From Islam To Islamism, From Islamic Fundamentalism To Jihadism E-Book

Christoph S.

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 404

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The aim of this work is to warn of worse things to come by means of an ideology-critical analysis of Islamic fundamentalism. The argument "Nobody could have known that", which in reality should read "Nobody wanted to know that", is today once again beginning to promote the wishful thinking of an "inherently tolerant and peaceful Islam". If no balance can be achieved between Western and Quranic thinking, the worst must be expected. The "supra-naturalistic value system" of Islam is to be critically reflected upon from the philosophical position of realism (understood as a value-neutral collective term for many philosophical currents), which assumes the existence and at least partial recognizability of an extra-subjectively existing external world.

Leseprobe

After World Youth Day [...] drunken young Muslims paraded past Cologne Cathedral and shouted: In forty years it will be ours. (From the interview of Auxiliary Bishop Heiner Koch in the RP of 30.08.2006,1 "Christians must become bolder" A4).

1 Rheinische Post: http://www.rp-online.de/politik/deutschland/christen-muessen-frecher-werden-aid-1.2315368

Table of contents

Foreword

Introduction

Main part

1.

Islam

2.

Presentation of one's own ideology-functional point of view from the point of view of cultural anthropology in comparison to the Islamic image of humanity

2.1 Cultural Anthropological Premises

2.2 The image of man in Islam

3.

From Islam to Islamism

3.1 The Beginning of Both Religions (Christianity & Islam)

3.2 Islam's Threefold Claim to Universality

3.2.1 Absolute claim

3.2.2 Totality claim

3.2.3 Claim to globality

3.2.4 Kant's Critique of the Proofs of God

4.

The value problem

4.1 Nietzsche's Double Negation of Truth

4.2 Monod - a representative of the strict dualism of descriptive science and normative object references

4.3 Lenk - constructivism and value-truth dualism

4.4 Birnbacher - the "naturalistic fallacy

5.

Ideology criteria that characterize Islamism as a deficient ideology.

5.1 Knowledge deficit

5.2 Monopolies of knowledge

5.3 Dichotomous interpretation scheme

5.4 Demonization of the Enemy Image, Glorification of One's Own Role

5.5 Blank formulas

5.6 Ambivalence

5.7 Asymmetry

5.8 Selective perception

6.

Islamic fundamentalism

6.1 History of Islamism

6.2 Fundamentalism - a Phenomenon of Modernity?

6.3 Fundamentalist premises in ontology and epistemology

6.4 Islamism and science

6.5 Islamism and democracy

7.

From Islamism to Jihadism

8.

Conclusion

8.1 Summary

8.2 Outlook

Appendix: Islamism in the Mirror of Selected Literature

A.1 Akbuluth: Islam and its significance for world politics - a misinterpretation and a false interpretation

A.2 Kellerhals: Islam. - An Appropriative Interpretation

A.3

Elyas:

Islam - Religion of Peace:

BKA (publ.):

Islamist terrorism -

a trivializing interpretation

A.4 Khoury

: Islam and the Western World

- A Religious-Philosophical-Theological Interpretation

A.5 Domenico Losurdo:

What is Fundamentalism

? - An Objectivist Interpretation

Bibliography

Foreword

Bertrand Russell, in his history of philosophy "A History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day", represents a new conception of the history of philosophy, whose programmatic intentions he already underlines in the subtitle. According to it, philosophy and its history is not a self-reflection of the human mind, detached from time and human society; but "philosophers are both results and causes: Results of their social circumstances, of the politics and institutions of their time; causes (if they are lucky) of the beliefs that give form to the politics and institutions of later ages" (Köln 2002). This general thesis is followed by the analysis. It is argumentatively confirmed in the main section by indisputable references to the Golden Age of Islamic philosophy. In the concluding part, a prognosis is ventured as to how a confrontation of Islam with its own and that of modern times can have socio-cultural effects.

The previous century in Europe was characterized by three major ideologies: Imperialism, National Socialism and Communism. Imperialism and National Socialism have raged in two world wars with tremendous loss of people and material; Communism, which has kept rich harvest of human lives especially in the gulags of the Soviet Union and had about 70 million people murdered in China under Mao, has buried itself in its own contradictions, articulated by President Gorbachev. What unites all three ideologies2 is their structurally similar value system, which grants man only an instrumental existence, with which these ideologies could play their power game.

But the world's sigh of relief is visibly weakening, because the ideological vacuum created by the largely bloodless demise of the Soviet empire is already beginning to fill again. The religion "Islam" is coming more and more under the political influence of the ruling idea of Islamism, a fundamentalist ideology of liberation3 with missionary zeal and zealots who take their worldview from a literal interpretation of the Koran and plan a Muslim state of God with global scope, whose enemy image, the West, is being demonized more and more, so that the Christian Occident, according to this account, is becoming more and more like Sodom and Gomorrah, whose extermination is a work pleasing to God.

