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MARIFATNAME, AN EXEMPLARY BOOK,PROTOTYPE OF LUDICROUS SCHOLARSHIP! SERPENT WITH RUBY EYES THAT TERRIFY ANGELSBehind the array of angels there is a huge serpent. Its head touches the end of its tail that coils around the earth. Its head is of white pearls, his body of yellow gold and its eyes of ruby. At the root of every hair on its body are one thousand wings adored by angels. The noise emitted by this yellow serpent is higher in volume than the chorus of angels that recites its name and it unleashes terror. It may swallow the entire universe in a morsel if it ever opens its mouth. Had that giant serpent not been restrained, the roaring of its voice would have annihilated the creatures upon the earth.ANGEL WITH SIX HUNDRED WINGS AND SIX THOUSAND FEATHERSGabriel has six hundred wings, each of which having one hundred feathers, the length of these covering the whole distance from East to West. The wings are embellished with colored lights while the huge body is snow white. His feet reach down to the core of the earth. A single feather on his wing can topple even the highest mountain.Beneath is the fourth heaven, its color is of white silver. It is called Erkalun. The angels in this heaven are in the shape of horses. Their master’s name is Kabail. He is the watchman of this fourth heaven. Below is the third heaven of yellow ruby. It is called Maun. The angels in this heaven have the shape of eagles. Their master is Saftail. He is the watchman of the third heaven. SUN WITH HANDLES AND SHEATED MOON CARRIAGESGod made for the sun a carriage of diamonds with 360 handles within the said universe and placed the sun on it. To pull the sun on his carriage from west to east, He assigned an angel for each handle to enable the angel to clasp it. For the moon God made a carriage of yellow rubies and placed the moon on it, and an angel to clasp each of the handles in order to pull the carriage of the moon from east to the west. Moreover, He created a sheath with sixty handles each of which to be clasped by an angel. Angels that draw the carriage of the moon gradually move it away from the sun and the angels that hold the sheath strip off the sheath proportionately with the distance separating the sun from the moon so that when the sun and the moon run across each other, the moon leaves its sheath and appears as a full moon. Whereupon, as the moon is drawn nearer to the sun by the angels, they arrange the sheath in such a manner that when it is about to touch the sun, the moon reappears fully clad in its sheath. This shall go on like this till Doomsday. This is the reason why the moon is sometimes a crescent, sometimes a half moon and sometimes a full moon.ADVICE TO WOMENTo prevent one’s wife from sitting at places overlooking crowded areas, in order that she may not be tempted to mix with them. To see that your wives be dressed soberly and shun showy garments so that she stays at home rather than goes out to show herself off.CAUSES OF POVERTY1. Committing sins..2. Telling lies 3. Sleeping late in the mornings. 4. Sleeping longer than eight hours in a given 24-hour period. 5. Lying naked in bed. 6. Answering nature’s call stark naked. 7. Eating in reclining posture. 8. Scattering around crumbs of bread. 9. Eating without washing one’s mouth when one is canonically not pure. 10. Burning onion and garlic peel. 11. Sweeping the floors at night. 12. Not disposing accumulated wastes. 13. Walking ahead of those older than himself. 14. Callinghis or her parents by their names. 15. Scratching one’s teeth with a stick. 16. Rubbing hands with mud and clay. 17. Sitting on the doorstep. 18. Leaning against one of the sides of a door. 19. Performing one’s ablution in the water closet. 20. Sewing unstitched piece on a dress while it is being worn. 21. Wiping off one’s face with one’s sleeve or hem of a skirt. 22. Keeping intact a spider web at home. 23. Tarrying when performing the prayer. 24. Leaving the mosque soon after Morning Prayer. 25. Going early to the market every morning. 26. To Lingering in the market place. 27. Buying crumbs of bread from beggars. 28. Cursing one’s offspring 29. Throwing lice into the fire. 30. Leaving open the covers of containers at night. 31. Snuffing out candles by blowing on them. 32. Writing with a knotted pen. 33. Combing one’s hair with a comb of which a tooth is broken. 34. Forgetting to pray for the souls of one’s parents and masters. 35. Winding one’s turban while seated. 36. Putting on one’s long drawers while standing. 37. Getting mad and sending away a beggar. 38. Being sparing in one’s consumption of one’s needs. 39. Being prodigal. 40. Being neglectful in handling one’s means. 