In the Beginning: Hijacking of the Religion of God: Volume 3: Islam

By Sami M. El-Soudani

Preface

It was shortly after I had graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1980, with a PhD Degree specializing in fracture mechanics and failure analysis of materials and structures, that I discovered the dire need for this book. This undertaking began to take shape in the early 1980s with the Middle East aflame, devastated by what some viewed as a holy war, and with millennialists prophesying the end of days by the year 2000 C. E. After publishing and co-authoring 87 scientific and industrial reports, and technical papers, many of which were in national and international magazines on the subject of failure analysis of metals and fracture mechanics of aircraft structures, I came to realize that consequences of failures of the human spirit are far more devastating than failures of metals and aircraft structures.

But now at the outset of the 21st century the world is still experiencing turmoil and devastation by wars spreading like wildfire, with Jews, Christians and Moslems at each other's throats in seemingly never ending battles and ugly strife. Some call it war on terror, others speak of wars of clashing cultures, crusades, jihad, etc., etc., etc. One cant help but wonder how this saga of 99% misery and 1% heroism will ever come to an end. Only the gullible would attempt to explain the ongoing world conflict among People of the Book: Jews, Christians and Moslems, based on the course of events during the past few years, or even the past few decades. This is where this book comes in with a rigorous, rationalized, and hopefully convincing critical assessment of a never-before-explored, most innate aspect of the human nature, and that is its obsession with hijacking of the religion of God. For better understanding of the root cause of the ongoing conflict among People of the Book, who are supposed to be worshipping the same God, we need to take a step back, take a deep breath, and reflect rationally, while ignoring all rhetoric and emotional bias in researching the past three thousand years of religious history. And this is exactly what I did in writing this three-volume book.

More specifically, this book is addressing the religion of God to whom every human being from among the so-called People of the Book today turns in prayer. Whether soldiers or civilians, when they are caught in the midst of the ongoing grisly and devastating wars, some would pray to Yahweh, others call upon Jesus Christ, while Moslem brethren whisper the name of Allah upon taking their last breath. Who is that God? And why is He so shrouded with mystery? Is He truly One and the Same God for all these people? Or are we suffering from some self-delusions and possibly hallucinations that may be the senseless products of our ancient religious fabrications and mythmaking. Going back in time three thousand years brings us to one very special night, when God was said to have come down in person onto Mount Sinai to have a close encounter with human beings through direct speech. This three-volume book examines the course of religious events from that magic and apocalyptic moment onwards till this day.

It took me twenty years of research to show that men who practiced hijacking long before they had wings have been quite active over the past three thousand years engaging in the lucrative business of hijacking the religion of God. All three religious persuasions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam suffered the dire consequences of miserably failing to heed the words of our Merciful and Patient God. No irony intended here in calling it a business, and indeed a lucrative one, because it brings the hijackers: power, enormous wealth, and often glory, all of which, in the sight of God translate, respectively into: arrogance, greed, and most certainly infamy.

In developing the extensive critical review of religion presented herein, detailing the respective histories of the selected thre

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 9, 2009
• ISBN: 9781450046633

Sami M. El-Soudani

Dr. Sami El-Soudani is an aerospace materials scientist specializing in fracture mechanics and failure analysis and has been engaged for over thirty years in averting failures of aircraft structures. For the past 20 years, however, he has been conducting independent theological research prompted by regrettable world events clearly showing that failures of the human spirit are of far more devastating consequences than failures of aircraft structures. Dr. El-Soudani, was born in Egypt, received his undergraduate degree from the Soviet Union, his MSc Degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) and his PhD Degree from the University of Cambridge, England. Nabawia El-Soudani received a Master of Fine Arts Degree at the California Institute of the Arts in the program of Film and Video (May 2006). She has independently produced, directed, and edited film/videos that screened nationally and internationally in festivals and galleries including a feature length documentary, entitled My Father My Friend that complements the research in this book. Her work critiques patriarchal power and the military-industrial-media complex. Having both Western and Eastern heritage, she works to bridge the gap between East and West finding a common ground in the humanity, history, and spirituality that they have in common.

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COPYRIGHT © 2009 BY SAMI M. EL-SOUDANI & NABAWIA J. EL-SOUDANI.

