Theology of Torture by Mohammad Reza Nikfar

Original (Farsi):
http://nilgoon.org/archive/mohammadrezanikfar/articles/Nikfar_Theology_of_Torture.html
Translation Farsi-English: Suzi Irani on
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=9837&post=38738&uid=249669090695
published on this blog by courtesy of Suzi Irani
A German translation is in the progress!

Title: Theology of torture

Written by MohammadReza Nikfar


This article starts by introducing prison as the perfect place to see a religion-based government. Then we will talk about this religion and its God. The God of torturers, who is naturally a torturer as well. Then we ask: who is responsible for this God? Afterwards, we talk about “Allah Akbar”, and the privileges and limitations it brings. At the end we talk about a certain spirituality, which is supposed to take out the violence from the religion. This spirituality is called secularism.



A phenomenon in the prison

Saturday, August 1, 2009- the first fabricated court was held for those detained in the protests against the election results. Afterwards a press conference was held for two of the detainees. They also gave a television interview which was aired on that same day. In these confession shows, the two detainees announced that during their time in prison, they reached the “truth”. This is not the first time that we have heard such “confessions”, and until this regime remains, these confessions remain as well. Why is it that the “truth” of and Islamic government always appears in prisons? We can answer this question phenomenologicaly. Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy, founded by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). It revolves around the idea that in order to pass a suspicion and reach the truth of a phenomenon, we should do experiments that let us get closer to that phenomenon. If we want to prove that in the summer, the weather is warmer in the city Abadan compared to Hamedan, we have to travel to both locations and compare our experience. A geometry hypothesis can be proved in a specific way, and the chemical effects of a substance can be proved in another way. In phenomenology, there is a relation between the subject and the experiment.Do you want to know the characteristics of Nitric Acid? Then go to a chemistry lab! Do you want to feel the weather of Abadan in the summer? Travel there in August! Do you want to taste an unknown fruit for the first time? Eat it! We cannot interchange these experiments. For example we cannot say that in order to prove the Pythagoras theory, we should go to Abadan, or in order to see how hot Abadan is, we should eat an unfamiliar fruit.Do you want to see how hot the South of Iran is in the summer? Go there in August! Using the same phenomenological method: Do you want to know what is the truth of the Islamic Republic? Go to their prisons! Prison, is the Hira Cave of the Islamic Republic. Honest angels are in its honest walls, revealing their saintly truth to you. We asked: why is it that the truth of the Islamic government always appears in the prison? The answer is that the truth of this regime is indeed its prisons. If there was any other explanation, then their miracle-working investigators would hold conferences and speeches outside the prison, to spread the truth to everyone else as well. We know that their investigators are also editors, writers and orators. However, their word does not sink in, unless they say it in prisons. If Husserl were alive, he would say: the pure blossoming of Islamic Republic is in the prisons. From this view we understand that each original phenomenon has a relative-innate nature, which means that the production of that phenomenon is dependent on the innate mind which is kept in a certain situation. The truth of the regimeThe “truth” which is “realized” by the prisoner through the investigators, is that the system has rights, and these rights are religious rights. Religious truth is not negotiable. You cannot find this truth, by reason and discussion. When there is a veil over the eyes, ears and heart of a person from the very beginning, it means that his nature does not permit him to see the truth, and he is constantly in “darkness”. So the veil has to be torn down for the truth to be seen. Not by discussions, but by special experiences in certain situations. This experiment can be a miracle or a semi-miracle. In the Islamic government it mainly occurs in prisons. That veil which is mentioned in Quran (Baghareh 7) is that same one which does not let the eyes, ears and heart to see the truth, and that is the veil that tears in prison. On August 25, 2009, the fourth fabricated court was held in Tehran. In this court they discussed how the veil of darkness was torn for reformist Saeed Hajjarian. They said that he confessed to being highly effected by Max Weber, and he thought that he could analyze Iran’s system by the theories of this famous socialist on the structure of Islamic governments of the east, and considering it a kind of royalism. All those years he spent considering Weber’s theory, was destroyed in his short