Fragile: Handle with Care

When breakable goods are shipped, they are stamped with a distinctive sign--"Fragile: Handle with Care". Even though the Quran, the holiest book on Earth, does not carry the warning, Quran-maniacal Muslims do handle it with the same attitude, as if the holy book will shatter into pieces. Apparent respect shown towards this book is not because of its contents. Instead, it has become a religious mandate, propagated by extensive propaganda and it is an exhibition of a natural human instinct to worship something, whether it be an idol or a book. Muslims believe that thawab (a spiritual reward) is earned every time a portion of the book is recited. It's a kind of credit card that offers mileage on flying-the more you charge the card, the more points you earn.
Is the book that Muslims are holding in their hands today nothing but a replica of the master copy, which Allah has preserved in his sacred library? All Muslims of the world would unanimously vote for "Yes". Their assessment is not based on facts but on a Quranic verse that says, "This is a Glorious Quran, (inscribed) in a tablet preserved!" (Q85:21). So, did Allah use his gigantic copier machine, creating thunder and storm, to make copies of his Quran?
Not really!
In today's world, people would reject any attempt of initiating a new religion. If someone did try, he would immediately be put in a straightjacket and sent to a psychiatric hospital. The same rule applies to Muhammad; his claim of receiving commands from Allah is an outright lie. However, for the sake of this article, let's pretend that Allah revealed the Quran.
Whenever a verse was revealed to Muhammad, it was memorized by his associates and sometimes written on pieces of wood, deerskin, palm leaves, bones, etc.
Why were those verses written on wood, deerskin, bones and palm leaves?
Historical records show that Ts'ai Lun, a Chinese official, reported the invention of paper to the Chinese Emperor in 105 AD, 500 years before the era of Muhammad. Recent archeological investigations, however, claim the actual invention may have been around 140-86 BC in Gansu province of China. Although the word "paper" came from "papyrus", there is a significant difference between these two. Papyrus was a type of plant found in Egypt along the Nile River. Approximately 5000 years ago, Egyptians made flat and uniform sheets from these trees for writing purposes.
Maybe China was a little too far from Arabia and Allah was not able to help Muhammad with paper. How about using papyrus, which was available in Egypt? In another archeological discovery, a roll of papyrus more than 2000 years old was found in Egypt. This papyrus contains 112 short poems of a Greek poet and they are in good condition. Allah could have easily commanded, "O prophet! Get a bundle of papyrus and write down what's sent to thee!" But it did not happen.
People used to make false a Quran when Muhammad was alive. We read in verse 2:79,
"And woe unto those who write the scripture with their own hands and then say, 'This is from God,' that they may in this way obtain a small gain. Woe unto them for what their hands have written and woe unto them for what they gain thereby!"
Despite the possibility of creating a false Quran, Allah or Muhammad never thought about the importance of compiling the Quran and putting the verses in the form of a book. Apparently, the foremost method of preserving the Quran was memorization. Some verses were written on stones, bones and leaves, without realizing the fact that goats love to eat leaves. Yes, a darned animal with four legs known as a goat ate a piece of the all-powerful Allah's Quran. "Narrated by Hazrat Ā'ishah that ayat-e-Rajm and ayat Raza'at were revealed, they were written on something. I kept them under the cart, meanwhile the holy prophet died and we became busy and one GOAT came and ATE those ayyat" (Ibn-e-Maja).
A'ishah had a problem with domestic animals before. In another instance, in order to resolve a scandal, a slave girl, Barirah, testified (al-Tabari, p.1523), "The only fault I ever found in 'Ā'ishah is that, when I was kneading my dough and ordered her to watch it, she fell asleep over it, and the pet sheep (or a goat) came and ate it." It's very normal for a little child; however, a goat eating the Quran is a noteworthy phenomenon that will have an enduring effect on believers of Islam.

What Is The Cost of Practicing Islam?

Muslims seem to behave like drug addicts who always need more of the same stuff to relieve their withdrawal symptoms. Muslims just cannot face the crisis head on and cure themselves from this seventh century ideology; instead, they ask for more. This stimulated me to write this essay about the price we are paying for practicing Islam and the price humanity has paid for keeping Islam alive for so long.