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Contents

Volume 3—Islam

7 The First Attempts at Hijacking Islam

8 Contemporary Attempts at Hijacking Islam

9 Can Humans Truly Hijack the Message of God?

Epilogue (For All Three Volumes)

Afterword

Acknowledgements

References

To My Wife

Holly Robinson El-Soudani

Chapter 7

The First Attempts at Hijacking Islam

Muhammad is but a messenger: Other messengers have passed away before him. If he die or be slain, will ye then turn back on your heels? He who turneth back doth no harm to Allah. But Allah will reward the thankful.

The Qur’an 3:144

Strictly speaking Islam cannot be hijacked on doctrinal grounds, and this is why in the title of this Chapter, as well as for the next one, I am using the more representative formulation: attempts at hijacking, rather than hijacking of Islam. There is a simple reason for this and that is: So long as there exists one pristine copy of the text of the Qur’an anywhere in the world, Islam can never be hijacked, at least in a doctrinal sense. More specifically that includes the doctrines of: (1) Who is God? ; and how does He relate to His created order, namely the Universe, and the living creatures? ; What does He (God) expect of us humans? It may also include doctrines regarding the End of Days, the Judgment Day, the Hereafter, Heaven, and Hellfire, etc.? The rationale for our postulate of the impossibility of hijacking Islam, while guarded by the Qur’an, is simply this: Whenever in doubt or facing any theological disputation, Moslems can always go back to consult the original letter of the Qur’anic text, in order to resolve any such doctrinal disputes. This is the secret behind the resilience of the Islamic tradition, for after some 1400 years the Qur’an and Islam endured the test of time. What inspires the confidence of Moslems upon seeking guidance from the Qur’an is its power of authoritative Divine delivery, its unparalleled self-consistency, and the fact that no copy of the Qur’an anywhere in the world differs from any other, not even by a single letter of the alphabet (the identical text of the Qur’an worldwide is meant specifically per its as-revealed Arabic text, a truth not to be generalized or extended to the Qur’an translations).

This crucial fact suggests an advantageous position for Islam over Christianity and Judaism whose hijackings were doctrinal and hence are fatal. In the case of Judaism, for example, the worship of the golden calf as a personal God portraying the real God (Yahweh) is a fatal doctrinal hijacking. As we have seen in Chapters 3 and 4 the rewriting of the Torah introduced many doctrinal changes, which is also fatal. The only document which I would consider to be the counterpart of the Qur’an is the Ark of the Covenant. In my mind it has the same reverence as the Qur’an, in that both are the untampered with, and truly revealed word of God. The Ark of the Covenant is an ancient term used to refer to the Tablets given to Moses inscribed with Hebrew Scriptures. They were delivered to prophet Moses upon his conferring with God (Yahweh; same as Allah) on Mount Sinai. To humanity’s misfortune, the Ark of the Covenant has been lost beyond trace till the day of this writing. It is nowhere to be found for nearly two and a half thousand years. It disappeared from Jerusalem at about the time of the First Temple destruction by the Babylonians, (or shortly thereafter). Unlike the Qur’an, the written Torah in existence today, at least by admissions of Jewish scholars (see our Chapters 3 and 4), is not the word of God, but rather it is a history of the Jewish people. As we have shown in Chapter 3, the recording of the written Torah commenced only after several centuries had elapsed with the prior Torah being limited to an oral tradition (i.e. conveyed by word of mouth). Had the Ark of the Covenant been preserved, and on hand today, humans would have never been able to hijack the divine message to Moses. Jews and the rest of the world would have been able to consult the Tablets given to Moses in a manner similar to what Moslems can do today with the Qur’an on hand.

Similarly contemporary Christians have no record of anything similar to either the Ark of the Covenant or the Qur’an. They don’t have anything that looks like a revealed word of God speaking directly, and in the first person, to humanity such as His delivery style in the Ten Commandments. Here Allah was speaking to Moses (and through him to the Children of Israel and, of course, to the rest of the world): I am your God… . All Christian Scriptures and Gospels on hand today were written by humans (see our Chapters 5 and 6) several decades later after Jesus’ mission had ended. By their content of textual material, the Christian gospels are the counterparts of what in Islam would be called "the hadith" of the prophet Mohammad. The hadith is a recorded or quoted transcript of conversations, discussions, admonitions and/or instructions by the prophet, addressing his audiences of disciples and close associates. The hadith of Mohammad is not a part of the Qur’an. By similarity each of the Christian gospels includes a brief record of Jesus’ life events or biography, which the Greeks might call (bios). Generally these biographies are rather incomplete, and the stories and parables of one gospel are often in contradiction with their counterpart statements in the other Christian gospels. Curiously, the Qur’an alludes to a Christian Scripture which is called the Injeel of Jesus. It appears as though there was a divine Scriptural source book of instructions delivered through Jesus to his disciples and from them onto the world at large. Such a source book may have been burned or banished altogether in the wake of the Nicene Conference held at Nicaea, Asia Minor, on May 20th, 325 C.E. For lack of a better definition translators of the Qur’an into English generally use the term gospel with reference to the Qur’anic term Injeel of Jesus. I am not sure I can agree with that characterization in the translation of the term Injeel, at least based on our compelling findings in Chapters 5 and 6. Jesus’ mission would have been totally useless or trivial had he nothing to offer to the Children of Israel by way of divine instructions and teachings. From our elaborate research in Chapters 5 and 6, it is readily deducible that Christians living today have been cut off completely from the teachings of the so-called historical Jesus, simply because Saint Paul stole the show from under Jesus’ feet, and had him stand on water, while Paul, the converted persecutor of Jesus hijacked Christianity to deliver it three centuries later to another equally cunning hijacker of religion, namely the Roman Emperor Constantine.