time in prison. They said that he has understood that he was wrong about the system. At this point the viewer is expecting an argument. This is the argument: “the legitimacy of Velayat Faghih is approved by Imam Zaman, and therefore it is irrelevant to relate Weber’s theory to current situation of Iran.” This argument is also stated as: “the decisions of Velayat Faghih show the decisions of Prophet Mohammad.” Therefore it is not royalty. What here we called “argument”, is only acceptable if you actually accept the reason for the argument which is “the legitimacy of Velayat Faghih is approved by Imam Zaman”. Believing this statement is intuitive, this means that upon seeing Velayat Faghih, one should consider them the continuation of the rest of Allah. Hajjarian has seen two Vali Faghih and he has served them both. Based on his experiences he has concluded that their system is a kind of “royalism”. The confession wants to say that his conclusion was wrong. The true conclusion is achieved in prison, and this conclusion makes him-or better say the writer of the confession- see that “the decisions of Velayat Faghih show the decisions of Prophet Mohammad.” This conclusion is intuitive, and the intuition, as was said before, comes in prison. In prison, the result of a lifelong pondering and research goes to waste and in a very short time the eyes of the prisoner open to the truth. In the Mesha Wisdom(?حکمت مشّا،) which is the most influential and serious part of Islamic Philosophy, the truth of each object is its original nature. Avicenna wrote in “The Book of Healing” (second vol. pg 292):”each thing has a nature that gives it an identity, and that nature is the truth of that thing.” If we accept that the truth of each being is how it comes to be in an original form, and we accept as Avicenna says that the truth is the original nature of that being, we will conclude that the truth of Islamic government is actually what we see by the miracle of torture and sexual abuse in prisons. The truth of this regime is what the torturer in trying to prove to the victim. When we carefully examine the reports from the tortures, and everything that was said by the investigators, we can see one common point in all of them: The truth that should be understood by the prisoner is that the regime has special rights, which enables it to determine what is and what should be the “truth”. Before the revolution, when they tortured the prisoners, they wanted to know what happened in the past, what information does the prisoner have, what do the prisoner and his friends do, and what is the truth. For the investigators of today, the questions about what information the prisoner has are not that important. The main important thing is for the prisoner to “confess”, and accept that the truth is what the investigator is saying. One prisoner has described this process of acceptation as an act of “going nuts”. On August 2, 2009, in the televised confessions of two reformist prisoners, Mohammad Atrianfar and Mohammad Abtahi, these sentences were said:Atrianfar:”we are nuts, but in a beautiful way, this is an important and beautiful matter…”Abtahi:”But I didn’t go nuts like that.”Atrianfar:”But I did really go nuts! And I changed, and this change is due to an understanding.”…“Going nuts” in the above conversation means “getting information and subjects all mixed up in the head” and “not being able to differentiate two things from one another”. There will come a time when the prisoner does not know what the “truth” is. Only one thing remains and that is the tortures of the investigator, and this investigator has the power to destroy one truth and make another. The investigator creates the “truth”. This is his special right. Where does he get that right from? The act of creating, in the religion, is known to be an act of God, and it is God who is aware of the unknown. The investigator is both a creator and knower of the unknown. The investigator is one of those who are close to God. He is an agent of a Divine Government. By analyzing the words of the investigators, we see that what the investigator tries to put in the prisoner’s head is that the prisoner is trapped in the prison of a Divine Government, and this government can create and state the truth on behalf of God. It is not important what the prisoner has seen or heard; there was a veil over his eyes and ears and heart. The veil is torn, and now the prisoner has to confess to a truth that he was not able to experience before. If he has never exited the country, but they say that he has traveled many times to Israel, he should accept that. Suspension of the truth is accompanied by the suspension of the norm. Passing from the truth experienced by the prisoner, and reaching the truth of the investigator, is like passing hell, where there is no norm. Here, nothing contradicts rape and sexual abuse in order to get the prisoner to admit that there is no higher ethics than religious ethics. In this hell hole, rape is a part of ethics. Ethics is anything that the investigator does. Rape is a kind of behavior that its ethics are created after itself.


