Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Religion: Understanding the Abrahamic Trilogy

In the Beginning is the End

In a world embracing superficiality and sleights-of-hand, anyone sincere can be forgiven for seeing ever-smaller areas of substance. Politics has been exposed as a reality show designed to distract voters from increasing debt levels at the same time they experience declining quality of life. Meanwhile, mainstream Christianity, especially Catholicism, appears nothing more than a political movement with tax-exempt status using public funds to advance private nepotism. Where, then, can a decent person discover pathways towards an enlightened mind? 

A young Westerner growing up pre-internet might answer "newspapers," "books," "college," and, if lucky, "parents," "coaches," or "neighbors." A teenager in 2020 might cite video streaming services, documentaries, e-books, and college. Very few would include health care workers, police departments, politicians, the military, or the majority of their teachers, despite the fact that the majority of their parents' taxes go towards some combination of the aforementioned. Accordingly, we don't need an academic to explain why Western governments have become irrelevant while multi-national corporations, especially financial and technological institutions, have risen. The technology sector's algorithms, driven by the highest advertising bids, determine what we see, while banks and venture capitalists provide the lubricant for our intellectual deadening. 

"Social media is a nuance destruction machine, and I don't think that's helpful for democracy." -- Jeff Bezos (USA, July 2020) 

As the world's current technological leader, the United States requires a reformation placing technology not above philosophy or spirituality, but beside it. Rigorous anti-trust enforcement may shift placements, but no intellectual ever credited man-made law as non-satirical inspiration, so we must examine something more fundamental than civil law to understand how we arrived at our current lopsided paradigm. As teachers, unions, lawyers, military commanders and politicians exchanged their moral duties for power and groupthink, the task of transferring institutional knowledge--for both the high and the low--is returning to institutions with the most longevity in human history: religion and its discontents. Will such reversion work? An answer requires exploring Avraham's/Abraham's/Ibrahim's influence on today's Western leaders, all of whom publicly profess spiritual backing and, even if financed by teachers' unions, will claim God a greater influence than any teacher.

I hope I have not already lost the agnostic or the atheist, and I also hope many of you equated "discontents" above with "rebels." For it is not self-professed leaders who always make history, but often the ones opposed to them; indeed, were it possible to study history through the eyes of the dispossessed, disenfranchised, and disregarded, surely we'd better understand how we arrived at our current disaffected state. However, since the victors and elites have historically been the ones with financial backing, and most of our kin illiterate for much of our history, we must train ourselves to filter existing information in ways acknowledging our existence as a product of a corrupted but successful narrative. Such training is precisely what I intend to impart here, rather than judgment or certain knowledge. But, pray tell, why religion and not science or some other more objective source? 

Wisdom in the Shadows

First, the reason technological algorithms cannot be trusted with information is because they cannot see what and who is absent. In other words, algorithms cannot and never will be able to imagine historical gaps or to extrapolate meaning by identifying missing information. For example, Frederick Douglass may be one of the smartest men to have ever lived, but it would be a mistake to consider his words the main tributary into the oceans of African-American experience. Above all, the task of learning is an exercise in humility, in realizing our information is always incomplete, and a machine, being unable to understand humility, is therefore handicapped a priori in imparting wisdom. Consequently, though we are, on our best day, sailors paddling a fjord admiring the scenery, because we are able understand the risk of drowning, our single drop of knowledge will always be superior to a machine's ability to analyze the depths of the water but not its own limits. In this way, the agnostic and the deist are better suited to the task of wisdom than anyone--or anything--certain of his or her sources of intellectual progeny. 

Before proceeding, we must address the inquisitive reader's complaint that studying Avraham/Abraham/Ibrahim is a useless endeavor, particularly if agnostics, deists, and rebels are the ones we ought to study. Two responses should suffice: 

1) We are unable to access the thoughts of a man murdered during the Spanish Inquisition, so we can stop right here, let the algorithms and academics dictate the narrative, or we can try to remember human nature has remained relatively constant since at least 2500 years ago and then examine pogroms, religion, and government overreactions generally to gain insights into human nature; and 

2) No matter how enlightened or correct we deem ourselves, all knowledge is incrementally gained. The same young man enamored with Robert Burns' poem "A Red, Red Rose" will eventually consider the poem effete in his older years without realizing it must have been a lyrical masterpiece for all ages in 1794. Even more inscrutable is the notion that listeners in 1794 would not have understood an ee cummings poem just like most Americans today cannot read Shakespeare, and so it follows that ee cummings himself was not possible in 1794 though a Shakespeare is possible today. 

"We bear the scars of patient decades and centuries' dreams... The book, too, reads its readers in real-time." -- The Booksellers (2020 documentary)

If you still follow, then you realize every piece counts, no matter how small, intangible, or incorrect, especially within an environment of incomplete information which is itself disseminated by technology unable to understand limits. We must also consider the possibility we have reached a point in human history where our information is so contrary to wisdom, we can only know what is true by shedding what is false--and, more importantly, to train ourselves to avoid making the same mistakes. 

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." -- attributed to Mark Twain (USA)  

Having resolved the reasons to study religion as a source of historical knowledge about ourselves, we can now discuss the Abrahamic trilogy of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

The Abrahamic Trilogy: Odd Man Out

Abram/Avraham/Abraham/Ibrahim represents the story of a man equally claimed by Judaism, Christianity and Islam; however, religious scholars know Abraham looms larger in Judaism and Islam than in Christianity. More specifically, Christianity places the Messiah--and by extension the Trinity--at the center of its message of faith, whereas Judaism and Islam place humanity below a single, unmorphable higher power and never on equal terms. In essence, Christianity emphasizes a personable faith, whereas its religious cousins emphasize humility. 

