Lawrence Auster (RIP, a true shtetl of mettle mensch), discussed William Muir’s 1878 The Life of Mahomet and drew the apt comparison that Muhammed was essentially the opposite of Jesus, the anti-Jesus, and that this says everything you need to know about the type of people who are drawn to the message of Islam. (via)
I’ve just read the fascinating third chapter of William Muir’s 1878 The Life of Mahomet, “The Belief of Mahomet in His Own Inspiration.” In the great tradition of 19th century scholarship, Muir is an author who sees both the trees and the forest. He works closely from the original sources, presenting the facts about Mahomet (I’ll use Muir’s old-fashioned spelling here) as we have them from the Moslem tradition, while also offering his own critical assessment of those facts. He has a highly articulated point of view about Mahomet that seems to me exceptionally insightful.
Muir shows how Mahomet became convinced, or claimed, that his own thoughts were Allah speaking to him, so that every sentence in the Koran, every single word, is believed to come directly from Allah. While Muir doesn’t deny Mahomet’s spiritual experiences that led to the writing of the Koran, he calls Mahomet’s claim of divine authorship a forgery, since he was falsely claiming that Allah was the author of the Koran rather than himself. By placing this divine imprimatur on his own thoughts, he made them impervious to analysis. To this day, it is virtually impossible for Moslems to think critically about the contents of the Koran.
After pointing out that Mahomet himself occasionally worried that it was genii who were speaking to him rather than Allah, Muir does something rather brilliant. He demonstrates, step by step, that Jesus’ responses to the three temptations of Satan were the exact opposite of Mahomet’s behavior. Whereas Jesus refused to use his divine powers for his personal advantage or for power, Mahomet often used his (false) claim of direct divine authorship of the Koran for purely personal ends (such as his various murders and marriages), and, of course, to make his religious teaching into an earthly, conquering, political force. In other words, Mahomet yielded to the temptations that Jesus rejected. Therefore, Muir concludes (and he calls this a suggestion rather than a dogma), if Mahomet was indeed inspired by a supernatural being, it was not God but someone else.
In this connection, Andrew Bostom in his research for his book on Islam has discovered and shared with me a remarkable Persian illustration of Muhammad at the massacre of the Koreizites, a Jewish tribe of Medina. It’s a famous episode in Muslim history. Muhammad, whose face is veiled, is seen sitting with his lieutenants in a kind of plaza while the killings, which he has ordered, proceed in front of him. The illustration is highly significant because it shows Muhammad “at work,” as it were. This is what he did as Prophet and founder of a religion. Nothing could bring out more clearly the world of difference between Muhammad and Jesus. While Jesus, innocent of sin, allowed himself to be executed for the sins of mankind, Muhammad ordered the mass executions of innocent men.
Getting back to William Muir’s remarkable biography, he quotes and comments on many passages from the Koran, making that book somewhat accessible to me for the first time, since whenever I have tried to read it on my own, I’ve been quickly overcome by a combination of boredom and revulsion. It occurs to me that the primitiveness of the Koran, the endless reiteration of the theme, “Either you follow Allah, or you are a piece of garbage and you are going to burn in hell,” is like taking the judgmental aspect of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures at its most judgmental, reworking it into the crudest possible form, and making that into the basis of an entire religion. And perhaps that is the reason Islam, unlike Judaism and Christianity, was so successful in winning over the Arabs: it appealed to their simple, fierce, tribal mentality in a way that Judaism and Christianity could not.
Why are the world’s violent and primitive attracted to Islam? Executioner’s Summary: it’s Islam’s appeal to the base instincts. The sand people are on the whole a stupid, clannish, hot-headed, inbred lot who have populated the world in numbers well above their natural state of existence thanks to the oil money and exported Western technology, and so it is their religion appeases and amplifies their under-evolved natures and provides justification for their burgeoning populations to expand and conquer infidel lands. You’ll note, too, Islam’s appeal to prison blacks, for similar reason: dr. feelgood and Hulk SMASH for the brutishly dumb.
Christianity is the religion of the higher IQ, the more empathic, the bigger-souled, the guilt-based (inner morality); it’s a religion for a people whose impulse is to transcend their human failings and better themselves, rather than to embrace their will to filth and stamp a seal of approval on their avaricious barbarity. Now of course there are exceptions, but in the sweep of history the general observation holds up, and continues to hold up.
I’m of the opinion that a religion is less an influence on culture and society than it is a manifest revelation of the genetic foundation of the people who profess belief in it. Religion serves the God of Biomechanics, not the other way around, and over time a religion is amended and elaborated, or in the case of Islam distilled to its thuggish essence, to satisfy the soulful yearnings and emotional demands of its followers. Christianity, in other words, could never be felt the same way or interpreted with the same keenness outside of the social context of civilized White Europeans and their diaspora. The same is true for Islam, which must necessarily remain chained to the jungle hearts of its tropical and desert wasteland base of believers (who will never realize this until they force Armageddon upon the world).
Regrettably, Christianity, like its people, has “out-evolved” itself — it evolved to where it was always logically heading faster and more completely than it could counter-evolve defenses against exploitation of its core tenets — and now waits in a horribly weakened condition for enemies to burn its cathedrals and piss on the gravestones of its saints and heroes.
Those who think the White West can be unyoked from Christianity and not just survive but thrive are fools; Christianity can no more be excised from the West than charity, empathy, genius, poetry, and high trust can be cut out from Western societies without permanently altering the character of the people. Discarding Christianity is taking a hatchet to a part of the essence of European man and expecting him to walk off the operating table unchanged. Instead, what’s happened is de-Christianized European man lays naked and defenseless on his gurney, once lamenting and now begging the world’s demon spawn to put the final fading glimmers of his listless spirit to the breaking wheel.
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