never submitting to delusion

Not for a moment, my heart, did you bow

To His glory, or ever rue your sins.

Cleric, ascetic, and scholar you were,

But never a true man of God: Muslim.

#1731: From Rumi's Kolliyaat-e Shams-e Tabrizi

Key word: bow

I remain captivated by the story of the Danish cartoons, one of my favourites is shown below:

Poul Erik Poulsen cartoon
by now widely available on the internet

Here is a summing up of the story printed in today's smh.com.au but taken from The Guardian:

It began innocuously enough. Last year the Danish writer Kaare Bluitgen was searching for someone to illustrate his children's book about the life of the Prophet Muhammad. It soon became clear, however, that nobody wanted the job, fearful of inflaming Muslim feelings about images of the prophet.

One artist refused the commission, saying he feared the fate of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker stabbed to death by an Islamist fanatic. Eventually someone agreed to do it anonymously.

Bluitgen's trouble prompted several Danish newspapers, including the best-selling Jyllands-Posten, to begin a debate. How far should Denmark go down the road of self-censorship? And was freedom of speech more important than Muslim sensitivities?

On September 30 the paper's editor, Carsten Juste, launched a provocative experiment, publishing 12 cartoonists who had come up with their own satirical drawings of Muhammad.

The world is now finding out just how inflammatory his actions were, with Muslim outrage erupting not just in Denmark and other European countries where the images were republished, but across the Middle East and in New Zealand.

source

In a discussion with Segovius at Anulios, he wrote:

To clarify: there may come a time - and soon for all I know - when all people who call themselves Muslims are extremists. I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.

The above statement will still hold true. Why? Because a Muslim is someone who is submitted to God and not someone submitted to evil. By their fruits you shall know them - and if all the fruits are rotten (or even some) it does not mean that no un-rotten fruit ever existed.

source

Segovius here is identifying "Muslim" with submission to God, not with all the terrorist activities and the current angry outbursts. However, Islam is simply NOT that simple. Islam IS the Quran, Islam IS Mohammad, Islam IS not a general but a very very specific concept of deity labelled "Allah". You can't separate it from all that baggage.

Looking through the remaining first lines of quatrains that I have yet to tackle, I was drawn by the word "bow", a synonym for "submit". I can't imagine how more loudly and clearly Rumi could have said it: "I am NOT a Muslim!" Rumi was, in fact, a true gnostic, a true knower and lover of God. Love does not demand submission. It never has and never will. Only power does that.

Islam is an emperialist religion of power and it is no wonder that a highly refined religion of love grew out of it, as a potent counterbalance.

The world has gone mad. This is a good thing in that it is like the lancing of a boil, a release of putrifying matter. It is also a bad thing because many buildings will be burnt and many people murdered. It is like a psychosis of burning, of conflagration, a tragic but necessary refining of humanity in the fires of both military and cultural war. We will not come through this without at least two nuclear explosions: one in defiance from Islam and one in retaliation.

Psychosis occurs in an individual when he has been stubbornly denying a truth, repressing doubt and shutting the door on his own self-critical capacities. Such persistent repression results in a fragile psyche that can shatter into minute glass shards at the merest adversity. Life does the deed, the world barges in on him and forces him to face the facts. This is when an explosion of fiery anger results.

On a mass scale, this is what is happening in the Muslim world. It is happening because they have been believing a lie. They have participated together in a massive delusion. They have deified a scatty compilation of sayings alleged to originate in one man called Mohammad who, in turn, alleged the sayings to have originated in One God called Allah. This is as true as to say that One Guiding Spirit directed every one of the 12 cartoonists in their remarkable efforts. The image above is as much of God, by God, from God, as was the Quran. Except that the spirit behind the Quran is now dead and the spirit behind the cartoons is alive and well.

It will take a long time for Muslims for get over the humiliation of all this.