Divine Governments
That hell hole is the place of reincarnation, the place to be reborn and recreated. The real world and its norms will come after this hell. During the reincarnation, there is no such thing as ethics. We enlarge the dimensions of this step, so much as to match it with the worlds of great systems and metaphysics and divinity, and create a new world. This act is permitted, because men create Gods like themselves, and when those Gods are created, and when it is time for mastery of coherent religions, those Gods create humans who resemble them. Therefore we have the right to question the origin of the divine, creating power of the investigators in the Divine government, and so we also have the right to research into great metaphysical and divine systems to understand the world of hell and torture. We study “prisonology” to understand God, and we study theology to understand prison.That “Demiurge”, the world creator who Plato mentions in Timaeus, does not operate in an absolute hollow of norms. A fine idea, called “super idea” exists, and the world creator uses this super idea to build the world. Hellenism, at the end of the ancient age, transferred the thought of this kind of world creation to Christ. So an idea entered a Semitic religion, which does not agree with that religion’s nature, as we see in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament it is said that the world is created from nothingness. Absolute nothingness. In that nothingness there is no existor, and no norm. only the will to create the world exists and later on in Quran this is explained as “Kon Fayakoon” (be, so it is). In “Journey of Creation” God does not create light to represent a good thing:”and God saw that light is good, and separated it from darkness.” The structure of the Earth is also not based on a fine idea, on the contrary, the fine idea is resulted from witnessing the structure of the world:”and God named the dry land “Earth” and called the waters “sea” and God saw that his work is fine.” And everything else is done the same way. God does something and then understand that it is “fine”. Protestantism, in its original form and its fundamentalism, goes back to this will, which is beyond good and bad. The strong indicator of its faith, Cultural Protestantism, remotes God from Earth, and puts man in charge of his own will, and now it is man that creates, and understands if it is fine, or not. That blind will power, is respectfully exiled, and is not dangerous anymore, and the human world is left to itself. The developments happen in this already-made world. The Protestantism is neutralized by culture. “Religion within the limits of reason alone” is written by Kant, a Protestant Philosopher. He has brought the beyond-the-mind will power, intro the limited walls of the mind.Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jew, is known to be the one who trapped the God of Torah in the limits of the mind. He made popular the metaphoric interpretation of Torah. He had learned this method of interpretation from the Greeks, and their analysis of the stories of Homer. He brought absolute separation between God and the world, and he explained the effective power of God on the world the same way that the Greeks explain Lugus, speech and reason and the wisdom behind the reason of being and discussions about it. Jewish Philo is the name that comes up, when we talk about how Christianity was Greekified. The will power of God becomes reasonable, by the Greekifation of Philo.Christianity has always had two Gods. As human culture grows, God becomes more reasonable and transcendental. When there is need for violence, revenge and angry will power, the other God surfaces. In this age, the God of Christianity is mostly calm and wise. It is not possible to use his name for inquisition and torture. Islam also has two Gods. A cultural God, who has lost his huge ego, and is now working within the walls of wisdom and norms. The production of such God was a long, difficult task for Islamic societies. Those like Avicenna, Saadi, Molavi and Hafiz have made God more elegant, great and a bit calmer and more tolerant. The entire accomplishment of the Islamic culture is making Allah merciful (Rahim). If social groups cause cultural and civilization crisis, God will lose his cultural form, and take an abnormal shape. God will become disorderly, furious, and deceitful, and returns to its original form. Islam came into a community with civilized Gods. They were known to have a “good nature”. The culture that is taught by Zoroastrian, believes that God does good. In “Bundahishn” we read:”Ahura Mazda was not God before creation. After the creation he became God, well wisher, wise, anti-bad, visible, giver to all, supplier, and worried for everyone. His first creation that came to be, was “being good”. When he brought about the creation, he made himself good, because he was the God of creation.” When an empire rose from the heart of the Islamic religion, it found its own place and books and rules, and so the taming of God reached a qualitative point. The amount of anger was reduced, and wisdom was instead increased. Interpretations were written for his Book, and this was a method of taming. To control God, they separated his being from his descriptions, and they used those descriptions to put him in a cage. They made some of these descriptions inherent, and so innately God became bounded. Naturally, one of those descriptions was being good. The culture took all that it knew as good and put it into