East-West Sword and Word

By Anwar A. Abdullah

At dawn of this brave century: overshadowed either by the mirage of Last Man or Last armada of Microbes, the heart of humanity is being ripped apart by the rising complexion of Modernism. While Religionism is tearing throughout the heart of modernity and money-life; Mammonism, is plotting against our humanity, everything is hinting at the herald

• Language: English
• Publisher: URLink Print & Media, LLC
• Release date: Jul 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643675718

Anwar A. Abdullah

Spending half of his life in the EAST; Upper Mesopotamia in Kurdistan, and the rest in the West; namely in Scotland and later in Denmark; albeit after 12 years of high education in Biology, management of natural resources, and biotechnology along with 40 years of experiences, he is now a senior adviser on sustainable development. He has devoted 20 years of his life for drafting a single book on his long and painful search for truth, East & West.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

H. G. Wells concluded that ‘to laugh is to awaken’, and ‘a day without laughter’, Charlie Chaplin would remind us, ‘is a day wasted’, for ‘to truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it.’ And yet, as the modern search for truth is still shrouded in mystery, everyone is waiting for the last laugh. For, there is no certainty even today as to who is playing the clown in the rising artefacts of knowledge. Nor has it become possible for the man of science to make heads or tails of his search for truth. This will last so long as we may ask how much of a zero is zero. Whereabouts is the shoot and root of this and that vast universe? Ha ha, it is in the secret behind the raw beauty of a baby’s face and the wealth of love in a mother’s eyes. And while all the birds of passage wonder on why all things are caged in fours and still made to pulse in threes, they all laugh at the sacred secret of ‘a man’s number’ (Revelation 13:18). And more so, they laugh at the unfolding scientific fact that a distant galaxy and a DNA spiral share symmetry. And yet we are caught in the shimmering ocean of details that the technicalities of modern science are showering our minds with. The uphill task ahead is on how to unravel the mystery of humans’ search for truth. While science has been playing at cross purposes, almost hard facts have nested in the heart of woolly mysticism. All the same, a dervish—or ‘Darwæsh’, from a Persian word for ‘doorway’—is the real master of his laughing matter, being admired so often by kings and lay folk as a chanter of purity.

Thus, for a great deal of my life, I have strived to pin down the essence of truth, whether it is of scientific or spiritual nature. And my experiences have ripened now into a conclusion. The real task for me, then, is to narrate a relevant discussion that stems from a full satisfaction of reason and approval of my heart. Such trials as that inflicted upon me, with an appeal to grasp the essence of humanity, have often sought nectar in silent wisdom. Shakespeare shows concern for this in the line ‘The silence often of pure innocence.’ So I have much work to do to know my species; but first I must know myself, for every time the scientist in me was silenced, a Sufi would awaken to the challenge. And thus I have now to allow myself one claim, yet I do so much more as a human than as a scientist. The fundamental issue is, as always, moral progress, with which I am primarily concerned. Ultimately this would entail setting the stage for an inquiry into a vexing question: for how long do modern intellects intend to pluck up courage in tackling the state of affairs that is affecting all mankind? Verily, we are still in waiting for the ‘happy turning’ of H. G. Wells, where ‘the human mind may be in a phase of transition to a new; fearless, clear-headed way of living in which understanding will be the supreme interest of life, and beauty a mere smile of approval.’ ‘Without ethical culture,’ wrote Albert Einstein, ‘there is no salvation for humanity.’

East or West, home is best. But even still, who is at home? ‘And if my wisdom should someday forsake me; alas’, wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘it loveth to fly away! –may my pride fly with my folly.’ Time and time again my thoughts are assailing me back to the ancient wisdom, which still asserts that by going far-east you will end in the West. In my search for real home, I should oblige henceforth to recall all human insights and precious, rather powerful, impulses across the sweep of time and space: of the great wisdom of Tagore and Maulãna Rumi, of Krishna and Mahatma Gandhi, of Lao Tzu and Buddha, of Shakespeare and Emerson, of Hugo and Sir Bacon, of Omer Khayyam and Al-Kindi, of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, of Einstein and Wells, of Zarathustra and Hegel, and of so many noble minds alike, whom I have gladly employed as guides in this voyage. Even those noble minds themselves could not escape the silent anguish of sorrows; nor could they wholly flee the terrible experiences under the shadow of sword: ‘And I, even I, turned to see wisdom and madness and folly; for what can the earthling man do who comes in after the king’ (Ecclesiastes 2:12). Virtually, they ought to bespeak almost one dream and dwell apart over there, under the shadows of reasoned truth.

And while the man of science has long vied for power over Nature and to overcome humans’ destiny on Earth, he cannot as yet induce the evolution of understanding that has long been sought by our noble minds. This is a time of extraordinary paradox; just as moderns are beginning to reap the benefits that new technologies and informative know-how have brought about, they are alas facing an illusion! A dreadful drought looms over modern hearts. Even for the living planet and all fauna and flora, though silent, they are furious beyond endurance. Long before the notion made by Emerson that ‘the near explains the far’, echoes of Egyptian wisdom stated, ‘as above, as below.’ Whether we are peering outward to the distant horizons of the universe or riding out the wavy storm downward into the deepest core of atomic centrality, the images mirror each other as auras of primordial realms of vibratory song. In either, it is at the heart of the divine argument that man is destined to confront the portent of God (Koran 41:53). Likewise, for many arguments that will become clear in the text ahead, a new sensitive awareness appeals for great courage by all moderns amidst what Tagore once named ‘crisis in civilization’ to confront a sharp question on whether the deadly serpent of superstition, bred of fear and ignorance, is still alive among us. Alas, it posed a harder question on whether we do understand what we know.

