Islamism - 7

[ramana]

Brihaspati wrote on BRF:

There is one fundamental difference between Islamism and all the predecessor organized religions we know about: while the "others" all started out almost surely as political-philosophical rebellions of local nature against the prevailing state and ruling systems, and were only later found out to be useful by imperialist visionaries and given their state-linked organized shape - Islam started out itself as an imperialist doctrine with an imperialist visionary at the very foundations.



Because a lot of material about those who lost out in the religious civil wars in Egypt under the Pharaohs of the new kingdom is lost, we cannot be sure but the general understanding now is that the solar cult did exist before Akhenaten as deviation/opposition to the theocracy and he for whatever reasons (OT here perhaps) took it up as an imperialist tool to assert his own authority.



Moses took monotheism up as a tool of rebellion against the prevailing Egyptian regime and later on the Jews used it as a doctrine to reclaim rights to Canaanite regions and lands which some of them perhaps left in search of employment in Egypt [the theory of slavery is hotly discounted by an influential group of academics].



Buddhism again started out from the grievances of sections of urban populations arising out of trade and urban life like professional entertainment by females [rich traders and nagara-badhus were the most prominent early recruits] against the prevailing regime of monarchies and oligarchies which were seen as corrupt and arbitrary. It was an imperialist visionary like Bimbisara who saw the potential as a then "new-age religion" to buttress his imperialist ambitions. Note that the great councils were all initiated by the "emperors" and Buddhism transformed into an organized state sponsored religion that perhaps imposed a lot of its memes on state authority.



The early Christians almost surely were one of the many politically radical Jewish groups fighting to reassert their independence from Rome, but their simplifying message was found attractive by influential section sof the roman state which led to at least one emperor seeing the potential in restructuring Christianity as an imperialist organized tool.



It is with Islam that we see a departure from this pattern in the sense that the religion was founded right from the beginning very clearly as an imperialist doctrine of expansion, subjugation and submission to authority. There was no meaningful state in the middle or even northern Arabic frontier against which the founders of Islam were rebelling.



Thus Islam cannot be understood in the way say Roman Catholicism has been understood. RC has been self-contradictory from the beginning because it had to hammered out of an essentially anarchist, anti-state ideology of individual self-assertive rebellion into one that submits and fuels imperialist expansion and consolidation. Thus the RC Church always had the potential of explosive fissures and deviations. Faced with the potential of scientific knowledge that finally filtered through the medieval contact with the East, it was almost a foregone conclusion that factions weak and chafing under RC papal authority before would lap it up as a tool of defying RC authority.



This is reflected in the fact that "science" was merely a tool as far as utility for war and independence from Papacy was concerned - it did not immediately transfer into the so-called humanitarian values of the modern period - slavery or oppression of the "other" was okay. Only when the net results of self-goals were seen in the world wars and those enslaved before showed the potential of applying these very same techniques back on the "previous masters" did Europe install checks and balances to prevent retribution on themselves for what they had done in colonial regimes.



Islam's reaction to modern science and complexity will therefore be completely different. There are no factions within Islam that seeks to upset the "centre" - for there are no centres, and there is no need for it. It is focused on power and subjugation of others, and unlike the other philosophies it does not suffer from contradictions of "peaceful intent and posturing" with the "need to subjugate". So for Islam science is only useful if it helps in war and subjugation of others, as well as satisfaction in use of power - say the little blue pills [dont know the real colour, have not seen them so far] and totally useless otherwise. You can have intricate knowledge of chemistry that will generate the blue pills which however does not need to ponder genetic mutation and its relation to natural selection and therefore face a crisis of faith.



If there are rebellions from within Islamism which at all counter Islamic theocracy - it has to be an equally self-assured and totalitarian world-view that also incorporates science as another religion [a kind of orthodoxy - no "scientific" belief can be challenged etc.]. I can see only one obvious candidate - the extreme Leftists. I guess, this is why all surviving communists of Iranian origin are basically Maoists. I guess panning this out for India is going to be a sensitive issue to discuss in details.