This post is a mirror of a comment I made on an Ahmadi Muslim woman’s Personal Musings Blog . Her article was on the declaration of the Islamic faith, although it contained a strong current of anti-polytheism through it. My comment seeks to open the sister’s mind. Why is polytheism so evil? It seems to be a manufactured boogeyman with no real consequence to our lives on this Earth.

I suspect this article’s audience are those who already believe in Ahmadiyyat or even Islam generally. Respectfully, perhaps that’s why I felt that the contents of this article, seem quite circular in reasoning.

While I am a non-theist (formerly a practicing Ahmadi myself), I have never seen a convincing deconstruction of why polytheism is bad and why this has any effect on the functioning of a vibrant and productive society.

Why is God’s apparent jealousy (no partners, no other gods) a quality to be celebrated as virtuous? It sounds very human; very arrogant. Even if true, why is polytheism such a dire evil? It doesn’t drive how we run society.

It doesn’t naturally follow that we’re going to prescribe that females receive half the inheritance of males or that men have the right to (lightly of course) beat their wives, because of polytheism. We get such things from a monotheism like Islam. #NotAll polytheism called for the burial of female infants, otherwise, the society would have disappeared in a generation or two. To produce smart independent women like Khadija, the pre-Islamic period could not have been utter chaos as Islamic history books conveniently like to paint it.

To my female sisters reading; I’m sure you’d like Islam much more if those things weren’t part of the Qur’an. So why is monotheism so good and polytheism so bad, in any concrete sense? Have you ever asked yourself this?

To me, it’s a non-sequitur. How do we get to a “better society” by virtue of eliminating polytheism? To be sure, I’m no fan of imaginary deities—whether invisible or carved from stone.

Further, through our folklore passed down generation after generation, we born Ahmadis are taught to revere Muhammad’s character while conveniently dismissing the earliest available biographies of his life that do not paint him in a splendid light (e.g. Ibn Ishaq’s biography of Muhammad).

If Muhammad has flaws, how then can he live up to the argument that you have constructed in this post? I know. You’ll say he has no flaws. So…

Consider that upon arrival into Mecca, even Ahmadi Muslims agree that Muhammad smashed the idols in the Kaaba. Did he need to do that? There was no armed struggle.

What happened to freedom of religion? What happened to respecting the rights of other religions, even those you do not agree with? What happened to being the better man?

A better approach would have been to move the idols from the Kaaba or to give the Meccans 72 hours to make alternate arrangements and carefully move their idols to a new location. Smashing other people’s religious symbols (sacred deities no less) is not the mark of high moral character or a model of pluralism for all of mankind, for all times to come.

At the root of this incident, is Islam’s obsession with polytheism. That obsession is a danger to a peaceful pluralism that respects the right to practice and observe one’s religious beliefs—even polytheism—if one chooses.