Mohammad is The Last Prophet. There will come no Prophet after him. That means that we shall not receive any new revelation nor will there be any new message from God to the people. What conclusion is to be drawn from that? Well, that Mohammad´s revelations are sufficient. God has said everything worth saying. The Quran contains everything we need to know. No further holy books are necessary.
But if you have so high expectations, you will be disappointed. The Quran doesn´t actually contain anything that the humanity needs. The vast majority of the earth´s population are not muslims and couldn´t care less of what is written in the Quran. They have gotten by very well anyhow. We in the “infidel Western World”, have not only gotten by well, we have done far better than the muslims!
But let us say that you are a muslim and really want to follow your faith as good as possible. You want to receive the heavenly reward and escape from hell. Is the Quran sufficient? No, even for the muslims who want religious guidance, the Quran is not sufficient. You will need Mohammad´s words too. It says in the Quran that you should pray, but not how. Mohammad showed how. Actually, he did it in different ways at different times, which has caused the Mullahs to argue about that. But still.
If you have been told that this is the last apparition, that God has spoken to us for the very last time and that He will never open his mouth again, and you believe it, then you will be utterly disappointed when you open the Quran and realize that it is full of faults and contradictions and even utter nonsense. It will simply not meet your expectations. Furthermore, is far too short. You can´t help but wondering why God didn´t take the opportunity to spread himself? This was supposed to be his last chance, wasn´t it?
God is dead silent when it comes to the most important explanation of why we turned out the way we did: The Evolution. Instead we have had to wait until Darwin´s book, “On the Origin of Species”, published in 1859. More than 1200 years after Mohammad. One excuse for this omission, could be that God knew of the evolution, since he is omniscient, but Mohammad didn´t so therefore God simply could not have explained it to him. The question that arises is of course: What is the meaning of Prophet if he only can convey such matters as he knows of and understands himself?
Weren’t we supposed to learn these things from the Quran? Things that we cannot find out by ourselves? Some will of course object, and say that the Quran has no ambition to explain how the world and mankind were created, but simply why. That, of course, is not the case. The Quran does claim to explain how the world works, and how it was created. Not only why. The trouble is that the explanations it offers are incorrect.
It also said in the Quran that God has sent prophets to all people, but it only mentions very few prophets and very few people. The prophets mentioned, are those already known in the Jewish and Christian lore. And Mohammad added the Arabic prophets: Hud, Salih and Shuayb. He doesn´t mention a word about greeks such as Orpheus or Pythagoras. Those two having contributed more than the three Arabic prophets, who have not uttered one single deep and prized thought. Furthermore, the Quran does not say anything about America. Mohammad didn´t know anything about America, but shouldn´t God have known? I find it difficult to understand why the people of America and all the Prophets who should have appeared there during history, the greek, the Chinese, the native American and many others, would be totally uninteresting, while the three arabs who didn´t mention one peculiar word, would be so highly interesting that it granted them a place in God´s last book.
The Quran simply doesn´t contain anything that Mohamad and this contemporary peers, could not have written themselves. If you claim that a person couldn´t possibly have been written by a human, since the language in it is,”Linguistically” advanced, then you really are underestimating humankind and most probably haven´t read Shakespeare. If there would exist a God, and he wanted to announce important things to mankind, wouldn´t it be more plausible to do it continuously and not just stop abruptly in the middle of an incomplete sentence, so to speak. Now there are actually muslims(actually former muslims, because if you believe in a prophet, after Mohammad, you are not a muslim), who claim that there have been more Prophets after Mohammad. To fill in the gaps, so to say. None of these Prophets did however succeed with that with which Mohammad had failed. Namely, to come forth with some superhuman knowledge.
The most famous muslim prophet after Mohammad, is probably the Indian, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908). His followers are called Ahmadis. Besides their faith in a new prophet, they have mostly the same creed s and practices as mainstream-muslims. Ahmad did however try, since he was familiar with it, to integrate the evolution in his theological system. It went so and so. But at least he tried! Another thinker with muslim background, that is considered as a Prophet after Mohammad, is the Persian, Bahaullah (1817-1892). Contrary to Mohammad, he was a very diligent writer. He wrote thousands of books, many of which claim to contain revelations from God. When orthodox muslims get upset with drawings of Mohammad and say that you “must respect all Prophets”, they actually don´t mean Ahmad And Bahaullah. Those, you can insult, as much as you please.
