Traitors of Islam
Sayyid Ameer Ali - The Spirit of Unbelief
A Critical Analysis of The "Spirit Of Islam" by Ameer Ali
The Spirit of Islam by Sayyid Ameer Ali is by far the best-known book on the subject in the English-speaking world--so widely read, in fact, that it has attained the prestige of an English classic. Consequently, the majority of English-speaking converts of American and European origin have derived from it a thoroughly distorted conception of Islam. Typical is the comment made by one English convert:
"The book which had most impressed me in my Islamic studies was The Spirit of Islam by Sayyid Ameer Ali, although this book is not without some criticism. in the Muslim world with regard to many customs and attitudes which the author wished to see reformed. It does, however, put before Muslims and the world as a whole, the true, inspiring grandeur of the faith of Islam which it should surely be the duty of every Muslim to attempt to bring down to the realm of practical life. This is undoubtedly a book which all Muslim students should endeavour to study......" *
* "Quest of the Spirit," Malika Frances Citrine, The Islamic Review, Woking, England, January-February-March 1963, p.17The "criticism" it has met in the Muslim world is more than deserved. In fact, no mere criticism is sufficient. If the ulema had been alive to their duty instead of sleeping, the contents of this book should have been denounced as heretical.
Born into a family of the Shi'ah persuasion in 1849, Ameer Ali received his education at Aligarh University and became a devoted disciple of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. He possessed from his earliest years, unbounded enthusiasm for English culture. In his memoirs, he confesses how "enthralled" he was by Gibbon before he was twelve and by the age of twenty had read most of Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Byron, Longfellow and other poets along with the novels of Thackery and Scott and "knew Shelley almost by heart." He finally took up the profession of an advocate and lived much of his adult life in London with his English wife until his death in 1928.
The first edition of his famed Spirit of Islam was published in London as far back as 1891. Ameer Ali revised and enlarged upon it several times until it attained its present shape in 1922. Ever since then, this book has been undergoing reprint after reprint in America and in England. Portions of it have also been translated into Arabic and Turkish and thus had an appreciable impact upon the modern-educated in those lands. The purpose of The Spirit of Islam is to prove that Islam is the most liberal and rational religion-the epitome of "progress" as the modern mind understands it. Polygamy, Purdah and Jihad are thus denounced as against the "true spirit" of the faith. In this way he hoped to attract European converts by equating Islamic values as identical with modern Western ideals.
Most of the first half of The Spirit of Islam is taken up with an apology of the life of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) to demonstrate to the Western world that his character was nothing but sweetness, tenderness, gentleness, forgiveness, mercy and love. Typical of the inferiority-complex inherent in all such apologetic literature is the manner in which he attempts to explain away the Holy Prophet's Jihad against his foes:
"The Koreish army was afield before Mohammed received God's command to do battle to his enemies. He who never in his life had wielded a weapon; to whom the sight of human suffering caused intense pain and pity and who, against all the canons of Arab manliness, wept bitterly at the loss of his children or disciples, whose character remained ever so tender and so pathetic as to cause his enemies to call him womanish--this man was now compelled by the necessities of the situation and against his own inclinations to repel the attacks of the enemy by force of arms and to organize his followers for purposes of self-defence......" (pp. 214-218).