"I learned I was Christian. It's the easiest thing in the world. You don't have to do anything. All you have to do is stop doing something. You have to learn to stop trying to preserve yourself." -- C.S. Lewis, as portrayed in Shadowlands (1993), comparing becoming Christian to taking a dive, or a leap of faith 

And here is where we reach, aptly enough, our next lesson. Not only is all knowledge, including science, incremental, but often a reaction to what came before. 

"Science is an incremental process of amassing information over repeated studies to slowly move towards a greater understanding. Rather than yielding sure answers, it's about reducing uncertainty." -- Eva Botkin-Kowacki (2020) 

The single largest impediment to human understanding is the inability to place one's current narrative in relation to historical ones from the ancestors' perspectives, resulting in incompleteness as well as contextual bias. Yet, upon closer examination, we have enough to form a likely narrative based on human nature once we understand the process of incremental knowledge as well as humanity's rebellious instincts. 

From the prism of a religious chain reaction, if we see ancient Jewish scholars as high-handed, arrogant, and corrupted by profit-seeking, then the existence of Jesus makes more sense, from his disregard for religious pedants to his ostracism by established community members. (The same dynamic would be repeated later with the prophet Muhammad, who railed against the elitist Quraysh tribe of which he was a member.) The pattern of hard-nosed teachers producing rebellious students is not new, and in this instance, could explain why Christianity chose storytelling over dogmatic instruction, a three-pronged God instead of a more straightforward singularity. 

[W]hen a dictatorship claims absolute authority over an idea -- in the case of Iran, Islam, in the case of Egypt, a ham-fisted brand of socialism -- frustrated citizens will run to the opposite ideological extreme. [Consequently,] The Islamic Republic was secularizing Iran; in Egypt the short-robed fundamentalists multiplied and multiplied. --  G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque (2010) 

By abstaining from a more structural belief system, Christianity as promulgated in the New Testament made itself more attractive but also more ambiguous and thus susceptible to fragmentation based on differing personal interpretations. 2,000 years later, my California community, settled by Catholic Spaniards, has a Jehovah's Witness Hall; two Korean-American churches; numerous Catholic churches, including one catering to Portuguese-Americans; a Mormon temple; and several more Christian institutions, none but the ones hosting Catholics and European history buffs aware of the reasons for such variety. 

To summarize, Christianity's multiple factions--spawned from anti-Catholic European sentiment--may reflect its ideological source code, which is itself multi-pronged; more importantly, its reliance on storytelling renders clear-cut commandments less possible, allowing authorities greater discretion and thus greater diversity of outcomes. When the engines of debt and interest are added to a culture permitting authorities in one district to rule differently than authorities in other districts, especially when no fiat or edict exists against slavery, financial Jubilees become pre-ordained. 

Facts: between roughly 300 BC and 200 AD, millions of slaves arrived in Italy, and Rome's one million inhabitants made it the largest city in Europe. In Rome, 30% to 40% of the population were slaves; in Italy as a whole, 20% to 40% were slaves. As late as 1452 AD, the Catholic Church issued a papal decree, Dum Diversas, promoting "perpetual servitude" against non-Catholics. 

So, too, is the notion of a Western Christian nation possessing the world's most destructive military while presuming to follow a hippie-like spiritual leader who never retaliated against his captors or called for war, even in self-defense. And so, too, can nations of men and women enamored with marriage hold ceremonies in churches under the literal (and often false) image of a prophet who never married. 

He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores. -- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Beyond Vietnam" (1967) 

Given such variances dislocated from logic and originalism, the Catholic Church, a centralized entity espousing the doctrine of papal supremacy, rose to power by offering to resolve such splits. From the moment it tasted power, the Church realized the shortest path towards relevance was as an intermediary between absentee rulers and illiterate commoners, especially where opportunities for personal discretion and subjective interpretation of laws existed. In such capacity, and unchecked by inbred kings mollified with self-portraits and other egotistical endeavors, it acted to supplant the court's sceptre with the papal ferula; to co-opt the military as royal advisor [Note: in chess, the bishop is next to the king and queen and equal to the warrior knight.]; to call for the Crusades; to murder non-Catholic women and children (unlike Saladin in Jerusalem); and to expel or persecute those not in line with its beliefs, whether Copernicus or common Jew. 

Warren Hinckle's If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade (1974)

Understanding the Catholic Church's methods as well as its status as intolerant political movement reveals a straight line from Pope Urban II's call for the Crusades in 1095; to Pope Nicholas V's "Dum Diversas" in 1452; to Martin Luther's "95 Theses" in 1517; to England's dissolution of Roman Catholic influence in 1536; and to America's Cardinal Francis Spellman and Joseph McCarthy, who, using the pretext of Communism, championed the Vietnam War to promote Catholic interests, including the installation of the Catholic Ngô brothers in South Vietnam, one of whom was an archbishop. 