Just as the already mentioned major ideologies have developed their enemy images, imperialism the merciless competitor, national socialism the 'inferior races', especially the international Jews tum, communism the 'class enemy', who were demonized and 'demonized' beforehand for easier annihilation, so today Islamism presents its enemy image of the 'crusading West' with the USA and Israel as protagonists.

Here, too, it is striking that the Other (we) pass successively through the roles of fellow citizen, then of adversary, then of enemy, then of diabolical emissary of hell, then finally of beast, inhuman and unbeing (incarnations of evil), so that it must be the duty of every good citizen, as a member of a truly godly worldview, to finally 'dispose' of the 'Other' (us) as 'human waste'. The terrorist wing of Islamism, unmoved by the admonishing voices of some of Islam's religious leaders, has committed itself to this 'disposal' program. It is the cynicism of power that here, as in the other ideologies mentioned, reduces the existence of the human being to a smooth functioning and allows it to be regarded at most as a means.

Inhuman Islamism, which now marches in lockstep in the ranks of "fascism," "communism" and "national socialism," is an attack on all civilized nations, which leads me to expose this terrorist ideology argumentatively and thereby to fight it, not least from my painful experience with communism. "Change through enlightenment" - this is how I would like to summarize my program laid down in this book in a striking way. The argumentative unmasking of Islamism as a negative caricature of an abused religion of redemption (I constantly see before me the two collapsing towers of the World Trade Center in New York) does not leave me emotionally cold, so that I will represent my point of view in normative evaluations in a committed and linguistically unambiguous manner; the postulate of objectivity applies to the factual presentation. The reader can always distinguish between normative subjectivity and descriptive objectivity.

That there is much to be said for a military confrontation between the West and Islamism in the future is the opinion of Huntington (1996)4 . In his controversial book "Clash of Civilizations" he argues: 'There are two world cultures (better civilizations), that of Islam and that of the West. Both claim universal power.' The Muslims believe that they have the right and thus the power to spread their culture with physical vigor throughout the world; the Europeans are convinced of the superiority of their rational civilization and want to maintain a Western world civilization despite dwindling power. The latter hope that through the globalization of human concerns a world culture transcending individual culture will emerge. Basically, the sole claim to power means a new edition of the bipolarity between Soviet communism and American capitalism as a struggle between Islamism and the free West.

I would like to bypass the clarification of the disputed terms "civilization" and "culture" here by using the term "system". The objection that there is no unified Islamic system, but only many Islamic states with their own interests that can never form a unity, is well supported historically and in fact, but so is the counter thesis5 , because the cartoon controversy has shown that in religious matters Muslims have a unified consciousness and because Islamism is preparing to become the common foundation of political Islam across countries. There is also the utopia of a common God-state, which united all or many Muslims in a historically existing empire under Muhammad, the four "rightly guided caliphs," the "Umayyads" and the "High Gate," and can thus become reality again if it is seriously pursued because the basis of faith has not changed. Pan-Arabism is also still an option politically, despite its defeat in the Six-Day War.

German domestic and foreign policy has long ignored, then trivialized, then clumsily addressed this looming global confrontation between two systems. For decades, Muslims were allowed to settle in Germany unchecked. Anyone who saw a coming problem in this unlimited immigration was denigrated as a racist, called a neo-Nazi, ironized as a German Turk, indexed as a right-wing radical. An integrative society was supposed to form on the multi-cultic playground. The European migrants succeeded in this; for there was no political tension with Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, Portuguese, Yugoslavs (as a collective term).

But the Muslims remained among themselves because of their completely different value system, which they brought with them to Western Europe, were not very socially engaged and were strangers who often only had a broken command of the German language6 . This was not so bad, because in the meantime a Muslim parallel society had formed, which was visibly visible in the emergence of ghettos. This was not so bad, because in the meantime a Muslim parallel society had formed, visibly visible in the emergence of ghettos, in which, reinforced by the media in Turkey, a Muslim social structure influenced by militant Turkish nationalism7 was formed, in which Turkish is the colloquial language. A state-within-a-state that is separating itself from the German state system is gradually beginning to establish itself. The "diaspora syndrome," inadequate educational qualifications, the often propagandistic influence of the Turkish media, whose fomentation of prejudice determines old patterns of thought and behavior of many Muslims, not only Turkish Muslims, the bleak situation on the job market, but especially the feeling of superiority as God's privileged people, which does not correspond to reality, additionally ensure isolation from German society and also rejection of this culture. Despite the many Turks and Muslims living in Germany in conformity with the constitution, the reservation remains that a development is taking place here whose direction can hardly be recognized and controlled. Low commitment to German concerns and emphasis on one's own otherness is causing dwindling acceptance among the German population. We are experiencing world Islam and militant Islamism in the coded form of seismic shocks in our culture, which are difficult to interpret and therefore do not seem to be entirely safe.

2 The embedding of this concept in a negative context, which becomes clear here, is content for the time being in its use to be a deficient social theory with an incorporated rigid practical reference.

