H.P. Lovecraft’s Satirical Takedown of Islam

Islam is a profoundly Lovecraftian religion.

In effect, what HP Lovecraft did in his famous weird tales in the early twentieth century was satirize monotheism from a scientific standpoint. His tragic heroes were Faustian scientists who doomed themselves by objectifying nature and thus hastening an encounter with the boundless inhumanity of their subject matter. In Lovecraft’s stories, the scientists discover truths of the universe that confound human intuitions and mock our familiarity with terrestrial dimensions and the vain presumption that our moral sentiments have ultimate merit.

Nature becomes the Supreme Being for scientists, and Lovecraft’s alien god characters stand in for the inhumanity of natural elements, forces, dimensions, and cycles. Instead of the fear of an almighty God, found in the classic monotheistic religions, there’s the cosmic horror of understanding the mere naturalness of our existential condition. We’re playthings of nature, and all our aspirations are dwarfed by cosmic concerns. We are to our Maker as a tiny, helpless bug is to a person.

The point of Lovecraft’s satirical criticism of monotheism is that the notion that God would be a loving, just figure whom we should worship is vitiated by the deeper knowledge of our Maker that derives not from mad prophets, but scientists. In place of the raving prophets, monks, ascetics, and messiahs, there’s usually the stereotype of the mad scientist. The “God” that science discovers is nature’s self-sufficiency, so the universe’s impersonal physicality, amorality, and absurdity replace the sacredness, wisdom, and parental comforts of the Abrahamic religions’ personified deity.

In short, Jews, Christians, and Muslims say we ought to worship God because we’re made in God’s image. Lovecraft pointed to the scientific objectification of nature and realized that we ought to be alienated from our Maker since personhood is an anomaly in nature.

Indeed, Lovecraft’s main departure from the stereotype of the Faustian scientist who discovers more than he bargained for is Abdul Alhazred, Lovecraft’s mysterious, so-called “Mad Arab” character who is said to have written the Necronomicon (a fictional grimoire or book of evil spells) in the eighth century CE. That book’s original title was Al Azif, the sound supposedly made by daemons. Lovecraft explicitly regarded Alhazred as a lapsed Muslim, as he says in “History of the Necronomicon”:

Of his [Alhazred’s] madness many things are told. He claimed to have seen fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars, and to have found beneath the ruins of a certain nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race older than mankind. He was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.

So there’s a direct link in Lovecraft’s cosmic horror between Islam and the scientifically informed worship of the real gods of nature. Due to the content of Islam, Alhazred should be regarded as “indifferent” only to the exoteric, reassuring interpretation of monotheism, not the esoteric search for the unvarnished truth of God. In effect, Lovecraft’s scientists confirm what Islam had long concluded or implied, which is that God is necessarily a monster.

The real Necronomicon is simply the Quran. As I point out elsewhere, the Quranic threat of hell is ‘the most repeated proclamation in the book. The words “punishment” and “fear” make the top ten most repeated words in the Quran (excluding stop words like “a,” “the,” and “is”). “Punishment” is sixth and “fear” is eighth. “Reward” is twenty-ninth.’

As an encyclopedia article on Jahannam (hell) says,

Among the different terms and phrases mentioned above that refer to Hell in the Qur’an, Fire (nār) is used 125 times, Hell (jahannam) 77 times, and Blazing Fire (jaḥīm) 26 times, or 23 by another count. The description of Jahannam as a place of blazing fire appears in almost every verse in the Qur’an describing Hell. One collection of descriptions of Hell found in the Qur’an includes “rather specific indications of the tortures of the Fire”: flames that crackle and roar; fierce, boiling waters, scorching wind, and black smoke, roaring and boiling as if it would burst with rage.

From the modern standpoint, hell is just what you feel when you recognize the inhuman implications of naturalism or what Friedrich Nietzsche called the “death of God,” as in the irrelevance only of the infantilizing, reassuring image of God that bolsters organized religions. That is, hell is most charitably viewed as the cosmic horror found in philosophical reflection on scientific knowledge.

