4 November 2004
Allah, glory be to Him, says in Surat at-Tawba (9:31-33):
They have taken their rabbis and monks as lords besides Allah,
and also the Messiah, son of Maryam.
Yet they were commanded to worship only one God.
There is no god but Him!
Glory be to Him above anything they associate with Him!
They desire to extinguish Allah’s Light with their mouths.
But Allah refuses to do other than perfect His Light,
even though the kafirun detest it.
It is He who sent His Messenger
with guidance and the Deen of Truth
to exalt it over every other deen,
even though the mushrikun detest it.
In these blessed ayats from Surat at-Tawba, Allah, glory be to Him, has indicated the disastrous path that the jews and the christians have set out upon. The essential condition of both these parties is that to adopt their chosen stance they have obliged themselves to deny Tawhid. Because these two parties have set themselves against Tawhid, it follows that they are in darkness. It is in this confusion that the jews and the christians can never be reconciled with each other. The result of this is an inescapable ambiguity which sets christian against jew and jew against christian. However, the nature of confusion is that the situation must also contain its opposite. So it is that in the first historical phase of the great deviation from Tawhid that was the christian Church, the jews were seen as the deadly enemies of the christians since, in the central fiction on which this false religion is founded, the jews were the executioners of Sayyiduna ‘Isa, ‘alayhi salam. The enmity between the two parties could not have been more profound, and indeed manifested as that ongoing persecution of jews in European history with cyclical expulsions from the cities of England to the steppes of Russia, culminating in the enormous genocide by Lutheran Germany during the Third Reich. The Nazi doctrines which licensed persecution were lifted directly from the ordinances of Martin Luther himself.
A critical element in this tortured conflict was how the two parties viewed the interdiction on usury. The ancient religion of the jewish people, through the prophets, forbad the practice of usury. The modern religion, the invented christianity of the brilliant jewish St. Paul, at its inception also forbad usury. Christianity was of course a Reformation. What St. Paul did was in effect to inject a reformed and universalised judaism into the body politic of the Greco-Roman Empire. In the place of the awaited Messiah of the jews was offered the arrival of the Messiah, Jesus. In the place of the awaited king of the jews was offered the cosmic king of the Risen Christ. In the place of the celebration of the saving of the jewish people commemorated in the Feast of the Passover was offered the new ritualised eating of unleavened bread. Paul instituted the universalisation of this rite. The unleavened bread of the communion sacrament now offered salvation to those who partook of it. Where once the biscuit assured the historical salvation of the jewish race, it now magically assured spiritual salvation for the whole human race.
To intensify the central rite of the reformed religion was borrowed the ritualised drinking of wine, this latter rite belonging only to an initiate priesthood. In the ancient religion the rabbi was in fact what you might call a holy butcher, since his primary task was the sacrifice of animals to be eaten according to religious law through the act of slaughtering them in a particular way, the cutting of the throat, and in a particular place, the Temple of Jerusalem. So in the new religion the priest drinking the cup of wine/blood was the indication of the prior ritual slaughter of Jesus, now metaphysically redefined as the Paschal Lamb. Thus the kosher lamb of lunch had become the life-giving Lamb of God. This borrowed adaptation by Paul of the well-known Roman religious practice of priests eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a dead king in order that his power should pass to them assured an anthropological profundity and a traditional resonance.
This provided the central ritual of the reformed judaism. Reformed judaism had to perform two duties. Firstly, free the jews from the stringent system of Divine Law. Secondly, compensate for the abolition of the social and moral rulings with a metaphysical assurance of safety from Divine punishment that would follow from breaking the Law by the ingestion of the Saviour’s flesh and blood which then purified the believer and absolved those wrong actions that he had been freed to do by abandoning the Law. Since the abandoning of moral and civic law was anti-rational, the liberation from it could not be justified rationally and so had to be licensed by a Mystery and by a transfer of belief from belief in the Creator to a belief in a negotiating divinity, a mediating metaphysical reality — Man-made-God! ‘Hic est corpus…broken for you—take, eat and drink…’ The enshrouding mystery was that the initiate priesthood, the bishops or presbyter in the old Greek, were necessary for the transformation of the bread and wine into flesh and blood. The doctrine was later defined as transubstantiation. Historically speaking it was a brilliant cocktail, uniting as it did the Unitarian element of old judaism with a central rite from old pagan Europe. Certainly, at its inception, the First Reformation was a great success and was certainly a prime mover in bringing down both the Roman Empire and the Viking civilisation.
The fatal mixture of a great truth and a great lie obviously could not survive, the truth being the reality of Sayyiduna ‘Isa, and the lie being that the Reformed Rite of the Passover could save the individual from the judgment of God. As the deception began to unravel, men began to realise that the doctrine of a god which entailed the absorption into it of a man-become-god could not survive the cool glance of reason. The solution of the Church was very simple—if you did not believe in the Trinity you had to be burnt at the stake. So it was that historically christianity found itself assailed on the one hand by the Unitarian simplicity of the prior jewish religion, and on the other by the anterior movement of Greek philosophy and its practice of rational enquiry. So it was that as the centuries passed, these two menacing groups became increasingly persecuted, the jews for having crucified (in the christian construct) Jesus, and the academics for the ultimate heresy on christianity, to declare, ‘It does not make sense.’