3 This term, too, is initially intended to serve phenomenologically as a collective term for the manifestations that can be grouped together under this dazzling term in everyday life, especially through the use of the media. In doing so, it is assumed that the term "Islam" can initially be clearly separated from the phenomenon of "Islamism": the former means "life according to the holy scripture of the Koran," the latter "life according to its message instrumentalized and deformed by ideologues.

4 American" citations are used, i.e. the author, year of publication of his production and page numbers in the text are marked by brackets. If several citations successively refer to the same publication, they appear only as bracketed page numbers.

5 This is where the particular approach is distinguished from the global approach. By decomposing a problem into many partial problems, one comes very close to the reality, but loses the view of the causative backgrounds, so that an evaluation of the whole is no longer possible. By placing a problem into global contexts, one distances oneself from the concrete reality of the individual data, but gains general structural insights, which for this only allow a general prognosis. Both perspectives have their justification and can complement each other. This work is more oriented towards the globalizing method, which cannot take every detail into account, so that a simplified picture emerges. However, the argument, repeated ad nauseam, that Islam as such does not exist, so that each individual case must be examined, only serves to rhetorically confirm all sorts of theories, so that factually existing common goals of Islam can be denied. The aim is to generalize the results of the study with a high degree of hypotheticality. It is also conceded without reservation that Christianity has also gone through historical phases of fundamentalism, but has overcome them on its own.

6 In the former GDR, all students had to learn Russian; however, because of the low prestige of Russian culture, which stemmed from World War 2, hardly anyone mastered this language. Because of the high prestige of English and French, Muslims living there do not stand out for their lack of mastery of the national language. I attribute the deficient language skills of many Turkish immigrants to a similar phenomenon, the lack of authority and low prestige of the German state, which creates an emotional language barrier.

7 The nationalistically acting Turkey, which simply ignores the European practice, may be mentioned here. About fifty thousand Turks living in Germany have, in spite of the ban on the 'double passport', subsequently re-accepted Turkish citizenship, even though they knew that their German citizenship would automatically expire when it became known. The Turkish state, which has lent a hand here, refuses to disclose the names, so that we can no longer rule out the possibility of non-German citizens voting unconstitutionally in any election, i.e. committing electoral fraud. According to the Hartz laws, citizens who apply for state support must disclose their financial circumstances. Now, many Turks who have applied for support under Hartz have assets in Turkey. But the Turkish state refuses to provide administrative assistance to the German authorities, so many Turks are financially better off than Germans.

Introduction

The topic of the work suggests as if a seamless path leads from Islam via Islamism to the terrorist concept of "jihad"8 , that is, with a certain consistency, Islam is to be seen as the starting point of a development that indirectly becomes the basis of jihadist terrorism9 . Islam itself is assumed to have a high potential for ideologization, which is permanently activated in the present. The three terms, it is assumed here, therefore do not describe three discrete states, but rather a gradual transition that makes a clear classification difficult. In the course of the investigation it must become clear whether this general suspicion is justified, is wrong, or must be modified and differentiated. That religions, insofar as they believed to proclaim the only authoritative truth, were and are to a particular extent the cause or co-cause of ideological conflicts, i.e. susceptible to fundamentalism, is taken as a strong premise. The Thirty Years' War is one such example, in which, in the name of God and Christian religions, religious motives and secular as well as spiritual strivings for power led to an extensive depopulation of the German Empire. The public burning of the pantheist Giordano Bruno by the Inquisition and the reprimand of Galileo Galilei by this institution prove an intolerant fundamentalism of Catholicism at that time.

Tepe's model of hermeneutics serves as an analytical treatment of the problem of fundamentalism. In his stage model of literary text interpretation, he distinguishes between two levels, the cognitive and the reflexive. The cognitive level is characterized by an objective and thus historically resistant sense of the text; the reflexive level poses the question of why the text is the way it is, that is, of the reason for the text's conception (Tepe 2001, 118-124).

The author would like to apply this model also to the interpretation of cultural phenomena and add to this stage model a third and last one. What presents itself as most real in a culture is its surface with the free play of economy, society, art, individuality, trends, values. At first sight, this agile set of relations seems to be without rules, random and aimless, i.e. chaotic. But with the premise that every effect is preceded by a cause, the question can be asked: Why are the phenomena the way they are?

The analysis of the object level thus brings to light the forces by which the contradictory surfaces are caused: contradictory or reinforcing value systems, convictions, theories. In the case of literary texts, this is the author's formative art program and value system, which determine the text structure as a causal background, so that the author's artistic and worldview intentions are reflected in the text. But the interests of the political actors can be questioned even further. The regress ends where assumptions, theories, value systems cannot be justified by any reasoning in turn. These founding premises are provided in their most comprehensive form by philosophy, religion and myth and directly determine the deep structure of a culture and thus indirectly its multifaceted reality.

Culture and history can be analyzed according to this three-layer theory. Thus, according to this theory, the topic demands a step-by-step approach. Islam as a religion with its unquestionable value system, which provides the ontological premises of the theological and profane superstructure, is first called "Islamism" in a value-neutral way, which in turn provides the theoretical justification for the confusing section of reality called "jihad.