To that end, creating a single book in my life has been a personal voyage of many discoveries. It has all but confirmed the dark matter of our ignorance, which seemingly exceeds the amount found in the universe. Out of this delusion, Einstein insisted, ‘We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.’ And yet, ever since Socrates, the issue has remained the same: how to make men realise their ignorance. We have determined all but how to compel them to face facts. I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance. Even a superhero like Gilgamesh should have to endure the brutal fact of human limitation. Albert Einstein would go further to unmask the crisis. Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And I’m not sure about the former. In our wandering on Earth, truth is our native home, and though it is not romantic, it is almost fair enough to comfort our conscience. Henry D. Thoreau urged once, ‘Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.’ Here, perhaps, Hugo would complain: ‘You do not love the harshness of truth; Jesus loved it. And so did the sage Bidpai wonder before on how it could be possible for man to speak some truth’? ‘Truth’, according to Hegel’s logic, ‘is the Whole’, and the absolute truth is enshrined in the whole.

So now, albeit against the outcry of Gell-Mann on who dares to take a crude look at the whole? I shall dare to adventure and weave my book in letters: a good yarn from the East, a good yarn from the West, one by one, under the pattern of all patience. And I should hereby confirm my gratitude and appreciation for each of our fellow intellects for narrating their social thoughts and scientific discoveries in countless pages of man-made literature that served to make this book possible. Thanks again to every modern seeker of truth in his or her longings and in whatsoever is the sincerity behind his or her search for truth.

Dr. Anwar A. Abdullah

Barzanji

Denmark

CHAPTER 1

FROM HOLY CONFLICT TO RELIGIONISM

Since this earthly life was suffused from the very beginning with the blood of Abel (Habil)—spilled with the furious justifications of Cain (Qabil), against the dreams of his brother—the march of civilization has been a painful process. Reason, as eternal manna, has come to rescue mankind from the misery of its imperfection, albeit its deeds are blighted with greed. In the minds of men, since reason alone has its own limitations, desires and wants have been often kept alive by vast forces beyond individual control and understanding. Judging through the prism as such, even wise Aristotle could not intellectually civilise an earthly force like Alexander. Nor did the Platonic wisdom of Albert Einstein allow us moderns to avoid the ‘plague-spot of civilization’—war. And that is how the glorious men of Cain have easily been lured into the brutality of progress—the sickness of war, which no civilization could ever cure.

Professor James H. Breasted wrote, ‘The World War has now demonstrated the appalling possibilities of man’s mechanical power of destruction. The only force that can successfully oppose it is the human conscience.’⁷ In Eastern thoughts, however, ‘power’ and ‘force’ have two distinct meanings, and this essential difference merits attention here. It might be reasonable to remark that human conscience is the only power that can successfully oppose man’s mechanical force of destruction, for it is the force of sword that has often sought primacy over the power of the word and justice. The main theme of these essays incorporates the way all things run in one motion within a network of multi-relation. In the study of great events and of men, we may observe the cause-and-effect linkage between. But of the nature of great men and crucial events many opinions have been held. Nothing seems to furnish a reply to history’s sharpest question: which one is the more praiseworthy element? Certainly we know how men take part in events, but we are never likely to know for certain how the great men of substance are shaped by the critical measures of events. For his suffering for his belief, moral sensibility honoured Abel as a grand principal. That, at least, is the received wisdom. This is quite simply because a prince is nothing in presence of a principle, as argued Hugo.²⁹ Emerson went so far as to say that nothing can bring you peace, but the triumph of principles.⁵²

Tracing the evolution of war from its prehistoric dawn up to over-organised wars among nations of modern times is a painful task. ‘But as tribes expanded and evolved into states,’ wrote strategist Robert Greene, ‘it became all too apparent that war had too many costs, that waging it blindly often led to exhaustion and self-destruction, even for the victor.’ ²⁴ Neither the leaders of armies (strategoi) nor our strategic thoughts could rescue mankind from the costly plight of war. And though the mass slaughter of others is often justified by such things, in each of its ceaseless episodes both mankind and precious values have to be thoroughly consumed. To add to the dilemma, mankind has often been driven in what is seemingly a vicious circle of ‘Warriors make war, and/or war makes warriors.’¹⁵ As such, it lures men on whilst exhausting their tribes. The oldest Persian word for warriors is ‘nar’, which also simply means ‘man’. Humans are what they were. As H. G. Wells wrote, Men made love and tribes made war.⁶⁵ In his apologies for war, Sun Tzu argued that ‘Every animal with blood in its veins and horns on its head will fight when it is attacked.’⁶³

While all the justifications made for waging wars within mankind failed to plead not guilty to tribal madness, and though war is of a tribal origin, it is the master force of all. Within such a heroic and patriotic theme, Kenneth Clark stated, It was achieved by fighting. All great civilizations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.¹⁰ And so was the enthusiastic comment of Miss Gertrude Bell upon a warm welcome by a mountainous host tribe: ‘Thank God! We too are a fighting race.’ Here the definition made by Samuel P. Huntington that ‘human history is the history of civilizations’ seems at first glance beyond dispute. Arguably, yet admitting the distinction blurred by the haze of iron swords that consumed most of its historic words, his later conclusive remark may overcome the difficulty of venturing a definition: ‘Civilizations are the ultimate human tribes, and the clash of civilisations is tribal conflict on a global scale.’³⁰ Acquainted with the necessary evils of war, mankind is the author of ongoing civilizations and of their written histories. And this has hitherto bequeathed to us moderns all the diverse accumulated aspects of material, cultural, and moral civilization. And still the bulk of this achievement is overshadowed by the legacy of the Cain-Abel divide, such that even today not a single civilization can afford a remedy.