Although I am not an economist, I delved into this topic to highlight the sheer economic non-sense inherent in Islam. This analysis will remind us of some idea of what sort of money we are talking about, rather than being an accurate estimate of the price that the Muslims pay for practicing their faith. Mind you, in this analysis, I have not even taken into account the price we are paying for jihad because all the money in the world does not bring back one lost life. Mohammed ruled in Medina for only ten years, during which he fought over seventy aggressive wars! This tradition of Islamic warfare continued immediately after his death and has been continuing up to our time.

Units of Measurements

Let us first agree on how to calculate the cost and which currency to use. The easiest way is to avoid any national currency so that we do not have to do any conversions. I am going to use man-hours as a unit of measurements. Let us agree that a one man -hour is the work produced when a man works for one hour.

An average person works eight hours a day and five days a week. The rest of the time should be used for rest and family/ leisure activities which are as essential to life as work itself is, if not more. I am not a pure economist or a qualified engineer, but I am told that building a commercial aircraft is one of the most complicated engineering projects of our time because of the millions of components involved. Such a massive project apparently costs a staggering one million man-hours

 

The cost of reading the Quran

Reading is normally a very efficient utilisation of time. It is usually informative and educational and can be a relaxing and very enjoyable pastime activity. We may dislike or disagree with what we read, but we still consider the time spent in reading as useful because of the information obtained about the subject or even about the knowledge about the writer or publisher. However, it is unlikely that anyone will read the same book again and again, certainly not everyday, regardless of how interesting the book is.

The Arabs came across the Quran some 1400 years ago and they didn't like it. But when Mohammed seized power he forced it on them using his claim of divine authority. This is not at all similar to forcing the Red book on the Chinese, it is far worse. The Arabs, now called Muslims under Mohammed's Islamic regime, were forced to revere the book, read it everyday and brainwash their children with it.

A Muslim cannot allow his mind, for even one second, to think of the Quran as a boring book, full with absurdities, because of the intense fear built in his mind since childhood. Muslims have a built in internal system that automatically oppresses their minds and stops them from ever thinking of expressing their true feelings towards their religion. They are conditioned to believe that such bad thoughts are not theirs but from Satan, therefore, should be rejected outright.  

Muslims are supposed to read the Quran on daily basis, and at least once in a year (in Ramadan) If only one tenth of Muslims (i.e., at least 100 million Muslims) read the Quran once in a year that means three billion man-hours are spent just to read the Quran once in a year. That is assuming a speed of twenty pages an hour for thirty days, and is enough to produce three thousands commercial jets! Come to think of this!!

Just think of how many tens of thousands of Muslims are engaged at this moment of time in debates trying to cover up the mistakes in the Quran and re-interpret its verses to defend its nonsense. Just ponder on what Muslims could do with those billions of man- hours by just ignoring a book that says things like the earth is flat and the sun orbits the earth.

The annual cost of Reading the Quran is: three billion man-hours a year
 

The cost of prayers

An average Muslim will spend at least an hour a day to perform the five daily prayers. Men, who ideally should go to the mosque to perform their prayers, spend even more time.  Islamic societies, like Saudi Arabia, where all men have to go to mosques for prayers, allocate about half an hour for each prayer during which all businesses must stop completely. More time is needed for special prayers like Friday and Eid prayers. This, what an Islamic government would enforce once in power in any Islamic country. If only one tenth of Muslims are keen worshipers, then we have more than two hundreds and fifty millions man- hours wasted just to perform the five daily prayers!

Multiply this number by 335 days (After subtracting Ramadan days, which is calculated separately) and we get a figure of 83.750.000.000

The annual cost of performing the prayers is: 83.750.000.000 man-hours a year

 

The cost of Hajj

About two million people perform hajj every year, a ritual which takes only few days to complete. However, in practice, it takes a Muslim an average of ten days to complete the ritual. The official Hajj holiday in Saudi Arabia is actually about two weeks. Actual Hajj is just around an hour's hard work, Simple calculations will give us a figure like 480 millions man-hours lost, assuming the two million people dedicated ten days each for the Hajj. The pilgrimage of course affects all Muslims everywhere and involves considerable preparations and extra financial demands.

And there are health and safety issues too. Saudi Arabia, being an oil rich country, is currently capable to provide some essential facilities for the pilgrimage. However, this remains far from enough. Every year we hear about the thousands who are killed and injured due to stampedes, illnesses and cross infections. It is a common knowledge that everybody that comes back from the Hajj usually comes back with a respiratory infection.