In summary, it is precisely the fact that there is a time-independent and enduring record of valid Scriptures to which humans can refer back, that makes it impossible to hijack the religion of God on doctrinal grounds. Applying this conclusion to Islam as guarded by the Qur’an, this is why we say that it cannot be hijacked on doctrinal basis. But one may still ask: Are there any other reasons or bases (sociological, political, operational, administrative, or otherwise) for possible hijacking of Islam? If so, what are they? To answer this question I will need to review seven basic tenets, which I choose to call the Operating Principles of Islam which I derived from the Qur’an itself. In specifying and characterizing these basic tenets or Operating Principles of Islam, we will also be correcting several grave and common misconceptions about Islam, as a religion, in the minds of both Western society researchers and Islamic scholars (the so-called Ulama). Thus reverting back to my earlier question: Can Islam be hijacked based on any one of these Operating Principles of Islam? The answer is yes! In fact in almost each and every one of them there has been an attempt at hijacking Islam. Men who practiced hijacking long before they had wings will always at least try. Such infamous attempts will be the subject of this and the next Chapter, but in order to understand these attempted hijackings, we must bring the less familiar readers up to speed on what I call The Seven Operating Principles or Basic Tenets of Islam.

The Seven Operating Principles, or

Basic Tenets of the Islamic Constitution

What I call here the seven Operating Principles, or Basic Tenets of Islam should not be confused with the basic elements of the Islamic faith, or with yet another definition of the so-called Pillars of Islam. The basic elements of Islamic faith imply the belief that: (a) there is no God but Allah, and Mohammad is his prophet, (b) one must also believe in the truthfulness of all God’s prior prophets (Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, David, . . .), and in the existence of angels, (c) belief that the teachings of the Qur’an confirm prior genuine divine Scriptures revealed to humanity (e.g. the Tablets given to Moses), (d) belief in the Day of Judgment, and in Heaven and Hellfire. The Five Pillars of Islam are simply the five lifetime assignments to be performed by each Moslem in practicing the religion of Islam, and these are: (1) bearing witness to the Oneness of Allah as the only God, and that Mohammad is but a genuine human prophet and a messenger of God; (2) performing the five daily prayers, (3) fasting the month of Ramadan, (4) giving at least 2.5 % of one’s income to the poor and needy (alms-giving), and (5) An optional assignment or duty of every Moslem: A one-time pilgrimmage trip to Mecca, for those who can afford it. And so the fifth pillar is only performed once in the Moslem’s lifetime, but some may undertake the pilgrimmage more than once, and even dedicate or relinquish one of the repeat trips to their parents or next of kin, who could not, or did not get a chance to perform that required pillar of Islam.

By contrast with these five aspects, or rather minimum required duties in the pursuit of Islam, what I will be calling in this Section the Operating Principles of Islam are akin to The Constitution or manifestation of the true spirit of Islam. In fact to a Moslem these seven Basic Operating Principles of Islam as outlined herein, and derived strictly from the Qur’an and the tradition of Prophet Mohammad (the Hadith), are Islam’s counterpart or analogue of the Magna Charta to an Englishman, or the analogue of the United States Constitution to an American.

The Seven Operating Principles of Islam are:

(1)   The First Operating Principle of Islam(OPI1): Freedom of Religion—There Shall be no Compulsion in Religion ; Humans Are Free to Choose.

(2)   The Second Operating Principle of Islam(OPI2): Islam Builds Faithful Hearts; Not Godless Empires.