It may be one of the weaknesses of the art of written history that it has made its historical men too heroic. Even Gilgamesh (2700 BC.), ‘the father, the hero’, was destined to suffer from the fear of death. Quite traceable to major events are the roles of heroic men, though such roles hardly seem significant compared with the magnitude of these events. Alas, unknown heroes are often buried under the darkened ashes of political and economic cost. And though men have seldom had much mastery over historic events, history owes a great deal to the unknown common folk. Alas, if the art of hunting men demands skills, killing them spurs thrilling tales. This simple fact may lend its irony to the question of all ages: If history, as Hegel thought, has its own plot, then of what is the web of history composed? Is it made of personal struggle among others or over others, and all that have been driven inward and outward by these ceaseless events of earthly drama day and night? Since everything exists in dynamic relation to something else, the history of humanity is an interweaving of unseen threads. It is all but made up of ideals and reality, strengths and weaknesses, morals and ideas, creative and destructive wills, taking and giving, sacrifices and massacres, virtues and vices, and written and unwritten key moments. As such, the march of humanity is of one motion, yet its relations and interactions are numerous. Tolstoy stated, ‘Though the surface of the ocean of history seemed motionless, the movement of humanity continued as uninterrupted as the flow of time.’⁵⁹

According to Toynbee, among the many races that had roamed around, and all through the civilised stage set up by the ancient tribal states of the great rivers, it was the two stormy waves of nomads who were the most striking.⁶⁰ Those were the nomads of the Eurasian Steppe and the Afrasian nomads of the North Arabian Steppe—albeit both existed at the dawn of second millennium BC. From the dusty Eurasian storm, the mighty nomadic Aryan horsemen came, whilst from the Afrasian lands there came the Semitic nomadic camel-men—Arabs and Hebrews—who had acquired the earthly means for exploring unconquerable space and time. Indeed, nothing could mask the irony in the relation between such an outlandish group of nomads (Huns or ‘la Bedouine’) and the mighty civilised empires that were used to ceaselessly extract wealth from the surrounding men and nature. And while the Hunnish people of the steppes imposed their primitive will upon civilised China, the Semitic wanderers of the Near Eastern deserts made life much tougher for the prime civilization of Sumeria. Whether by the Babylonian city walls, the Chinese Great Wall, or the later Roman Hadrian’s Wall, the barbarian tribes were always those being kept back. And while the strongholds could keep the less civilised groups of mankind at bay, those ancient civilizations always looked down on the rest of the world from a perspective of urbanity versus barbarism.

By and large, the call for war at those civilised core areas was an enviable anthem among warrior dynasties used to a life of constant warfare. Seemingly, those who bent to the dust were interested in what destiny could have had in store for them. None of them, however, was as yet aware of war would entail. And still, over a span of little less than two millennia (from the thirteenth century BC to the seventh century AD) during human history, the triple script of monotheistic religion was recorded for those referred to in the last script as ‘Ahl al-Kitãb’ (the people of the scriptures).

The oldest of these three most influential religions is Judaism, which came about after the revelation of the law, or the sacred scripture to Moses (Mosheh), in the late thirteenth century BC. A distinct Jewish ethical identity and religion had first emerged among the ibh’rî (or ibh’rîm)—the Hebrews. They were landless immigrants of semi-nomadic tribes from ancient Ur in southern Mesopotamia. Their patriarchal forefather was the Semitic A’bram (1900 BC), later Abraham. (See Genesis 17:5.) And all it had its beginning when God uttered His first words to him: ‘Go your way out ’ (Genesis 12:1). We must reckon the emergence of Abraham (PBUH) as one of the great events in the history of monotheism. Thus it was the next hundred years that saw him engaging in his frequent wandering all over. From Ur of the Chaldeans in Lower Mesopotamia, he went to Haran (Harän) in Upper Mesopotamia, and from Haran to Canaan, and then to Egypt, and back again to Canaan. Thereafter he maintained his keen longing southwards all through what has become later known Abraham’s Valley, and down to the barren Mecca, where his first son, Ishmael (Ishmã‘il), had settled along with his mother, Ha’gar. Moses was among b’nê yis^ra’el—the Sons of Israel (or Ya’qôbh [Jacob], who can be traced backed to Isaac (Yishaq), the second son of the patriarch Abraham, and then from Sar’ai, later to be called Sarah by Jehovah (Genesis 17:15).

While the so-called early high cultures in ancient societies of the great plains of Egypt and Mesopotamia had gained an unassailable edge over the rest of nomadic tribes in their empires, a historic ascendancy was then recorded for ibh’rîm as a Jewry. This majestic call represents one of the great moments in the history of mankind, as it is an enduring hallmark of the divine law that brought about monotheism. For it is the written law which has enforced the notion of a universal God (Yeho. wah’, Yahweh, or Yhew [He causes to be]).¹² Judging from Biblical words, the true God, Yahweh (later Jehovah), is the Creator and the virtue Truth: ‘You must not take up the name of Jehovah your God in a worthless way’ (Exodus 20:7).⁴⁵ As such, these core words proceed to highlight an earthly highest virtue: honour your father and your mother in order that your days may prove long upon the ground that Jehovah, your God, is giving you. (See Exodus 20:12.)

