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The following night was the continuation of the previous lecture. I focused on the importance of critical thinking and using our God-given 19 rules of inference. I warned them against developing schizophrenic personalities, which almost all religious people do. I started with the following words:
Before putting anything in our mouths we observe the color, sniff its odor. If it looks rotten, or smells bad we do not touch it. If a food passes the eye, nose, and hand tests, then our taste buds will be the judge. If a harmful bit fools all those examinations, our stomach come to the rescue; it revolts and throws them up. There are many other organs, such as liver and kidney, which function as stations for testing, modification, and filtering of imported material into our bodies. They ultimately meet our smart and vigilant nano-guards, white cells. Sure, there are many harmful or potentially harmful foods that pass all the way through our digestive system into our blood, such as alcohol and fat. Nevertheless, without much using our reasoning faculty, we have an innate system that protects our body from harmful substances. Then, it is a mystery how we put information and assertions, especially the most bizarre ones, into our brains without subjecting them to rigorous test of critical thinking. We should not turn our brains into trashcans of false ideas, holy viruses, unexamined dogmas and superstitions! We should be wise!
Do we have an innate system that protects us from harmful or junk ideas, especially dogmas or jingoism that could turn us into zombies or self-righteous evil people? Yes: our logic is the program that detects and protects us against the most harmful viruses, which usually find their way when we are hypnotized by crowds, salespeople, politicians or clergymen.
The Prominent Imam with an Illiterate Role Model
For the third lecture, Taj took me to London. There I was going to give a lecture at Muslim Institute. I met some with familiar names, authors that I have known decades before, such as Dr. Ziyauddin Sardar and Dr. Ghayasudding Siddiqui. I also met some young reformers such as Farouk Peru, and Yusuf Desai and Nosheen Oezcan of Forward Thinking. I was positively surprised that with the exception of an imam there, who was considered a moderate and open minded one, they did not react in angry temper tantrums to my invitation to follow the Quran alone.
The imam rejected the Manifesto for Islamic Reform wholesale with a passionate opening. He accused me of distorting the facts. To substantiate his opposition, Imam Abduljalil Sajid picked one out of my assertions. He argued that Muhammad must have been illiterate. He did not provide an alternative take against my depiction of such illiteracy to be either an insult to Muhammad's intelligence or his intention. He did not bother to explain how a role model, a divinely selected messenger would not be able to recognize 28 Alphabet letters in 63 years of his life (two years for each letter!), or during the 23 years he received revelation that encouraged its audience to attain knowledge by reading. He did not deal with the problem of the alternative explanation, that is, how a role model could deliberately keep himself illiterate for all his life! Somehow, our imam, like all other religious leaders, had great tolerance for contradictions. His brain was filled with so many; he had perhaps given up from resolving them. A perfect example of intellectually boiled frog syndrome! I had empathy for him, since in my youth I was one of them. I let him vent his frustration.
Imam Abduljalil argued that the word Iqra did not mean read, but it meant recite. So, according to him, despite the instruction of verse 96:1, Muhammad could still have been illiterate. It was a late Monday night and we did not have time to engage in a lengthy discussion. For instance, I could remind him his own hadith which reported the first encounter of Muhammad and Angel Gabriel. According to that hadith report, when he was instructed with the first verse of chapter 96, Iqra, to make Muhammad read the visually displayed Quran, the angel squeezed him like a lemon several times when Muhammad claimed “wa ma ana biqarin” (I cannot read). Obviously that hadith report did not mean that Muhammad was incapable of repeating a word with two syllabi; it meant that he could not recognize the letters… I picked another argument.
-- Let's assume that you are right regarding the meaning of Iqra. Then, what is the Arabic word for “recite”?
-- ???
-- Well, there must have been a word for reading in Arabic, since the Quran talks about books, about pen, about writing...
-- ???