Historically, it was the second part of the equation that was finally to undo the ‘Eternal’ Church of Rome. There then followed the Second Reformation. In that sense, the Second Reformation actually represented a divorce from the Pauline heresy and the return to judaic formulae. No-one examining the theological literature before and after the Second Reformation can fail to see that the deconstruction of the Sacrament meant the reconstruction of the Old Testament prophetic tradition, or you could say, Isaiah took over from the Gospel of St. John. At the same time that the Second Reformation was freeing itself from its sacrificial rituals, it was also being given licence to practice usury, thus in a sense freeing itself from both the prior religions.
The Second Reformation achieved two vital ‘modernisations’ of christianity. Firstly, both Luther and Calvin not only sanctioned but encouraged usury as a mercantile principle. Secondly, in abolishing the elite power of initiated bishops, that is, the only ones who could turn the bread and wine into flesh and blood, they replaced them with a teaching class of academics. Put it another way, the great network of monks and monasteries which had been the venous system of European civilisation was replaced by a network of professors and universities. The initiating Bishop became the educating Presbyter—in fact these terms were synonymous, one from the Latin, one from the Greek—but the situation was the same.
There then followed what we may term the Third Reformation. It consisted of an open declaration of atheism, the new religion whose reforming task was the abolition of anointed kings and empowered priests. Kingship structurally represented the two earlier religions, judaism and christianity. The coronation ceremony entailed the anointing of the king, a ritual pertaining to the kings of Israel and being installed with the Orb and Sceptre indicating the joint rulership of Church and Kingdom. The civic role of the christian priest, Catholic or Protestant, was replaced with the educating teacher, who had taken on that authority and so was named Domine, the Latin for Lord. This Third Reformation reached its climax in a process whose name, far from indicating the triumphant rule of reason and thus the end of religion, rather indicated a completely new religion.
The name of the final Reformation was the Enlightenment. Whereas the prior religion was compounded, part Truth part lie, the Enlightenment, declaring as it did the end of religion itself, was therefore itself the Great Lie. Enlightenment whose credo was the elevation of the rational discourse and critical analysis, at the same time set itself up on a metaphysical basis of spiritual superiority over the religions of worship and gratitude to the Divine. The new religion was to be nothing less than the worship of Man.
One of its high priests, Rousseau, had grudgingly admitted that for the doctrine of humanism to survive the element of worship could not be denied. So it was that in a blood-bath unparalleled in the excesses of the previous religions, in the midst of the Terror, Robespierre declared a new religion, the Worship of the Supreme Being, a worship totally devoid of any moral or civic content, and that in turn meant no prohibition on usury. The new religion of the Supreme Being, a mere concept, and one voided of moral content, was introduced with a new calendar abolishing the christian dating and replacing it with a Year One of the French Revolution, and was accompanied by mass slaughter. In every city in France guillotines were set up. Several in the larger cities, many in Paris. In one town the wives and daughters of men thought to be against democracy and the Rights of Man were dragged to the guillotine in front of the whole town, and with the paving stones around the guillotine painted red to mask the blood of the women and children. Humanism and the Enlightenment were launched upon the world.
The Enlightenment spread darkness over the whole earth, and from that moment it began to die. Species after species were to vanish from the face of the earth due to the now encouraged doctrine of usury, that is, banking. The air became toxic. And the great oceans began to putrefy with the vanishing of the cleansing species. Two cataclysmic World Wars not only wiped out millions but also smothered the memory and the echo of civic order that had once been the patrimony of the human creature, now deified and doomed.
Against this background and its turmoil the christians made a desperate attempt to survive and to avoid what was clearly the end of their religion in its doctrinal bases. What one might call the extreme wing of the Second Reformation began to redefine itself in terms that could not be challenged by the new forces of the Third Reformation. The central sacrament was gone. Transubstantiation was rejected by the rational mind, and the idea of ingesting bits of flesh and blood, however homeopathic the dosage, was repellant. Transubstantiation gave way to consubstantiation, that is, ‘It is it isn’t!’ Finally came nonsubstantiation, or, ‘Of course it isn’t!’ It had ended up a grisly commemoration service, but what was the point if the Divine Pardon did not follow?
This final body of christian believers, devoid of the very initial transaction set up in the Pauline initiative, required another emotional outlet to be a binding factor. This movement, in reality a side-effect of World War II, looked to the historical persecution of the jews by the christian Church as its great error. In the ethos of that shock they saw that Lutheran Germany under the shadow of an admittedly Crooked Cross had acquiesced in a genocide of millions of jews. So it was that combined with this christian guilt came the influence of an awakened world jewry which called for the biblical restoration of its people in the biblical lands, and in its sacred capital and its Temple, the culinary necessity of the rabbi class. The end result of this disastrous mix of elements, none of which was essentially required by either judaism or christianity, was that christianity became the home of a fervent eschatology whose task it was to hurry on the Final Day by the completion of the signs which indicated the Second Coming. They wanted to jump from the eschatological frying pan into the apocalyptic fire! The result of this was that the same Church which for centuries had burned, tortured and expelled jews, became the fervent supporter of the state of Israel in an emotional frenzy which educated jews found distinctly repellant, but realistically admitted that it certainly made a change. It was useful.