To make the claim of reason in the face of earthly reality, the Jews must hold to these behaviours with firmness: One must not murder. One must not commit adultery. One must not steal. One must not testify falsely as a witness against one’s fellow man. (See Exodus 20:12–16.) Further, they ought to refine all the following behaviours on the torch of wisdom, out of worry for the subtle venom of earthly desires that do often disturb the norms of attitudes: One must not desire one’s fellow man’s house. One must not desire one’s fellow man’s wife, slave man, slave girl, bull, ass, or anything else that belongs to one’s fellow man. (See Exodus 20:17.) Those core words were carved on tablets of stone. As soon as God finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, he proceeded to give Moses two tablets of the testimony—tablets of stone written on by God’s finger. (See Exodus 31:18.)

It should be recognised here that in many respects b’nê yis^ra’el was neither culturally nor materially superior to the dominant powers in the lands of the great rivers. According to Professor Breasted, ‘The social and moral development achieved by the ancient oriental societies long before Hebrew literature arose.’⁷ So much that is unexpected, however, occurs in history as a result of the demands of progress on humanity. This is indeed of an elementary value over time. Ultimately, mankind could not tear itself away from the knowledge of God, and civilizations should give way to such spiritual demands—which God made to carry out His plan. All this was just beginning, somewhat against normal expectations, when a great deal of reasoning began to strengthen, and monotheism began looming large among the past wanderers. In one historic stroke of irony, a child of destiny was able to beat Pharaoh while he was growing up right under the nose of the authoritative figure, just after the lost infant Moses was rescued by the pharaoh’s wife, Asiya. But the rather rotten empires confused many gods, from which the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten (1353–1336 BC) had chosen the sole god—‘Oh living Aten.’²³ Such a salutation might not have silenced the fact that slavery grew from the core of these early high cultures. Seemingly, much of the accumulated scriptural and narrative traditions of b’nê yis^ra’el is a result of that historical episode of unhappiness. They are fated to be subsumed by each single tragic seventy-year period at different glorious time intervals of various great imperia. And that is what constitutes the ‘sore six’ in Egypt and the single last epoch in Babylon.

Again, however, the nomadic Hebrew herdsmen cooperated to create something grandly sacred. Their destiny was to be inspired by so many prophets through six centuries of holy times. And the narratives they brought about regarding a given age of bitter times were presented as the aftermath, wrath, and fury of those against what was called ‘A holy people to Jehovah your God.’ Understandably so, the cavity of that wound was deep indeed. Their life was made of such wounds. They took refuge in a covenant printed in their hearts while darting from one land to the next, ending up as impoverished exiles at the Gate of the Gods – Babylon. H. G. Wells wrote, ‘It is not so much the Jews who made the Bible as the Bible which made the Jews’.⁶⁵ And still, how did those generations come and go? Did they ever forget that law? Ah, had the sacred text been best kept hidden in the hearts? Much of the Hebrew text of the law had endured a long period of oral transmission before it was committed to writing. The current version, according to De Vaux, ‘may retain some elements of the original book of Covenant "berîth", and from which Moses reads.’¹² The fact is, as lamented by Sir Kenyon, ‘owing to the Jewish habit of destroying manuscripts as soon as they had suffered from wear and tear, no early copies of the Hebrew text have survived’.³² According to Mead,³⁸ there is one certainty here that the current textual traditions seem to be written from the viewpoint of much a later period than their ultimate source. All in all, the Jews had learnt much of their patterns of wisdom as an outcome of rather silent historical sorrows deeply felt over times, without which nothing could have lulled them gradually closer to one God. But still they are so proud that ‘Jehovah is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, not of all the world’—so wrote Sir Kenyon.³²

It is of little wonder, then, that the received wisdom of the cited core words of the law, as they have come down to us, is mantled with characteristics that mostly rest in the accounts given to Yahweh: regretful (Exodus 32:14), manly (Exodus 15:3), warlike (Numbers 10:35–36, 21:14), and jealous (Exodus 34:14). That is, in its own way, just as striking as the most controversial statement, which is crowned with the emphasis of a punishing God (Ezra 5:12; 10:14). Above all, the emerging reality was too much for their historical pride. In their eyes, it was an utmost humiliation inflicted as a last epoch upon the elite nation by unholy Babylon. For some, their thoughts are still dwelling under the shadow of such immense shock. And more would have emerged than faded out in their bitter complaint at such a vicissitudinous fate: ‘Flee out of the midst of Babylon, and provide escape each one for his own soul. Do not be rendered inanimate through her error’ (Jeremiah 51:6). For others, however, that is a destiny—the silence after the word. In his wisdom, Professor G. Steiner wrote, ‘The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a home land.’ ⁵⁵ It has almost gained the selfsame echo in the European Ulysses: ‘They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely, and you can see the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the earth to this day.’³¹

Born in Galilee and brought up as a Jew, Jesus of Nazareth announced himself thusly: ‘I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright morning star’ (Revelation 22:16). Apparently the teachers of Israel, the chief priests, and the older men could not universally receive what was ushered by Jesus, even though, according to Muir, his mission to them was ‘To confirm their Scriptures, to modify and lighten some of the burdens of the Mosaic Law, and to recall them to the service of God.’⁴² To that end, the Teacher of Truth seemed too eager to deepen materialistic Judaism with intellectual morality via a transformation of Judaism into moral law (Matthew 5:3–48; 6:1–34; 7:1–27). Even so, the Jews themselves could have had somewhat of a different worry: the coming, by which the realm of the Jews would be defaced, leading to its cessation. And thus Jesus Christ had to confirm time and again his mission: ‘Do not think I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I came, not to destroy, but to fulfil’ (Matthew 5:17). As nothing seemed to materialise in his teachings, the universal moral law brought by him was intended to take them beyond the earthly realm: ‘You are from realms below; I am from realms above’ (John 8:23). Thus has appeared the first conclusion as to be drawn from Jesus’s own sayings. He was still hard put to direct his fellow men as to their ascendance to the kingdom of heaven via brotherhood on Earth. His sayings seemed to dispatch words in a mystical manner that obliged him to often illustrate them for ordinary folk, and so they were explained even for his twelve disciples.