In every Islamic country, there are special government departments to organise the journey to the Hajj. This is more evident in Saudi Arabia which employs extra measures and deploys extra staff to deal with such a massive influx of people. Assuming the country has only five millions of employees who have to stop working for only ten days then four hundreds million man- hours are lost just in Saudi Arabia. Add this to above figure of 480 millions man- hours we get a total of 880 millions man-hours. Considering other Islamic countries losses then a one billion man-hours lost must be a very conservative estimate.

The annual cost of the Hajj is: one billion man-hours.

The cost of Ramadan fasting

Muslims in general like to consider Ramadan as a month dedicated for fasting and worshipping. Working hours in most Islamic countries are reduced substantially, as Muslims do not allow normal daily activities to affect the spiritual atmosphere.

Muslims start the working day late and finish early and spend the day hours in a state of physical and mental exhaustion, because of the state of hypoglycaemia secondary to their fasting. However, Muslims just love to deny this simple physiological fact, and try to convince themselves that fasting is good for health, and will produce a typical Islamic research that defies the academic standards and designed to produce results to prove their point.

During the evenings, Muslims suffer of dumping syndrome due to eating too much after fasting for too long. They may suffer of headaches and may feel unable to do their normal activities. Muslims will then be busy performing taraweeh prayers that take about an hour to complete. They will also perform other keyam prayers after midnight that takes another hour to complete. 

Suhur is a meal taken very late at night, when the usual medical recommendation is not to eat before retiring to bed. But suhur is a meal that is recommended by Muhammad; therefore, Muslims will just eat it regardless of any medical advice. After that there is a fajr (morning) prayer, which needs to be performed before eventually retiring to bed in the early morning. Undoubtedly, this will reflect on the next day activities. In other words, it will be another day wasted.

It doesn't matter how many Muslims actually observe fasting, because the reduction in the working hours affects everyone. If only one fourth or one fifth of Muslims go to work, that is about two hundreds and fifty millions people. Working hours officially drop from eight to six hours during Ramadan that gives us about five hundreds millions man- hours lost every day. Multiply that by 30 and you get fifteen billions man-hours lost during the month of Ramadan alone! Now, calculate, how many jet aircrafts could be produced with this staggering number of man hours? And that is assuming the rest of the working hours are efficiently used which they are not.

The annual cost of fasting is: fifteen billions man-hours.

Subtotal

By adding all the above billions of wasted man-hours we get a figure of:

102.750.000.000 man-hours.

The intellectual cost 

The above astronomical numbers are dwarfed compared to the tax Islam imposes on Muslim's intellectual activities. A true Muslim believes that science is about learning Quran and Hadith( Muhammad's sayings and deeds) they say in Arabic: alelmu  aya aw hadith, which means just that. The Arabic word for Muslim clerics is ulama which mean scientists! Other sciences, like physics and maths, are considered to be only auxiliary.

It is the duty of Muslims to read the Quran as many times as possible, and preferably know it by heart. They also need to know its interpretation. After the Quran comes the hadith and sunna which Muslims are also expected to know in some details. Having done that, Muslims have to read the sirah, which is the life story of Muhammad, and the rest of Islamic history. For non-Arabs, we can add the time spent in mastering the Arabic language. A Muslim must know at least the basics of sharia law in order not to miss out in the race to paradise. Muslims must know what to say when they wake up in the morning, and what to say when they go to bed at night.  They must know what duaa (prayers) to say at the beginning of a meal, or at the end of it. They need to know which duaa to say as they go to the toilet or step outside the house or when they travel. There is a duaa for every occasion.  

Having completed all that, a Muslim is expected to keep up to date with current Islamic sciences and research. For example, they are expected to know about the therapeutic capabilities of reading the Quran and hadith and their applications to their daily lives. A very important Islamic science is called altebbu alnabawi meaning medicine according to the prophet. Muslims believe that just mentioning the word Allah is very soothing to the mind, while dipping both wings of a fly in one's food provides cure from illness. True Muslim doctors and intellectuals believe in these Islamic medicines more than they believe in their text books or man-made medicines, and will direct their scientific research to prove their point. They will manipulate scientific and medical research; in the same way they manipulate the Quranic interpretation, to produce results to their liking.