Warren Hinckle (1974)

Having formed a cohesive picture, we can draw still further to today's presumptive American president Joseph Biden, Jr., a Catholic who supported the Iraq War and thus the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Semites and Muslims. Whether the target is Jew, Muslim, Protestant, or Buddhist, the Catholic Church's ability to use centralization to consolidate power throughout history is a feature, not a bug, of Christianity's subjective and personal ethos. Think: if everyone but you is dispersed or fragmented, who will prevail in a democratic system? And if you are the main branch from which others have split in opposition, which part will be the strongest until the bough breaks?  

"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last Catholic priest." -- attributed to Denis Diderot (1713-1784) 

(NoteSplits in Islam also occurred, not due to disagreements over Islam's (or, for that matter, Judaism's) fundamental tenets, but the bane of every corporate empire: post-succession planning.)

A Linear Reaction

If logic, peace, or objective truth are not universally binding agents in today's Christian-majority United States, then what is? If you understood the Jubilee reference above, then you know the answer. 

America is the country where not one, but two trillion dollar bailouts--with another soon coming--were needed to rescue Western-led banks post-2000. (Jan Hus and Martin Luther's complaints of Catholics "selling indulgences" continues, but in a different, more global form.) This trillion dollar machinery exposes debt as the glue yoking Christian residents and their institutions together, not ideology, education, politics, or religion. To sum up, the absence of a hard rule against interest, combined with a religious corps hell-bent on subsuming government policy to its own interests, has created, ironically, a reaction in which modern America's debt-soaked younger generation views socialism as equally favorable to capitalism

"In absolute terms, the average person in the bottom half of the US income distribution today is worse off than the average person in 1980 in the US... [But] the people at the bottom half of [Communist] China's income distribution today are four times better off than they were 30 years ago." -- Danny Quah (2019), Singaporean professor of economics

Having covered Judeo-Christianity's progression and blowback from Torah teacher to anti-Establishment rebel, we can finally discuss Islam's role. At this juncture, the Trilogy's second chain reaction resembles the "flower children" and anti-colonialists of the 1960s who became corporate suits in the 2000s: 

In many countries, anti-colonial fighters and heroes would win independence and assume power, but then fail at nation-building, because the challenges of bringing a society together, growing an economy, [and] patiently improving people's lives are very different from [rebelling against injustice and] fighting for independence. -- Singaporean PM LEE Hsien Loong (2015) 

The Ottomans/Turks (Sunni but not Arab), Omanis (Ibadis, not Sunni or Shia), and Iranians (Shia, not Sunni) would protest the label of "corporate suits," but the Arabs, as traders and merchants (hence, the famous caravans), have little argument, particularly given Khadija bint Khuwaylid's (خَدِيجَة ٱبْنَت خُوَيْلِد) status as an affluent merchant and employer of the young Muhammad (PBUH). 

Despite Islam's attempts to create a more equitable economic system, the political journey from dogma to status exploited for financial gain to equitable economic system is a recurring theme in human history, with the final step appearing more and more elusive. A bright student like Jesus Christ may realize his community's teachers or priests are full of empty bombast and more concerned with stature than wisdom, but such knowledge alone does not render him qualified to work as a teacher or priest, a situation the Catholic Church capitalized upon. Thus, from one point of view, it was left to the Arabians and Sunni branch of Islam to provide a more equitable structure to the ideas of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad under the assumption the last honest man had the advantage of the benefit of time--and incremental knowledge.

As a religion that had to influence traders while led by an orphan marrying a successful businesswoman, Islam was in a unique position to create a system (sharia, or شريعة‎) that would obviate the stories returning caravans told of Christianity's loopholes for exploitation. Today, no Islamic-majority country has citizens with trillions of dollars or dinars of consumer debt, a predictable outcome once one understands Islamic law's ban on interest (not just usury). Whereas Christianity's more subjective source code allowed interest to be charged, Islam negated the possibility of usury from the outset, realizing firsthand the coexistence of greed and business. 

September 2020

Furthermore, in contrast to America's Anglican, Quaker, and Baptist founders, Islam's prophet was never a slaveowner. 

From cover of Stephanie F. Jones-Rogers' book,
They Were Her Property (2019)

Not only did Muhammad (PBUH) never own slaves, he used his wife's money to free African slaves, including Bilal ibn Rabah; however, Muhammad (PBUH) could not immediately ban the established practice of slave-trading, which was highly profitable and as important to pre-Islamic Arab traders in 600 AD as to Christian-American Southern plantation owners in 1700 AD. That being said, from 610 AD to Islam's peak in 1511 AD, no person, whether African or otherwise, could be a slave if also Muslim, though European influence in Africa post-1511 AD made Afro-Arab Muslim slave traders (e.g, Tippu Tip aka Tippi Tib aka حمد بن محمد بن جمعة بن رجب بن محمد بن سعيد المرجبي‎)  non-oddities. (Note: the business of transporting goods across a vast landscape pre-navy required workers in the same way the tobacco or cotton industry requires manual laborers, with the main question being whether one treated such workers as minority partners or temporary chattel.) 

Abraham's Origin Story

In no way do I mean to denigrate Christianity. While Islam may be incompatible with Catholicism, Catholicism is not the only branch of Christianity. If Christianity is the odd man out in the Trilogy, then Judaism and Islam are the bookends attempting to corral the excesses permissible under a storytelling system. Had law and rationality been enough, we would have stopped our religious exploration at the Torah and Talmud and suffered a shortage of brilliant authors, including C.S. Lewis. Moreover, Islam's core tenets of anti-interest and anti-slavery would be less possible without Christianity's faith in mankind, even if sometimes misplaced. So too, does Islam have much to learn from a belief system able to weave a dream any which way and then attempt the task of elevating its believers into the story, with failure not preventing another dream state. Christianity's placement of a human being on the same plane as God lends itself to egoism and the "cult of personality" but also greater ambition than belief systems more wary of mankind's limits. 

