Reading, Righting, Wronging, Religion and Rationalism

I have some friends whose bubbly personalities sometimes froth up into indelicate spume which gets my gag reflex going. A polemic about the madrassa got me thinking, and my thoughts are below. But first the original sin, from a man who was born in The Great Satan:

"A madrassa is an Islamic School where boys are made to memorize the Koran and hate supreme infidels like yourself. It's early indoctrination that continues into the tender killing years. Think of it as a terrorist incubator. Oh, and they teach math too."

In response:

The Koran is a poem which has been written down, not a book as we understand the medium. The way it works, ideally, is that the verses are bouncing around your unconscious all the time, rather than being a series of steps in an argument, as we tend to read text, and that requires memorisation - as with the Vedas, the Torah (including commentary), hymnals and other inspired works - and tarot works the same way. Anyway, memorisation traditionally begins in early childhood, when the brain is a sponge, and with some discipline which is not fashionable in the west today.


So let's separate the pure tradition from the bastard child of it practiced amongst Wahhabis and other fiends today - because not all discipline in childhood is indoctrination. ALL religions, including shamanistic ones, have been or are being co-opted by a state of mind which is pathologically unpoetic. In Christianity, literal interpretation of the Bible is only 100 and a bit years old, and coincides with mechanistic philosophy, which interprets everything in a nuts and bolts, true or false, right or wrong, you or me manner. This makes it impossible to understand the Revelation of John or the Book of Daniel, and you end up a Jehovah's Witness if you try, devoutly painting lions and lambs lying next to each other, and men beating swords into ploughshares - what am I gonna go with a ploughshare in South London, or a sword, for that matter? It's all Stanley knives and CS gas round here. The other product of rationalistic religion, if you are the military-industrial complex, is that you end up actually creating genuine doom for us to enjoy - witness the word of god made flesh.

Anyway, I imagine something similar for Islam, which has undergone a rapid transformation since Englishmen, Americans and Soviets started extracting oil from beneath camel routes. In the service of what? Their own gods Mammon and Progress. In God we trust indeed!

Literalism doesn't work with holy books, they are, all of them that I know, self-contradictory, and the Koran extremely so, winding, circular, and confusing. You can't even begin to interpret it if you don't know all of it - for example:



"If Allah so willed, he would have made you a single People, but his plan is to test each of you separately, in what He has given to each of you" (Koran 5:48)

"Our God and your God is one; and it is to Him that we bow." (Koran 29:46)

Contrast that with:

"If anyone desires a religion other than Islam, never will it be accepted of him; and in the Hereafter He will be in the ranks of those who have lost" (Koran 3:85)



Of course, Islam means surrender, so perhaps there is more to the chapter than is obvious to the ignorant, but it would be unseemly for me to do a midrashic commentary on the Koran, as I haven't read it all (though note that midrash and madrassa come from the same root). My point is that surgical exegesis, with the gaze of a scalpel-wielding anatomist, gives you nothing useful for spiritual growth, only for propaganda.


The text the Koran grew out of notes the contradictions explicitly:

"Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the Lord." (Ezekiel 20, 25-26)

More on this subject here.

That said, many madrassas today emphasise certain chunks of complexity over others, and the noble Islamic tradition provides powerful techniques which can be used to firm up young minds, rather than make them malleable. We use other techniques to indoctrinate our own children with the little we understand about the natural world, and they grow up incapable of seeing the world any different, abhorring any other philosophy. Dawkins is the worst example of this, the atheist Ayatollah, hawking his blinkered faith as rationalism. A fatwa upon him!


My religion, by the way, which is Santo Daime, has just been banned in England by mechanistic idiots of the fundamentalist school, who can't tell the difference between crystal meth and ayahuasca, because both are drugs, and drugs are bad. Five of my friends have been arrested, one is still under house arrest. I am fuming, and if I had the means and the courage, I would bomb parliament. I may yet, though maybe chemical warfare with Agent DMT would be more poetic.

In another religion close to my heart, which is Thelema, one technique is to wear a ring on one finger one day, and be, say, a libertarian vegetarian, and the next day on another, and be a staunch Catholic reactionary who likes a good barbecue, referring back to your finger if you forget which you are meant to be. Crowley, after the thirty odd obscene, obscure, and blasphemous books he had written had bombed, assumed a fake name and penned a book of poetry in praise of the Virgin Mary. It did quite well in Christian circles, despite the acrostic in the epilogue, which was also a poem to the Virgin. The first letter of the first and last word of each line spelled - "The Virgin Mary I desire, but arseholes set my prick on fire." Needless to say, the Christian community didn't notice. Like someone said, we see what we are trained to see.

Love unconditional,

Abu-Nemu Ibn Ibrahim / Rabbi Nechman / Richard Nemkins / Nemado de Jesus / Frater Nemurabo (depending on the finger)