adjectives that were appropriate enough for the name of Allah. It is obvious that the person who lived ten centuries age, did not have the same perspective on goodness as today’s human does. But still that first description of goodness was good enough to keep God from doing anything he pleased. In writing of Quran, punctuation marks are not used. If in this statement from Quran:”Be so it is” we use a comma after “be” then we will have “Be, so it is” which can mean that the two steps are separated from each other. In the first step the speaker is willing to order “Be” and in the next level something is accepting the order and “starts being (existing)”. Does the goodness also exist in the “Be” step, or does the goodness become visible after the comma? Due to its special education, Islam never became like a Lugus lesson, and this means that it was never able to tame providence and therefore the religion. The only metaphysical plan which can be regarded as a rationalist, is the plan of Avicenna, who determined a deep distance between God and the World, and filled in the distance by parts of creation which is called “Wisdom”. This distance is so deep that inhibits any king from claiming he has the will power of God, and inhibits any clergy from determining what the will power of God would do. Avicenna considered that comma a grace, and he thought of this grace as “good”. His God is a forgiver, not a forbidder. His God, if taken seriously, cannot reveal his truth in prisons and under torture. Philosophers have involved God in a promising discussion. There is a popular thesis, saying that we can imagine all divine systems as a discussion between those who created the system and God. For example we can write the divine theories of Avicenna as a conversation between him and God:- Please explain how you created the world.- First, wisdom was born from me.- And then?- From the first wisdom, a second wisdom was born.- And this went on?- Yes, until we reached the tenth wisdom.- And after that the world was created?- Yes, the world under the moon.- Why were all these steps taken?- So the path from unity to abundance would make sense!- Oh, I understand!(Commentary of a third witness: The creator has created this long path so the philosophers would not criticize him!)Between the Avicenna of today and God such conversation might also happen:- What do you think of the Islamic Republic?- (Mockingly and angrily): Islamic Republic? I do not care about little details of the world.- But they say that they are under your direct orders.- They lie.The Gods don’t get into such conversations when they are first created. A discussion like this needs time and peace. Whenever a God is born, he can take two paths: he might develop into an evil soul, and be known as deceptive, or he might be lucky enough to stay away from the bad and become “good”. It all depends on the balance of the powers. However the Gods are not just created out of nothingness. They each have a past. Their ranking of good and bad also is not stable. They’ve all had ups and downs during their existence. They usually have multi genes, which mean that their originality is a hybrid, therefore they have varied talents.The God of Islam ruled over Mecca and Medina, and then expanded its territory. Had Mohammad lost in one of his great battles and had his tactics not worked, this God would have had become something else. Maybe just a story would remain of that spirit in the Arab world, who once everyone worshiped, but then it turned evil and its followers were defeated. Unique and special phenomenons are all accidents. If Lat and Azza and their friends had not lost their value, and didn’t have enemies who could defeat them, they could have stayed in the center of the ignorant Arab world, and they could have reached a point where they had the power to force their beliefs upon others, and maybe today in our country it was their Gods who we knew and worshiped. And maybe the religious intellectual, Abdolkarim Soroosh, was trying to find the “good” in the dominant religion, and separate it from its bad history. The Islamic God found a “good nature” when it entered the Islamic civilization. This change of the nature happened by joined wisdoms. In an empire where there used to be Zoroastrians, Manicheans, Christians and Jews, there was already a pre assumption about what a God should be like, and it was impossible to spread a religion where the first order, “be”, was not for good. The governmental wisdom also required for God to become reasonable and less angry, and to stay away from current events so not everyone could be able to use him as a tool. Mu’tazili, who were the first to introduce the divine system of taming the Islamic God, got their ideas about goodness from Christianity. It is documented that their idea that God is good, he is the origin of all goodness, he is not bad, and he does not bring others into badness, came from John of Damascus. They discuss the descriptions of God based on the views of this Christian Saint. They made goodness into something divine, and since they accepted Quran and religion as creatures, they did not consider the goodness of the good as something religious. Goodness is good because of its good nature. Badness is bad because of its bad nature.This idea that ethics is more valuable that religion, is not wholly accepted in any religion. In all religions that have come our way there have been strong talents for contradicting ethics, and these religions have always showed their talents in the course of history.

