My Islamic Studies: A Plea for Sanity Rather than War

I didn’t learn much until a few college Anthropology courses with secular Arabists who specialized in Darfur and Turkey. Two Muslim governments, two WILDLY different approaches to governance, and those are countries that both have Sunni majorities (because on top of everything else, Iran is also Shia, which means it is a country made up of both a religious minority on top of the ethnic minority as Persians as opposed to the Arab majority of regional neighbors to the West).

Shia Islam really doesn’t have anything theologically in common with Mormonism, which is a strange mishmash of 19th century King James Bible Protestantism, Freemasonry, and a very distinctively conservative interpretation of Unitarian theology that was predicated upon reactionary patriarchal beliefs and practices, including child bride marriage in an era when such things were scandalous.

Shia has nothing to do with that but the Mormons follow a very similar trajectory as the immediate heirs of Muhammad. After Joseph Smith died, there was a schism along lines of succession and whether the leadership should allow for women. Brigham Young went Westward with one set while Joseph Smith’s wife remained behind to build a breakaway faith, the Community of Christ.

Muhammad’s heirs divided over succession, although it was not so clearly-defined by patriarchal as opposed to matriarchal succession. Yet it is a vital analogy in this moment because it has been used frequently. When The Book of Mormon was published, it was reviewed by journalists like Mark Twain. The press called Joseph Smith “An American Muhammad,” and not unjustly. Islam historically began as a response to two different Christian phenomena in the Arabic Oriental Orthodox Church, the Arian heresy and the dispute of trade route taxation by Europe upon what eventually became known as the Silk Road. Mormonism emerged from the 19th century Upstate New York Burnt-Over District, a strange and unique geographic moment in North American history where the westernmost frontier of the Republic was Albany and the landscape was populated with tent-revival preachers of every denomination and stripe within a quintessentially American farmer’s market of theology.

In this regard, both Islam and Mormonism are categorized by anthropologists as faiths that have Restorationist beliefs and practices, meaning their faith explicitly states that it improves upon and updates into a more pure formulation the Abrahamic inheritance of the Torah, Talmud, and Gospels. Both the Quran and Book of Mormon open with a chapter where the Prophetic voice in summary says “This is a new holy book that goes beyond the shortcomings of the Bible and Christianity.”

I am a secular scholar and journalist who understands Islam as a multi-tendency religious tradition, equivalent in terms like the early subdivisions of the Protestant Reformation. The German National Church under the Third Reich, meaning the Nazi Party’s homegrown religion, was fundamentally a German Protestant Christian church…and at the exact same moment in history, thousands of other Protestant denominations, for various reasons, denounced and rejected that German National Church’s racial theology. Islam is so large and diverse that the analogy can be further extended:

Western minds have been propagandized by the media to singularly define Islam as the wretched, disgusting, misogynistic, and ultimately intolerant civic law under the House of Saud, equivalent to how certain American states have dry counties because of a VERY PARTICULAR AND CONSERVATIVE church in the county that can exert influence over policy implementations.

The House of Saud is not the Vatican of Islam, it is only one of hundreds of different governments made up of Muslims around the world. It forbids females from governance, beheads homosexuals, and spent the last 25 years solidifying their geopolitical role as a Zionist collaborator in terms of weapon sales to Israel.

So the House of Saud really is a mirror reflection of our own fascistic Southern Baptists, Fundamentalist Mormons, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and other lovely personalities who are known to habituate abortion clinic driveways with ghastly signage on display.

Meanwhile, Iran has its shortcomings. It has a history of being repeatedly attacked, dating back to the immediate start of the Cold War, by the United States. The Mullahs and the overall popular culture includes a heavy reliance upon stifling propaganda that has legitimate shortcomings.

Syria under Assad was a secular state that allowed alcohol production; by contrast, as a state governed by Sharia, Iran has a Prohibition regime equivalent to ours.

But also like our Prohibition movement, it emerges from a religious Temperance movement, inspired by exiled religious leaders, who saw Prohibition as a legitimate method for confronting substance use as a symptom of Secular Western Modernity (as administered under the Shah). The government likewise operates a stigma-free Methadone program for all Iranians.

As someone with both gender dysphoria and substance use disorder, I would be safer in an Iranian hospital than I would be in a Saudi hospital, and this is the regional partner that my government has designated as being a more humane and humanitarian society?

Saudi Arabia is a petro-engorged single-commodity economy upholding a Mafia dictatorship family originally installed by Franklin Roosevelt as part of a larger dirty deal with Winston Churchill so to head off British peace-feeling Appeasers that would pursue a separate peace with Berlin. It was a stillbirth of British imperialism, not unlike the partitions of Palestine, Ireland, and the Indian subcontinent. Churchill was desperate to end the war with a complete restoration of the interwar colonial status quo. By contrast, Roosevelt and the New Dealers adamantly refused to repeat Woodrow Wilson’s missteps with the League of Nations, including the hypocritically idiotic allowance for the maintenance of the colonial system of wealth extraction in the metropoles. Roosevelt was explicitly anti colonial for simple pragmatic reasons: America was bailing out the British banking and war industries for the second time in two decades. British colonialism had to stop being too big to fail because it had generated two wars with Germany. Roosevelt was done watching American soldiers go die for something that was so unsustainable, toxic, and inhuman as the British empire, his ancestors had helped establish American independence for such reasons (or at least in his own imagination).

But Churchill was insistent on maintaining access to the Gulf, and in that regard the campaigns in North Africa and Italy, both described as wasteful periphery-pecking by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. The Mediterranean as the access, via the Suez Canal, into the Gulf, and then further eastward towards the Indian Ocean and subcontinent, was more important to Churchill than the Second European Front, meaning D-Day was unnecessarily delayed by perhaps two years while the gas chambers were allowed to operate longer without threat of disruption by Allied GIs. Churchill’s pursuit of the Colonial Preservation agenda therefore enabled in a tangible sense the operation of the Nazi holocaust.

Saudi Arabia was a client regime state built up around a make-believe monarchical system that had not existed before the First World War, something brilliantly illustrated in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Flawed as it is (Alec Guinness in yellow-face is an abomination), the film succeeded in capturing the essence of the colonial client regime created in the Arabian Peninsula as a codicil/corollary of the Balfour Proclamation. Lean was still brilliant in spite of the racism of his casting because, flaws and all, he was communicating to the audience the colonial dimension of the regime and emphasizing how colonialism perverts the indigenous nations and their leaders, fomenting within the colonial client regime revanchist government and social policy to serve capital accumulation.

Iran is so much better than Saudi Arabia.

But honestly, the largest Muslim population is not even in the Arabic world, it is in Southeast Asia and countries like Indonesia and Pakistan. Those countries still have a viable secular Islamic politics that are less militant and extreme