True Muslims must believe in Jinns (invincible creatures) as a very influential factor in causing illness and family crises to humans, and they are expected to learn from the Quran and sunna how to deal with these creatures. Muslims also believe in dreams and will read books and waste hours in front of televisions to learn about the interpretations of dreams according to the Quran and sunna. Dreams are believed to be messages from Allah (or may be from the Satan) which needs to be decoded! Almost every Middle Eastern television channel has dedicated programmes to educate people on how to interpret dreams or deal with jinns.

Having completed all those rituals and Islamic mumbo-jumbo, and Muslims still have some free and functioning brain cells, they may learn some other sciences. But true Muslims do not normally waste their time reading about other civilizations or religions, and those few who do, only do so for the purpose to learn how to attack it. True Muslims do not believe in music, photography, paintings, sculptures, performing arts or any fine arts. All these are sins!

It is a very sad fact that in a Muslim's library you can only find books related to Islam or, if there is still some room, the Islamic view of other cultures. You will not find a true Muslim reading about Hindu or Chinese cultures because they are, to Muslims, not even worth reading.

Let us put a dollar value to the man-hours wasted in Islamic activities. Assume an average wage of USD 10.00 per hour.

Now, multiply this average wage rate with the staggering figure of 102.75 billion man-hours.

Total annual cost of practicing Islam is incalculable! It is more than one trillion USD per year. Yeah, the Muslims are just throwing away more than a trillion dollars/year doing Islamic mumbo-jumbo! No wonder, worlds poorest countries are the Islamic nations!

It seems to me that Muslims underachieve because they do not have time!

