We appear to take a doctrinal stance towards science and scientists, considering science some form of contrary belief, as if it were another religion in competition with Islam, or a form of evangelisation. And so we adopt the stance of disagreeing with what science sees as its foundation, its starting point and viewpoint. So we presumably have some scientific alternative which is more correct and more effective.
WHO EXACTLY ARE WE to do this? And what do we offer for knowledge so that we reproach its exponents? The wording also carries a measure of implicit pride and underestimation of science and its exponents who persist in believing in Darwin’s theory!
Doesn’t this explain the reason for our disastrous, exemplary and unique backwardness, even among all the other states that are backward? Doesn’t this place us outside science, and thus outside the march of humanity? In adopting this stance are we part of the human race in this age? Do we have any alternative science in our long, broad, thick-skinned history, an alternative that the whole world follows? Or is this like some form of poetry that beguiles only the deluded? Is there anything justifying all this vanity, this loftiness and pride, even while one’s whole country sits at the bottom of the hierarchy of nations?
Of course, one could make reference to our preeminence in knowledge in the various branches of biology, as demonstrated by the level of our jurisprudence among Al-Azhar high school students, with their knowledge of how to crossbreed a donkey with a horse to produce a sterile mule, and how our knowledge is linked to how we diligently conform it to our religious belief – so the horse may mount the donkey to achieve the scientific task with the Islamically legal approval. For it would be a reprehensible thing for a donkey to mount a mare, the reason for this being that the horse, for the Arabs, is an honorable being, in addition to the fact that ‘goodness is tied to the forelocks of horses’ according to the noble hadith.[1] Perhaps our scholars encountered a problem here: to convince the donkey of the reprehensibility of mounting a horse, or to convince the horse not to allow the donkey to mount it. Such problems should be simple enough to solve, God willing.
A campaign of takfīr on everything that is contrary to the customs and traditions of the Bedouins
Nations are reaching their dotage when they enter into a state of dementia and Alzheimer’s right before a sad, humiliating undignified death – a nation afraid of a life that undergoes changes that it has not experienced and cannot understand. A nation that is afraid of the present age and all its ways and leans on its distant past, conjuring it up in its belief that this was the finest of all ages. It is just like someone who suffers from senility and can no longer see the world it does not recognize, and who relives his long lost youth in some waking dream. He is unable to change his ways, his purposefulness is lost in a preoccupation with his Afterlife and he refuses to make any further productive efforts, now that he knows that he is living his last days.
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How should we describe ourselves, while our major journals express our hostility to science as some product of ‘other’ people, and urge us to oppose these people if we wish to remain loyal to our roots and our backwardness? We are a nation that creates its problems with its own hands and then has no way to solve them. We link all our ‘solutions’ to religion or a religious point of view – like the ḥijāb, for instance, which began as a garment expressing modesty and has ended up a compulsory obligation, failure to wear it signifying, by necessity, an outright denial of faith.
We have Islamized all aspects of life in our country as we pass through a time of deep crisis of change, with Islamization attacking our minds in unauthorized audiotapes containing rubbish inciting hatred and strife, in newspapers, magazines, books, state radio and television, in national conferences and celebrations, along with a river pouring in of petrodollar money linked to an Islam in appearance only – robes, beards, ḥījābs, niqābs, slippers, ‘Islamic’ food, and ‘Islamic’ medicine – all of this accompanied by a campaign of public takfīr of society, of the state, its laws, its constitution and its freedoms, all of this in the media, in the country’s mosques, and even on public transport.
A campaign of takfīr on everything that is contrary to the customs and traditions of the Bedouins, a campaign of takfīr on art and artists male and female, a takfīr on literature that actually is literature, on culture and science.
Terrorism is a hybrid product of the mating of the culture of technology with the culture of the Bedouin tribe
It is natural for people to suspect anything that is new. But the disaster is made all the worse today when, after our efforts to find solutions to the problems piling up on us – after the meetings and the efforts of specialists and the development of plans and proposals – the final reports are re-submitted to the shaykhs so that they can verify their standpoints in them or prohibit them. What is worse, we talk about religious reform just so that Islam, in its current situation, does not breed more terrorism, and then go on to pass the reform file to the clergy for the purpose of religious reform! The question here is: can the virus be expected to search itself for a treatment that would kill it off?
Terrorism is the natural and presumable result of bad policies that used religion for its purposes. Terrorism has become a living organism that grows and multiplies by seducing others to mate with it so as to improve the bloodline, and just as our biological jurisprudence has excelled in crossbreeding a mule that does not reproduce, our biological achievement is now evident to the whole world.