(3)   The Third Operating Principle of Islam(OPI3): Equality of the Genders; Male and Female; Absolute, Total and Unequivocal; With the Qur’an as the Liberator of Female Gender from Pre-Islamic Jahiliyya (Era of Ignorance).

(4)   The Fourth Operating Principle of Islam(OPI4): Hereditary Monarchy as Well as Elitist Imamate Are Both Contrary to the Spirit of Islam.

(5)   The Fifth Operating Principle of Islam(OPI5): No Preference Whatsoever for a Prophet’s Descendants Including Mohammad to the Seat of Government, or in Ruling Over any Nation Professing to be Islamic.

(6)   The Sixth Operating Principle of Islam(OPI6): All Affairs Including Election of Governing Rulers and Community Leaders Shall be Administered or Resolved Via a Democratic Process. In the Qur’an it is Called Shura: This is a Qur’anic Catch-all Term in Arabic Literally Implying: Public (not Elitist or Electoral College) Consultation, Voting, Approval, Ratification, and/or Consensus.

(7)   The Seventh Operating Principle of Islam(OPI7): Allah Alone is the Sole Law-Giver; Not Mohammad, Not Jesus, Not Ezra, Not Moses, Not David, . . . ; And Allah Alone Will Also be the Judge of Us All on the Day of Judgment.

(1)   The First Operating Principle of Islam (OPI1): Freedom of Religion—There Shall be No Compulsion in Religion ; Humans Are Free to Choose.

The most famous verse in the Qur’an 2:256 is known as the [Verse of the Throne]. Here Allah says: "Allah there is no God but He—The Ever-Living, The Self-Subsisting, Eternal. Neither slumber nor sleep can seize Him. His are all that is in the heavens and the earth. Who can intercede in His presence except by His permission. He knoweth all that appeareth to them (the human beings), as well as that which is behind them (the unseen). Nor shall they compass aught of His knowledge except as He willeth. His throne doth extend over the heavens and the earth, and their preservation wearies Him not; He is the Most High, the Supreme (in Glory). There shall be no compulsion in religion. True guidance is now distinct from temptation. He that renounces idol-worship and believes in Allah hath grasped the most trust-worthy hand-hold that never breaks. And Allah heareth and knoweth all."

As we can see, ascertaining freedom of religion, and prohibition of coercion appears in the Qur’anic verse above to be the first tenet of Islam given unequivocally in the form of a commandment: "There shall be no compulsion in religion . . ." This apparently most important commandment immediately follows God’s introduction of Himself to our world, and after asserting His absolute and ultimate authority over the creation, Allah proceeds immediately (as if changing the subject) to provide the first article of faith or equivalently the divine Islamic Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religious persuasion to each and every living human being. We shall refer to this first tenet of Islam later in this Chapter in connection with an apostacy in the early history of Islam, which took place immediately following the death of prophet Mohammad.

In addition to the First Article of Faith, the First Operating Principle of Islam (OPI1) also includes side-by-side with granting freedom of religion, the Doctrine of Free Will. as a necessary doctrine which had been the subject of an historical debate among Islamic (as well as among Jewish scholars) over many centuries. From the Islamic perspective, here is what Allah says in the Qur’an 81:27-29 Chapter Al-Takwir or the Cessation in regard to the Doctrine of Free Will :

This (Qur’an) is naught else than a reminder unto creation; Unto whomsoever amongst you that willeth to be righteous. But ye shalt not will except as Allah willeth; the Lord of the Worlds.

In this verse it would appear that Allah has expressed, on the one hand, that humans are free to make choices such as deciding to be righteous, but then, on the other hand, immediately in the next sentence He seems to take that away by saying But ye shall not will except as God wills. On the surface of it all this may appear to be paradoxical. Far from it! ; the entire verse is self-consistent as we shall demonstrate by mathematical analysis here below. The Doctrine of Free Will is in fact rather illusive and complex in nature, and as such does not lend itself to simplistic analysis. In fact I myself, having a scientific and engineering background, naturally found it most elegant to rely on the queen of sciences, namely mathematics in order to simplify, and model the complex Doctrine of Free Will, a challenge which over the centuries eluded many a layman’s understanding. I found Cantor’s mathematical theory of sets, and its associated Venn diagrams to provide a convenient and elegant method for modeling and interpreting the Qur’anic verse quoted above [Qur’an 81:27-29 ], which I consider as a Scriptural stipulation of the long-debated Doctrine of Free Will. Our analytical argument runs as follows (refer to Figure 7-1):