Divine metamorphosis
If God has become good as a result of becoming wise, then why is it that religion and ethics are so contradictory? A theological answer to this question could be: God is the king of all existence, and the more powerful nature he has, the more he is in danger of losing his ethics. Kings defend kings. Sometimes one king might make the inhabitants rise against another king. But the rule is that all the kings sit together at the end and unite against the inhabitants. God was the one behind the uprisings against Shah. When Khomeini became the king, he stood by God. God becomes ethicless, because his importance is in his power and his actions (?به فعال مایشا بودنش)Fernando Pessoa stated in one of his works, “The Book of Disquiet”: “Gods, whether they exist, or they don’t, we are their slaves. There is no doubt that God is a true social power. He has different features, both in war and peace, and in badness and goodness…..God means that we also exist, and this is not the end of the story.” From a social point of view we can interpret this statement as: God exists, because we do not always help each other out, and sometimes there is nothing we can do. Instead of helping, we ban each other, and we fight and kill. We need God both for killing and for justice. If oppression does not exist, God will not exist either, and if he does exist, its existence is not the same as what we have read in our history. In a clear criticism of religion, God is introduced as a made up illusion, an object, which is used as a force that keeps the humans in chain, from inside it ties up their souls and minds and from outside it becomes an organization, which helps the brutality and ignorance to stay. But God is more a Subject than an object. It is the name of a self-active force that we cannot use for everything. Masters themselves become slaves of this force. At the beginning of the creation of what will later be called God, there is no difference between a bad spirit and a good spirit. Each spirit can be either good or bad. However, they can all be dangerous. Knowledge of Gods is knowledge of how naturally dangerous they are. One big part of each culture is how to control Gods. This frightening thought always rests that Gods might go back to their scary nature, and forget all the culture they have learned. Prayers, divinity, metaphysics, spirituality and art are all serving to produce a safe path for the authority of God, so crisis is not raised and the system of the world is not disturbed.Abdolkarim Soroosh has an idea which is not in accordance with the historical researches about religions. He separated the nature of Islam from its authority. He takes this nature out of the history, and believes that “authority”: is what has been forced onto the nature throughout time and historical events. He does not pay attention to the fact that wherever culture is not improves, and “authority” was not able to control the “nature”, religion has returned to its original nature and made crisis. “Authority” can tame the religion; however there are special authorities that let religion be violent and forceful. Therefore, criticizing the religion is criticizing the culture, even if we carry on the criticism of religion independently. The situations that cause religion to go to its mean nature are those valuable situations that cause the phenomenology of political religion.Educating and taming of religion by the use of culture has not been easy. In many parts of the history of Islam we see times when the disorderly, furious and deceptive God has resurfaced and shown his true nature. These returns are specific to huge cultural or social crisis. In recent years we have faced a new crisis, which is wrongfully regarded as the protest of tradition against modernism. If tradition means customs, manners, characters and insights of those who lived before us, we can say that those cultures had their own tamed God, who is very different from the angry God that the current regime in Iran, and others like Mulla Omar, Mohammad Ata, and Osama Bin Laden are representing. This God in Iran and in other places is the production of a modern metamorphosis, even though its ingredients are from old times. In this metamorphosis, the will power of God surfaces as an angry and systematic technique. The anger of the God in this age is a terroristic-technical phenomenon. In this new metamorphosis which creates the new angry God, the gene of anger has reactivated, and has become the base. The thoughtfulness of an ancient culture is lost, and it has lost its taming effect, and the abnormal God has returned; the one who is only made of power and anger.Damage recognition and responsibilityWho is responsible for such God? Who is responsible for a God whose servants can rape, torture, murder, lie and found a religious system that causes all these crimes?Atheists say: “this is not our concern. We have said from the beginning that we don’t have any Gods.” Religious intellectuals say:”we are not responsible for this God. Our God is kind, and a defender of human rights.” Those clergies who are against this regime say:”this is not a religion-based system. Its agents are abusing religion.” Spirituals say:”our God is all about love and fun, and he does not torture.” Ordinary people say:”these torturers are not religious, they are thieves and gang members and a bunch of dirty Mullas.” And when the heads of the regime see all the scandals of their divine system, they relate them to “enemies”.However we are all responsible for that God, because we wrote a play (?زیرا همسرنوشتیم) and God is the actor of this scene. Nothing can cause a failure for a culture more that an out of control God, and nothing is a better evidence of such matter more than when a divine power turns into an uncontrollable earthly force. The Islamic culture was unable to produce a God who forbids lies, duplicity and rape. In Islam, one can easily lie, cheat, rape, murder. On one hand, God of Islam is very powerful, on the other hand this God can be easily misused. This means that culture was not able to well educate the religion, and it has acted weakly. Everyone is responsible for this weakness. Religion leans toward Lompanism, and this is one side of the story. On the other side, civilization and cultural weaknesses let Lompanism to spread the Mullas and Lompins in critical times. The torturing and abusive God is a result of ignorance, bad habits, and the tendency to be forceful and cruel. When sympathetic teachers see the crimes of the regime, they should ask themselves:” where did I go wrong? What was the problem with my