Because the author of this work is so vulnerable to Western criticism, the very idea of Jihad is an anathema so he feels compelled to assert that our Holy Prophet did not really want to fight his enemies. Only expediency forced him to do so. The authentic biographies of our Holy Prophet such as the Sirat Rasul Allah by Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Hisham and the Kitab at-Maghazi by al-Waqidi do not accord with these apologetic conclusions. The eighth and ninth Surahs of our Holy Quran, both consecrated to the subject of Jihad, bear out the utter fallacy of Ameer Ali's apologetics, as under the banner of modernism, he tries to read the present into the past:
"The mind of this remarkable Teacher was, in its intellectualism and progressive ideals, essentially modern. To him the service of humanity was the highest act of devotion..…" (p.121)
The writer insinuates that the Holy Quran is not infallible Divine revelation but merely the result of purely human meditations:
"There is no doubt that in the Suras of the intermediate period before the mind of the Teacher had attained the full development of religious consciousness and when it was necessary to formulate in language intelligible to the common folk of the desert, the realistic descriptions of heaven and hell, borrowed from the floating fancies of Zoroastrian, Sabean and Talmudical Jew, attract the attention as a side picture and then comes the real essence, the adoration of God in humility and love. The hooris are creatures of Zoroastrian origin, so is Paradise, whilst Hell in the severity of its punishment is Talmudic. Probably in the infancy of his religious consciousness Mohammed himself believed in some or other of the traditions which floated around him but with a wider awakening of the soul, a deeper communion with the Creator of the Universe, thoughts which bore a material aspect at first became spiritualised. The mind of the Teacher progressed not only with the march of time and the development of his religious consciousness but also with the progress of his disciples in apprehending spiritual conceptions .... Virtue for its own sake can only be grasped by minds of superior development; for the average intellect and for the uneducated, sanctions more or less comprehensible will always be necessary ......" (pp. 197-198)
Ameer Ali cannot accept the literal truth of the Hereafter but only its "usefulness as an instrument for the uplifting of the masses." Thus a detailed description of the ancient Zoroastrian concept of the life to come to demonstrate how it influenced the "eclectic faith of Mohammed."
The history of the pious Khalifate is portrayed in conformity with Shi'ah dogrna. Consequently, his unduly harsh criticism of Osman, the third Khalifa.
"Osman possessed neither the shrewdness of Abu Bakr nor the intellectual vigour and moral fibre of Omar.....The character of the deluded Pontiff* has been graphically portrayed by Dozy. The personality of Osman did not justify his election to the Caliphate. It is true he was rich and generous, had assisted Mohammed and the religion by pecuniary sacrifices and that he prayed and fasted often and was a man of amiable and soft manners. He was, however, not a man of spirit and was greatly enfeebled by old age. Unhappily for this old man, he possessed an inordinate fondness for his kinsmen who formed the Meccan aristocracy and who for twenty years had insulted, persecuted and fought against Mohammed. These were the men whom the Caliph favoured. Complaints poured into Medina from all parts of the Empire. But the complaints were invariably dismissed with abuses and hard words. A deputation consisting of twelve thousand men headed by Mohammed, the son of the Caliph Abu Bakr, came to the Capital to lay before Osman the grievances of the people and seek redress. Ali persuaded the deputation to depart to their homes by giving them a pledge that their complaints would be redressed. On their way back, they intercepted a letter written by Osman's secretary and which bore the Caliph's own seal, containing a mandate to the unscrupulous Mu'awiya to massacre them in a body. Enraged at this treachery, they returned to Medina, entered the old Caliph's house and killed him. Osman's death furnished to the Ommeyyads what they were long thirsting for -- a plea for the revolt against Islam, against its democracy, its equal rights and its stern rules of morality......." (pp. 294-295).
[*Note how Ameer Ali fallaciously compares Hazrat Osman to a Roman Catholic Pope in the most derogatory manner!]
This is a blasphemous distortion of history against one of the greatest companions of our Holy Prophet. Osman committed no treachery. The letter referred to was a forgery which Osman himself insisted he had nothing to do with. If Osman (God forbid) were as evil a character as this writer would have us believe, our Holy Prophet would never have included him as among his most beloved companions nor would he have proclaimed him publicly as one of the ten who would go direct to Paradise. Our Holy Prophet declared that Osman would be his constant companion in Paradise. Many other authentic Hadith attest to the virtues of Osman. Having lived with him in closest intimacy for more than twenty years, our Holy Prophet is surely the better judge of Osman's character than this heretical modernist, prejudiced from the outset by his Shiah inclinations.