If we believe in God in accordance with what we have been told in the Scriptures (take any one of them: Judaism, Christianity or Islam) we must also believe that there is a day of reckoning (i.e. the Judgment Day) when all humans will return to God, in order to account for their deeds before Him. Now to think that the actions of a human being are predestined (predetermined by God), and that human beings have no choice in the matter, or shall we say, have no freely willed actions in their life, is contrary to God’s sense of justice, and proves that He is devoid of mercy, particularly if certain humans may end up being cast in Hellfire for any length of time, or still worse, forever. If we rule out such a sinister plan as a disallowed state of affairs between the Creator and the created order, we may find a much more rational a relationship befitting a Merciful God that intelligent beings such as the human species are given free will, just as God himself has freely willed actions. But what is the relationship between God’s own will and the will of a created intelligent being such as us humans?

To understand this relationship we draw the analogy between God creating a human being and a human being building a computer from the ground up. This analogy correlates three types of intelligence: Divine intelligence, human natural intelligence, and a computer’s artificial intelligence. When we humans design and build a computer we select for it: its central operating unit (CPU), processor, motherboard, random access memory space, the size of its hard drives, etc., etc. In other words the free willing human selects for the (human-created) computer its overall domain of operations and defines for the computer a broad variety of actions that it can perform. We may load the computer then with as many software programs as the human creator wills, and even program the computer to turn on and off at certain times to perform any specific operations its human master wills it to perform. If a human can do all this, it is obvious that the human intelligence must be superior to that of the computer, and although a computer may perform certain algorithmic operations much faster than a human being can, the natural intelligence of the human master is still far superior to the artificial intelligence of the created machinery (the computer).

Now a similar hierarchy must also be the case between the Divine intelligence (the Creator or the Mastermind) and that of the human being (the created intelligence). God’s domain of choices (or the Divine free will) should be much more voluminous with abundant variety, including perceptions and possibilities far beyond those conceivable or imaginable by a human mind ( the created intelligence). When God created us He must of necessity define for each and every human being his or her domain of intelligence and consciousness, his or her DNA and hereditary qualities, his or her physical capabilities, psychological build and personality traits, etc., etc. In other words with these endowments by the Creator, God defines the domain of all possible actions any individual human may perform in his or her lifetime. Now God may be in a position to program that human to perform only certain activities, but that seems rather primitive, and indeed limiting of the degree of sophistication desired, and in fact pointless. The whole idea of creating a sophisticated human being with the highest degree of intelligence and consciousness among the created order is to empower that being in order to use his or her full potential of being free willing like God himself, but not quite. With God’s intelligence and consciousness still being far superior to that of a human being and with Him being uncreated, His will is absolute, and would seem to be unlimited. By contrast the human free will (if allowed by his or her Creator) would have to be free within the human intelligence and consciousness Operating domain, which renders it still bound or limited free will. If we then define the will of God as a Universal Set of choices (i.e. by definition the set of all possible sets) and because God created the human, and defined all possible choices or willed actions for that human, which must be implied in the process of creation in and of itself, then we may envision that the set of all possible willed actions that a human can make in his or her lifetime is a subset of that Universal Set of the Divine. This modeling of the willed actions of the Creator and created order fits elegantly and in fact lends itself to treatment by the mathematical set theory of Cantor as I have illustrated herein in Figure 7-1. In set theory every element of a subset is also an element common to the Universal Set. But what does that say in reality? It implies that when God created that human being, He was the Designer who chose of His own free will to endow that human with such a domain of choices that he or she can freely make. So the dots shown within the domain identifying a particular human being were previously willed by God in the process of creation, whence the Qur’anic statement: "But ye shalt not will except as Allah willeth." But now if God has that human being during his or her lifetime make any choices at any time uninhibited and uncontrolled by God’s own instantaneous desires, every human being would have a domain of freely willed actions. Such choices may be good or evil; aiming at success or failure; they may be creative or life-wasting; etc., etc. With such an allowance God may also consider that the sophisticated intelligent being whom He created, and endowed with free will (albeit a bound, rather than an absolute or unlimited free will) should be also assigned a sense of responsibility placed on every human’s shoulder which goes hand-in-hand with the awarding of free will. In fact Allah in the Qur’an refers to that as Al-Amanah meaning the entrusted responsibility shouldered by the human being.

