Mullah Index

The Mullah Index

By John Taylor; 2006 April 26

In my daily reading this morning, from the Kitab-i-Asma, the Bab
excoriates Muslims who kept themselves out of its spirit, who have not
the "slightest notion" of Islam, who proved that they understood not a
letter of the Qu'ran,

"... otherwise they would not have turned away from God, Who hath ...
caused them to die and hath proffered life unto them, by clinging to
parts of their religion..." (The Bab, Selections, Kitab-i-Asma, XVII,
2, p. 140)

This is thought provoking. God causes us to die and then live (note
the reversed order, you learn to live material life, which is a form
of dying, and only then do you live spiritually, if you accept the
life offered by God) Religion is one, a whole, like the one true God.
Clinging only to a part of one's faith rather than the whole is to
corrupt it, make of it an idol, syncretize it. This happens no matter
how loudly and ardently one mouths the phrase, "there is no God but
God."

Then the Bab discusses the mania of the Mullahs for making up rules
regulating every detail of their followers' lives. I have heard
optimistic Muslims declare that they find this a comfort, that they
enjoy having a rule for the minutiae of daily existence, from the
dinner plate to the cut of their clothing. The Bab disagrees, He
considers this wrong headed, a betrayal of the Spirit.

"Ye spend all your days contriving forms and rules for the principles
of your Faith, while that which profiteth you in all this is to
comprehend the good-pleasure of your Lord and unitedly to become
well-acquainted with His supreme Purpose." (Id.)

It hit me after reading this that what the Bab is pointing to is a
more sophisticated form of corruption that developed from Islam and
spread around the world. Islam was a more complex and sophisticated
religion than any that came before, and it gave to the world most of
the structures that make up the modern state. This is a good thing,
mostly. But it also, thanks to the early Mullocracies, gave us
bureaucracy, red tape, the stultifying mass of laws, rules and
regulations that is the chief characteristic of government in our age.
And it started in religion. Consider this brief article which has been
prancing about the world's newswires over the past week or so.

Bureaucrats look to Kafka, by Henry Samuel
(Daily Telegraph, filed: 15/04/2006)
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/04/15/wkafka15.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/15/ixworld.html>
France has created a "Kafka index" that measures the complexity of a
project or law against its usefulness to cut red tape. The index -
referring to Franz Kafka's The Trial, which describes one man's fight
against a nightmarish bureaucracy - is a scale of one to 100 measuring
how many hurdles, from forms to letters or phone calls, are needed to
win state permits or aid for a project. "It is an indicator to measure
as objectively as possible the most complex procedures so that we can
then simplify them," said a government spokesman. The index will be
regularly updated on a website, raising the prospect of a hit parade
of France's most Kafkaesque ministries.

What a lovely, catchy name! The Kafka Index. And what a great idea, to
create a way of measuring and naming the amount of delay in every
department. Kafka's master novel was written not coincidentally in
Prague; it describes an oppressive, faceless bureaucracy that charged
people without naming the charge or citing evidence of guilt. Hatred
as laws instantiated. But still, it seems unfair to charge the artist
with the crime that he denounced in his brilliant novel by calling it
the "Kafka Index." A much better name would be the "Mullah index."
That would be truer to history, it would give full credit where credit
is due.

The Mullah Index should not be restricted to red tape; it should
extend to all corruption. For that is the spade that the Bab in the
above is calling a spade. Petty nitpicking rule mongering by those
with power is corruption as much as any other crime, in the same way
that state sponsored violence is just murder and terrorism done by
officials shielded by the state. We need a programmer activist to go
into Google Maps and make up a display of the Mullah Index for every
region of the world -- and do it in a fair way, one that would show
North America to be the most corrupt place on earth, even as the
Guardian declared it to be.

In order to do that, you would just have to factor in the amount of
wealth being wasted. Sure, in poor areas thousands and even millions
are sucked away by corruption, but here it is billions and trillions.
To name just one example, Bush II has spent so much money over budget
since he took office that economists tell us he has brought the
world's most powerful economy almost to its knees. His heritage as
president is a multi-trillion dollar crime that took place in full
view of the world. Apres moi, le deluge. It is my hope that this will
end forever the concentration of so much power in the hands of one
person. Though as the term "Mullah Index" implies, concentration of
power into a professional elite offers little as an alternative. Group
power, but not elite power, that is what is needed.

What we need to end corruption is to arrange things so that we feel
the pain as it happens. If a leader decides to overspend, alarm bells
should go off immediately. That happens in our body. If I bump into
something in the night I feel the pain immediately. It does not turn
up in next years' health Annual Report, I feel it here and now. If I
do something good, it feels good. If you could do that for accounting,
we would have an effective body politic and huge national debts --
which are essentially money that belongs to all extorted by nation
states, would be a thing of the past.

Let us end with some selections from Plato, the ultimate authority on
corruption and how to deal with it. Start with this fragment on
corruption and generation, from Plato's Philebus:

Soc. Next let us see whether in another direction we may not find
pleasures and pains existing and appearing in living beings, which are
still more false than these.
Pro. What are they, and how shall we find them?
Soc. If I am not mistaken, I have often repeated that pains and aches
and suffering and uneasiness of all sorts arise out of a corruption of
nature caused by concretions, and dissolutions, and repletions, and
evacuations, and also by growth and decay?
Pro. Yes, that has been often said.
Soc. And we have also agreed that the restoration of the natural state
is pleasure?
Pro. Right.

The greatest book on both corruption and regeneration of the state is
Plato's masterwork, the Republic. Here we find all the criteria by
which a Mullah Index might be set to indicate. Consider the following
extracts:

"... Let us suppose that philosophical minds always love knowledge of
a sort which shows them the eternal nature not varying from generation
and corruption."
"... There was gymnastic which presided over the growth and decay of
the body, and may therefore be regarded as having to do with
generation and corruption..."
"We would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moral
deformity, as in some noxious pasture, and there browse and feed upon
many a baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, until
they silently gather a festering mass of corruption in their own soul.
Let our artists rather be those who are gifted to discern the true
nature of the beautiful and graceful; then will our youth dwell in a
land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in
everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into
the eye and ear, like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and
insensibly draw the soul from earliest years into likeness and
sympathy with the beauty of reason."
"... Then shall we proceed to show that the corruption of the majority
is also unavoidable, and that this is not to be laid to the charge of
philosophy any more than the other?"

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com