To the Romans who had stormed Jerusalem, nothing seemed to deter them from such utterances: ‘There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.’³² Seemingly, the more important facts of the time did suggest a situation in which the common Jews were still waiting for a Mes.si´ah or prophet king to come. ‘Mes.si´ah is coming, who is called Christ … the Saviour of the world’ (John 4:25, 42), and ‘who is Christ the Lord, in David’s city’ (Luke 2:11). As H. G. Wells argued, ‘But it is not only the intense tribal patriotism of the Jews that Jesus outraged. They were a people of intense family loyalty, and he could have swept away the narrow and restrictive family affections in the great flood of the love of God.’ ⁶⁵ For the teachers of Israel, however, there seemed to be nothing on which the messiahship of Jesus could rest. Ultimately they ended up in a clash of arguments, and Jesus Christ utterly tore them down in his denouncement: ‘But you do not believe, because you are none of my sheep. My sheep listen to my voice and I know them, and they follow me’ (John 10:26–27). In fact, their objection was due to an accusation of Jesus claiming himself to be the king of the Jews or of being another teacher (Rab .bo’ni). Essentially, as Spengler explained, ‘The Romans then an ageing people, cannot possibly have understood what was at issue for the Jew in trial of Jesus.’⁵⁴ As the crisis deepened, flames leaped up, and thus ‘Pilate took water and washed his hands before the crowd saying: I am innocent of the blood of this [man]’ (Matthew 27:24). In reality, ‘the Gospels, after all, have not seemingly been devoted only for the holy people, but for the whole human race’²⁷ and for ‘people of all the nations’ (Matthew 28:19).

What the Christ uttered as a general rule, or canon of the law, had not been spelled out in an original written form either. The proposed existence of the Aramaic primitive gospel was not documented, and otherwise the sources were pure memories of the witnesses. What have come down to us is the Greek scriptures of the Bible, the name of which literally comes from Greek as the plural of "biblion (book) and the diminutive of biblos (papyrus). The term Bible" refers to any book containing the sacred writings. According to Mead (1902) ‘the Bible was first of all printed in Latin translation (in 1462), and that upwards of half a century elapsed before Cardinal Ximenes produced his costly editio princeps of the original text.’³⁸ To that end, Professor G. Steiner has stated, ‘Tyndale’s Bible is the first of our scholarly texts: the Old Testament is founded on the Hebrew, and the New Testament is a translation from the Greek, as edited by Erasmus in 1516 and 1522.’⁵⁵ In this arena, early attempts directed to record the life of Jesus were many – a fact confirmed by St. Luke in the prologue to his Gospel (Luke 1:1–2). The four at hand are the very historical accounts of the life of Jesus and were ‘most probably written in Egypt, in the reign of Hadrian.’ And perhaps this was the case with Matthew, who ‘published his Gospel in Hebrew.’³⁸ In three of them, Jesus is the ‘Teacher of Truth’. In John’s Gospel, however, ‘Jesus is the truth’ (John 14:6). According to Sir Kenyon (1940), ‘If no single manuscript and no one type of text can be shown to have preserved a textual tradition uncontaminated from its source, no single manuscript or type of text can be considered to monopolise the truth.’³² A rather gentle press upon the breasts of holy writ should yield true milk – the ‘Words of God’ that were overshadowed by Jesus’ doings. After being circulated among the decent followers, these were to grow out as the Canonical Gospels of four different congregational traditions.

Perhaps what seems most likely to deserve our attention here is the emerging conceptual idea of fatherhood. It might explain the most controversial state of affairs in monotheism. And this longing of the Jews for ‘the God of the Father’ is indeed ‘the most important aspect of the religion of the patriarchs.’¹² Now, the word ‘Rab’, from Hebrew, or ‘Rabb’, from Arabic (literally ‘Lord’ or ‘God’), can also in its literal sense be sought for a manifestation of ‘the father of the family’. All the same, the family element seems to be present in the Eastern memory, and as Albright argued, it is of an ancient origin as far as ‘the divine triads of ancient near east, usually consisting of father, mother, and son.’¹ Little wonder, then, that the whole idea was nourished again to trace down the nature of Jesus Christ – whether he is of the substance of the Father or not. ‘The mysteries of Trinity and Incarnation, wrote Edward Gibbon, ‘appear to contradict the principle of the divine unity. In their obvious sense they introduce three equal deities, and transform the man Jesus into the substance of the son of God’.²² Once again, with such a spiritual longing for that that caring God, the notion of ‘God of the Father’ could have been assimilated into an absolute Fatherhood – the ‘one Father, God’ (John 8:41). And yet one must be careful in accepting the terms of reference as such. For in Jesus’ reply to the devil, it is written, ‘It is Jehovah your God you must worship, and it is to him alone you must render sacred service’ (Luke 4:8). Let alone the Biblical notion of the omnipresent God, which seems to capture existence as a whole across time and space: ‘I am the Al’pha and the O’mega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end’ (Revelation 22:13).

