One cannot divorce Islam from the Arab culture which created it. Pagan Arab society created, nurtured and expanded Islam. The theology of Arabian paganism suffuses the Koran, the Hadiths and Sharia Law in its various implementations across the Islamic world. No serious study of Islamic theology can refute this base fact. Arab theological culture and pagan theology pre-dates the invention by Mohammed of his father's clan's chosen deity the moon idol El-Ilah or Al-Lah [the one]; by millennia. Islamic theology is in the main, the sanctification of pagan Arab theologies, celestial worship, constructs and beliefs. There can be no disputation about that reality as evinced in the studies by Hitti, Phillips, Lewis, Coons, Lawrence of Arabia, and Arab writers and sources. Islam is Arab pre-modern culture. That is why there is such a problem with Islamic theology.
I have never understood why more attention is not paid to the Arab-pagan theological ideals which are for all intents and purpose, the whole thrust of Islamic imperial totalitarianism.
Arab society in the pre-Mohammed age was for millenia, a backwards, celestial worshipping set of rituals and ossified tenets. Outside of the nearby spice routes, the Arab Bedouins were for millennia outside of the main intercourse of civilisational intercourse and development. The great empires and states to the north and west were impacted by trade, the transference of ideas, war, social changes, inventions, and competition. The Arabs were left out of this and were almost a closed society unto themselves. Trade, slavery with Ethiopia and interactions in caravaning, brigandage and social norms were of course felt in the Arab peninsula. Centuries before Mohammed began his campaign of unification and attendant slaughter and despotism, the Christians and Jews had made significant inroads and had established thriving and wealthy communities – much to the envy and consternation of the more primitive moon and celestial obsessed Arabs. But in the main it is true to say that the great forces which created vibrant civilisations to the north and West and across the Indian ocean in the subcontinent were completely absent in Arabia.
What cultural disfigurement so arrested Arab development, that newly formed Jewish and Christian communities rejecting the primitive and irrational paganism of the Bedouins, could so completely surpass their fellow dwellers in the barren wastes of the peninsula. The outward manifestations of Arab failure were both obvious and timeless; and all of them found their way into the Koran. The Arab and Muslim hatred of women, the Jew, the infidel and the follower of Christ, is testimony to this long historical pedigree of savagery and blood-lust. It is no mystery why human blood must be spilled by Arabs and Muslims when their 'enemy' or inferiors are killed. The cult needs blood to purify itself, and render pure again, what was made impure by Jews, Christians, women, and anyone not a part of the death cult.
Today we see the timeless millennia-old savagery of Arab pagan culture at work in the service of Mohammed's moon deity Il-Lah or Al-Lah. Not much has changed in the anti-culture of Arabia or greater Islam. In our world we see that infidel or impious Muslim necks are cut; faces disfigured after gang rapes; female heads smashed in with stones; innocents liquidated by homicide bombers; blood of non-fundamentalist Muslims spilled; all to appease the cult of Il or Al-lah and purify the world, through the sacrifice of human impurity. This cult of death has liquidated over 300 million humans in its 1400 years of imperial barbarism.
According to the United Nations on a per annum basis, the Arabs kill some 10.000 women in dis-honor killings; some 10-20.000 female babies out of family shame for bearing a girl and not a boy; and of course the Arabs murder countless Jews and other insufficiently Muslim Arabs. In non Arab locales such as Iran thousands of people have been murdered by the fundamentalist regime since 1979, many of them girls and women for 'crimes' of honour, or 'shame' including looking men in the eye; not being sufficiently covered by bed-sheets in public, or having their own bank accounts. Turkey's Islamic history is one of endless Jihad until 1921. Tens of thousands, including Muslims and Kurds, have been killed by Muslim Turks in the past 50 years. In Africa, Asia and throughout the West, the treatment by Muslims of Unbelievers, Jews, Christians, Hindus, and Animists is simply shocking in its savagery, bloodiness and genocidal intent. Collectively we can term the actions of Muslims as barbarism.
What other signs of pagan Arab, pre-Mohammed failure do we find in our world today ? Like pre-600 AD Arabia, the greater Arab-Muslim world today is shockingly illiterate. Perhaps the illiteracy rate has improved since 632 AD, but the clear fact is that a high percentage of Arabs and Muslims and especially women, are completely ignorant. Some 30-50% of women are illiterate in the Muslim world. A slightly lower level of illiteracy exists for men. Education within the Arab-Islamic world focuses for the most part on the Koran, Islamic law, Islamic history and Islamic supremacism. Little pertaining to the creation of modern society – technology, finance, business, engineering, ethics, morality, individualism, respect for women and the disadvantaged – finds its way into Arab and Muslim re-education. Within the environs of greater-Islam, education is not to improve the mind, but to saturate untutored minds with propaganda and create a submissive and pliant community.
This must be true, because for the past 1000 years the Arab and Muslim world has created exactly nothing of value. The Arab 'enlightenment' never existed of course. The imperialist Arabs simply squatted on superior empires and civilisations. All of the so-called 'inventions' made by the Arabs were translations and the recrudescence of ancient ideas committed by Christians, Jews, Greeks and Persians. Even today the Western discovery and usage of oil is an event that never would have occurred if left to Arab 'civilisation'. The combustion engine, the physics and engineering of oil refining and usage was and is, completely beyond the capability of the Arab-Muslim anti-culture.
Many experts and 'moderates' believe that it is a myth that a majority of Iranians, and Arabs support Western concepts of democracy, freedom, human rights and individual responsibility. I myself tend to disagree with this view. The problem is not that Persians, Turks and Arabs don't want Western ideals, freedoms, the ability to venerate life and economic-political opportunity. The problem lies in the unfortunate historical legacy that their culture preaches the exact opposite. Islamic and Arab history is a sorry tale. It has been a spectacle of a society and imperialism riven and corrupted by a male-dominated; racist; misogynist; anti-modern theology. The true purpose of the moon cult is to establish a society of submission premised on racism and supremacism. Such a creation is an obvious template of what is called 'Orientalism'. A program of hatred not only of the individual, but of life.
How to erase and re-program greater Arabia and Islam? Exogenous force, pressure and will. Only in Iraq and Afghanistan, at the point of American military power, is there hope for true reform. Without military intervention Arab and Muslim society will never be modernized. Without being defeated in war, Islam and Arab theology will never eschew the cult of death for the cult of life. Islam is after all a military cult of power and oppression. Such cults don't reform themselves because some liberal-left wing moron at a Western university drones on about it being a 'religion' or some tree-hugging imbecile donates chocolates and tears for the Arab-Muslim fascist-group of choice.
The Arabs and Muslims have always been opposed to civilisation and the modern world. They have never been interested in furthering modernity or the pursuit of individual happiness. The cult of death is by its very nature oriented to destroying life. Jews, Blacks, the Female, Christians, Hindus, and anyone who is opposed to the fundamentalist nonsense called the Koran is marked for destruction. And yet pious voices in the West extolling the mindlessness of multi-culturalism and cultural relativity, pronounce that such a program is 'religious'. Arab theology was never religious. Neither is its derivative called Islam.