In any case, to the extent that Lovecraft’s weird tales satirically targeted monotheism, it’s no accident that any of the three Abrahamic religions might seem Lovecraftian when interpreted from this updated, naturalistic standpoint. But Islam is especially Lovecraftian because of the simplicity of its message. Islam emphasizes our obligation to submit to God.

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Let’s let some Muslim apologists explain the religious basis of this submission. Here’s one from the Shiite Academy for Learning Islam:

Submission is not derogatory for the human being. It is with the understanding that we are servants of God, not free to do what our desires want. We have been created and are responsible and accountable for our actions. A person who truly believes that he has a Creator is convinced of the necessity to obey the Creator. He cannot set himself up to choose his path according to his own views.

Again, “To submit to God, to obey His commands and accept His decree is to entrust yourself to Him. It means to know that He is the Greatest and most Wise, that He knows all that we do not know. That He is worthy of instructing us [and telling us] what to do for our own best interests.”

Indeed, “Submission to God is an honor for the human being. It is submission to the Creator, not to created beings who are just as helpless and dependent on the Creator. People submit to the demands and expectations of others without realizing the folly of submitting to those who are intrinsically just as weak as they are.”

Another apologist, from Al-Islam, expands on that contrast between submitting to the greatest being and submitting to beings that are as equally flawed as us.

The idea in Islam is that you [should] submit to the Divine, which means acknowledging that, yes, there is an Entity that has created me. I am not an all-powerful deity myself. There is an all-powerful Entity that has brought me into existence that has control over my life. I am not omnipotent, I am not omniscient, and therefore I submit to that. I accept that my attempts to be autonomous are illusory or I am deluded in my fight to be autonomous.

Again,

When you come to that point that actually I can never be autonomous, and that this struggle to be autonomous and to be free is futile because none of us are ever totally free or going to be totally free in the absolute sense, then you come to the realisation that I submit to the Ultimate Power that has brought everything into existence because I am acknowledging a fact. I submit to the fact that I am not all-powerful. I submit to the fact that there is a Power that is greater than I am.

The alternative to wisely recognizing that our Maker is much greater than us is to foolishly submit to fellow humans as we vainly try to be independent:

There are a lot of ways in which people are not free. If you don’t surrender to the Ultimate Reality and depend upon the power of that Ultimate Reality in your life, and that is the focus of your life, you are going to be surrendering to something else. You are going to be surrendering to your boss, you are going to be surrendering to the next job, you are going to be surrendering to the opinions of your friends, you are going to be surrendering to the opinions and pressures of your society, you are going to be to be surrendering to messages that you’ve been given through the media about how you should be as a person. You are going to be surrendering to the latest fashions, what you are being told to wear from season to season. You are going to be surrendering to something if it is not surrendering to the Divine.

In the case of the US, a Muslim apologist might point out that American secularists worship money, sex, or the Founders and their Constitution. Of course, these are all idols in the monotheistic context. Only Allah, the ultimate source of everything, is worthy of our submission because we owe everything to that source.

Now, the way into a Lovecraftian critique of this apology for Muslim submissiveness is very simple. Take the Takbir, for instance, the well-known declaration in Muslim prayer, Allahu Akbar, which means that God is great or greater (than anything we can presently imagine or experience).

Notice, though, that the first of the above apologists slips into personification of that Supreme Being by speaking of Allah as a male. That apologist speaks of how we should “obey His commands and accept His decree,” and thus “entrust yourself to Him.”

This personification of God in the presumption that we’re made in God’s image is itself obviously idolatrous. Far from humbling us, this literalistic form of monotheism rationalizes pride in our powers, including our reason and autonomy, by giving them divine sanction. God would have made us to be godlike so that by striving to be rationally autonomous, we’re only using our God-given traits.