method of educating others, that caused so many people to enter into such ignorant and criminal paths?” In Islam there is a high tendency towards terrorism. Other religions have also done cruel acts, and they still due, but none of them were as much fond of terrorism as Islam. The problem is not only because of out-of-orderly systems of some Islamic communities. The boarder that was set between the order “be” and the action “so it is” which was set by culture, could not control the power of the person who gives the order of “being”; and this power has the tendency to combine with any other source of power who can give such order. The life of a human has no value in the eyes of such powers, especially if that human is not Muslim. A Muslim can easily be called a non-Muslim. Islam, is a religion for the whole world, but the Islamic God was not able to become the God of the whole world. This God has always been God to one certain tribe and one community. This power was easily torn in between different tribes, and they all fought amongst themselves. Discrimination between one group and another group has always been one of the main principals of this God: Be united in your own group, and be cruel to the other group. This God is in a rush, anxious, greedy, and holds grudges. He is not sympathetic toward ”sinners” and he believes that a power outside the world upon which he rules, has caused them to sin. When he gets furious at someone, he calls them deaf and blind, and considers them of an unknown dirty nature; it is not clear how they were even created. Its social medicine is only the surgical blade. The wise historian, Eric Hobsbawm, says that the twentieth century was the century of century of extravagance. This century was also the century of Islam, as much as it was the century of greediness. The century of extravagance is yet not over for Islam. Recognition of damages of this God and this religion is naturally recognition of damages of the culture and the community. Anywhere that the culture is weaker and the community is more disorderly, religion takes a more violent action. The difference between Iranian clergy and the Taliban in Afghanistan is that in Iran the words of Hafiz were able to penetrate the souls of Iranians, and make them kinder. If such cultural barriers which those like Hafiz have put in the ways of Faqihs and Mullas did not exist, the society would not have a developed structure, and modernism would not have entered the people’s behavior and beliefs, and then our situation would not have been any different from Afghanistan. The culture of Iran is an Islamic culture. This means that its culture has put all its power into controlling Islam, but it has not succeeded yet. “Allah Akbar”Will it be successful? Now we focus on using the religion to tame the religion. This is a cultural possibility. Culture has gained this historical talent of putting one God in front of another. Culture however, is a mixture of talent and stupidity. The stupidity of culture is ignorance toward the dangers of this second God.The Islamic slogan “Allah Akbar” has a controlling ability. “Akbar” is both a great description and a predilection ( صفت عالی است، هم تفضیلی?), and in this slogan, the act of taming is used by emphasizing the predilection, and saying that Allah is better that another made up God. When people shout “Allah Akbar” from their rooftops, they want to say that they depend on a God who is greater than the God of the government. This way, the God of the regime becomes just an idol, and it is confronted by the true God. “Allah Akbar” shows the divine greatness. In Islam, God is both tended toward greatness, and toward the opposite way, where he becomes involved in the most detailed matters, and presents himself as a greedy, unforgiving businessman or a grudge-keeping king, or a mixture of both. On one hand, this God is the creator of everything, and no movement in the world goes unnoticed by him. On the other hand, he can sink so low that he can argue with just one person and curse at him. It is interesting that sometimes that greatness and this lowness mix together and a disgraceful human description like “deception” is made into a great adjective like “the best of deceivers” and is used to describe the God. “Allah Akbar” an both be a destroyer of deception and a producer of deception, because it both criticizes power, by showing off a better power, and also produces power by stopping the greatness, and bringing down the king of the skies and making him into an earthly king.. “Allak Akbar…Khomeini Rahbar” (which means God is great…Khomeini is the leader): the first part shows greatness, the second part shows descent.This mechanism of limiting the greatness, and tending toward descent is one of the problems of Islam with secularization. If Islam was a religion of complete greatness, it would not be against secularization. If its God followed the wisdom of Avicenna and would not get into the details of the world, he could give this right to the people to fix up their society. Some believe that the problem of Islamic societies with secularization of the political, legal and social systems goes back to their spiritual tendency. But it is the exact opposite way. The main problem of Islam with secularization is the existence of a God who prefers descent to greatness, ignorant minds, a discriminating system, materialized religious icons, dirty laws, and a religion that can easily be used as a power tool. Therefore the struggle over secularization of the political system is not only about political power. A big part of it is a struggle for spirituality, education, art, and graceful minds and behaviors. The fight for secularization is a fight against vulgarity. It is vulgarity that is gathered into power in a religious system, and shows itself in the form of rape and sexual abuse in prisons.Can religion be freed of vulgarity? History is yet to be made, and religion can become what its devotees want it to be. The devotees have the right and liberty to change their religion into something else. Essentiality is not against liberty. It is obvious what is essential: they should make their God great. In order to stop him from becoming the God of the torturers, they should forbid him from becoming an employee of the prison. Prison is the origin of power. Those who want to inhibit God from guarding the prisons, should take him down the power seat. The spiritual secular reasoning of our world, gives our devotees the choice of spirituality or vulgarity, torture or ethics. Secularism means succession of ethics over religion.



September 1, 2009