41. Sleeping in a house without door. These are the contents of the bestseller of Erzurumlu Ýbrahim Hakký, Sunni sectarian Muslim. The book, written two a half centuries earlier, is still in vogue among the believers. Even muftis have praised this religious mania. Its editors have extolled its author in their prefaces. The author did not verify the truth of his hallucinations calling them “evidences proven by experience.” TABARI, THE GREAT SCHOLAR AND GUIDE OF IBRAHIM HAKKIIbrahim Hakký bases most of his sayings on fabricated hadiths and the Sunni scholars of the past. Tabari, who lived 900 hundred years before Ibrahim Hakký, is one of the sources the latter drew upon. Tabari, like Ýbrahim Hakký, had a flowery style and an extremely rich imagination. Despite the teaching of the Quran that often makes reference to the use of one’s reason and logic and encouraged scientific discoveries, the Muslims, especially in the course of the last seven hundred years, have been immersed in ignorance, and suffered to remain underdeveloped in terms of modern scientific developments.The Quran came to be considered merely as a book read for the souls of the departed. Its translation was banned. Instead, the guides that actually led the public have been the books such as those of Tabari and Erzurumlu Ýbrahim Hakký. Not even the censure leveled at Islam by atheists has been as damaging as these books. BACKGROUND OF BACKWARDNESS IN SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENTAlthough inventions and superstitions did exist during the first couple of centuries after the death of the Prophet, there had been no proper domination by the Sunnis, Shiites and traditionalists. Evidence of this is the emergence of religious schools like the Mutazila that opposed irrationalism, espoused even by some Abbasid caliphs.The Muslim community was the most advanced and civilized community in the world in these first centuries. Almost all textbooks of history of scientific thought acknowledge that the fountainhead of the philosophical and scientific heritage of European civilization and Renaissance had been Islam. At a period when Christian communities did not have a proper library, the Muslims that had occupied Spain had erected seventy big public libraries; solely in the Cordoba library about 600,000 books shed light on intellectual life. Great scientific discoveries in astronomy, chemistry, medicine, botany and mathematics were the exclusivity of Muslim scholars. One should also note the great number of books translated by Muslims. The scholars drew upon their contents and made a synthesis of what they learned from them with their own discoveries. As a matter of fact, the works of Greek thinkers like Aristotle and Plato, that Europe has acknowledged to be the basic source of her own civilization, were made available thanks to Muslim translators. The scientific curiosity of the Muslim community was spread over a vast geographical area. WHEN PEOPLE CHANGE THEMSELVESWhy did such a community experienced a decline?God chose to make a change in the superiority in terms of scientific achievements of the world, so it falls to us to look for its reasons in our own behavior. In the course of the centuries that immediately followed the Prophet’s death, the sole authority that governed people was the Quran. Scientific reasoning and logical thinking were encouraged and promoted by the Quran. But when the hadiths got the upper hand afterward, the hostility against the intellect became the major drawback in the development. As scientific research was based on logical thinking, one could not expect any advance in the Muslim community immersed from this time on in superstitions. Imam Ghazzali, one of the major persons responsible for the establishment of the irrational in Islam, wrote on page 83 of his book, The Way of the Wise, the following: “For rational argumentation is the cause of many ills and will not do any good. Argumentation is the source of hypocrisy, envy, megalomania and pride.” The consequence was the rise of a mentality that sought salvation from the lodges where dervishes kept whirling. This state of affairs could not get rid of the prevailing ignorance and remained doomed to backwardness. Max Weber, in his book Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, writes how Protestantism shaped man’s mind, which, in turn, gave rise to the capitalist system. He explained how the background was formed that made possible the development of an idea, a belief, a religious sect and a system. If similar research is conducted in the case of the development of Islam and the causes of its rise from the Bedoiuns of the desert to the highly developed civilized state, one will see that the source behind the searching mind had been the Quran. In the consequences given rise by the mental infrastructure formed by the hadiths, sectarian hadith transmitters and religious orders, one can see clearly the reason for the scientific, intellectual and cultural underdevelopment. HAD THE WORLD BEEN ROTATINGFamous Sheikh Abdul Aziz from Saudi Arabia states in his book “Rational and Spiritual Evidences against the Revolution of the Earth around the Immobile Sun” published by official authorities: “Whoever argues in favor of this will be in a state of damnation. For such an argument is against the existence of Allah, the Quran and the Prophet. The person who claims this shall be invited to repent; if he does repent, so much the better, if not, he shall be cursed and declared a renegade and condemned to die, and his assets shall be forfeited by the treasury of the Muslim State. If, as they claim, the earth did revolve, the mountains, trees, rivers and seas could not stay where they are. We would witness that the countries in the west would be shifting toward the east and vice versa. The position of the Kýbla would have changed and men could no longer detect it. Considering that none of such events takes place, this claim is not valid for many reasons difficult to enumerate.”According to this treatise those that argue for the revolution of the earth and the satellites must be put to death. What is more striking is the recent date of the work: 1975. This is the consequence of having hadiths, sects and orders as reference and not being satisfied by the Quran. |