A Christmas Palm Tree

In late December, the plains of North India turned suddenly cold and grey. Towards evening, as the sun is beginning to set over the minarets of the village mosques, smoke from the buffalo-dung cooking-fires begins to mass in a flat layer at the level of the tree tops. By dusk, the layer has turned into a vaporous mist which thickens and curdles overnight to form by morning a dense fog. Some fifteen years ago, on just such a bleak, cold dawn, I climbed the long flight of ceremonial steps leading up to the great mosque at Fatehpur Sikri. This lay in the heart of the ruined Moghul capital built by the sixteenth century Emperor Akbar, a few miles to the West of Agra. I was a nineteen year old backpacker, and it was my first visit to India. I had just spent my first Christmas away from home, and I was enjoying the sensation of complete disorientation. It was immediately after Christmas, I kept thinking, but not only was there not a Christmas tree or a Christmas decoration in sight, there was nothing even remotely Christian to be seen- or so I thought. For when I reached the top of the steps that rose to the Buland Darwaza- the massive domed, arched gate leading into the Imperial mosque- I saw something that confused me even further. Here was one of the greatest pieces of Muslim architecture in India, but according to my guide book, the strip of Persian calligraphy which framed the arch read as follows: "Jesus, Son of Mary (on whom be peace) said: The World is a Bridge, pass over it, but build no houses upon it. He who hopes for a day, may hope for eternity; but the World endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer, for the rest is unseen." The inscription was doubly surprising: not only was I taken aback to find an apparently Christian quotation given centre stage in a Muslim monument, but the inscription itself was unfamiliar. It certainly sounded the sort of thing Jesus might have said, but did Jesus really say that the world was like a bridge? And even if he had, why would a Muslim Emperor want to place such a phrase over the entrance to the main mosque in his capital city? Weren't Christians regarded as the enemies and rivals of the Muslims- and vice versa? This was certainly the impression I had been given at my Catholic school where I had only ever come across Islam in the confrontational context of the Crusades. It was only much later, after I had lived and travelled in India and the Middle East for several years that I began to be able to answer some of these questions. The phrase emblazoned over the gateway was, I learned, one of several hundred sayings and stories of Jesus that fill Arabic and Islamic literature. Some of these derive from the four canonical gospels, others from now rejected early Christian texts like the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, others again from the wider oral Christian culture-compost of the Near East- possibly authentic sayings and stories, in other words, which Islam has retained but which Western Christianity has lost. These sayings of Jesus circulated around the Muslim world from Spain to China, and many are still familiar to educated Muslims today. They fill out and augment the profoundly reverential picture of Christ painted in the Koran where Jesus is called the Messiah, the Messenger, the Prophet, Word and Spirit of God, though- in common with some currents of heterodox Christian thought of the period- his outright divinity is questioned. The Koran calls Christians the nearest in love, to Muslims, whom it instructs in to "dispute not with the People of the Book [that is, the Jews and Christians] save in the most courteous manner and say we believe in what has been sent down to us and what has been sent down to you; our God and your God is one". I have been thinking a lot about that quotation over the last three months. Ever since September the 11th we have seen some of the right-wing Qualities,- as well as the tabloids- united in an often virulent bout of Islamophobia, as a hundred instant experts in Islam have popped up to offer their disparaging views on a religion few seem ever to have encountered in person. After the scale of horror of the atrocity in New York perhaps this sort of thing is inevitable; but it doesn't alter the fact that the image these writers are projecting of Islam- particularly vis-a-vis its relations with Christianity- is a ludicrously unbalanced, inaccurate and one-sided one. For the links that bind Christianity and Islam are so deep, and so complex, and so intricately woven, that the more you learn about them, the more the occasional confrontations between the two religions begin to seem like a civil war between two different streams of the same tradition than any essential clash of two incompatible civilisations. When the early Byzantines were first confronted by the Prophet's armies in the seventh century, they assumed that Islam was merely a variant form of Christianity: Islam of course accepts much of the Old and New Testaments, obeys the Mosaic laws about circumcision and ablutions, and venerates both Jesus and the ancient Jewish prophets. The early Life of Muhammad relates how, when Muhammad entered Mecca in triumph and ordered the destruction of all idols and images, he came upon a picture of the Virgin and Child inside the Ka'ba. Reverently covering the icon with his cloak, he ordered all other images to be destroyed, but the image of the Madonna to be looked on as sacrosanct. When Muhammad's successor Abu Bakr stood on the borders of Syria he gave very specific instructions to his soldiers: "In he desert", he said, "you will find people who have secluded themselves in cells; let them alone, for they have secluded themselves for the sake of God. Likewise, when his successor Omar went to Syria, he actually stayed with the Bishop of Ayla and went out of his way to meet the Christian Holy Men in the town. For many years Muslims and Christians used to pray side by side in the great churches of the Middle Eastern cities: in Damascus, for example, the great basilica of St John was used for worship by both Christians and Muslims; only fifty years later were Christians obliged to pray elsewhere and the building formally converted into what is now known as the great Ummayad mosque. As late as 649 AD a Nestorian bishop wrote: "These Arabs fight not against our Christian religion; nay, rather they defend our faith, they revere our priests and saints, and they make gifts to our churches and monasteries. There were never any conversions by the Sword, a myth much propagated in anti-Islamic literature. Indeed, the greatest theologian of the early church, St. John of Damascus (d. 749), was convinced that Islam was at root not a new religion, but instead a variation on a Judeo-Christian form. This perception is particularly remarkable as St. John had unique access to the fountainhead