[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.First they would conquer toward the east and then head west and liberate Jerusalem.At that point the messiah, or mahdi, would be revealed.That mahdi would then destroy Dajjal, and the entire world would fall under the heel of Islam, a period of power that would last forty years.Then the Muslims would be comprehensively defeated yet again, and that would signal the end of the world, bringing about the Day of Judgment.Do you know when that time is?”“That could refer to any time,” I said.“It refers to now,” Aslam replied.“The group of Muslims with the black flags are the Taliban.They’re from Afghanistan, which was called Khorasan.When they go east it means that they will fight against India for occupied Kashmir.Then they’ll head westward and liberate Jerusalem from the Israelis.”I was skeptical.“What about the mahdi?”“Bin Laden is the mahdi! That’s why I told you to take him seriously.”“How can that be?”“The mahdi was prophesied to be from Arabia, just like bin Laden, and he’s supposed to be tall and thin, just like bin Laden, and he’ll have a mark on his back, which bin Laden probably has.Most important, though, bin Laden is with the Taliban and they have black flags.By the time he’s forty, I think bin Laden will reveal himself.”“Who is Dajjal then?” I asked.“America.”“Dajjal is supposed to be a one-eyed man on a donkey,” I countered.“Yes,” Aslam said, “but Dajjal is a metaphor.The one eye refers to the camera, or media, which is what America uses to take over the world.And the donkey, that’s easy.America’s president is Clinton, and he’s a Democrat.Their symbol is the ass.”Bin Laden’s promises of deliverance rang hollow to me.He seemed like nothing more than an opportunist.Another in a long line of pretender messiahs.The worst thing about him was that he turned Islam into a shooting star.Into fireworks.Into a gunshot.He touched believers by the light of the faith but then encouraged them to become a flame, which he fanned into a conflagration.Such an affirmation of Islam was utterly pointless.It soon fizzled out.As Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad said in his online essay “The Poverty of Fanaticism,” extremist Muslims often got burned out on Islam, and eventually did things the religion prohibited, such as getting non-Muslim girlfriends, thus proving that their faith was weak.To make his point, Shaykh Murad gave the example of an Egyptian extremist named Hamdi who, years after launching attacks at Coptic Christians, ended up with a Christian wife from Australia.I believed in an Islam that was permanent, unchanging, and solid.Being Muslim wasn’t just a state of mind, as bin Laden argued, but a state of existence.Islam was all-consuming.A total condition.A state of submission to the will of the Almighty.It wasn’t a system or formula or prescription that one utilized for a little while, in order to gain revenge against one’s enemies.Islam was way bigger than that; it was the primordial state of being.Bombing and killing, marauding and murdering, taking up arms against America and Israel—these were a waste of time.They were childish acts carried out by insecure Muslims, by precisely those Muslims who judged success in life according to worldly terms.What mattered, as I saw Islam, was the afterlife.That was the most important part of living.Bin Laden, meanwhile, was not concerned with the afterlife.The other false prophet, a siren of secularism, the author of a book called The Satanic Verses—modernity’s anti-Quran—was Salman Rushdie.He was out to undermine every Muslim’s faith, it seemed to me.I had heard about The Satanic Verses in Pakistan when the book, newly published, had spurred riots and book burnings.Back then I had lived in a world where all books and writing utensils were considered sacred.Ammi had often told Flim and me that “if a book so much as falls to the floor, you better pick it up; otherwise the Day of Judgment will arrive.” When I heard that people were burning a book, I become anxious.One day I even snuck out to the site of a public protest after it had been cleared and poked through the burning tires to see if something remained of the novel.That was then.Before I learned that I was a Caliph in waiting.Now I had to protect the flock of believers.Sitting in the stacks of the university library, I read through the novel in order to figure out how to undermine it.It was a secularist’s manifesto.The wondrous Prophet Ibraham was depicted as heartless.A girl in charge of a group of eager pilgrims cruelly led them to an oceanic death.An imam who resembled the Ayatollah Khomeini was shown as wily and power-mongering, rather than pious and honest (as any true, God-fearing ayatollah would be).The whores of Mecca took on the names of the Prophet’s wives.Finally came the real problem: the part about the Prophet Muhammad and the circumstances surrounding the revelations that became the Quran.This part suggested that first Satan and then Muhammad’s Persian scribe Salman had both tampered with the Quran, changing words outright.It was this part that made the book vile to Muslims, because it promoted doubt.Skepticism opened the door for believers to think there was a chance that revelation wasn’t from God, that the Quran was written by men and thus wasn’t otherworldly.Widespread skepticism would be the ultimate victory for secularism, which had previously subjected the Torah and the Bible to just the same attack.What the secularists wanted—Rushdie among them—was to establish the supremacy of reason over and above revelation, something that all religious people had an obligation to resist, because if reason became dominant, the world would fail.I had learned these things from reading the text of a 1999 lecture titled “The Changing Face of Secularism and the Islamic Response,” given by Zaid Shakir in Aylesbury, England.In that lecture he claimed that secularism was un-Islamic.Whereas God said in the Quran, “I have only created jinns and mankind that they might worship Me,” secularism demanded that we worship the earthly, the immanent, the tangible.Shakir explained that secularism forced the people of the hereafter to become the people of the here and now.Rather than looking at death as a gift, which brought an opportunity to be near God, secularism looked at death as a curse, the moment when one became divested of the world.Shakir explained that secularism was trying to destroy the last normative religion in the world.It wouldn’t use swords or guns to separate the creation from the Creator; rather, it would use a sinister idea called freedom.That was what Salman Rushdie was selling.My revolt against secularism involved shelving Rushdie’s book in the art history section of the library when I’d finished reading it.That way no Muslim of a weaker constitution would encounter it, since Muslims—who considered images haram—didn’t usually study art history.Hiding the book was way better than burning it—which drew attention to it
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