Our imam who started his criticism with a loud denunciation suddenly turned mute. He could not even come up with a single word. I did not wish to push him further, since everyone in the room realized that he either did not know what he was arguing about or he realized that he was wrong. I remembered the most ridiculous praises in human history, where Muhammad is praised by millions for his illiteracy with the distorted meaning of the word “ummy” uttered together with another distorted word "sally". Thinking about the low illiteracy among the so-called Muslim population, I did not let the issue go away without a conclusive ending. I wanted to prove to him and everyone else that Muhammad was literate.
So, I used one of my successful teaching tools, which I employed first time in 1987 to convince Ali Bulaç, a prominent and prolific Muslim thinker who has numerous books and a Turkish Quran translation. After following my instructions, Ali was convinced in less than a minute that Muhammad must have been literate. Imagine the power of debunking the consensus of all Sunni and Shiite scholars in less than a minute! Imagine convincing a famous and popular Sunni author that all his Sunni scholars were wrong about an important issue. All in less than a minute! Yet, this proof has been implicitly provided in the Quran with the revelation of its first verses, through the very verses instructing how to read the Quran. What a marvelous book!
So, I tried that Quranic educational tool. I asked the imam to grab the pen and write down the beginning of chapter 96: “Bismillahirrahmanirarrahim. Iqra bismi rabbika allazi khalaq” That's it. Surprise: he did not wish to write it. Perhaps he was scared to continue engaging in a Socratic dialog. Had he written those few words, I would ask him why he wrote both words the same. Surely, he would be justified to spell them the same, since both were pronounced the same and meant the same. Then, I would ask him to look at the spelling of the Quran. He would notice that the one in Bismillah consisted of three letters, BSM, but the one in the following verse was spelled with an extra aleph, BISM. So, even if we assume that Muhammad did not write the revelation of the Quran with his own hand, even if we believe in the stories of him dictating to scribes, he must have at least known the letter aleph. If he knew aleph, then he was at least 1/28th literate. “I proved that he knew the letter aleph and now it is your turn to prove that he did not know the letter B, the second letter in the alphabet,” I would nicely ask. If our imam got stuck again, I would perhaps go forward and ask him about the different spelling of Mecca and Becca or the curious spelling of Bastata in verse 7:69.
I wanted to end the argument with the imam with an exposition. I knew his problem and I knew the fastest way to expose it. I told the audience that the gentleman was arguing about God's system without knowledge and without an enlightening book. I announced that I was going to prove that he did not in fact have respect for the Quran. I started reading from verse 6:145 and then posed him my question: "Do you have any other source or any other witness that adds more dietary prohibitions to the four items listed in this verse?" If he said no, he would contradict numerous hadiths and all sectarian teachings. If he said Yes, he would contradict this verse and would be exposed by the following verses as a "mushrik" (polytheist) for attributing the manmade religious prohibitions to God. He did not rush into saying Yes, as most of the Sunni scholars recklessly do. To my question regarding additional dietary prohibitions, he responded with extreme caution: "May be or may be not!" What? You are an "imam" in your fifties and you have eaten thousands of meals and you still do not know what is prohibited? And you are refuting the Quran alone for a "may be or may be not"? Do you exist? "Maybe or may be not?" Is eating shrimp haram? "Maybe or maybe not!" Is eating lobster haram? "Maybe or maybe not!" Are you okay? "Maybe or maybe not!"
For some of the audiences, that was the last straw that broke their already stressed respect for the imam. Several people got frustrated him. One of them loudly yelled at him with animated arms: "If you do not know such a simple thing, then why are you debating with the guest speaker? Let him talk." Hearing his own people reprimanding him, the imam quietly left the room. I felt bad for him, but what he was doing was very wrong. He was trying to keep people in the darkness of ignorance. He was promoting shirk (polytheism) under the guise of monotheism. He was pretending to respect the prophet Muhammad while he was disrespecting the only book he delivered. He was insulting his intelligence by claiming that he remained illiterate until his death. Yet, he insisted upon putting Muhammad's name next to God every time he uttered the monotheistic maxim. I hope that after hearing the message, he will show courage and wisdom to reject the fabricated Hadith and Sunna and uphold the Quran alone.
