The Muslim in the Normative Sense

So the Muslim is the one who is supposed to be aware of this — and "Muslim" is being used here in its ideal sense, in a normative sense, not in the sense of the so-called "Muslim world". It is worth getting out of that idea altogether. This is not about Algeria, or Afghanistan, or Iran. It is about the Qurʾānic view of a Muslim, not how people believe what they believe, or their deluded states and things of that kind. There are crazy people all over the world. Anyone who has spent a period of time working in a psych unit has met very interesting people who really believe they are prophets of God. One watches such a man, and he is telling you — look, he says, there is a message from God for you; and one says, aha; and he says, and God says this, and this, and this, and you are in big trouble if you do not believe me. And there is a kind of — one used to listen to these people, because that was part of what the staff were supposed to do; one used to listen to these people, and there was something in one that wanted to say: come on, you are just pulling my leg. There was really something that just wanted to nudge this person. But after a while one starts realising that they are not pulling anyone's leg: they really do believe this condition. And we have a phenomenal capacity for delusional states; and most of us — none excepted — are walking around with our own delusions. We are just simply unaware of them.

A book well worth recommending to anyone interested in this subject is by Goleman, the man who wrote Emotional Intelligence. He has another book that is actually much better than the first one. The first one became popular; interestingly enough, the second one is not as popular. It is called Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception. It is a very interesting book, because here is somebody who is simply looking at what we now know about our brain and our delusional states; and religion is really one of the big opportunities to go into serious delusional states. Goleman — G-O-L-E-M-A-N. It was written a while ago, and it only became known after his Emotional Intelligence. This is what the publishers do: a man writes a book, and nobody ever hears about it; then he writes a bestseller, and suddenly all his old books are in print. The market — the logic of the market.

So the point is that, when talking about Islam, there is no wish to look at this other phenomenon, which is the phenomenon of delusional religious states that are in every tradition. There are people all over walking around believing that they have the truth and nobody else does, and a lot of those people are quite frightening — especially when they become President of the United States, and then everybody is in big trouble. One of them does not remember any more; but when he was in office, it was rather frightening.