Brussels Terror Attack: Due to Western Ignorance of the Barbaric Darkness of Ibn Taimiya’s theological system – Part III

Brussels Terror Attack: Due to Western Ignorance of the Barbaric Darkness of Ibn Taimiya’s theological system – Part III

 

By Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

 

In two earlier articles published under the titles “Brussels Terror Attack: Due to Western Misperceptions – Part I” (https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2016/03/23/brussels-terror-attack-due-to-western-misperceptions-part-i/) and “Brussels Terror Attack: Due to Western Ignorance of Evil Theological Systems – Part II” (https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2016/03/24/brussels-terror-attack-due-to-western-ignorance-of-evil-theological-systems-part-ii/), I highlighted the Western ignorance of the Muslim World and more specifically of the fact that the extremist way of life, mindset and belief are approved and shared by many hundreds of millions of Muslims in countries other than the evil cradle of Salafism / Wahhabism, i.e. Saudi Arabia; I called that dimension of Western misperception of the Islamic World ‘sociopolitical’. Then, I proceeded through a historical-religious analysis, emphasizing the putrefaction process caused to the Islamic religion by the different Islamic theological systems, and I established a link between the three successive layers of alteration caused by the theological systems of Ahmed ibn Hanbal, Ahmed ibn Taimiyah, and Muhammad ibn Abdulwahhab. In the present article, I will expand further on the nefarious impact that the barbarism of Ibn Taimiyah had on Islam as religion, spirituality, culture, and civilization.

 

As I described in the previous article, “Ahmed ibn Taimiya was the ugly and perverse child of his time“, meaning the period of the Crusades and the Mongol invasions that resulted in the destruction of Baghdad. In fact, his theological system was an introverted reductionism that triggered an overwhelming indifference for, and an abysmal hatred of, the “other”. These characteristics were intensified by ibn Taimiya’s followers who instructed Muslims to limit themselves to basics and to abstain from any contact with, or study of, the “other”.

WHY TROUBLES GO DEEPER THAN MERE WAHHABISM: THE EVILNESS OF IBN TAIMIYA’S THEOLOGICAL BARBARISM
Of course, after the year 1291 (Fall of Acre), when the last Crusader was out of the Orient, the Islamic World recovered from the Crusades and the Mongol invasions, and continued to expand in terms of imperial power, advance in terms of civilization, and prosper in terms of economic recovery and wealth accumulation. But there were two main negative points that survived for some centuries, gradually spread across the entire Muslim World, and finally prevailed:

A – The introversion gained momentum among the populations, irrespective of the success of the armies and the caliphs. It was combined with a genuinely un-Islamic reductionism (I mean of course ontological reductionism) as Ibn Taimiya followers – in order to control the masses – diffused the pathetic opinion that Philosophy, Arts, Letters and Sciences are useless, because “only few things are necessary for man to gain the ticket to the Paradise”: by hating and ignoring the “other” (which is a non-Islamic attitude and stance of life) and by preaching and diffusing this mindset, attitude and behavior, the followers of Ibn Taimiya addressed the fears, the sorrow, and the horror generated among the Muslims because of the Crusaders and the Mongols.

B – The bullying exercised by the masses that followed the theologians, who accepted Ibn Taimiya’s heretic theological system, started having an impact in the long run and progressively all the scholars, scientists, artists, architects, mystics, and philosophers came under attack, got dispersed, and disappeared.

For the first time, around the years 1350-1400, within Islam was formed a driving force which was pushing toward ignorance, darkness, hatred and barbarism. 

It is obvious that such evil force could not exist without targets. Even worse, the targets had to be close. Shia Muslims and Oriental Christians were the first to be targeted. Then, it was the turn of the mystics, the Sufis, the philosophers, the erudite scholars, the astronomers, the chemists, the architects, the poets, the intellectuals, and the artists.