If we compare the deep structures of the Western world with the Islamic world, it turns out that there is a deep, seemingly unbridgeable ontological difference between the Western and Islamic worlds. Islam assumes a world that was created by Allah and is therefore recognizable only through him. The Koran as sola scriptura describes objectively, binding for all times, absolutely true, what it is about this world and the role of man. The form of government that results from this is what Prenner (2005, 128) calls "nomocracy," a primary rule of God's word from which reality follows analytically. One can imagine this act of creation as an illocutionary speech act, which at the same time performs the corresponding action to the linguistic in formation, for example: 'I baptize you [...]'

By receiving the Koran, the Muslim learns about God's intention, but also about the nature of his world. The Koran is thus the mediator of objective knowledge, to which the Muslim must adapt: a direct path to knowledge of God and the world is not possible. Truth thus means "conformity of thought and action to the statements of the Koran" because it is semantically valid as God's word and therefore factually objective. The highest commandment of Islam is hidden in the term "surrender to God's will," which means monarchical and theological absolutism of Allah, to whom man is only an insubstantial shadow. Islam defines itself and its world from God, the almighty ruler.

The West represents the ontology of subjectivity according to the motto of Protagoras "Man is the measure of all things". The doubt about the objective world of the Middle Ages, which is understood as a reflection of the divine one, comes to its methodical expression in Descartes. At first everything is doubtable, even the existence of one's own person. But if one imagines the non-being of one's own person, then there must be an imaginer who imagines his non-being, the I, the self-consciousness, which already precedes all individual knowledge. So the universal doubt goes wrong, because to be able to doubt always presupposes already knowledge. Thus, skepticism does not lead to abstinence from knowledge, but to unquestionable knowledge. Descartes' method, then, is to arrive at doubt-free knowledge through doubting. Human reason, he concludes, is the locus of unconditional knowledge, while the object world can at any time feed skepticism because of its contingency. Subjectivism, then, by negating doubt, determines at the same time the indubitable thinking and being subject, no longer an idea of God's existence conceived as absolute objectivity. The power of imagination, reason, ratio are the conditions for the I to be certain of itself as well as of the world.

Thus, modern times represent an anthropocentric worldview, while Islam follows a theocentric basic concept. For him, God and his creation are the absolutely real, to which the human functions of being and cognition must be aligned. Both are diametrically opposed and constitute the fundamental difference between the two worlds. Basic positions, here the relation between religious objectivism of Islam and secular subjectivism of the West, determine the problems of today's world. Thus arises the objective of this thesis: From the philosophical position of realism (value-neutral understood as a collective term for many philosophical currents), which assumes the existence and at least partial recognizability of an extra-subjectively existing external world, the "supra-naturalistic value system"10 (Tepe 1988, 11) of Islam shall be critically reflected.

First of all, there are two directions of the ideology-critical analysis, the epistemological and the socio-critical: Ideology11 , now used in a comprehensive sense neutral to positive, changes according to the theory of "location-bound thinking" of cultural sociology (Mannheim 1984) on the one hand the philosophical and profane thinking and perception of reality, on the other hand also the perception and shaping of political-social reality. The former asks about the anthropologically attributed abilities of all human beings to absorb and process data, about the ability to think: about its conditions, possibilities and limits and criticizes attempts to influence the criteria of cognition and thus the ability to cognize on the basis of any pursuit of interests, prejudices or indoctrinations. The other criticizes social designs that pretend to be able to orient a society according to true, i.e. universally valid and binding values.

Birnbacher (1996) has proceeded according to a similar method of ideology criticism in the essay "Schopenhauer as Ideology Critic". An ideological complex is first subjected to a theoretical critique of the falsity of the statements, then the reason for this "distortion of truth" (51) is determined: political functions and moral intentions of the new doctrines of salvation that have bent the facts of the matter to suit their goals, to be critically evaluated, and finally the behavior of the actors who have produced an ideology or blindly follow it is exposed.

This critique of ideology has already been carried out on a theoretical level. I mention here only Lieber, Tepe, Salamun. Ideology formation takes place according to scientifically researchable laws, whose criteria can be documented scientifically-descriptively. Here I base myself on Salamun (2005), who points to the already elaborated criteria of a critique of ideology and totalitarianism, which can fruitfully contribute their "explanatory approaches and interpretive hypotheses" (9) in the analysis of fundamentalism. Surprisingly, it emerges that all fundamentalist movements develop in a structurally very similar way, so that they can presumably be based on the same, super historical structural model. The individual fundamentalist worldviews are then only individuations of a super historical structure, so that the goal of the work must be a determination of the individual characteristics of Islamic fundamentalism12 on the basis of these general structural features. But such descriptive accounts - we think of imperialism, National Socialism and communism - are not enough. If a dire calamity can be predicted, it can be effectively combated already, or better: only in its early stages.