A less known “Prophet-after-Mohammad-group”, is the American society of Moorish Science Temple, founded in the beginning of the 20th century. Their Prophet was an African American circus artist, occultist and Black rights-activist, who called himself Noble Drew Ali. He was born in North Carolina in 1886, as Timothy Drew. His mother is said to have predicted that the boy will achieve great things, but she died and he was given to his mean auntie who beat him. Drew ran away from home and joined a party of travelling gipsies. From them he learned some magic tricks.
The author Mohamed Omar posing as a Pulp Prophet
There is a nice picture of the Prophet Noble Drew Ali, posing in some kind of “oriental” attire, with his right hand placed on his chest and a fez on his head. The hand on the chest signals that he is a holy man, a spiritual Napoleon. I myself carry a fez and can´t help digging his style. He and my alter-ego, the Anti-Caliph, seem to be kindered spirits, but the Anti-Caliph takes himself less seriously.
Drew Ali looks like a living cliché of “a wise and noble oriental” that has loosened himself from the pages of a comic book of one of the twenties cheap Pulp Magazines such as Weird Tales or Amazing Stories. Luckily Drew Ali didn´t mind being portrayed. His predecessor Mohammad, is said to have forbidden the portrayal of all living creatures ”that have a soul”. Most contemporary muslim scholars allow photographing, but not painting of a portrait. Strange distinction, but photographing probably couldn´t be avoided.
However clothes and pose doesn´t make you a Prophet. You´ve got to have a revelation to come with, and that he did! A brand new Quran! He called the new Quran, “Circle Seven Quran”. A good thing with this Quran is that it doesn´t contain any nasty punishments or calls to Jihad. In other words, a clear improvement.
Noble Drew Ali´s message is a kind of Pulp Fiction-religion that mixes that time´s Science Fiction with occultism and popular orientalism. That way, it partially resembles Scientology, created by the Pulpwriter, L. Ron Hubbard. He wrote adventure stories in all possible genres and then used the material to create a new religion. He went from poet to Prophet!
The Prophet Drew Ali claimed to have met a priest under the Cheops-pyramid in Egypt. Drew was led down in the dark aisles, blindfolded, and left all by himself. Somehow he managed to find his way out. It made such an impression on the priest, that Drew was initiated. He received a lot of secret knowledge and was given an unknown part of the Quran that had been lost. Sometimes Drew claimed to be a reincarnation of the Prophet Mohammad!
The noble Drew Ali didn´t only have a ”pulpy” look. The story of how he was named a Prophet in an Egyptian toombchamber, could easily have passed as a pulp ficition-adventure. Perhaps written by my favorite horror author, H. P. Lovecraft, who wrote both for Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. I am particularly thinking of the horror story that Lovecraft ghostwrote for Houdini: “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”. Published in Weird Tales in the spring of 1924.
Not only does Drew Ali´s and Houdini´s story resemble. I suspect that Drew Ali has been influenced by Houdini. The Prophet Drew was like Houdini, a circus artist and an escape artist. Drew performed with his tricks on different stages and must have been well aquainted with the great star of the business, Houdini. In the, allegedly, autobiographical novel “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”, Houdini claims to depict events that took place during a trip to Egypt in January 1910. It is not impossible that he mentioned it at different performances or interviews in the press and that Drew heard about it that way. In the novel, Houdini tells us how he was abducted by beduins, his hands tied at his back and blindfolded, and taken down below the pyramids in Ghizeh. There he supposedly is said to have had horrible visions and to have witnessed ancient pharaonic ceremonies. He managed to escape, as the king of escape artistry always did!