We have neglected the man responsible for this entire discussion, so let us return to his story. It is true a polytheistic religion or one allowing multiplication of an ancestor could have formed the basis for an anti-slavery, anti-debt philosophy, but not as likely. As most adults know, the difference between themselves and their younger selves is the realization possibilities exist, but probabilities dictate outcomes. Thus, the probable challenger to Christianity's three-pronged approach had to have been one that re-asserted humanity's single, unbroken bloodline back to Abraham, a common ancestor. Why is such reversion so important? Put simply, a shared common ancestor makes it harder to split humanity into racial or other factions, which in turns makes it harder to justify maltreatment of one's fellow human being. 

Once we agree human history can be traced to a single common ancestor, the unifying value of Avraham/Abraham/Ibrahim cannot be disputed. To the uninitiated, 
Islam is a monotheistic religion with five pillars at its core and a prophet who united Arabia's nomadic tribes, but if monotheism is indeed Islam's sine qua non, why not follow Judaism, which also has a prophet who united his people? While any ideology could have challenged Christianity, probabilities indicate it had to have been one that expressly opposed Christianity's embrace of slavery and interest-driven banking while appealing to a single common ancestor. Islam's overlaps with Judaism look more deliberate under this theory than accidental, further promoting the idea a common ancestor can help unite us in unexpected ways. 

Conclusion

Some of you might be wondering what will be the linear reaction to Islam. You are asking the wrong question. Civil governments should have replaced religious authorities in the same way hospitals replaced shamans. The fact that most civil governments lack credibility while religious extremism is on the rise means we have all failed, merchants, storytellers, and scholars included. My advice? Anyone searching for truly Islamic neighborhoods should look at the prevalence of guest worker dorms, payday loans, and credit card balances, not mosques. A surprising number of countries claiming to be Islamic sanction a surprising number of unIslamic practices. 

At the end of the day, if all you gain from this discussion is the idea that Jews were strict pedagogues, Christians were media-savvy, and Muslims were business-minded, you have not been paying sufficient attention. Look to Abraham to re-align your path, and stay the course. Humanity is counting on your perseverance. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020) 

Bonus: Cultural differences relating to marriage are often highlighted in discussions comparing Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. On this topic, I am no expert, so I'll be brief. High divorce rates in Christian-majority America; relatively high poverty and inequality, especially for women, in countries once invaded by Catholic Spain;  and child molestation judgments against Catholics should give pause to anyone looking to a priest for marriage advice, but the beauty of a belief system emphasizing storytelling means we are only one positive story away from re-writing history, statistics, and, yes, your own romance. Good luck. 

Luke, on marriage: "It's a bureaucratic civil ceremony and a pretty pointless one... It's not biologically natural for people to mate for life. Animals don't mate for life. Well, ducks do, but who the hell cares what ducks do? I mean, people grow and evolve their whole lives. The chances that you'll grow and evolve at the same rate as someone else are too slim to take. The minute you say, 'I do,' you're sticking yourself in a tiny little box for the rest of your life. But hey, at least you had a party first, right?" (Gilmore Girls, Season 2, "Red Light on Wedding Night," 2001)

"Well, I’m perfectly congenial to the idea of weddings, but what I think ruins so many marriages, though, is this romantic idea of falling in love. It happens, of course, I suppose to some people who are possessed of unusually fertile imaginations. Undoubtedly it is a mystical experience which occurs. But with most people who think they are in love I think the situation can be described far more simply, and, I’m afraid, brutally. The trouble with all this love business is one or the other partner ends up feeling bad or guilty because they don’t have it the way they’ve read it. I’m afraid things went off a lot more happily when marriages were arranged by parents. I do think it is absolutely essential that both partners share a sense of humor and an outlook on life. And, with Goethe, I think marriages should be celebrated more quietly and humbly, because they are the beginning of something. Loud celebrations should be saved for successful conclusions." -- W.H. Auden (Paris Review, Spring 1974)

Monday, April 15, 2019

A Short Manual to Nonviolent Undermining of Nations

You are about to read an 11-step manual on how to dissolve social cohesion. It may seem malicious to promulgate such methods, but once you realize any nation or people can become evil and callous, the need for defensive tactics becomes obvious. You don't have to follow all the steps below, but a combination applied consistently and over enough time will be lethal. 

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder. -- Arnold Toynbee 

1. Promote Extremism, especially in Politics 

Most people believe evil and decay enter with belligerence. In reality, too much of anything can lead to destruction. If you cannot defeat your enemy by violent means, then promote the most shallow, superficial, and/or extreme people within their societies--regardless of ideology

Obviously, national politics is the most ideal arena, but you can start small. Look at public schools (ignore nepotism, whether formal or informal), police departments, and local governmental bodies. Even a city planning commission, if staffed by zealous nitpickers or inexperienced lawyers, can help disintegrate faith in one's fellow citizens. 