Salamun, however, forgets to point out not only the scientific value but also the pragmatic aspect of such analyses. Here the author represents an enlightenment pathos that does not shy away from rhetorically aggravating formulations and yet is based on good reasons, because the principle "principiis obsta" (Resist the beginnings) applies; once an ideology has established itself in the negative sense, it gains a momentum of its own that can hardly be slowed down by criticism, because it 'disposes' of its critics until there are none left. The changes in theoretical cognition and practical social action caused by ideology in the deficit sense, ideology(-), must be exposed by an ideology-critical analysis. However, this exposure of ideologically deficient structures - another aim of this work - does not pursue an end in itself, but the strategy of bringing about a change in the reader's behavior. According to the logical relation "if p, then q", if I do not want q, the result is the setting of non-p; i.e. the emergence, flourishing and decay of an ideology run according to predictable historical phases, but can be influenced by man.

When the purpose of a fundamentalist ideology is exposed as false or inhuman, means must be sought to promote a different purpose in the sense of humanization. This work therefore pursues the concern to prevent the world from stumbling into a Third World War by means of an ideology-critical analysis of Islamic fundamentalism. The argument "Nobody could know that", which in reality should be "Nobody wanted to know that", which irrationalized the outbreak of the First and Second World War as well as the reign of terror of communism, starts again today to promote thoughtlessness, but also wishful thinking, as an "inherently tolerant and peaceable Islam". If no balance between Western and Koranic thinking can be achieved, the worst must be expected!

The theoretical basis of this work is Tepe's theory of ideology, which he has summarized in two studies, among others13 . Since the other two world religions are structurally and functionally related to Islam, they are largely excluded from this sub search for editorial reasons, although historically similar circumstances are conceded. Christianity, shaped by various fundamentalisms in its past, has purged itself of its susceptibility to fundamentalism in a painful phase of enlightenment and textual criticism.

But Islam vehemently resists a historical-critical analysis14 of the Koran. Subsequently, Islamism is subjected to a critical view, as is jihadism, from which consequences can be drawn for one's own political thinking and actions.

8 The term jihad is used here mainly in the meaning "holy war. As a reason for this can be given: "Unfortunately, our Muslim friends have now also adopted it and have drawn a false picture of Islam, which has contributed to many misunderstandings" (Schimmel 1996, 12). Its actual deterioration in meaning is not noted by many authors, so that they translate this term with the "great jihad" that requires inner purification from the believer.

9 Under the chapter heading "Vom klassischen Djihad der Eroberung zum Djihadismus des irregulären Krieges," Tibi (2004) sufficiently demonstrates the semantic degradation of meaning of this term, which also corresponds to an actual one.

10 A "supra-naturalistic value system" reckons not only with the existence of a physical reality but also with that of an otherworldly, metaphysical reality.

11 Mannheim (1984) distinguishes two approaches to thinking: "from within" and "from being" (1982, 213). He calls the former "idea," the latter "ideology" (213). It is not so much the what of ideas that Mannheim wants to determine; he wants to consider the mental entity as a function based sociologically on certain conditions. In a broad sense, it is a matter of the underlying socio-cultural value system that makes it comprehensible why the resulting intellectual product is the result of thinking from a certain position of interest, from an "ideology," a certain zeitgeist. This concept is here called "ideology(+)" (Tepe 1988, 8). This view largely coincides with Russel's conception of the philosophy of history.

12 Islamic fundamentalism is a deficient worldview because it pretends to be able to impose politically from the holy Koran an ideal world whose reality is attainable in the near future.

13 Tepe, P.: Theory of Illusions. Essen 1988. Same author: Illusionskritischer Versuch über den historischen Materialismus. Essen 1989.

14 According to the intersubjective experience that "the spirit did not fall from heaven", as a book title of v. Ditfurth negatively paraphrases the metaphysical thesis of creatio ex nihilo, it is claimed that a linguistically composed message, even if the bearer passes it on literally and without any additions of his own, has uncritically simply taken as a basis the nature of the language at that time with all the implications brought forth by man. It is indisputable that, since the Qur'anic Arabic is a human creation that has undergone a more or less long development, it is a condition for understanding the message of salvation that Allah has been able to proclaim only under the condition of the existence and mastery of a man-made and constantly changing linguistic system of meaning. Allah cannot speak to man in any other way than in human language. He had to become "human. The question may be allowed here, how Mohammed could have read the original Koran by an act of God, if he was illiterate according to general judgment.

Main part

1. Islam

The number of publications on Islam is legion, making it easy for any interested reader to gain access to this religion, which forms the third strongest denomination in Germany. Therefore, an already differentiated prior knowledge about this world-spanning faith in one God, Allah, is factored in here and only a first summary presentation is prefaced. In the course of the discussion, the developing problems require a more detailed examination of individual sub-areas.

Descriptively (in terms of religious studies), Islam is a creation of the Prophet Muhammad (born around 570 A.D.), who believes himself inspired by Allah to proclaim God's will to mankind. Muhammad lives as a merchant and trader in Mecca and learns about Christianity and Judaism as a caravan leader; he himself is a follower of polytheism, which is practiced by Arab tribes. The Kaaba in Mecca, today the highest sanctuary of Islam, is held in high esteem as a religious shrine by many polytheists. The many often feuding tribes also correspond to various polytheistic systems, so that Muhammad comes into contact with an abundance of deities, many of whom are also feuding with each other. He retreats into the desert and meditates, because he feels like a true seeker of God in this contradictory world of gods.