Moreover, this personification is unsustainable when paired with scientific knowledge of nature’s impersonality and inhuman scale. Whatever the source of the natural order might be, it’s not at all like us. Hence, that source isn’t a male. Hence, we can dismiss this apologist’s reassurance about submitting to that source.

Lovecraft’s satire enters the picture at this point by depicting the much more likely alienness of our Maker. This updating of theology with scientific objectification alienates us, as opposed to implying that we should submit to that source as a child would submit to his or her parent.

Lovecraft dramatizes the submission to our alien Maker with descriptions of grotesque cults: the acolytes of Cthulhu and the other alien gods become as inhuman and amoral as the object of their worship.

So the personification of Allah blocks the Lovecraftian satire in only a cheap, feeble, self-contradictory way, by cherry-picking idols. We’re supposed to reject secular idols but not religious ones, like the comforting personification of the deity, even though scientists show that our ultimate source would have to be very unlike a mere terrestrial social mammal.

Now, the second apologist is more careful since she speaks mystically and vaguely about the “Ultimate Power,” “the Divine,” and the “Entity that has created me.” But precisely because of the lack of sugarcoating here, the pill of submission that’s supposed to cure our foolish striving to be free from our Maker is no longer so easily swallowed.

Here, again, the mystical conception of Allah is susceptible to Lovecraft’s satirical takedown: if Allah is an impersonal entity, that’s perfectly consistent with Lovecraft’s depiction of our Maker, and this worship of an impersonal, asocial Creator is what generates cosmic horror.

Sure, the first apologist says that a benefit of submitting to Allah is the promotion of social peace: “When human beings submit to the Creator, the society that is formed is at peace. There is harmony between individuals based on common faith and belief in the Hereafter.”

Of course, the history of theistic religions is anything but a record of peacefulness. The abstraction of a Creator whom we should worship feeds tribal conflicts because of the hermeneutic question of interpreting the Creator’s will.

Islam itself fell prey to tribalism immediately after the founder’s death, as the Shia split from the Sunnis on the issue of who should succeed the founder, Muhammad, and lead the followers. Shia believe the leaders should be infallible Imams, direct descendants of Muhammad, whereas Sunnis believe the leaders should be Caliphs, elected individuals.

So the assumption that religious submission facilitates social peace is empirically false.

But notice that Islamic peace is consistent with Lovecraft’s satire. There’s peace in a ruthless dictatorship, especially a dystopian one such as Lovecraft’s or George Orwell’s. If the ruler is diabolical enough to convince the masses to worship him or her even though he or she doesn’t deserve that treatment, the followers will make excuses for the ruler’s wrongdoings. Each expression of the amorality that follows from the concentration of political power can be viewed as a necessary evil that serves a greater, hoped-for good.

There’s peace in the cult of Cthulhu or the subservience to the Old Ones. Once the cosmic gods return to rule the Earth, when the stars align, as Lovecraft put it, we submit to our Maker, or we’re obliterated with the same nonchalance as when we swat an annoying mayfly. Those who submit are transformed into ideal servants only because the cosmic horror renders them insane.

There’s peaceful one-sidedness in this religious insanity, so the ideal of social peace is hardly just the mainstream one, according to which we can maintain our sanity and uphold moral values while promoting social harmony.

For Muslims, secular morality is sinful idolatry since it presumes we have human rights that are independent of our Maker’s will. If Allah decides that humans are worthless, our right to live vanishes. The notion that our rights are natural or inherent is thus rooted in the vanity that we ought to be independent from God, according to Muslims.

But that very emphasis on unconditional submission to our Creator is what’s perfectly Lovecraftian, meaning that it leaves itself wide open to this atheistic criticism. The Cthulhu cultist demonstrates equally unconditional surrender, and the result is appalling and dystopian, but no less “peaceful,” as in one-sided, leaving no room for societal conflict.

Indeed, Lovecraft’s point is that coherent monotheism is consistent with a dystopian outcome, which means that this worship of a Supreme Being is as monstrous as our Maker would have to be, given scientific knowledge of our origin.