Islam and nihilism
OP - March 12, 2013, 06:54 AM
An issue I've been mulling over: Can Islam, like Christianity, ever culminate in nihilism? Or let me encapsulate the question in less abstruse terms by subsuming it under the rubric of Hegelian/Marxist materialistic dialectics.
I'm curious to see how many of these nutcase propagandists around the world actually come from a bourgeois/middle class background. If the working classes were educated in islamic countries, do people here suppose that they would be more inclined to dispense with the ideology? I notice a very curious master/slave relationship here. Whereas in the west we've (superficially at least) fetishised commodities, in the islamic world the polar opposite is taking place. I call it the islamic desiring machine because the plight of the working classes are so dire and humans are naturally emotional creatures. Ca boom, enter religion to fill the void, 'opiate of the people kind of thing' whereas Marx was referring to an enforced structure this isn't the case with Islam as there is a naive belief testifying to the unity of the ummah. Naturally, any intelligent person who is well-versed in history will tell you that such a dubious brotherhood never existed proceeding the death of the profit - classic cult behaviour, much?
Islam is fundamentally a moral system that is not life affirming. All moral systems, and especially those which are not life affirming are doomed to nihilism as they rest on metaphysical premises. Metaphysics is an inherently problematic discipline that only seems to serve the purposes of pesky Kantian liberals (yes, I see Dr. Tariq Ramadan of Oxford as one, before you ask). Now we could get into whether transvaluation is a moral system within itself, but I tend to see the transvaluation or going beyond good and evil teaching in Nietzschean thought as embodying a rational morality that is post-cultural and post-societal and most importantly post-metaphysical. So, rational moral discussion that values humans as capable, intelligent individuals that are concerned with advancing the human race as one, with a spirit of cooperation that seeks to minimise harm and maximise opportunity in order to preclude conditions where master slave dialectics will prevail and hence inevitably result in conflicts and the inversion of such dialectics.
There are various muslim esoterics who will contend that islam is the transvaluation that Nietzsche talks about, however, I respectfully disagree:
'What was the only part of Christianity that Mohammed borrowed later on? Paul’s invention, his device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the belief in the immortality of the soul—that is to say, the doctrine of “judgment"' Nietzsche, The Antichrist, section 42. Notice the rhetoric utilised here. If priestly tyranny did not exist in islam it would have crumbled.
The question is: would it be possible to offer a perspective to the islamic population (deprived of all these batshit fundies with temper tantrums) that admits to the reformist facet of Islam in 7th century arabia, a political mythos, if you will, whilst accentuating its inherent nihilism? Nihilism would be illustrated through contradictions, inconsistencies in the very essence of the faith, science, etc. I mean, I'm sure many would conclude that Lockean liberalism was remarkable for its time, but if you're an atheist you better run for your fucking life as his letter of toleration mercilessly vilified atheists and did not accept them as part of the social contract.
Thoughts? This is being written in a very sleep deprived haze.
TL;DR: looking for an analysis of the class dynamics of clerics vis-a-vis the average working population (preferably in islamic states)
Topic: Islam and nihilism