In the year 610 A.D. his prophetic phase begins; in the form of the angel Gabriel he perceives the voice of his, the one God, which, after a glimpse into the original Koran, imposes on him the true doctrine of God and also the order to proclaim it to all people. After his death, since Muhammad himself is illiterate, his visions, which have already been set down individually in writing, are summarized in the "book", in the Koran, unfortunately not chronologically, but according to the length of the suras, which shorten more and more.

Islam can refer to two sources; the Koran, the word of God, and the Godly life of the Prophet. The "book" written in Arabic, the "language" of God, cannot be translated into other languages according to its divine origin; it is the truth par excellence, valid beyond time, and a binding guideline for every Muslim in all areas of life. According to Muhammad's will, the text of the Koran is the direct word of God; he himself is only "the seal of the prophets" (33:40). Thus, hermeneutically, the Qur'an consists only of a single-layered text whose truth is openly available and not of layers of different levels of truth, so that a depth interpretation is not necessary. This opinion is strongly contradicted by hermeneuticists, because they can prove that the Koran contains very misleading and contradictory texts in many places, which can have their reason only in contradictory background premises and historical influences. Therefore, the faithful follower of Islam (surrender to the will of God) should not reflect, analyze and interpret the Quran, but should transfer God's word into the intended meaning one to one. And this is best done by learning the text by heart.

The godly life of the Prophet, who must, however, be denied any divinity, provides a second basis for the teachings of Islam, because this godly life is a model for every Muslim, but in its truth-guided stringency it can be classified under the Koran. Sayings, actions, questions, many of them concerning everyday life, on which the Prophet took a stand, were collected from those around him and commented on by the first four caliphs. Thus, in addition to the Scriptures, there is a short tradition in Islam in which these instructions are collected, the importance of which is, in my opinion, much too high, since they are not God's words and have not been authorized by the Quran. Such a self-contained instruction is called Hadith, of which "up to a million [...] circulate in six canonical books" (Barth 2003, 63), which allows for an abundance of variants of interpretation that cannot be overlooked, even though only about 9000 Hadiths are recognized and lead to multiple causes of dispute within Islam.

At the moment, it seems as if Muhammad enjoys a higher standing than God among Muslims. The instructions contained in the hadiths, which find their applications where the Qur'an has not provided a regulation, together with the Qur'an form the sunna, which has become "custom" according to the example of the Prophet.

The ummah, the "community of all Muslims" (Tibi 2001, 30), as established by Muhammad, is to be distinguished from this. It is the incorporated state idea of Islam and states that all Muslims should live in a state community. The head of such a universalist state should be a caliph or a righteous imam in the succession of Muhammad. In modern times, such an umma exists only as a utopia, because only Islamic nation states exist, but no overarching association of states is yet a reality. For Islam, however, the universalistic idea of an umma, a "world power Islam," (38) is subliminally always a political program.

It remains to introduce the controversial institution of "sharia," for many Europeans a negatively connoted irritant. It is "the collective term for Islamic rules of life, religious duties and the religiously based law of Islam, which is traced back to revelation" (Barth 2003, 67). Regional modifications or misogynistic rules of life and dress have also found their way into this religiously legitimized body of law, which encompasses the entire life of the Muslim. Muhammad's downgrading of women to the second rank has fostered a macho mania for masculinity that we often perceive among young Turks and youth of other Muslim states. Women's rights have been increasingly reduced throughout the history of Islam. It becomes an existential problem when the Sharia is imposed on minorities of other faiths. It is the sum of the Koran, Sunna, Hadith, consensus and analogy. We have here a comprehensive legal system that encompasses all of human life; it is total because it regulates all areas of life, thus conveying a great security of life; it is totalitarian for those who perceive the sharia as paternalism.

Thus, in Islam there is a pyramid of truth that can be thought of in a stepwise manner. At the top are God and the Koran, followed by the sayings of Muhammad, the hadiths, summarized in the sunna, the conclusion by analogy, in which questions that are not explicitly listed and resolved in the Koran and the hadiths are decided according to similarity with them, and the consensus, the unanimous opinion of Islamic theologians, which enjoys the reputation of a fatwa. The Shari'ah encompasses all of these stages to the extent that they incorporate rules from the four sources of law.

Islam's beliefs, which have assimilated Christianity, Judaism, and polytheism, can be divided into two areas: beliefs and practices.

Essential beliefs are "the unity of God (monolithic monotheism), the power of angels, revelation, prophethood, the existence of the afterlife and belief in predestination" (76). The five pillars of Islam are considered to be the practices of faith: the profession of faith, the five times daily prayer, almsgiving, fasting and the pilgrimage, the Hajj.