The birth of yet another monotheistic religion would then take place in a geographical spot with rather poor soil – Mecca, which was then in the Arabian Peninsula. The historic fact that divine wisdom often orchestrates crucial events into certain turning points is rather appealing. While the powerful Roman and Sassanid Empires were mastering the state affairs of men and of the natural wealth on Earth. Neither the inhabitants of the sands nor their insignificant land seemed interesting enough to be brought under direct attention. In such featureless land, however, humble and rather scattered Arabic tribes would undergo a spiritual trial. This momentum birthed Islam, whereby people from various races came together in a spiritual melting pot that could transfer their earthly identity beyond all tribal bounds into an Ummah-al-Islam. It marked a new era of spiritual development with an emphasis shifted to the concept of the One God – the Lord of the Worlds, the God Allah – to replace the old dogma of the God of one nation. Regarding that, we should bear in mind that Yahweh has another name. In the old text, there is the Hebrew expression ‘ha-El .o.him’, which is the Hebrew title El .o.him. This is also the plural number of the word ‘El .o’ah’, which means ‘God’.⁴⁵ Perhaps the name El .o’ah might justify the utterance of Jesus: ‘E’li, E’li’ (Matthew 27:46). And as even the name suggests, it is more appealing to the name Allah. Here, ‘the pluralis excellentiae or maiestatis’ of ‘El .o.him’ would sum up the mightiness of God, which is also closely related to the plural pronoun ‘We’ in the Koranic Script. In another idiom, we may say that the God of Battles could be recognised thence as the God of mercy. The last script has almost confirmed that for the common caring God, and its manifesto stands out as the divine contract: ‘Your Lord hath prescribed for Himself mercy’ (Koran 6:54).

Reading into its Biblical scripts, monotheism seems to lay down yet another historical criterion: ‘Indeed, the Axe is already in position at the root of the trees’ (Luke 3:9). This is the perfect justice of heaven: ‘You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its strength, how will its saltiness be restored’ (Matthew 5:13). And a branch should thence grow out of Abraham’s roots, throughout his prime seed of Ishmã‘IL. Quite so, we should bear in mind that the following person in its historical significance seemed to be a reflection of Israel (Servant of God El) (Genesis 35:10; Isaiah 44:1). Evidently, monotheism was about to embark on another wave of transformation so that to break this concept down, and to substitute for it a form of non-racial umma in which each individual is ‘Abd Allâh’ (servant of God Allah). And the matter of fact is that truth is no longer bending for a historical personage, as Abd Allâh is not from the chosen nation, but he or she can be any human being from anywhere on the earth. And thus, what Christianity initiated before Islam would proliferate into individuality that is evolved in its ultimate worthiness of self-respect and out of participation and responsibility in the common concerns of mankind. It marks a turning point in monotheistic development under the sovereignty of the mighty Ar-Rahmãn.

By the early seventh century (AD 609), both of the Holy Scriptures were restored and embodied in a third scripture, the Koran, as a ‘Final Revelation’ granted to Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Its early collection by Zaid bin Thabit, just two to three years after the prophet’s death, is undisputed. And the textual script, which has become known as Uthman’s Script, is still in the hand of every Musulman worldwide. Despite the common anticipation of the ‘Coming One’ foretold in the script of the Jews – the Mes .si’ah (Deuteronomy 18:15), the Jews rejected Jesus as the coming Mes .si’ah. Exactly so is Parqaleeta, or the Comforter, in that of the Christians: ‘When the one arrives, the spirit of the truth, he will guide you into all the truth’ (John 16:13). Muhammad, ‘the Prophet who can neither read nor write, whom they will find described in the Taurat and the Gospel (which are) with them’ (Koran 7:157), has since been questioned by both the Christians and the Jews as the ‘Seal of Prophets’! Apart from the sacred notion that the scripture cannot be nullified, at the root of the argument is then the question of why the Koran is to be regarded as a final holy writ. Hints at an answer run throughout many Koranic suras and ayat. These altogether hold that the last script is not superior in kind to the others, inasmuch as all three books are spoken of as the Word of God. The former revelation, the law (‘Taurat’ or ‘Torah’), and the universal moral law (‘Injil’) are to be believed in collectively as the Word of God by all the faithful of various sects. Perhaps more important is the idea that the Koran has completed the revelation. Islam has thus transformed the human community, and the detailed foundations of a universal religion have been laid down. Through this scripture, the human community will transition from tribal status into non-racial umma. The argument is mounted further to declare the Koran as the final book, yet it should be under the eternal care (Koran 15:9).

Once again, heaven in its most enduring form has been granted to nomadic herdsmen or semi-nomadic folks who are of so little account even as to have left no literature behind. Ultimately this has become an urge to every materialistic civilization ever since being first built by Cain (Genesis 4:17–22). In due course of enlightening those neighbouring civilised farmers, the herders of the ancient Orient had to ache much about the moral element of progress. And as a matter of fact, it is the monotheistic religions of such a truly universal faith that have indeed changed the course of history. This phenomenon is known by a term coined by H. G. Wells – ‘nomadisation of civilisation.’⁶⁴ But to tackle the question of who first taught the existence of only one God,¹² Moses was not the first monotheist. It is apparent that the ‘destruction of the gods’ belongs more to Abraham than Moses (Koran 21:57–67). The common theme is not about who is to become the salt of the earth. Rather it is about the One God – namely Allah or Elõah. The eternal quest beloved by all Sufis is rather a longing for the merit of the core words of the One God than that of certain men of prayer. For them, the question remains: if it is all about the oft-forgiving God, why has affinity for the selfsame God generated more hatred and envy than love for all mankind?