In our portrayal of this mathemtical model shown in Figure 7-1 two humans may have their respective domains of free will overlapping if they make certain common or identical decisions. It is also possible that two humans may make choices in their respective life times that are entirely different. For example a human being living in the cave age would never entertain the thought of stealing a car, or giving five dollars in charity to a homeless person. Not only that there were no dollars in those days, but there were no homes either. Perhaps a caveless man may draw the sympathy of another to carry him off to his own cave away from the wind or snow. We are presenting here examples of certain decisions, which may not be available to any given human phase of existence in this world, simply because of environmental and/or temporal factors (see Figure 7-1).

In our mathematical modeling of the Free Will Doctrine there is also a place for the null set which is a set without any elements. A stillborn child who did not live to take any actions or make any decisions is a logical representative of this case of a human being. Also a prohibited state for a human being created by God is for his subset to protrude outside the Universal Set. This negates the notion of being created by God. Such a human being has possible choices that are entirely outside the Divine realm or domain of choices. The universal set then ceases to be Universal by definition. If the protruding subset choices include some that are not God’s, this then contradicts the part of the Qur’an 2:256 Verse of the Throne saying "His are all that is in the heavens and the earth." By the same token God does not expect a human being to make a free-willed decision that falls outside his or her dedicated domain of willed actions or subset. This aspect is specifically expressed in the Qur’an 2:286 The Cow Chapter as follows:

Allah tasketh not a soul with more than it can bear. It shall be requited for whatever good it hath earned, and whatever evil it hath deserved. Our Lord! Condemn us not if we forget, or fall into error; Our Lord! Lay not on us such a burden as Thou didst lay on those before us! Our Lord! Impose not on us that which we have not the strength to bear! Pardon us and grant us forgiveness. Have mercy on us. Thou art our Protector; help us against those who stand against faith.

With these words of prayer we conclude our presentation of the First Operating Principle of Islam comprised of the commandment of freedom of religion in combination with the Doctrine of Free Will as a pair of mutually complementing basic tenets of Islam.

image001.jpg

Figure 7-1   Mathmatical modeling of the Doctrine of Free Will As a twin component of the Commandment of Freedom of Religion with both comprising the First Operating Principle of Islam, per Qur’anic verses—2:256 Verse of the Throne; in the Cow Chapter, and 81:27-29 in the Cessation Chapter.

(2)   The Second Operating Principle of Islam (OPI2): Islam Builds Faithful Hearts; Not Godless Empires

One of the most unfair representations of Islam was a video broadcast of a recently produced Western Documentary aired on a United States television station with the title, Islam: an Empire of Faith. The offensive aspect that I find in this title is the word Empire. The subject Documentary included a series of interviews, narrations and commentaries by Western scholars, religious critics and media masters. This documentary production devoted no more than a few minutes (literally a few percents of its total playback time) to the history of early Islam; a period of Islam’s highest glory, at a time when devout Moslems enjoyed, and practiced high ethical standards, enjoined justice, and democratic values under the leadership of prophet Mohammad and the reigns of his earliest successors, namely: Abu Bakr, Umar Ibn Al-Khattab, Uthman Ibn Affan, and Ali Ibn Abi Talib (the prophet’s cousin). By contrast the same documentary devoted some 70% of its time to a much more detailed review of an Islamic Empire, which I personally consider to be the lowest point in the history of Islam: the Ottoman Empire. Having said so, the subject documentary title should have been more correctly: The Ottomans: an Empire of Failure. Admittedly the Europeans felt the imperial force and pressures by the Ottomans as they kept attempting to penetrate deeply into Europe over the course of several centuries, in order to spread Islam by the sword, but achieving very little, until finally the Ottoman Empire itself was brought down to its knees in World War I by the Western Allies. Its territories thereafter were broken up and colonized. Maps serving the Western powers’ interests were reportedly drawn at high tea time, and the Ottoman Empire, as of this writing, has been subdivided. Its territories came under control of an oppressive mix of European Neo-Colonialists, mostly Great Britain and France. Today the former Ottoman territories are under control of what I choose to call PAX Ameritanica (my coined acronym for PAX Americana + PAX Brittanica.) This is a military-for-profit contemporary alliance, or equivalently an evil enterprise bringing together old foes, joining forces as brothers in arms, but this time driven by greed and going after worldly possessions, namely the rich oil fields of the Middle East. Such strange bed fellows, assuming the role of Neo-Crusades set out to capture Islam, and use the religion to control the masses and set them up to fighting one another (such as warring Iraq and Iran, while the U.S. was shamefully supplying arms to both sides). This is a real sinister intent in international relations exploiting the poor and ignorant hijackers of Islam to self-destruct.