In the shortest time, less than half a century, the right of sacrament was replaced with baptism, a ritual that happily belonged in both judaism and christianity. Forgiveness of sins no longer required either bishop or presbyter, but only a dizzy and swaying mass of enthusiastic believers celebrating the act of being Born Again.
The end result of this is a poor and uneducated mass of evangelical christians in the centre of the USA who believe that there was no evolutionary process, nor indeed that new species emerged over vast stretches of time, but rather that they popped up in a few days, and who believe that the Manifest Destiny of the Founding Fathers, which was the task of American citizens, was to restore the jewish people in a homeland from which they would take on the rulership of the world. In the enthusiastic move to fulfil these bizarre prophesies, we have seen the USA governed by a Born Again Christian and surrounded by key advisors all firmly committed to the Israeli project.
It must be confronted that part of this fevered embodying of the Book of Revelations in the New Testament is the designation of Islam as a Satanic force. Jerry Falwell has openly attacked Islam and insulted it in the most savage manner. His rhetoric is full of comic fantasy interpretations of our Deen with lots of silly but no less menacing talk of the symbolism of the moon and star, to which he gives his esoteric interpretation.
Allah says in Surat at-Tawba, glory be to Him: (9-32)
They desire to extinguish Allah’s Light with their mouths.
But Allah refuses to do other than perfect His Light,
even though the kafirun detest it.
It is significant that in the ayat which follows this, Allah’s denunciation of the rabbis and monks, that is, of the jewish and christian leaders, states that the errors for which they will be punished involve the misuse and abuse of material wealth. It is very clear that the leaders of the evangelical movements on the American continent, which necessitate mass temples and mass hysterical celebrations, require a capital base of enormous wealth, which is then further generated by media propaganda. At the same time, reference to the hoarding of wealth is in itself a direct definition of the character of a usury economy. A bank in itself is an institution of hoarding, and the doctrine of investment is itself a practice of the retention of wealth and not its spending.
Allah, glory be to Him, says clearly in Surat at-Tawba (9:34-35):
You who have iman! many of the rabbis and monks
devour people’s property under false pretences
and bar people from access to the Way of Allah.
As for those who hoard up gold and silver
and do not spend it in the Way of Allah,
give them the news of a painful punishment
on the Day it is heated up in the fire of Hell
and their foreheads, sides and backs are branded with it:
‘This is what you hoarded for yourselves,
so taste what you were hoarding!’
There is no doubt that the USA is a divided country. It is politically divided because it has adopted adversarial party politics, called democracy. It is of its nature that each major part denounces the opposite part as unworthy, incapable or corrupt. Since they both say that, and they govern cyclically, it must follow that the people of a democracy are governed by the worst in their society. It is religiously divided. The dominant and energised force is the post-christian rump of evangelicals. The passive and media-dazzled humanists regard these evangelicals with bemused helplessness. From a ruhani point of view, that is from a spiritual and sufic point of view, neither of these two parties, therefore, recognise that their swift-acting enemy is usury, and thus the whole financial system.
Allah the Exalted says again in Surat at Tawba (9-33):
It is He who sent His Messenger
with guidance and the Deen of Truth
to exalt it over every other deen,
even though the mushrikun detest it.
It is important for us in this Ramadan time of true illumination to recognise the import of one minor event that happened in our blessed month of fasting. Osama bin Laden addressed a message to the American people. He told them that their safety did not lie with either presidential contender. He told them that their safety lay with themselves. Safety does not lie with ourselves, it lies uniquely with Allah. In fact, one of His Divine Names is Al‑Hafidh. He is our Protector, our only Protector. As far as we know, this man did not mention the name of Allah. He did not call the people of America to enter the Deen of Islam. He did not ask Allah to protect the great Muslim community of the United States. Nor did he tell the American people that Allah had sent a Messenger for all mankind. He did not recite the Book of Allah to give to the American nation the Good News and the Warning.
Our Ramadan message to the people of America is that in the Noble Qur’an, Allah, the Creator of the universe, tells how Jesus spoke while still a child in the cradle. Allah the Exalted relates in Surat Maryam (19:30-36), when they asked, ‘How can a baby in a cradle speak?’—
He said, ‘I am the slave of Allah,
He has given me the Book and made me a Prophet.
He has made me blessed wherever I am
and directed me to do salat and give zakat as long as I live,
and to show devotion to my mother.
He has not made me insolent or arrogant.
Peace be upon me the day I was born,
and the day I die
and the day I am raised up again alive.’
That is ‘Isa, son of Maryam,
the word of truth
about which they are in doubt.
It is not fitting for Allah to have a son.
Glory be to Him!
When He decides on something,
He just says to it, ‘Be!’ and it is.
‘Allah is my Lord and your Lord
so worship Him.
This is a straight path.’