Above all, review anything related to debt or inflation. A public or private bank that loans too much money to the wrong people or too little money to the right people will create problems. In peacetime, only the banking and natural resource exploration sectors have specialized instruments capable of causing as much damage as a ten-tonne bomb (see, for example, America's 2008-2009 crisis). 

2. Trust, Nuance, and Context are Conjoined

Some people genuinely believe others "don't want to know how the sausage is made." Agree with them by eliminating nuance and reducing transparency as much as possible. The human mind wants to focus on single or binary data points to understand complex issues. Feed that bias using true but incomplete information. With the media becoming fully digitized and therefore subject to SEO manipulation and the highest bidder, social targeting is easier than ever before. Aim to create a lack of trust through selective reporting and/or the elevation of simplistic viewpoints

We are pragmatists. We don't stick to any ideology. Does it work? Let's try it, and if it does work, fine, let's continue it. If it doesn't work, toss it out, try another one. We are not enamored with any ideology. -- Singapore's founder Lee Kuan Yew 

3. Ignore Potential 

Not actively promoting and nurturing exceptional persons is a surefire way to lose them, whether through physical departure to other nations or a loyalty shift. 

Remember: immigration is a zero-sum game. If you can attract the best and brightest into your nation or group from a competitor, with each person, you create an almost insurmountable 200% gap in your favor. We universally acknowledge stealing ideas is easier than inventing them, or that not all new ideas will succeed; yet, voters seem unable to understand immigration is the exact same process, but applied to people. 

You will know you have succeeded if any prominent politician mentions building a wall

4. Use Idealists and Conformists within Minority Groups 

History tells us empires fail when they openly discriminate against minorities. A wise leadership prefers instead to set extremely high or impossible standards anyone can allegedly reach, then manipulate the budgeting, promotion, and/or selection process to assist his or her friends and allies.

Prices are the new discrimination. -- Chris Rock (2017)

If journalists or others expose inconsistencies or discrimination, it is not difficult to find conformists, idealists, or egotists within the allegedly harmed group and then elevate a single person from that group while maintaining the status quo (e.g., America's President Obama). 

5. Inane Distractions Thwart Substance 

Promote voyeurism and gossip. Louis Brandeis said it best: 

"Triviality destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence."  

Divert the target's attention from the long-term to the trivial and short-term. 

6. Attack the Artists 

The smartest people in any country are usually comedians. If you can goad leaders into condemning or banning a comedian, you will cause an immediate and permanent loss of credibility.  Hypocrisy is everyone's hemlock, whether governments, individuals, or corporations. 

The same logic applies to authors and musicians. Stalin murdered Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940; the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Detroit's police department shut down an NWA concert in 1989; the city filed for bankruptcy in 2013. The time frames may differ, but once top level officials try to control art, enough mistakes have been made that the end is inevitable. 

Interestingly, Governor Ronald Reagan assailed UCLA professor and writer Angela Davis in 1969, and California in 2019 is America's most unequal and indebted state. Also in 1969, the NYPD raided Greenwich Village's Stonewall Inn, a bar in a well-known counterculture district. According to the New York Times, six years later, New York City was so close to bankruptcy, "the city's lawyers were in State Supreme Court filing a bankruptcy petition." By the time the Establishment's list of scapegoats includes bohemians, everyone with means has packed their bags or already departed with them. (Americans will be pleased to know as of April 15, 2019, President Donald Trump has not called for the jailing, deportation, or murder of any artists.) 

[Bonus, from professor Danielle Morgan, Spring 2021: "It demonstrates to me the power of comedy that former-President Trump would get so angry that he'd not come to the White House Correspondents' Dinner. He would take to Twitter and yell about Saturday Night Live. Trump spent so much of his time attacking entertainers and, in particular, comedians because he knows that comedy reaches the masses very quickly and very convincingly.]

7. Inefficient Governments Cause Problems 

As religious entities moved into the government's traditional role of providing social welfare, most governments welcomed them, assuming they could provide services more cost-effectively. Yet, how many people realize religious entities have gained credibility through community services because their governments are inept or misusing their tax dollars? Or that the more influence the government allows religious entities in social services, the less one can argue in favor of separation of religion and state? 

The more you can promote religion in everyday public life, the more you can fragment society. Wise governments neither promote nor denigrate religious entities in exchange for noninterference. 

The 1st Amendment leaves the Government in a position not of hostility to religion, but of neutrality. The philosophy is that the atheist or agnostic... is entitled to go his own way. -- Justice William Douglas in Engel v. Vitale (1962)

8. Promote Segregation and Informational Fragmentation 

Segregate different groups of people as much as you can. Most people associate segregation with racial characteristics, but separation based on wealth, education, information, or some other trait eventually leads to intractable inequality and hubris. 

Heed the following Martin Luther King Jr. proclamation and do everything you can to render it untrue: "Anyone who lives inside [our country] can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds." 

9. Fear is Your Friend, Curiosity is Not 

Of her profession, journalist Amanda Ripley once wrote, "we know how to grab the brain’s attention and stimulate fear, sadness or anger. We can summon outrage in five words or less." Notably, she states that it is "impossible to feel curious... while also feeling threatened." 

Almost everyone knows the U.S. government deliberately lied to the American people and American judges in multiple egregious instances, including but not limited to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944). Yet, almost no one believes psy-ops (aka propaganda) to shape public opinion and legislative action exist as regular, ongoing events. Maintain this naïveté. 
Indigo Girls, 2002

10. If You Can Collapse a Building by Taking Down One Pillar, Don't Try to Destroy Three

The more open a society, the more fragile it is. If your paradigm assumes the executive, legislative, and judicial branches--all of them--are required for society to function smoothly, remember that only one of these branches need be corrupted or disdained to cause decline. 