And now in order to justify even more elaborate imperialistic measures the Neo-Colonialists skillfully labelled the religion of God radical Islam. This is in fact the term used by the United States President, George W. Bush, in his 2006 State of the Union Address to the United States Joint Session of Congress, and to the American people. The allied British-American war on such a small nation such as Iraq, is a war of aggression, where embedded American and British contractors would be robbing a poor third-world nation and its people of their natural resources, which in this case consist mainly of crude oil. All this wickedness was flawlessly executed under a smoke screen of liberation, national security, disarming the Iraqi villains and terrorists, and elimination of weapons of mass destruction, etc., etc. The list of such lies is endless at this point, but the chain of falsehoods ended up most recently with the latest justification of such heinous violations of the International Law, when the U.S. President George W. Bush put it simply to the American people in his 2006 State of the Union Address as America’s addiction to oil. In my view President George W. Bush is oversimplifying a very complex global geopolitical transformation, which is barely showing up on the horizon, and is likely to remain with us for an unknown long term into the twenty-first century, which we shall demonstrate in this and the following Sections.

2.1   The Twenty First Century—The Best of Imperialism Has yet to Come: Transition From Antiquated Monarchial Empires to Virtual Empires; From On-site Colonialism to Agile Colonialism; and From Mediaeval Crusades to the Wolfowitz-Huntington-Bush-Blair Neo-Crusades.

What we have been witnessing in the final two decades of the twentieth century is that certain allied superpowers including the United States of America have been joining forces, often on a bilateral level aiming to replace the ancient empires, while as before they implement the same principles of hegemony and oppression. Ironically, this is a manifestation that the human history keeps repeating itself. Here PAX Ameritanica (or PAX Americana + PAX Brittanica) replaces antiquated Empires, such as the Roman Empire, the Zoroastrian, also known as the Persian Empire, or even the mediaeval crusades of allied kingdoms under the banners of the Catholic Church in service of the Pope. All such warring Empires, somehow always managed to exploit religion (or some concocted form thereof) in order to mobilize their blindfolded population, while accomplishing their monarchial hidden agendas of hunger for power, greed, and self enrichment.

But where are these empires now? Did anyone of the monarchs or individual instigators of such wicked acts of war-for-profit take any riches with him or her to the grave? Obviously not; they have all come and gone, risen and fallen, lived and died: The Romans, the Persians, the Ottomans, and most recently the British Empire, . . . . In fact the latter used to boast of being the Empire upon which the sun never sets. But now it shrivelled down to merely the British Isles, albeit with some military might of a declining superpower. Why and how did this happen to the British Empire? The answer is simple. It became economically unaffordable to maintain colonial troops on the ground in large numbers indefinitely anywhere in the world.

The latest arrival to the imperialists club is the United States of America, which is currently the greatest military superpower world-wide. This nation of nations was supposed to dissociate itself from colonialism and imperialism. At least that is what its founding fathers had in mind back in the days when the Americans struggled for their independence from the British colonialists during the American revolutionary war. The twentieth century in general, and the past three decades in particular brought about an unmistakable and sharp decline in the ethics of foreign policy of the United States Government. This is manifest in a drastic shift in its orientation towards imperialism, world-wide hegemony and oppression of certain small nations and ethnic groups, from the so-called Third World. Ironically, there exists no longer what used to be called the Second World. This latter term was a reference to the other evil empire, to use the former United States President, Ronald Reagan’s name-calling of the Soviet Union. This other evil empire recently bit the dust by totally disintigrating during the last decade of the twentieth century. The Soviet Union collapsed for no reason other than an inherent (built-in) failure of its political-economic system and tyrannical limitation of individual citizens’ freedom and lack of personal incentives which naturally motivate humans to improve their quality of life. So in reality the collapse of the Soviet Union took place in the early nineteen nineties driven by its own endemic fatal flaws (to no credit of Ronald Reagan). And with the Romans, the Persians, and the Ottomans long gone, there is no permanence for any empire which stands for injustice, tyranny and dictatorship, with dreams of hegemony and oppression. There should be lessons learned here for the United States of America, but will the people of this Country heed the message?