Terrorism is a hybrid product of the mating of the culture of technology with the culture of the Bedouin tribe: it has spawned a powerful giant, one that possesses contemporary tools with a mind of the backward past, a giant strong in body but weak in intellect, half human, half automaton, half civilized – a hybrid like a mule. This is why it is a bloodthirsty killer, and why it also cannot reproduce. It therefore regresses, biologically, to a stage of parasitic beings. This hybrid is a parasite in all its affairs, a parasite in its financial resources, a parasite in the way it obtains perpetrator-hosts for its acts. It lives in rubbish-dumps of hatred and caves of treachery, far removed from civilization and from the threat of civilization’s radiation treatments that are fatal to germs. And then, in order to solve the problem of its formative biology, it also takes on the characteristics of vampires, feeding like them on human blood, injecting its toxins into their arteries to contaminate them, infecting them with intellectual rickets, with imbecility, feeble-mindedness, hatred and malice.
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The terrorist is not concerned about who his victims are, who will be buried alive by the bombing, nor whether they are pious worshipers or sinners. Sound humans have never behaved like this. It is our scientific achievement, an achievement without equal: a predatory, parasitic, rabid vampire hybrid that preys on Shiʽites and Sunnis, on children, women and the elderly, on Jews, Christians and Buddhists, on Egyptians, Iraqis, Malaysians and Turks. It strikes anywhere: in the Holy Land and the sacred Sinai, in France, Spain and America, in Malaysia and Afghanistan – in any place. It devours indiscriminately, not differentiating between male and female, nor old nor young, nor white, black nor yellow, nor a suckling child. Have you seen any other people in the world that have discovered anything like the method we have discovered and manufactured in our laboratories? Is there anyone in the world who has as many enemies?
So to come back now to our good shaykhs who are to solve the problem of terrorism for us through a religious reform. Some of these supported terrorism either publicly or timidly, and some of them kept silent, but none of them declared terrorists to be infidels in the way that they were happy, previously, to declare as infidels the nation’s thinkers and administrators, and indeed the whole country.
Our good shaykhs are the very ones who induce our young men to sell their blood in the market of immortality, to join the wide-eyed virgins, and meantime leave us sandwiched between pools of blood and the powerful threat of an international response. The closer the winds of democracy became, the more ferocious the shaykhs turned, and the more ferocious terrorism became, claiming that democracy is a Western heresy to be repudiated, as if true religion will be damaged when the people get to observe those who are stealing it.
The closer the winds of democracy became, the more ferocious the shaykhs turned
During the past crisis-ridden period, the shaykhs seized all powers, to become the source of legislation, the source of law and the executive. They became ‘those who command and prohibit’ while the modern state was sidelined since it was not on message and was failing to drink the Mecca Cola, enacting infidel legislation, with its entire system based on infidel foundations. And since democracy casts all of this aside in favour of a modern civil state, the intensification was all the more to be expected – a sign of the beginning of the end.
After September 2001 when winds blew against the bloody thrones, the oppression of terrorism increased because it was a religious state, or one allied to it in its final phase and its pending removal, because the establishment of the modern state ever since the time of Muḥammad ‘Alī[2] has exposed their ignorance, their backwardness, their greed and their duping of God and believers. So they hated it, declared the state and its legislation infidel, and demanded its dismantling, until they were granted an opportunity for its collapse in 1967.
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Now because times change, the time has come for our shaykhs to leave reform to those qualified to carry it out, because our shaykhs have become redundant in the country of the future, where conditions for reform are being prepared for this future. They will either be consigned off in some depôt, or retrained (a difficult task, admittedly) to accompany us aboard the ship of the future.
But this problem does have a solution, one which we present out of love for the nation. For we do not know a hatred like theirs, and instead we forgive them and are prepared to rehabilitate them. We know what forgiveness is, and what love towards all the sons of our nation means. We will take on the task of re-educating you, training you, freeing your heads from superstitions, so that you can indeed sail with us on the ship of salvation towards civilization. Because there is no one else today who can save you from extinction.
[1] I.e. that a great benefit or reward (the spoils of war) is to be derived from rearing horses for Jihad. The hadith is Sunan Ibn Mājah 2786 or Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 1872a. (Ed.)
[2] Muhammad Ali Pasha al-Mas’ud ibn Agha (1805-1848) was the Ottoman Albanian governor and de facto ruler of Egypt from 1805 to 1848. He is considered the founder of modern Egypt and his rule marked the first significant programme of Europeanization of state institutions.