Thus coming back to the initial source of this long-standing problem between the W and E of ‘WE’, one of the arguments put forward for separating the Western civilization from the age-old civilizations in the East is the Greco-Roman legacy. It has been widespread though a questionable assumption, however, that Western civilization and its culture are merely an extension of the Greco-Roman one. If one is used to hearing the Roman and Greek periods referred to as high cultures, one would thus be confronted suddenly by the historic fact that there were still earlier ones, which were called early high cultures. Certainly, writing was among the greatest inventions in mankind’s history, and the early high cultures both in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt are the taproot that strikes deep into the dawn of our recorded history. Recently, Robinson has argued that even today an extinct script, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Babylonian cuneiform, or the glyphs of the ancient Maya of Central America, may strike Westerners as little short of miraculous and bizarrely different from their own alphabetic scripts.⁵³ We have long since come to acknowledge that the Greeks, apart from their philosophy and rationalism, and the Romans, with their secular law, were heavily influenced by the Near Eastern civilizations.

Seemingly, the best of East and West owe their existence to an achievement of the fourth millennium BC – the so-called urban revolution of the Sumerians, which created civilization in the Land of Two Rivers, Mesopotamia. To that end, attempts at going back any farther than the Sumerian epoch have often been stymied by the difficulty of accurately determining when history detached from prehistory. Speaking of that, over six millennia ago, like all the pioneers, the Sumerian brown wave came to strike the rich southern shores of Mesopotamia. A tide during their voyage led them to wash their feet on the wild shores of Eastern land. And what their pens wrote down reached us; alas, the rest was perhaps told without aid of pen or tongue and thus passed away with the same ocean current that brought them to the shore. And even regarding ancient Egyptian, ‘It is believed that the people who carried this culture came into the Nile Valley from the Red Sea by way of the River hammamat and settled in Upper Egypt, from where they spread southwards along the Nile.’⁵⁰

The breakthrough to civilization was recorded in Mesopotamia; so was the conclusion by Landsberger.³³ Even for the ancient Greeks, whose achievement was a lamp for mankind, dating the beginning of history was bound identifying the first appearance of usable written sources in the Tigris-Euphrates river valley and Nile Valley alike. Among other ancients, the Greeks were already under the influence of the written culture of Mesopotamian cuneiform. And if technological, economical, and cultural advances were keys to the rise of civilization, so was its birth in the fourth millennium BC, and the authors of this whole development were the Sumerians. In fact, Babylon and Assyria were the land that stretched northward from Sumer, whence the bringers of civilization came. The hieroglyphs and hieratic of ancient Egypt, invented c. 3000 BC, was seldom adapted to write other languages. In this it contrasts with the cuneiform script of the relatively decentralised multilingual Mesopotamia. Early Egyptian civilization seems to have been influenced by Mesopotamia, although there is no great temporal difference between the emergences of both. Mesopotamian civilization is demonstrably older and more original than Egyptian civilization in nearly every instance. The Sumerian language – sumeri, or sumeru – could be learned only through the medium of the Semitic Akkadian. So for nearly three millennia, Sumerians were followed by the languages of their cultural heirs: Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and up to a dozen more, including scriptural Hebrew and Aramaic, all written in the Sumerian way. The Sumerians, a brown people of unknown origin who spoke a language unrelated to any other known language, did perhaps come from the South before 3000 BC, presumably across the sea.¹, ¹⁸, ³³, ³⁴, ⁴³, ⁴⁷

The human knowledge bequeathed by Mesopotamian cuneiform shed its seeds westward via Syria, northward to Anatolia, and Eastward as far as the Indus Valley. The Babylonian Empire was continued by the Assyrian one, the Assyrian empire by the Persian one, and so forth.³⁴ The Indus civilization, without any doubt, wrote Nissen,⁴⁷ came into being only about one thousand years after the Babylonian civilization, and it most probably did not develop without the Babylonian model. McNeil³⁶ has gone further, stating that Mesopotamian stimulus hastened the development of the Egyptian and Indus civilizations until they arrived at an inner perfection and balance, which inhibited further borrowing from outside. Alternatively, Spengler⁵⁴ argued that all that the astronomical, medical, and juristic knowledge the Talmud contains is exclusively of Mesopotamian origin. According to H. G. Wells, ‘The Babylonian captivity civilised them and consolidated them. They returned aware of their own literature and acutely self-conscious and political people.’⁶⁵ Farther afield in the East, Gavin Menzies confirmed that ‘Chinese astronomers had well over two thousand year’s experience of recording of events in the night sky. They had noted the appearance of a new star at 1300 BC.’ ³⁹

According to Bowle, the foundation of cities and formulation of law, the creation of a bureaucratic tradition, and the advent of organised society occurred not in Europe but in Mesopotamia and Egypt.⁴ It was then ancient India which took on the task of keeping the torch of human thoughts alive in the centuries between the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam. Yet India was not alone, as both the Medes and the Persians were developing the great Persian Empire. This Eastern civilization, which dates back to the seventh century BC, was augmented with knowledge from Greeks, Romans, Hindus, and Chinese. To the west, just across the Red Sea, there stood ancient Egypt, the fruit of a hybrid tree rooted deep in pharaohic history, and the Greek jewellery of Alexandria. The civilization of Islam, which manifested as a healthy new sprout emerging amidst such rich civilizations in the Near East, had shown the ability to digest and refine not only the huge reservoir of more than a millennium of the written achievement of Greco-Roman culture but also most ancient achievements. So, for the first time, intellectuals from a tremendous diversity of ancient cultures found something in common – rational Islam – to bring them together in search of all knowledge for its own sake. After establishing Muslim society as a universal faith under which nationalism and national feelings were absent, the universality of knowledge became possible. People could read in the same spirit of brotherhood of learning after so many centuries. The Advancement of Learning by Sir Bacon states, ‘And the anointment of God superinduceth a brotherhood in king and bishops, so in learning there cannot but be a fraternity in learning and illumination, related to that paternity which is attributed to God, who is called the father of illumination or lights.’⁷¹