Of all superpowers that we considered in the foregoing discussion, the United States of America remains the only one still on a critical path. Noam Chomsky [57.1] in his book entitled Hegemony or Survival—America’s Quest for Global Dominance characterized the generally observed trend of foreign policy in America over the past century as a common doctrine handed down from one president to a succeeding president of a similar mind set and same outlook on life even if they were nearly one century apart. Here Chomsky writes [57.1]:

"The principle is ‘America as historical vanguard’: History has a discernible direction and destination. Uniquely among all the nations of the world, the United States comprehends and manifests history’s purpose. Accordingly, US hegemony is the realization of history’s purpose, and what it achieves is for the common good, the merest truism, so that empirical evaluation is unnecessary, if not faintly ridiculous. The primary principle of foreign policy, rooted in Wilsonian idealism and carried over from Clinton to Bush II, is ‘the imperative of America’s mission as the vanguard of history, transforming the global order and, in doing so, perpetuating its own dominance, guided by the imperative of military supremacy, maintained in perpetuity and projected globally.’"

The United States Society is being tested, in my view, by the Almighty God as to whether: It will stand for justice, and be a force for progress, peace and stability in the world, or will it go after more and more control of world resources, hegemony, imperialism, war crimes, and oppression. The recent course of events associated with the invasion of Iraq by PAX Ameritanica suggests a very low score for America on these accounts as Chomsky [57.2] continues:

"As for the goals, senior Middle East correspondent and analyst Youssef Ibrahim was no doubt oversimplifying when he identified them as bolstering the president’s popularity for short-term political gain and turning a ‘friendly’ Iraq into a private American oil pumping station. But there is good reason to believe that his observations at least point in the right direction. Maintaining a hold on political power and enhancing US control of the world’s primary energy sources are major steps toward the twin goals that have been declared with considerable clarity: to institutionalize a radical restructuring of domestic society that will roll back the progressive reforms of a century, and to establish an imperial grand strategy of permanent world domination. Compared with such ends, the risks may well seem insignificant."

That is where the free wills of the American voters are being tested individually by God. To any American who thinks that he, or she, is not accountable before God for his or her vote: think again; . . . Irregardless of anyone’s religious persuasion, this could very well be the most influential act of faith in God, and righteousness, that any American undertakes in his or her life time. This test of every American individual’s moral character will decide whether the American Empire will continue to rise, or is it time to take the deep dive. If the Americans have learned anything at all from prior history, they should always remember that permanence is only for God, as the Qur’an says "Allah: there is no God but He—The Ever-Living, The Self-Subsisting, Eternal." Qur’an 2:256.

2.1.1   Towards Virtual Empires

We may readily come to grips with the realization of what I will call in this book virtual empires of the twenty first century, if we consider in some detail the bilateral alliance which popped-in recently, namely that between the United States and Great Britain. Naturally the two countries were already having a strong bond through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But it is evident that the two countries have been pulling off to the side, like a conniving pair at the risk of alienating other NATO allies. Recently the two nations bilaterally mobilized their combined modern military forces for invading the small defenseless nation of Iraq. As I have already stated, in reality such an enterprise is but "a for-profit, military-industrial-media complex"; a Western monstrocity about which President Dwight David Eisenhower had warned the United States some forty years ago. Here is what Eisenhower said in his 1961 farewell address:

"This conjunction of an immense Military Establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the Federal Government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications . . . . In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compell the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together."

It is inconceivable to think that it was in service of God that the British-American virtual Empire kept popping in persistently over the past three decades. Within such a short time, this virtual Empire managed to wage three wars against small nations already, namely: (1) Invasion of the Faucklnd Islands with U.S. President Ronald Reagan helping Britain with intelligence information against Argentina; (2) The First Gulf War under George Bush, Senior in 1991; (3) The Second Gulf War masterminded by the former President’s son George W. Bush in 2003. During the British-Argentine war over the Faukland Islands, the United States President Ronald Reagan kept looking the other way during the raging imbalanced battles between Great Britain and Argentina in betrayal of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. It was obvious that President Reagan made his choice in favor of his Virtual Empire with the British. What this simply means is that the North American President abandoned the concept of solidarity within the Organization of American States altogether, in favor of Pax Ameritanica. The latter is not a conventional Monarchial Empire. But it is a textbook case of what I call a twenty-first-century Virtual Empire. For this alliance the Qur’an 5:2 [Chapter Al-Ma’idah, or "The Table Spread] addressing the faithful has this to say:

Cooperate with one another in righteousness and piety, and help not one another unto sin and aggression. and have fear of Allah, for He is stern in punishment.

And there is no question that PAX Ameritanica is an