Quarrels over
the leadership began almost as soon as he died, and so Islam had its first
major schismbetween the Sunni and the Shiabefore it had even established
itself as a system. We need take no side in the schism, except to point out
that one at least of the schools of interpretation must be quite mistaken. And
the initial identification of Islam with an earthly caliphate, made up of
disputatious contenders for the said mantle, marked it from the very beginning
as man-made.
It is said by some Muslim authorities that during the first caliphate of Abu
Bakr, immediately after Muhammad's death, concern arose that his orally
transmitted words might be forgotten. So many Muslim soldiers had been killed
in battle that the number who had the Koran safely lodged in their memories had
become alarmingly small. It was therefore decided to assemble every living
witness, together with "pieces of paper, stones, palm leaves, shoulder-blades,
ribs and bits of leather" on which sayings had been scribbled, and give them to
Zaid ibn Thabit, one of the Prophet's former secretaries, for an authoritative
collation. Once this had been done, the believers had something like an
authorized version.
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If true, this would date the Koran to a time fairly close to Muhammad's own
life. But we swiftly discover that there is no certainty or agreement about the
truth of the story. Some say that it was Alithe fourth and not the first
caliph, and the founder of Shiismwho had the idea. Many othersthe Sunni
majorityassert that it was Caliph Uthman, who reigned from 644 to 656, who
made the finalized decision. Told by one of his generals that soldiers from
different provinces were fighting over discrepant accounts of the Koran, Uthman
ordered Zaid ibn Thabit to bring together the various texts, unify them, and
have them transcribed into one. When this task was complete, Uthman ordered
standard copies to be sent to Kufa, Basra, Damascus, and elsewhere, with a
master copy retained in Medina. Uthman thus played the canonical role that had
been taken, in the standardization and purging and censorship of the Christian
Bible, by Irenaeus and by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria. The
roll was called, and some texts were declared sacred and inerrant while others
became "apocryphal." Outdoing Athanasius, Uthman ordered that all earlier and
rival editions be destroyed.
Even supposing this version of events to be correct, which would mean that no
chance existed for scholars ever to determine or even dispute what really
happened in Muhammad's time, Uthman's attempt to abolish disagreement was a
vain one. The written Arabic language has two features that make it difficult
for an outsider to learn: it uses dots to distinguish consonants like "b" and
"t," and in its original form it had no sign or symbol for short vowels, which
could be rendered by various dashes or comma-type marks. Vastly different
readings even of Uthman's version were enabled by these variations. Arabic
script itself was not standardized until the later part of the ninth century,
and in the meantime the undotted and oddly voweled Koran was generating wildly
different explanations of itself, as it still does. This might not matter in
the case of the Iliad, but remember that we are supposed to be talking about
the unalterable (and final) word of god. There is obviously a
connection between the sheer feebleness of this claim and the absolutely
fanatical certainty with which it is advanced. To take one instance that can
hardly be called negligible, the Arabic words written on the outside of the
Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem are different from any version that appears in
the Koran.
The situation is even more shaky and deplorable when we come to the hadith,
or that vast orally generated secondary literature which supposedly conveys the
sayings and actions of Muhammad, the tale of the Koran's compilation, and the
sayings of "the companions of the Prophet." Each hadith, in order to be
considered authentic, must be supported in turn by an isnad, or chain, of
supposedly reliable witnesses. Many Muslims allow their attitude to everyday
life to be determined by these anecdotes: regarding dogs as unclean, for
example, on the sole ground that Muhammad is said to have done so.
As one might expect, the six authorized collections of hadith, which pile
hearsay upon hearsay through the unwinding of the long spool of isnads ("A told
B, who had it from C, who learned it from D"), were put together centuries
after the events they purport to describe. One of the most famous of the six
compilers, Bukhari, died 238 years after the death of Muhammad. Bukhari is
deemed unusually reliable and honest by Muslims, and seems to have deserved his
reputation in that, of the three hundred thousand attestations he accumulated
in a lifetime devoted to the project, he ruled that two hundred thousand of
them were entirely valueless and unsupported. Further exclusion of dubious
traditions and questionable isnads reduced his grand total to ten thousand
hadith. You are free to believe, if you so choose, that out of this formless
mass of illiterate and half-remembered witnessing the pious Bukhari, more than
two centuries later, managed to select only the pure and
undefiled ones that would bear examination.
The likelihood that any of this humanly derived rhetoric is "inerrant," let
alone "final," is conclusively disproved not just by its innumerable
contradictions and incoherencies but by the famous episode of the Koran's
alleged "satanic verses," out of which Salman Rushdie was later to make a
literary project. On this much-discussed occasion, Muhammad was seeking to
conciliate some leading Meccan poly-theists and in due course experienced a
"revelation" that allowed them after all to continue worshipping some of the
older local deities. It struck him later that this could not be right and that
he must have inadvertently been "channeled" by the devil, who for some reason
had briefly chosen to relax his habit of combating monotheists on their own
ground. (Muhammad believed devoutly not just in the devil himself but in minor
desert devils, or djinns, as well.) It was noticed even by some of his wives
that the Prophet was capable of having a "revelation" that happened to suit
his short-term needs, and he was sometimes teased about it. We are further
toldon no authority that need be believedthat when he experienced revelation
in public he would sometimes be gripped by pain and experience loud ringing in
his ears. Beads of sweat would burst out on him, even on the chilliest of days.
Some heartless Christian critics have suggested that he was an epileptic
(though they fail to notice the same symptoms in the seizure experienced by
Paul on the road to Damascus), but there is no need for us to speculate in this
way. It is enough to rephrase David Hume's unavoidable question. Which is more
likelythat a man should be used as a transmitter by god to deliver some
already existing revelations, or that he should utter some already existing
revelations and believe himself to be, or claim to be, ordered by god to do so?
As for the pains and the noises in the head, or the sweat, one can only regret
the seeming fact that direct communication with god is not
an experience of calm, beauty, and lucidity.
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from: Christopher Hitchens
Was Muhammad Epileptic?Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007,
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God
Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
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