The Understanding of Revelation. Michael Knowles

Religious autocracy

The God of Islam’s relationship to mankind is monarchical in this manner, that the God of Islam without human cooperation and imput communicated what he is and what he requires, and requires submission in return. This is religious autocracy which repudiates religious democracy. This religious autocracy repudiating democracy extends to political society, to male and female relationships and to family relationships. The direction of any society will derive from the ideology on which it founds itself. The total sovereignty of God is mirrored in the absolute sovereignty of the Islamic caliph or king or emir. Democracy in matters of government, male and female relationships and family relationships will only make headway in Islamic societies where the society moves away from legislation based on the Koran.

The Islamic notion of revelation is static. That is, it does not admit of development. This is because the Koran is believed to be written solely by God and God alone, and consequently from eternity. Being solely from God it is eternal in its origins. There is no time element about its content or about its prescriptions –on worship, slaves, almsgiving, crime and punishment of crime, sex, marriage, divorce, dress, war, menstruation, divorce, adultery, relationship of men and women and so on. Being solely of God all the prescriptions of the Koran are timeless in their origin and timeless and universal in their application, irrespective of culture and society. They are the Last and Final Testament communicated through the consciousness of Mohammad, the Last and the Final Prophet. Being of God and eternal they are not subject to development and change or amendment but are applicable universally in time and space. They are to be adhered to literally as God does not change or alter.

Historically they may first have been revealed to one particular Arab desert tribe with a particular culture in the seventh century in one particular region of the world but those particularities are an irrelevance. As that particular society and its particular leader did not contribute one idea or phrase or line to the code of the Koran, that code is not peculiar to that society in any way but of universal application. Form criticism and other exegetical tools cannot be applied to God who is eternal, unchanging and unchangeable. No human being can tamper with or amend or modify or develop or edit or demythologise what is solely of God and eternal and has no causation, not even the slightest, in anything human or cultural or temporary.

The theological and the moral code of the Koran is universally applicable in time and space. There is no space for existential unease in orthodox Islam, no space for doubt, for uncertainty and angst. The truth as been delivered in very considerable moral detail and must be imposed because it is of God in every detail. All societies irrespective of time and place must conform to the prescriptions of the Koran which we might identity as the culture of a particular desert tribal society in seventh century Arabia. We might see such a conformity as backward-looking. Islam does not The prescriptions of the Koran as applied to Medinan and Meccan society in the seventh century are timeless.

Religious Autocracy