11. Overextend the Enemy 

If you succeed using the above methods, governments and societies will be unable to ignore their problems and may defend themselves using censorship, jails, torture, and other blunt instruments. Once you are in this stage, the goal is to cause the target to overextend itself as much as possible and to abuse its power. 

For example, after 9/11, America knew it could not legally torture detainees but did so anyway, in no small part because its political and military leadership specifically drafted exceptions to time-honored procedures. "Black sites" for interrogation or "extraordinary renditions," often in cooperation with other nations, eventually led to a total breakdown in decency, causing the United States to lose credibility worldwide, despite being the victim of a vicious, cowardly attack. 

Abu Ghraib, the most prominent example of America's decline, occurred outside the nation's official borders as a way to escape oversight from the media and courts. The American government even argued its knowing creation of a loophole to evade judicial oversight meant it deserved the power to destroy not just the enemy, but its own checks and balances. (See also President Bush's Executive Order 13224, which "prohibited transactions not just with any suspected foreign terrorists, but with any foreigner or any U.S. citizen suspected of providing them support.") 

Overextension renders a society imbalanced, leading to extreme actions becoming accepted as new norms. Shift the norm as far as you can in any direction. 

12. It's Always Been the Same Old Story

All governments have the same general issues: overpopulation or underpopulation and immigration; employee unaccountability and selection; foreign capital and influence, especially in the media; debt repayments; access to resources, including sustainable food production; effective regulation of competitors, whether criminals or corporate, without endangering innovation; and security without overextension, which includes infiltrating influential groups and gaining intelligence

If you ever find yourself thinking you've discovered something new rather than being put in a position to communicate existing and older ideas more effectively using ever-changing mediums, remember my grandmother's advice: "Don't worry so much. In the end, life is mostly eating, f*cking, and sleeping." 

Good luck

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Superpowers, Prophets, and Religion

Travel causes even the least observant to re-learn history. I began reading Ehsan Masood's Science and Islam (2009) last week, and I highly recommend the book. 
From what I gather so far, a world with two primary superpowers is not new. Masood mentions the Greek-Persian rivalry several times. (From my museum visits, I know the hatred between these two empires was so fierce, the Greeks engraved faces of defeated/dead Persians on their mead mugs.) 

Less predictable is the path of a new superpower. As America and the Soviet Union continued a costly rivalry from 1945-1991 and then from 2000 until 2016, China took advantage of their inattention, becoming a new superpower in just twenty years (1995-2015). No country can maintain supremacy if it expends energy and wealth fighting multiple fronts over an extended time period, a lesson every empire seems to forget. 

The Persian Sassanids and the Byzantine (Orthodox) Christians were similarly occupied with each other, allowing the untrained Arab Umayyad tribes and Bedouins to eclipse both empires within thirty years. Interestingly, such victories against outsiders occurred after Muhammad's (PBUH) death. For all the talk of the Prophet Muhammad's (PBUH) strategic prowess, his military career--as opposed to his economic and philosophical one--lasted only ten years, towards the end of his life, from 622 to 632, and after his first wife's death. (The Prophet Muhammad () was born in 570 A.D.) 

A diversion: Muhammad (PBUH) initially fled to Medina to escape assassination attempts; however, the polytheistic elites, his brethren in Mecca, continued to pursue him. Only after he moved from Mecca, his birthplace, to Medina in 622--when he was approximately 50 years old--did he authorize violence under the express limitation of self-defense:

Permission [to fight] has been given to those who are being fought, because they were wronged. And indeed, Allah is competent to give them victory. (Qu'ran, 22:39) 

Furthermore, Muhammad (PBUH) testified he was visited by the angel Gabriel/Jibril in 610 A.D.--at the age of 40--meaning he opposed elites and their excesses before receiving divine revelations, even though he belonged to the influential Qurayshi tribe. Like most changemakers, he was a rebel early on, disgusted by materialism (see Jesus's actions, overturning tables of moneychangers at temple), making friends with outsiders, including but not limited to African slaves. (FYI: though Abu Bakr, Muhammad's successor, was said to have light skin, we don't know if "light skin" referred to light brown or some other color.) 

