Can Islam be a True Religion?

There have always been those who have been wise enough to see that the underlying truth, the mystical foundation of all great religions—from that of the Ancient Egyptians to today's Christianity—is the same.

When that Mystical Foundation, that Secret Doctrine, that Divine Wisdom is lost, ignored or misunderstood, that religion is no longer alive, in contact with living Spirit. It has died, and becomes a shell of crusty forms, dusty scrolls, empty practices and dead words; where teaching-fables are mistaken for history, and mythology is taken literally, where the outward tokens of inner holiness are imagined to be holiness itself.

How you look, what you wear, eat or drink, is not in itself, pure or impure, sinful or pious. It is whether those behaviors enable or prevent you from pursuing your spiritual quest that determines their value.

Jesus tried to tell us that in his debates with the Pharisees, who were pretentious in their outward religiosity, but not devoted in their hearts. Jesus condemned them because they affected the outward signs of piousness without making the inner spiritual journey they signified.

He called them "whited sepulchres". Pretty and clean on the outside, filthy with corruption on the inside. Strong language to make the point that it isn't the outer forms that are important, but the inner journey.

Buddha had a similar message. Early in life he joined a group of ascetics for several years who starved themselves, tortured themselves. They ostentatiously rejected the world. Buddha did not find what he was looking for among them. He established a "middle way", and while practicing moderation and focusing on his inner journey, found enlightenment.

Wise men and women have always understood that the sensuous pleasures of the material world are dangerous snares. We have been warned against them. Not because eating too much, or getting drunk, or having casual sex are, in themselves evil...but because they are so much fun, and so addicting on the physical level, that they can tempt people away from their growth on the spiritual level.

It's good to help, warn and advise people to resist the juicy, material temptations that might trap them into neglecting their soul's journey. It is quite another to mistake avoidance of temptation for spiritual advancement, or call the tokens of such avoidance piety.

That is exactly what the Pharisees were up to.

And that is what the Taliban and their Wahabi brothers are up to. They are spiritually dead, and parade their "piety" tokens as though they were spirituality itself. And in their profound evil, torture and kill others for not mimicking their ignorant posturing.

As a result, I have never been willing to concede that Islam was among the world religions that share at their base, the Mystical Divine, Secret Doctrine.

But, maybe somewhere, a tiny voice of spirituality still whispers at the bottom of the foul black pit that is Islam, trying to be heard above the screams of the tortured, dead and dying.

It is possible, that once, there were Muslim mystics who understood the cosmic unity, the single divine whole of which we are all a part; who knew the brotherhood of all men as equally valuable children of the Universal Spirit.

So, while this doesn't change my mind in any practical way regarding my fervent detestation of Islam as it exists today, I am willing to grant that once upon a time, it too, may have deserved inclusion with the "great religions of the world" by virtue of it sharing the Mystic Truth.

The Gunslinger