 

An inherent element of the evilness of Ibn Taimiya’s system is uniformity; the hatred of the other – in and by itself – eliminates every chance for diversity. At the social level, this situation means that you cannot differ, because you then become the “other”, and you get subsequently targeted. This means that you cannot carry out experiments in Chemistry, you cannot make sidereal observations in the Observatory, you cannot meditate, and you cannot explore or study anything, because “only few things are necessary for man to gain the ticket to the Paradise” and because the quasi-totality of the population, who are ignorant and uneducated, are not involved in these activities. This means that, by being a genuine scholar, polymath, mystic, explorer, erudite intellectual, philosopher, scientist, architect, artist or author, you differ, you automatically become the “other”, and consequently you are immediately taken as target.

 

During those centuries many Muslim scholars, polymaths, mystics, explorers, erudite intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, architects, artists or authors were persecuted – not by the power of the Sultan and Caliph but – by the average people at the very local, social level; they were forced to stop their scientific, philosophical, artistic or spiritual activities, they were obliged to move to other countries, and they were killed. And a systematic disregard for the Islamic Spiritual, Intellectual, Academic and Scientific Heritage was imposed, so that average Muslims forget the Golden Era of Islam, i.e. the greatness that the filthy and evil minds of ibn Hanbal and ibn Taimiya were virtually unable to ever reach.

Last, in cases of illustrious names of the foremost Islamic scholars of the Golden Era of Islam, the likes of al Farabi (Alpharabius), Muhyiddin ibn Arabi, ibn Sina (Avicenna), Nasir al Din al Tusi, ibn Rushd (Averroes), Al Ghazali, and others, they were all systematically, uninterruptedly and viciously denigrated, defamed and execrated by the uneducated, uncultured and sullen followers of the tenebrous theology of ibn Taimiya. This continues down to our times.

As regards ibn Taimiya, he gave the evil example; speaking against al Ghazali, he said: “This Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, despite his brilliance, his devotion to Allah, his knowledge of kalam and philosophy, his asceticism and spiritual practices and his Sufism, ended up in a state of confusion and resorted to the path of those who claim to find out things through dreams and spiritual methods” (Majmu’ al-Fatawa, vol. 4, p.71).

It goes without saying that this force destroyed the Islamic Civilization, driving the Muslim World to a bestial level of total insignificance around the years 1600-1700. For reasons which rather pertain to foreign affairs, not one caliph / sultan decided to oppose openly and drastically the force of darkness. We refer mainly to the Ottoman times now, because Sunni Islam in Europe, Asia, and Africa was multi-divided in the period 1300-1500, until Selim I (Yavuz Sultan Selim, the ‘stern’ one) reinstated the Caliphate in its magnitude. When the expanded Ottoman Empire was engaged in ferocious battles against Spain in Western Mediterranean, against Austria-Hungary in Central Europe, against Abyssinia in the Horn of Africa, and occasionally against Iran (and later Russia) in the East, it would be impossible for a Caliph (the Sultan) to trigger a deep social chasm by arresting the followers of the vicious, Satanic theological system of Ahmed ibn Taimiya and by declaring an open war against them. Sultans, in their majority, tried to basically rule against the dark ideas of these ignorant people, without turning openly against them.

Through the above, one can conclude that a great number of populations that traditionally belonged to and followed the Shaffi’i, Hanafi and Maliki schools of jurisprudence started being gravely affected and genuinely altered because of the socially forced diffusion of the villainous system of Ahmed ibn Taimiya, a Hanbali.

In a way, viewed through a historical perspective, the diffusion of that system across 96-98% of all the Muslims’ territories (the rest 2-4% representing the Arabian Desert) represents a late and indirect form of Hanbalization of the Shaffi’i, Hanafi and Maliki schools of jurisprudence.

In fact, this process never stopped; it was only spread over and over.

However, in the whole process, there is particularly critical moment, a date that can be taken as the turning point in the down spiral, from Civilization to Barbarism within Islam. This can be safely and accurately determined; it is 1580. Why this date is so important and what happened then in Istanbul are essential for the entire world to know, because today’s tragic events and terror attacks are only a mere reproduction of that ominous day.

 

(to be continued)