Thus, for most of his life, Muhammad (PBUH) gained influence and protection through two sources: first and foremost, his older wife, an affluent, established merchant who trusted the younger Muhammad in part because he disdained materialism; and second, the poor, especially slaves, whom he freed, co-opted, and elevated into positions of authority (see stories of Bilal ibn Rabah, Salman Al-Farsi, and Suhayb ar-Rumi aka Sohaib ibn Sinan). ["Many of those who fought for Islam in the early years were among the poorest in the region." (Masood, pp. 24)] Regarding the second source, Muhammad's (PBUH) openness to outsiders surely arose because he was orphaned at a young age. 
The Bible's New Testament is starkly different than the Koran on the matter of slavery.
See 1 Peter 2:18.
As for other historical topics, Masood doesn't cover the Sunni-Shia split in depth, but I'll try to summarize here: some Shia scholars argue Muhammad (PBUH) united the numerous tribes and peoples of Arabia under a monotheistic and Abrahamic banner, only to have his work destroyed after his death in a military coup defying his succession wishes as set forth in his Ghadir Khumm speech. The Sunnis, for their part, see no conflict because Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad's chosen successor, was eventually made into a Caliph and was too young to command a leadership position at the time of Muhammad's (PBUH) death. (Ali was eventually murdered in 661 in present-day Iraq.) 
Being too young didn't stop the Europeans from choosing successors,
perhaps their way of ensuring the military's influence.
If they want to pursue the matter further, the Shias might argue Umar/Omar--the same person who pledged allegiance to Ali at Ghadir Khumm--altered the Prophet's intended inheritance (the Fadak estate) to his daughter, Fatima Zahra, allegedly causing her to suffer a miscarriage and death less than three months after Muhammad's (PBUH) death. (Muhammad once said, "Fatima is a part of me. Whoever makes her angry, makes me angry.") The Sunnis may counter by saying succession is rarely a smooth process--almost every caliph after Muhammad (PBUH) and Abu Bakr was assassinated or poisoned, not just Ali ibn Abi Talib. Additionally, the Fadak estate was eventually returned to Fatima's heirs by an Ummayyad caliph. 

[Timeline: Abu Bakr (632 to 634AD), includes Ridda Wars (Arabic: حروب الردة‎) aka the Wars of Apostasy from 632 to 633; Umar I (634 to 644); Uthman (644 to 656); Ali (656 to 661)] 

Furthermore, while Husayn ibn Ali, Muhammad's (PBUH) grandson, was murdered under the Sunni Ummayads, their ancestors did not specifically target the Shias--after all, the Ummayads lost to the Abbasids, direct descendants of the prophet Muhammad, who were also Sunni. According to Professor M. Umaruddin of Aligarh University, the "Abbasids put to death not only all the members of Ummayad family but also all their supporters. They disillusioned the Shi'as by killing them wholesale." (The Ethical Philosophy of Al-Ghazzali) 
Succession and internecine feuds were common in Europe, too.
In fact, both the Sunnis and Shia can point to a third interloper, the Khawarij group, as the source of division within Islam. The Khawarij (aka the Seceders) were about 12,000 people, a hardline sect that refused to accept Ali's governance, eventually assassinating him. 

In any case, after 755 A.D. and after the end of Ummayad rule, "Persian culture and civilization asserted itself dominantly and triumphantly in the Muslim world." (Id., pp. 10) "Shi'ism in particular appealed to the Persians, who further developed the Shi'ite doctrines of the Imamate and evolved most of the transcendental theories about it. The two main sects of the Sh'ias, the sect of the Seven and the sect of the Twelve appeared during this period," a split once again caused by the familiar issue of succession. The Sixth Imam, Ja'far Al-Sadiq, disinherited his eldest son Isma'il, nominating his younger son Musa al-Kazim instead. It seems the Twelvists chose incorrectly, disappearing circa 873 AD, leaving the "Seventies" to follow the son of Is'mail, a man named Muhammad who favored allegories, storytelling, and even wine to interpret the Quran. (Id.) (Were Rumi, born around 1207, and his mentor Shams, born around 1185, influenced by the Seventies? I don't know.)  

As I was reading Masood's book, I realized another pattern in power replacement: the presence of a single unexpected defeat leading to the collapse of a long-standing empire. We've all heard of Napoleon's Waterloo and Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union (starting in June 1941, with the winter in November 1941 destroying Germany's morale), but what about the battle of Yarmuk in Jordan in 636, where about 35,000 Arab Muslims defeated a Byzantine force of 100,000? Or the Battle of Badr in 624, where Muhammad's army of 313 men defeated almost 1,000 Arabs from Mecca? 
I'm reminded of Ernest Hemingway's quote about bankruptcy/collapse coming gradually then suddenly, a sentiment that seems to apply perfectly to empires in decline after an unexpected military defeat. 

Another pattern discussed in Masood's book is the speed by which a center of commerce or influence can shift. The Ummayads moved the center of operations from Mecca to Damascus, and Baghdad's intellectuals also seem to have moved to Damascus. Similarly, Constantinople immediately became an important city after the Byzantines moved the center of Christianity away from Rome. 

Yet, all empires drove away distinguished minorities even as they attracted intellectuals and new residents. For example, the Byzantines excluded Nestorians, who were Christians, but who had a different interpretation of Christ's role. Masood describes the Byzantines as fundamentalists who insisted on "a single interpretation of the nature of Christ," displacing minorities and non-conformist Christians as far away as China. 
It got me thinking: for most of human history, groups of minorities were rarely able to tell their stories in documents that survived intact, so we lack full knowledge about declining social cohesion and the numerous escalations that led to expulsions. Such gaps make it almost impossible to study complete patterns in historical displacement, rendering history books woefully incomplete. Consequently, when studying history, remember: you are learning a sliver of a sliver of a moment in time. Be humble. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2019)

Bonus 1: Europeans were not scientifically advanced until they came into contact with post-Islamic Arab civilization. See https://bahai-library.com/cobb_islamic_contributions_civilization#7 

"[V]irtually all the science and technology of the classic world had already been passed on to Europe by the Arabs - a process which had begun before 1100 and was completed by the time Constantinople fell. Although this Arab revival of classic learning was the chief influence in Europe's scientific awakening, this fact has been popularly disregarded." 