of Islamic thinking in the earliest days of the faith. He had grown up in the Ummayad Arab court of Damascus- the hub of the young Islamic world- where his father was chancellor, and he was an intimate boyhood friend of the future Caliph al-Yazid; the two boys drinking bouts in the streets of Damascus were the subject of much horrified gossip in the streets of the new Islamic capital. But, in his old age, St. John took the habit at the remote desert monastery of Mar Saba, where he began work on his great masterpiece, the Fount of Knowledge. I first really heard about St John of Damascus and his writings when I went to spend a few nights in Mar Saba in the course of a journey around the monasteries of the Middle East in 1994. Mar Saba lay tucked into a cliff face in the wastes of Judea, a spectacular near vertical plunge of chapels, cells and oratories. One night, while the monks were still singing their vespers in the chapel, and their chant of their kyries were echoing around the rock-cut corridors of the monastery, I was taken by the monastery guestmaster to see the cave where St John wrote The Font of Knowledge. With a flickering storm lantern in his hand, he led the way to a small cell backing onto a rock wall, its ceiling cut so low as to make standing virtually impossible. "St John spent thirty years in that cell," he said. "Although he could not stand he hardly ever went out of it. He believed he had become too proud of his high position in the court of Damascus, so he chose this cave in which to live as a monk". It was here that St John of Damascus wrote his critique of Islam, the first ever penned by a Christian. Intriguingly, John- the ultimate insider- regarded Islam as a form of Christianity closely related to the heterodox Christian doctrine of Arianism: after all this doctrine, like Islam, took as its starting point the idea that on Christmas Day God could not have become fully human without somehow compromising his divinity. Used to the often surrealistic scriptures of the Gnostics, then in widespread circulation among the Christians of the Near East, John was apparently unworried by the points where the Koran diverges from the basic narrative of the Gospels- such as the very full but oddly unfamiliar description it gives of the first Christmas. In this Koranic version, Jesus' birth takes place not in a stable but under a palm tree in an oasis, shortly after which the Christ child, still in his swaddling clothes, sits up and addresses Mary's family with the words: "I am the servant of God. He has given me the Gospel and ordained me a prophet. His blessing is upon me wherever I go, and He has commanded me to be steadfast in prayer and to give alms to the poor as long as I shall live. I was blessed on the day I was born; and blessed I shall be on the day of my death; and may peace be upon me on the day when I shall be raised to life." Islam, of course, grew up in the largely Christian environment of the Late Antique Levant, and the longer you spend in the ancient Christian communities of India the Middle East, the more you become aware of the extent to which Eastern Christian practice formed the template for what were to become the basic conventions of Islam. The Muslim form of prayer with its bowings and prostrations appears to derive from the older Syrian Orthodox tradition that is still practised in pewless churches across the Levant. The architecture of the earliest minarets, which are square rather than round, unmistakably derive from the church towers of Byzantine Syria, while Ramadan, at first sight one of the most distinctive of Islamic practices, bears startling similarities to Lent, which in the Eastern Christian churches still involves- as it once used to in the West- a gruelling all-day fast. Perhaps no more branch of Islam shows so Christian influence as Islamic mysticism or Sufism. For Sufism with its Holy Men and visions, healings and miracles, its affinity with the desert and its emphasis on the mortification of the flesh and the individual's personal search for union with God, has always borne remarkable similarities to the more mystical strands of Eastern Christianity, and many Muslim saints- such as the great Mevlana Rumi- worked to reconcile the two religions. Indeed the very word Sufi seems to indicate a link with Christianity. For Suf means wool which was the characteristic clothing material of Eastern Christian monks which was taken over by the early Mystics of Islam. Other styles of dress adopted by the Sufis are also anticipated in pre-Islamic Christianity: the patchwork frock made from rags, and the use of the colour of mourning, black for the Christians, dark blue for the Muslims. Another interesting link- at the extreme edge of both Christian and Muslim asceticism- is the wearing of heavy chains. This was a practice first adopted by the Christian Grazers and which was later adopted by some Sufi sects. Through punishing the flesh, such exercises were believed by both groups of ascetics to induce visions and spiritual ecstasy. Certainly if a monk from sixth century Byzantium were to come back today, it is probable that he would find much more that was familiar in the practices and beliefs of a modern Muslim Sufi than he would with, say, a contemporary American Evangelical. Yet this simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think of Christianity as a thoroughly Western religion rather than the Oriental faith it actually is. The recent demonisation of Islam in the Christendom, and deep and growing resentment felt in the Islamic world against the Christian West, has created an atmosphere where few on either side are still aware of, or even wish to be aware of, the profound kinship of Christianity and Islam. I first came across the idea of Christ as an object of Muslim devotion when I read that inscription quoting Jesus, son of Mary, on Whom be Peace, on the gateway at Fatehpur Sikri. Last month I came across a Mughal miniature, now on display in the British Library, which was probably painted within that city soon after the gateway had been built. It is a nativity scene, with Mary and the Christ child and wise men coming to offer gifts. But the wise men are Mughal courtiers, Mary is attended by a Mughal serving girls, and the Christ child and his mother are sitting under a palm tree. As this miniature shows, there are certainly major differences between the two faiths- not least the central fact, in mainstream Christianity, of Jesus' divinity. But Christmas the ultimate celebration of Christ's humanity- is a feast which Muslims and Christians can share together without reservation. At this moment when the Christian West and Islamic East seem to be heading for another major confrontation, there has never been a greater need for both sides to realise what they have in common and, as in this miniature, to gather around the Christ child, to pray for peace.