The Great Danger of Religion Is Religiosity

The problem with focusing on one dimension, and particularly the outward dimension, is that religious people are very often unpleasant people to be around. That is a matter of experience. In a life on this planet, some of the worst people one can ever be around are religious people, and one can feel much more comfortable with a secular humanist — although there are some very rabid fundamentalist secular humanists as well, because one gets both sides. But definitely, within the religious tradition, the great danger of religion is religiosity: with self-righteousness, with being judgemental, with a sudden conviction that one is right and everyone else is all wrong; God is on my side, He is not on your side. This is a real trap for any practitioner of a religious teaching. And it is certainly a trap within the Islamic tradition, just as it is in every other tradition.

There is no sense in which this was the spirit of the Prophet Muhammad's teaching. An example: one of the Tābiʿīn, the second generation, asked one of the Ṣaḥābah. He said: we had a woman who died amongst us, who died without a maḥram — in other words, she did not have a relative; she was living alone — and so should we wash her and bury her? And the man just said to him: we did not make things up; we did not make things that difficult during the time of the Prophet, so Allah said — in other words: bury the poor woman, and give me a break.

In other words, what happens is that the spirit of the law gets lost with the letter of the law. And Islam is a tradition that really is trying to unify the idea of the spirit of the law and the letter of the law: that one cannot have one without the other. If there is too much justice, one ends up with wrath. If there is too much mercy, one ends up with a type of social chaos. So the Islamic teaching is trying to join these two.

The problem with a modern Islam is that there is a massive focus on wrath, on anger. And this is what would be termed in the Nietzschean worldview the slave mentality of resentment: that the oppressed suddenly has a special status within human society because of the experience of suffering. I suffer and you do not; therefore, ipso facto, the one who suffers is better than you. This is a real trap in the human psyche: because you are not suffering the way this one is suffering, this one is better than you. No moral superiority, no superiority of action — simply by the one fundamental issue of suffering. And this is a trap.

And this is what Roy Olivier says is the real crisis of the Muslim world: as long as they stay in this framework, as long as they have this mentality, they cannot pull themselves up. It is a completely disempowering condition to be in. This is what Warith Deen Muhammad, W. D. Muhammad, once said, talking about the African-American within this culture demanding reparations — demanding: there have been four hundred years of injustice, and nothing will be done until the wrongs that have been done are rectified. What W. D. Muhammad said about that is that this is like a man who has literally been mugged. He is left there dying on the ground. A man comes and offers him his hand to pick him up. And he says: no — not getting up until the guy who did this comes back and apologises. That is a disempowering situation, because the guy who did that is most likely not going to come back and apologise, and the man will wallow in his self-pity, because people are not going to help him up. And this is really, in many ways, the condition of the Muslim world.

All of this has been put in context in order to go into the next realm of Islam, which is called iḥsān. Because it is probably, of all the teachings of Islam, the most forgotten.