Algebra is an Arabic term. (So is mocha, in case you didn't know.) As for freedom, the first declaration of human rights comes from the Persians. See http://www.persepolis.nu/persepolis-cyrus.htm 

"The Declaration of Human Rights written by Cyrus the Great has been hailed as the first charter of human rights, predating the Magna Carta by nearly two millenniums." 

Finally, one reason the Persian Empire lasted around 430 years (224 to 651 A.D.)--longer than the Greeks and Romans (14 to 395 A.D.)--is because it was one of the most tolerant empires in the history of the world. 

Bonus II: Lisa Ling, in 2019, unintentionally showed a significant overlap between Arab Islam's and Genghis Khan's military success: "I think also in this period of class divide is really a moving one, because he was this character [Khan] who was a slave at one time himself, went on to conquer two thirds of the population of the earth, because he elevated people, he elevated slaves, and the lowest level of human to rise up in his army." 

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

I Have a Story: Humility and Religion

In San Jose, California, after a Meetup.com casual dinner. Seated at a table with one Latin-American male born in America, half-Mexican, half-El Salvadorian; one white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed American; one American female of undetermined ancestry; and me. All of us appear to be in our 30s. Someone mentioned speed dating, and now people are discussing relationships. 

Woman 1: "I need support, I need to feel protected, I need..." 

Me: "Just have a good time. What's wrong with having a good time and going from there?"

Woman 1: "I'm not looking for a good time, at least not the kind I think you mean."

Woman 2: "Aren't you looking for something deeper, something meaningful? I think when women have sex without meaning, it causes damage, physical and psychological."

Me: "I haven't actually described what I thought a good time was. A good time is whatever makes people happy, as long as everyone involved is transparent and honest. Why would you be against having a good time? And who are we to judge? 

The more I travel, the more I realize Americans make things too complicated. I'm guilty of overthinking myself, but I'm trying hard to get rid of that habit. People in other countries may have fewer opportunities than us in many ways, but they still manage to be more content, partly because they have fewer options, but also because they go with the flow. 

The women in other countries I've met are more practical. They tend to want someone who is employed, who is kind, and who treats them well. I've never heard a woman in a foreign country talk about relationships by saying she 'needs' something." 

Woman 2: "I think if you talk to women--and really have a deeper conversation with them--you'll see they have the same expectations as Americans. They may not be in a position to get what they want, so they just internalize the gap between their expectations and their reality." 

Me: "If American women have relationships and happiness figured out better than non-American women, why are Americans the ones taking prescription drugs and anti-depressants at the highest rates in the world?"

Woman 2: "I think those women need to work on themselves before dating, and many women should figure out how to be happy by themselves before getting into relationships. Now that I'm in a good relationship with another Christian, I'm 100% sure he will be there for me when I need him." 

Me: "'I'm not 100% convinced of anything. The whole point of dealing with human beings is recognizing we're imperfect, and because we're imperfect, we cannot predict our future with 100% certainty. When you say you are 100% sure that your relationship will work out, I really question your brand of religion, because you're putting yourself on the same level as an omnipotent being. Religion, when done right, should make you more humble, not less. 

Let me ask you something. Right now, you and I could exit this restaurant and get hit by a car and suffer severe injuries for life. Do you think your relationships will stay the same if you, God forbid, became a paraplegic tonight?" 

Woman 2: "I am 100% sure my friends and my boyfriend will be there for me." 

Me: "I saw a documentary where someone just like you was severely injured in a car accident. After a year, her friends stopped visiting her. One reason you, your friends, and boyfriend are together is because you all share many of the same traits--you go to the same church, you believe in the same God, etc. A severe physical accident will make you different, will weaken the similarities that bind you together. Aren't you being arrogant in thinking you can predict the future with 100% certainty, even when circumstances change vastly?" 

Woman 2: "I have no doubt they will be there for me, and that my boyfriend and I will be together." 

Me: "You know, about 50% of Americans who get married in a church end up getting divorced. All of them thought just like you--that their relationships would work out. Do you think you're special in ways those people were not?" 

Woman 2: "I don't think I'm special. I just know my friends." 

Me: "The women in the church aisle who later got divorced, if you had asked them before the moment they said, 'I do,' would they have said they also knew their boyfriends?" 

Woman 2: "But 50% of the women who got married stayed together. Personal traits matter, too. If I have integrity, why wouldn't my relationship work out and be part of the successful 50%?"

Me: "I think we're all looking for permanence in a modern world geared towards impermanence. People want to to think they'll always be together with someone, not because they're necessarily afraid of being alone or being unhappy, but because they want something permanent. A wedding ring isn't valuable because it's expensive--it's much sought-after because it represents hard-to-get permanence. That desire for permanence is the underlying basis of your opinion, your certainty. 

When I speak to religious women in other countries, I'm always humbled. A Latin grandmother might have only a tiny cross somewhere in her small house, but when you talk to her, you can feel her faith. You don't need to ask her anything about it--you'll just feel it. She'll never say she 'needs' anything or that she's 100% sure of anything except her own belief in God. She won't say she knows what another person would do, but she will tell you believes in God, and that will be the end of the discussion. It doesn't even enter her mind to say she's 100% sure about the future of other human beings. She believes in God, and God will do what is right by her. That's the kind of faith that leaves no room for logical argument because it's genuine. She'll have a fraction of my education, of my knowledge, but she'll be the one who humbles me because her faith is worth more than all of my knowledge." 

END SCENE.