Before the thesis 'Islam possesses an implicit ideological potential which is particularly easy to activate and which, as Islamism, determines Islam and its basic political lines today' can now be examined, a separate determination of the position is necessary which is based on anthropology, namely because the term 'ideology', according to Tepe’s theory, becomes the actual constituting determination of man's being. His definition of man as an "illusion-prone animal" (1988, 7) needs explanation because of its at first seemingly strange choice of terms.

2. Presentation of one's own ideology-functional point of view from the point of view of cultural anthropology in comparison to the Islamic image of humanity

As was to be expected, there are fundamental differences between the Islamic conception of man as laid down in the Koran and that of scientific cultural anthropology. These differences have become even more pronounced in recent decades because of Muslim immigration to Europe, which has led to parallel societies instead of assimilation. Thus, spatial proximity has not brought the two value systems together, but has increasingly alienated them from each other.

Through satellite television, Muslims are connected to their homeland on a daily basis and perceive the reality surrounding them mainly from this perspective. They are "with their head in their homeland, with their body in Germany"; but as these different value systems drift further and further apart, they threaten to tear apart the personal identity of Muslims and the political identity of immigrant states. The difference between the human image of cultural anthropology and that of the Koran must now be named.

2.1 Cultural Anthropological Premises

According to this theory, man is not a being that is safely guided by God through this world, he is an instinct-reduced being with open genetic programs that allow learning. The animal is adapted to its world a priori by ITMs (Innate Triggering Mechanisms) that allow little room for modification. A creature's instinct repertoire, a genetically anchored prior knowledge for characteristic actions and reactions, adapts it in advance to its habitat in such a way that it can survive.

But in the evolution of humans an instinct reduction has taken place; the anticipatory knowledge of the external world stored in the genes exists partly only in open learning programs. While ITMs, for example 'enemy images', which compel to flee, only appeal very selectively and in an attractive way, very strongly extended forms of knowledge anticipation have developed in humans, the categories discovered by Kant and interpreted by Lorenz (1997) in terms of natural history, which contain, as it were, rules of object recognition, and do so a priori. What can be a possible object of experience is already known in advance by man, and in every concrete imagined object the forms of perception space and time as well as the categories quantity, quality, relation, modality are co-represented. They work by anticipating in advance a system of order by which the incoming quantity of data is structured. This makes man a "cosmopolitan animal" (Tepe), capable of perceiving, describing, and responding to an infinite number of possible objects. But this evolution towards flexibility and simultaneous stripping away of instinct-guided behaviors must be paid for by man with dismissal from the security of this protective umbrella and shield.

Thus he gets a problem: He is, paradoxically speaking, forced to be free. (It is no counterargument that many people give up this freedom in favor of institutional securities and place themselves under their protection. Religions, for example, offer the insecure person a sense of his own security). His self-knowledge makes him feel incessantly that he is a constantly endangered, constantly suffering mortal being, since there are no longer any guiding instinctual programs. "Reality and suffering pressure" (Tepe / Topitsch) inhibit any coping with life. Now even the open learning programs don't help him; for what should man learn something for?

He is first of all forced to create a substitute of instinct, which guarantees him the vital security of his life execution. This is necessary, because the normal human being is no Romulus and Remus and also no Robinson, which can grow up in isolation, but a being, which is embedded in culture. Man is a "cultural being by his nature" (Gehlen / Lorenz), i.e. a human nature as a species determination does not exist, which does not contradict a common biological basic equipment, because his 'nature' consists in the necessary absorption of culture, so that he becomes a being created by culture for the second time, which itself can produce culture again, which presents itself in an unmanageable variety.

This culture meets man in an immense abundance of designs, but means stabilization of his needs by "institutionalization" (Gehlen). It fulfills similar tasks as instinct: man is born into a certain culture whose aprioris and values he assimilates. State and social institutions, rules of coexistence established by tradition, sanctions and morals, mythical and religious customs, common language and common past are the cement that now makes possible a meaningful fulfillment of life. One can therefore even speak of a metaphysical need of man for eternally valid values; but human history, on the contrary, consists of a succession of value systems that become detached. While the three basic behavioral capacities cognition, emotion and will shape animal life as behavior, as a unity of knowledge, feeling and readiness to act, these capacities have differentiated in humans. The brain as an organ of survival has evolved into an additional organ of knowledge, which can judge relatively independently of feelings and personal interests. In the knowledge acquisition there is objectivity, it (the knowledge) cannot be completely wrong, although it originates from different cultural and personal sources; because life needs security. Our ratio, according to the realist premise, is capable of representing reality, albeit modestly.

What remains hidden to the people by the "objective spirit" (Hegel), called culture, for a very long time, is that this is in reality only a product of the "subjective spirit", product of the human mental creation which arises with it, changes and passes away. As long as mythical and religious things are understood as eternally lasting things together with a rationality of the perception of nature, which is close to life and fits to it, as reality, a psychic existential security is given, which, however, already starts to falter, when myths and religions are written down and thus have to allow a hermeneutic questioning about their truth content. They are - so the result of the questioning - no objectivations of the divine or spiritual, but only symbols of a reality lived before, which now becomes a fiction. They are only vital deceptions (if they claim an objective truth), they make a personally fulfilled and socially supported life possible for the one who believes, so that Tepe can speak of man as the ideology-decayed being, whose anthropological constant describes the dependence on essentialized illusions (culture-preserving institutions).