Similarly, the author of this book maligns all our greatest Imams and Mujaddids as responsible for the subsequent decadence of the Muslim world. Here is how he expresses his wrath on Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal:
"The fourth most important sect of the Sunni Church* was originated by Ibn Hanbal. He flourished during the reigns of Mamun and his successor, Mutasim B'illah. These two Caliphs were Mutazilas. Ibn Hanbal's extreme fanaticism and the persistency with which he tried to inflame the bigotry of the masses against the sovereigns brought him into trouble with the rulers. Ibn Hanbal and his patristicism were responsible for the ill-success of Mamun in introducing the Mutazila doctrines throughout the Empire and for the frequent outbursts of persecution which deluged the Mohammedan world with the blood of Moslems (p. 352) .... Ibn Hanbal--a red-hot puritan, breathing eternal perdition to all who differed from him, was shocked with the liberalism of Hanafism, and disgusted both with the exclusive narrowness of Malikism and the commonplace character of Shafeism, applied himself to frame a new system based on traditions for the whole empire. Abu Hanifa had rejected the majority of Traditions,** Ibn Hanbal's system included a mass of incongruous, irrational and bewildering stories, the bulk of which are wholly inconsistent with each other and bearing upon their face, the marks of fabrication. He denounced learning and science and declared a holy war against Rationalism. The populace carried away by his eloquence, or rather his vehemence, took up the cry .... The pulpits began to fulminate brimstone and fire against the upholders of science and reason.. The streets of Bagdad became scenes of frequent rioting and bloodshed. The prime mover of the disturbances was put in prison where he died in the odour of great sanctity.... (pp. 438-439)- The theological students, who were chiefly the followers of Ibn Hanbal under the weaker Abbasid Caliphs, became a source of great trouble in Bagdad. They constituted themselves into a body of irresponsible censors; they used forcibly to enter homes, break musical instruments and commit similar acts of vandalism...." (p. 487)
[*Note that Ameer Ali is so imbued with Christianity that he applies its terminology to Islam. There is no such thing as the "Sunni Church!"
**This is not true]And this is how our author justifies the abandonment of all the injunctions of the Shariat as obsolete and opposed to "progress".
"The present stagnation of the Musulman communities is principally due to the notion which has fixed itself on the minds of the generality of Moslems that the right to exercise private judgment ceased with the early legists. The Prophet had consecrated reason as the highest and noblest function of the human intellect. Our schoolmen and their followers have made its exercise a sin and a crime. The Moslems of the present day have ignored the spirit in a hopeless love for the letter. It was natural that in their reverence and admiration for the Teacher, his early disciples should stereotype his ordinary mode of life, crystallise the passing incidents in a chequered career, imprint on the heart orders, rules and regulations enunciated for the common, exigencies of the day in an infant society. But to suppose that the greatest Reformer the world has ever produced, the greatest upholder of the sovereignty of reason, ever contemplated that those injunctions which were called forth by the passing necessities of a semi-civilised people should become immutable, is doing an injustice to the Prophet of Islam. No one had a keener perception than he of the necessities of this world of progress with its ever-changing social and moral phenomena nor of the likelihood that the revelations vouchsafed to him might not meet all possible contingencies. No religion contained greater promise of development, no faith was purer or more in conformity with the progressive demands of humanity.... (pp. 182-183). What has been laid down by the Fathers of the Church is unchangeable and beyond the range of discussion. The Faith may he carried to the land of the Esquimaux but it must go with the rules framed for the guidance of Irakians!" (p. 353).
According to Ameer Ali, the "true spirit" of Islam is the Mutazilite heresy whose followers, such as al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, attempted to inject into the bloodstream of Islam, pagan Greek philosophy. Ameer Ali lauds the Mutazilite philosophers as the forerunners, if not the very life-source, of modern Western civilization. Because he blames those Mujaddids, who succeeded in rejecting alien innovations and maintaining an unadulterated Islam, for the demise of the Muslim world, it is clear that what the author is defending is NOT Islam but merely modern Western ideals under the thin disguise of Muslim names.
The above was an excerpt of pp.69-76 of Islam and Modernism, Maryam Jameelah, Mohammad Yusuf Khan & Sons, Lahore, 1965/1988.
Reference:
The Spirit of Islam, Syed Ameer Ali, Christophers, London, 1922
* These are the most important classics of Muslim modernism. They belong on the "black-list" and should be approached with extreme caution because they have all done (intentionally or unintentionally) irreparable harm to the Islamic cause.
Source: The Cultural Association
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