In a conversation on Facebook with Patrick D. Bowen, an American author that has written a lot about Moorish Science Temple, he mentions that Drew performed tricks in the 1910-s, that had been popularized by Houdini. Not only that, the same tricks appeared in a “How-to” manual that had been published by Houdini. I think that it is only fair to assume that Drew was influenced by Houdini. Both of them were magicians and escape artists. Both of them were active during the same period and both of them tell us a story of how they were blindfolded and led down in the darkness under the pyramids in Ghizeh, where they encountered some kind or ancient, religious knowledge. And then they managed to escape!
Even if Drew didn´t steal his story about the initiation under the pyramids, from Houdini, he most certainly stole a whole lot of material from other sources when he wrote his Quran. In that aspect he resembles Mohammad a whole lot, since he himself took most of the Quran´s contents from older jewish and christian sources. Mohammad however, didn´t have access to the scriptures in hebrew or greek but simply had to trust his storytellers, which resulted in a lot of errors. In the Quran it states that the christian Trinity consists of Mary, Jesus and The Father! Furthermore is says that Mary was the sister of Moses, who lived more than a thousand years earlier. If I am to reproduce all the errors, it would be a very long list.
Approximately half of the contents of the Prophet Drew´s ”Circle Seven Quran”, originates from the book: “The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ”, written by Levi H. Dowling in 1908. It tells us how Jesus during “the lost years” (i e the ones not described in the Gospels), travels to India. In return, Dowling´s book, is based on another book, “The unknown life of Jesus Christ”, by the Russian journalist Nikolai Notovich, written in 1984. The latter claimed to have found an ancient manuscript in a Tibetan monastery. Noble Drew made a few changes of his own. He switched God to Allah and erased the description of Jesus as being blonde and blue-eyed. This thing that Jesus allegedly travelled to India, actually also influenced the Prophet Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the Ahmadiya sect. He wrote the book “Jesus in India” in 1889, where he claims that Jesus didn´t die on the cross, but survived and wandered to India, where he died and was buried. An old Islamic saint´s tomb in Cashmir, is designated as the tomb of Jesus. Much of the material in Ahmads book is taken from Notovich´s book.
Noble Drew Ali´s teachings also contain some peculiar Race-mysticism. A mishmash of craziness, where the content seems to be that the African Americans actually are so called “Moors”, a made-up oriental cliché of a “race”. This so called race should differentiate itself from others by adding an “El” their names(as Jor-El and the other inhabitants of the planet Crypton!) They should moreover call God by the Arabic name “Allah”. This thing with the “Moors” was, of course, an attempt at giving black people, higher status. The Blacks, were not the descendants of slaves, but to the Moors. A proud and civilized people, that had built an empire: The Moorish Empire. In the picture you will see Noble Drew and his “Moors” posing in front of the temple. The garments seem to have been taken straight out of that time´s Pulp magazines or romantic Sheikh-movies!
There is a sentence in the Circle Seven Quran that is extremely profane from an orthodox, Islamic perspective: “Allah and man are one”. That shows that Drew was more influenced by Theosophy and mysticism, but also by his christian background, than by the little he knew about islam. Finally, and this is my opinion as a “fez-fetishist”, the most important commandment: All members were obliged to wear a fez!’
When the American Prophet died in 1929, a conflict broke out between his brother Edward Mealy El and his driver, John Givens El, as of who should be his successor. The latter claimed that he was a reincarnation of Noble Drew, and therefore had greater claim. A final remarkable thing: Noble Drew Ali was supposed to build a new Kaaba, the cube-shaped temple in Mecca, in Chicago!
Too bad that it wasn´t done, considering the many accidents in Mecca, where hundreds of pilgrims are stomped to death, due to over-crowdedness and poor organizing. The Americans would probably have organized and handled the pilgrimage far better than the Saudis.
If anyone, in our age of globalization and Internet, would do the same thing as Noble Drew Ali, they would most certainly get a death-fatwa over their heads by, you know who, who lack the sense of humor.
This essay was written by Mohamed Omar, The Anti-Caliph. He is a Swedish ex-Muslim and a fan of Lovecraft.
Support my work by donating via Paypal: