Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist - Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

The omnipotence of God is asserted everywhere in the Koran; man’s will is totally subordinate to God’s will to the extent that man cannot be said to have a will of his own. Even those who disbelieve in Him, disbelieve because it is God who wills them to disbelieve. This leads to the Muslim doctrine of predestination that prevails over the doctrine of man’s free will, also to be found in the Koran. As Macdonald says, “The contradictory statements of the Koran on free will and predestination show that Muhammad was an opportunist preacher and politician and not a systematic theologian.”

“Taqdir, or the absolute decree of good and evil, is the sixth article of the Muhammadan creed, and the orthodox believe that whatever has, or shall come to pass in this world, whether it be good or bad, proceeds entirely from the Divine Will, and has been irrevocably fixed and recorded on a preserved tablet by the pen of fate.” Some quotes from the Koran illustrate this doctrine:

54.49. All things have been created after fixed decree.

3.139. No one can die except by God’s permission according to the book that fixes the term of life.

87.2. The Lord has created and balanced all things and has fixed their destinies and guided them.

8.17. God killed them, and those shafts were God’s, not yours.

9.1. By no means can anything befall us but what God has destined for us.

13.30. All sovereignty is in the hands of God.

14.4. God misleads whom He will and whom He will He guides.

18.101. The infidels whose eyes were veiled from my warning and had no power to hear.

32.32. If We had so willed, We could have given every soul its guidance, but now My Word is realized—“I shall fill Hell with Jinn and men together.”

45.26. Say unto them, O Muhammad: Allah gives life to you, then causes you to die, then gathers you unto the day of resurrection.

57.22. No disaster occurs on earth or accident in yourselves which was not already recorded in the Book before we created them.

But there are inevitably some passages from the Koran that seem to give man some kind of free will:

41.16. As to Thamud, We vouchsafed them also guidance, but to guidance did they prefer blindness.

18.28. The truth is from your Lord: let him then who will, believe; and let him who will, be an unbeliever.

But as Wensinck, in his classic The Muslim Creed, said, in Islam it is predestination that ultimately predominates. There is not a single tradition that advocates free will, and we have the further evidence of John of Damascus, who “flourished in the middle of the eighth century A.D., and who was well acquainted with Islam. According to him the difference regarding predestination and free will is one of the chief points of divergence between Christianity and Islam.”

It is evident that, toward the end of his life, Muhammad’s predestinarian position hardened; and “the earliest conscious Muslim attitude on the subject seems to have been of an uncompromising fatalism.”

Before commenting on the doctrine of predestination, I should like to consider the Koranic hell. Several words are used in the Koran to evoke the place of torment that God seems to take a particular delight in contemplating. The word “Jahannum” occurs at least thirty times and describes the purgatorial hell for all Muslims. According to the Koran, all Muslims will pass through hell: (sura 19.72) “There is not one of you who will not go down to it [hell], that is settled and decided by the Lord.” The word “al-nar,” meaning the fire, appears several times. Other terms for hell or hellfire are

LAZA (THE BLAZE):“For Laza dragging by the scalp, shall claim him who turned his back and went away, and amassed and hoarded” (sura 97.5).

AL-H UTAMAH (THE CRUSHER):“It is God’s kindled fire, which shall mount above the hearts of the damned” (sura 104.4).

SAIR (THE BLAZE):“Those who devour the property of orphans unjustly, only devour into their bellies fire, and they broil in sair” (sura 4.11).

SAQAR:“The sinners are in error and excitement. On the day when they shall be dragged into the fire on their faces. Taste the touch of saqar” (sura 54.47).

Al-Jahim (the Hot Place) and Hawiyah also occur in sura 2 and 101, respectively. Muhammad really let his otherwise limited imagination go wild when describing, in revolting detail, the torments of hell: boiling water, running sores, peeling skin, burning flesh, dissolving bowels, and crushing of skulls with iron maces. And verse after verse, sura after sura, we are told about the fire, always the scorching fire, the everlasting fire. From sura 9.69 it is clear that unbelievers will roast forever.

What are we to make of such a system of values? As Mill said, there is something truly disgusting and wicked in the thought that God purposefully creates beings to fill hell with, beings who cannot in any way be held responsible for their actions since God Himself chooses to lead them astray: “The recognition, for example, of the object of highest worship in a being who could make a Hell; and who could create countless generations of human beings with the certain foreknowledge that he was creating them for this fate…. Any other of the outrages to the most ordinary justice and humanity involved in the common Christian conception of the moral character of God sinks into insignificance beside this dreadful idealization of wickedness.” Of course, Mill’s words apply, mutatis mutandis, to the Muslim conception also, or to any god of predestination.

We cannot properly call such a system an ethical system at all. Central to any valid system of ethics is the notion of moral responsibility, of a moral person who can legitimately be held responsible for his actions: a person who is capable of rational thought, who is capable of deliberation, who displays intentionality, who is capable of choosing and is, in some way, free to choose. Under the Koranic system of predestination, “men” are no more than automata created by a capricious deity who amuses himself by watching his creations burning in hell. We cannot properly assign blame or approbation in the Koranic system; man is not responsible for his acts, thus it seems doubly absurd to punish him in the sadistic manner described in the various suras quoted earlier.

Bousquet begins his classic work on Islamic views on sex with the blunt sentence: “There is no ethics in Islam.” The Muslim is simply commanded to obey the inscrutable will of Allah; “good” and “bad” are defined as what the Koran, and later, Islamic law considers permissible or forbidden. The question posed by Socrates in the Euthyphro , “Whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods?” receives a very definitive answer from an orthodox Muslim: something is good if God wills it, and bad if God forbids it; there is nothing “rationally” or independently good or bad. But as Plato pointed out this is not a satisfactory answer. As Mackie puts it (n.d., Chapter 31): “If moral values were constituted wholly by divine commands, so that goodness consisted in conformity to God’s will, we could make no sense of the theist’s own claims that God is good and that he seeks the good of his creation.” In an earlier work (1977, Chapter 29), Mackie observes that the Muslim view has the consequence:

that the description of God himself as good would reduce to the rather trivial statement that God loves himself, or likes himself the way he is. It would also seem to entail that obedience to moral rules is merely prudent but slavish conformity to the arbitrary demands of a cap icious tyrant. Realizing this, many religious thinkers have opted for the first alternative [i.e., “the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy”]. But this seems to have the almost equally surprising consequence that moral distinctions do not depend on God, …hence ethics is autonomous and can be studied and discussed without reference to religious beliefs, that we can simply close the theological frontier of ethics.