God is dead
This is what Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in his Aphorism 125 of the Fröhliche Wissenschaft. The consequences are a theology without God and believers without God.
All this applies to Western philosophy – at least this is what I thought when I was young. And the work by Karl Löwith “Von Hegel zu Nietzsche” convinced me that I was right. I thought that God’s Death was a typically Western problem.
But now, after the umpteenth terrorist attack against civilians in Turkey I have started to think that also Allah died. And that he remains dead. And that they have killed Him.
The consequences: an Islamic theology without Allah and Muslim believers without Allah.
In my opinion, this is the best way to explain the self-proclaimed “Islamic State”, the so called Syrian-Iraqi Sunnistan of Islamic Atheism and Nihilism since theological explanations of the phenomenon fail to appear. And completely detaching the phenomenon from Islamic religion would be irrational and irresponsible because the warriors of the Islamic State define themselves as Muslim, relate to Islam, refer to the Quran, and even believe they are better Muslims with the right to define Islamic standards.
Without any doubt, a theology without God, in a monotheistic context, means a theology without a Creator and without Life, because in monotheism, and so also in Islam, Allah is the Creator (haliq) and source of all life. And this IS theology without God is vehemently opposed to one of the main principles of Islam, enunciated in Quran 5:32 where it says:
(…) “Whoever kills a person [unjustly]…it is as though he has killed all mankind. And whoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved all mankind.”
If Islam means life and belief in God, the Creator of Life, then anti-Islam means nihilism and killing Allah, the Unique, and Only Creator, “in the name of Whom” you read and speak. “Iqra” (read) and“qul” (say) are two main monotheistic calls to all Muslims in the name of Life and Islam as submission to Allah’s world order.
They who arbitrarily kill, violate Allah’s world order and submits themselves to the vacuum He shot into this world. In this nihilistic view of life, the kamikaze attack is to be seen as the logical consequence of Allah’s killing. Allah’s killing is followed by the complete manipulation and necrophile interpretation of Allah’s message of life and light.
The jihad in the name of self-defence is transformed into a sadistic aggressive war in which all means are justified to eliminate all civilians of all religions and cultures because the fact that for this purpose you blow yourself up to be catapulted into the Paradise of Nihilism, suffices as justification. And the more innocent the victim, the better it is. Since for these killers of a self-proclaimed takfiri sect the matter is to put themselves over normal Muslims saying “salam” to others and living a modest life, without choosing to play the anti-heroes of a distorted Islam.
However, the nihilistic Anti-Islam without Allah is part of ourselves, it is part of our Muslim society, all Muslims are part of, because also these nihilistic killers of Allah are part of the Ummah, whether we like it or not. Therefore, as Muslims we are primarily responsible for the determination and solution of this set of issues. And we are responsible because we believe in Allah, ar-rahman ar-rahim ar-ghafur.
Unfortunately, there are many causes explaining these symptoms of a self-proclaimed caliphate of Allah-killers, and these causes are even extremely diversified: on one hand, they are related to the geopolitical, economic, and sociologic conditions of the countries, for which these people“according to their conviction” engage to create a more just and more Islamic world order for the people living in the region. Geopolitically speaking, the whole region of the Middle East is the sad result of a post- and neocolonialist partition plan which pushed millions of people into poverty, dispossession, insecurity, and ethnic and sectarian segregation. Since the multicultural and tolerant Ummah, the recognition of diversity according to Quran 5:48, dies with Allah:
“…If Allah had so willed, He would have made you a single people, but (His plan is) to test you in what He hath given you: so strive as in a race in all virtues. The goal of you all is to Allah; it is He that will show you the truth of the matters in which ye dispute”.
On the other hand, neither Marxism nor neoliberalism offer an adequate economic solution to the region, because Islam has its own economic solutions. Furthermore, unwavering U.S. support forZionist colonial crimes with impunity of the Apartheid state of Israel, has caused extremely deep frustrations in the Muslim world of the Middle East which is already in a deep existential crisis.
Equal opportunities, professional chances for young people, female empowerment, education for all are a utopia in a region which has already surrendered itself and where the word “inshallah” is just drowned in fatalism. However, there is also a dynamic interpretation of the concept “inshallah” which could give these people back their self-conscience. In my opinion the concept “inshallah” has to be interpreted according to verse 11 of the sura al-rad where it says:
“… Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves.”
In this understanding, Islam means dynamics, addressing challenges, optimism, and also personal battle of the soul for the good and justice life and mercy.
The West constantly destabilises the region where Western secret services, Islamophobic groups, and Western cultural colonialism are considered responsible. In the heads of “distorted” people, this situation justifies the war against everything and everybody: Muslims must die because they are guilty of takfir and Western people have to die because they are on the side of colonialists and have made the Muslim world what it is now.
Where is the solution? In the understanding of the terrorist’s psychology and in the struggle against external neocolonialism and the connection between militarism and capital and the nihilism and radicalisation of young people in Muslim societies in which they see themselves in a vacuum in which Allah, the Creator of all Life is missing.
An urgent socio-pedagogic program to be implemented worldwide is needed to put Muslims and Non-Muslims together to avoid the radicalisation of young Muslims. Perhaps, instead of radicalisation, we should say vacuumisation and nihilism. Unfortunately, every religion also has its nihilism. And so every religion has its own God-killers. And this also applies to Islam and the Muslim community, in particular in this difficult time characterised by blind violence against innocent civilians.
Only preventive dialogue can solve the problematic complex of “IS”, “DAESH” and its God-killers. What has to belong to this preventive dialogue, is also the engaged struggle against Western militarism, the connection between arms industry, capital, Zionism, neocolonialism, and wars in the Middle East and the constructive struggle against islamophobia by the dialogue about Islam between people and social groups.
What has not to be disregarded is that this is an obligation of the whole society – Muslims and Non-Muslims – all over the world since only by responsibility and involvement of all of us in this problematic set of issues which concerns us all can bring a true, and sustainable solution for the Middle East and the world. It is a long and difficult process, but if we do not start to fill this vacuum with humanity and life, always new God-killers will appear on the horizon with the same purpose but with different names.
The practical struggle against terrorism by national states does not suffice. The solution of the problem does not consist of shooting down terrorist. This is just the final result of this vacuum manifestation and the reaction of the state when the terrorist and the police man look at each other for a last time in a cul-de-sac before the wall of nihilism. However, it is a matter of preventing the self-proclaimed Allah-warriors to kill the Islamic culture of life and to kill Allah. It is not the matter of killing them after that their distortion process has achieved the wrong goal and while they are bleeding to death in front of this high wall in the cul-de-sac.
To achieve this goal, you need a socio-politically engaged civil society. Security and police, Special Forces and struggle against terrorism, military forces, infiltration and training of secret services and terrorism experts in situ do not suffice because they just eliminate symptoms. If they they sufficed, then terrorism would not be there anymore. However, there is no successful war of the state against the causes of terrorism, but only against its visible symptoms – when people blindly shoot around and when the first perpetrators and the first victims lie on the marble floor of the airport.
The causes of terrorism can only be eliminated in whole by inclusion, education, economic and social development, equal opportunities, and empowerment of the civil society. The opposite of nihilism is humanism, a humanism existing in all religions and cultures, and which can fill all vacuums with life, a Life which in Islam comes from Allah and returns to Him. The German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe was right when he said:
“If Islam means submission to God, we all live and die in Islam”.
Finally, I would like to mention the Verse of Light from the Quran (24:35) because for me it is the symbol of the way Muslims should go through their life in this world, without diametrically opposing East and West:
“Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The example of His light is like a niche within which is a lamp, the lamp is within glass, the glass as if it were a pearly [white] star lit from [the oil of] a blessed olive tree, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil would almost glow even if untouched by fire. Light upon light. Allah guides to His light whom He wills. And Allah presents examples for the people, and Allah is Knowing of all things.”