It can be called a tragedy that the study of the mythical and religious value systems destroyed the naive belief in the truth of the identity-creating symbolic world. For it soon turned out that these ontological designs are not true, that they are collective projections of the human will, so that what in man as hope, wish, utopia, ideal, illusion pushes for reality and realization, also exists in truth as it should exist.

One's own nothingness can be compensated with these often twisted projections: the slave on earth becomes a master in heaven, earthly mortality is transformed as eternal life after death, in which one firmly believes, so that precisely the one whose earthly fate is lamentable is rewarded for it in heaven with eternal joys. This self-imagined and then rationalized consolation potential, that what is supposed to be is, transforming subjective desires into objective reality, has produced invaluable cultural goods, but at the same time is a source of inadmissible objectifications.

But what would happen if there were a possibility to let mankind exist without illusions? This question touches the permanent crisis mood of modernity; because just by cognitively questioning basically all values for their truth content in the sense of positive natural sciences, it has to state that everything what our culture has produced, namely values, in itself cannot claim a supratemporal validity like laws of nature. In the knowledge that every understanding of values and value behavior yields only a temporary benefit for mankind, that every historical epoch is determined by changing values, the thesis of nihilism, most radically represented by Nietzsche, is based on the fact that even the creation of new values already means a priori their destruction. To seek salvation in the truth of natural sciences fails because nature can in no way give answers to the questions of our life, because it itself exists value-free and can only be investigated scientifically in a value-neutral way.

The world of the intellect is cold; it does not grant a warming feeling of life. The absolute but narrowed claim to truth of the positive sciences, which is imposed from the outside as scientific belief and affiliation, ensures a backyard existence of values, emotions, experience, spiritual experiences: the metaphysical need for existential security is no longer served. Yet it is precisely these that feed the human need for art, culture, moral self-worth, and existence-affirming religions that, through traditions and institutions, provide it with a meaningful life. As a being dependent on social and cultural relations (prolonged childhood, "physiological prematurity", "secondary nest-feeder") (Portmann), culture offers man the protective space for his development, so that he can sublimate the "pressure of suffering and reality". However, the existential anxiety tamed by this can then break out again without restraint when man reflects the mere construct character of this cultural world, which is the case today, so that many people suffer from modernity.

Every human being is shaped in advance by quasi-transcendental constants of his culture. which we can translate with "value-boundness" and with "world-conception-boundness" Tepe 1988, 10). The latter limits our cognitive horizon of expectations to what is conceivable in this time, the former serves as compensation from the pressure of suffering, but assigns even more a social horizon of meaning to lead a good life. But when the construct character of human cultural values has become transparent, when man has become painfully aware of his meaninglessness, he looks for safe, convincing values and in reality finds only utopias, ideologies(-) (see next section), illusions assumed to be true, intoxicating transfigurations of existence, fantastic houses of cards, if he does not metaphysically exaggerate them, i.e. endow them with 'higher consecrations'. At this point we come back to Tepe's theory of illusions (1988), in which he starts from the "irrevocable ideology-ness" (8) of human existence. Thus, he conceives this concept very broadly, as "dependence on value orientations" (8). The initial biological disorientation caused by instinct reduction is initially more than compensated by the cultural value system in which the young person grows up embedded.

From this comprehensive and value-neutral to value-positive concept of ideology, which can also be translated as culture-boundness or "value-holding" (8), Tepe develops his two concepts of ideology (+) and (-), whose content determination and labeling the author would like to adopt, if the context does not allow a clear assignment. In general, man is determined by ideology(+), by value attitudes that basically guide human life often unconsciously and unnoticed like an apriori. Ideology(+) is the cultural anthropological term for man's struggle against the paralyzing pressure of reality. But when this explicitly projectively transforms things in such a way that desires and wills become ontologized cognitive and rational being, then the narrower concept of ideology(-) is authoritative because something that is only normative in character is made into a descriptive object with the consequence that a cognitively universal claim to truth can be and is made. This transformation from normative to descriptive is, from an ideology-critical point of view, to be judged as sleight of hand, which leads to a "knowledge deficit" (8).

A short foray in the direction of Islam makes the central problem clear: 'How is the absolute claim to truth of this religion, authorized by God, to be evaluated ideology-critically? Is there a voluntaristic projection here that what is supposed to be, God's omnipotence, also de facto carries human existence?' Islam offers man an eternal life in paradise if he fulfills God's will, proclaimed by Mohammed, it promises eternal existential security without being able to prove it empirically; our claim to knowledge, committed to positivism and critical rationalism, sees in man a being that is in principle excluded from any transcendence, so that he must create a substitute for himself through the creation and participation of culture, which as such is always already seen through, can only fulfill itself as a temporally limited value function. It is, in Nietzsche's sense, a "life lie".