At the source of this remarkable achievement stand the almost legendary figures from far and near: botanist and pharmacist Iben al-Baitar from Malaga; historian ibn-Khaldun and traveller ibn-Batuta, both natives of North Africa; the Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen); astronomer Ibn Yunus; physician Ibn al-Nafis; astronomer and philosopher Averroes (ibn-Rushd); the father of modern surgery, Abu Al-Qasim Al-Zahrawi (Abulcasis); prince of physicians Avicenna (ibn-Sina); geographer and historian al-Masudi; the philosopher of the Arabs, al-Kindi; alchemist Geber; the Persian scholar and scientist Abu Raihan al-Biruni; alchemist ar-Razi; phonologist Sibawaihi; the father of algebra, al-Khawarzmi; physician al-Tabari; Sufi philosopher Al-Gazzali; mathematician and astronomer Omar Al-Khayyam; brilliant mathematician and astronomer Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Tusi; the great al-Farabi from Turkey; and the legendary al-Rumi from Afghanistan. These names are still very much alive in the common consciousness, as opposed to the names of associated caliphs and sultans. However, Michael H. Morgan has recently labelled the achievements of those listed above as a ‘Lost History’ among the Western intellects, who lamentably ‘come to think that they alone have created the modern world’.⁴¹

‘In Baghdad,’ Hoyt wrote, ‘the marriage between reason and religious law did mark a golden age of Islamic culture that had lasted for more than 400 years.’²⁸ In The Discoverers, Boorstin confirmed that ‘paper the sine quo non-modern printing, as we have seen, came to Europe from Baghdad, and later through Arab Spain in the 14th century.³ The classification of knowledge recognised nowadays did not exist. The wise man Hakeim, who supervised a majlis (circle), was able to master mathematics, astronomy, and geography at the same time. According to John Gribbin, ‘The Renaissance was the time when Western European lost their awe of the Ancients and realised that they had as much to contribute to civilization and society as the Greeks and Romans had contributed. To modern eyes, the puzzle is not that this should have occurred, but that it should have taken so long for people to lose their inferiority complex.’²⁶ Still, despite the notion that the rise of modern science was a by-product of an atheistic worldview, its early development cannot deny association with the rich Moslmãnic culture. Nor modern science did stop its dependency in the realm of arts, literatures, medicine, alchemy, astronomy, and mathematics. In fact, while Europe of the eleventh and thirteenth centuries was keeping its eyes fixed upon the fruits of the higher civilizations of Islam and Byzantium, ‘European attraction to Muslim technology and intellect, and fear of Muslim power and religion, would mark the relationship between Europeans and Muslims all the way into the Renaissance and beyond’, as confirmed Michael H. Morgan.⁴¹ According to Muller, ‘Islam did more than Byzantium to transmit the Greek heritage to Western Europe.’⁴³ Indeed, Islamic civilization was the spiritual heir at once of all monotheism and of the splendid intellect and endowments of the past great history of mankind. Eventually the Islamic civilization would pave the way for Europe breathing a fresh air of the Renaissance and thus be cured of many aliments of the Middle-Ages.

In the modern ages, progress has been overshadowed by destructive theories of force that have led since to the crisis of faith. In searching for a better view of the reality, men of common sense like Voltaire rejected religion. Voltaire maintained that the objects of reason and those of faith are of very different natures. Freud later agreed: ‘The early father of church, it maintains that religious doctrines are outside the jurisdiction of reason – are above reason.’²⁰ Ironically, this argument had already been directed against the prevalent notion of Paschal: ‘Let any person examine on these heads the several religions in the world, and see whether any of them, except the Christian religion, satisfies the mind in such an enquiry.’¹⁴ Here we ought to be cautious with Wilkins in his reading of Hegel’s relevant statement about the perfection of Christianity: ‘Manifestation, development and determination or specification do not go on ad infinitum and do not cease accidentally.’⁶⁸ More so, even the argument put forth by the rival Enlightenment culture seems to be one made at the expense of certain logic, having all the ironic contradictions of a thematic solution: to love humanity, yet at the risk of denying mankind all the nectars of the love of God. The revolt against religion was originally legitimised by asserting the universality of human worthiness. Exhausted humans, by now moderns, thus had to accept the challenge of rejecting the justice and mercy of heaven in trade for man-made justice and truth. And the trade-off from whence they came along to witness the heyday of a furious confusion was the ultimate triumph of Marxism. As Tucker put it, ‘The primary sphere of man’s being was not his life as a citizen of the state but rather his economic life in civil society.’⁶²

According to Professor Breasted, ‘the process of human advance which brought forth character is still unfinished-is still going on’.⁷ And yet never before have humans been given a definition so vague as to captivate the entire character by a great deal of anxieties and fears. The similarity is striking between the Freudian concept of cruelty of Nature and its Marxist conceptual sister, the socio-economic alienation of man amidst capitalist society. Their conceptual ideas would later do nothing but serve largely as an abstraction of individual life throughout human history. They would turn humanity upon itself and treat it with an elaborately planned lack of spirituality, which would not delight the minds of their great teachers. (See chapter 2.) And since the French Revolution, humanity has had to suffer from the illusion of nations; each against all others, and all against nature. As a nation in arms, according to William Woodruff, ‘king and god had been replaced by the People and the State.’⁷⁰ And all their voluminous writings later appeared to consider any relation with the Supreme God as false or as little else but illusion. As