A pseudoscience used to manipulate the gullible
By Misbahuddin Mirza
May/June 2022
Faladdin, a fortune-telling app created by Turkish entrepreneur Sertaç Taşdelen, presently has 5 million monthly users and generates an annual revenue of $5 million — 60% of which comes from ads — and is 12 times larger than it was three years ago — using its freemium model (restofworld.com). According to restofworld.org “every day, more than one million Faladdin users upload photos of their coffee cup grinds, and Taşdelen’s team provides personalized ‘readings’ of them within 15 minutes. Of these readings, 700,000 are in Turkish, 200,000 are in Arabic and 100,000 are in English.” With a million-dollar ad budget, Taşdelen plans to expand to the West. Although fortune-telling is illegal in Turkey, it continues to be a scourge in Muslim societies worldwide.
In 1576 Murtaza Nizam Shah I, the Nizam Shahi dynastic ruler of Ahmadnagar in southern India, ordered the construction of the Farah Bakhsh (Joy Bestowing) garden adjacent to the Farah Bakhsh Palace, with a subterranean canal. Tabataba’i, a Nizam Shahi historian, writes “After a few days such a garden and edifices were built that the highest paradise melted in the fire of envy” (Emma J., Flatt, ‘The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates: Living well in the Persian Cosmopolis’, Cambridge University Press, 2019). So, what is strange about this? Well, upon its completion, the ruler visited the garden and became so furious that he ordered the immediate demolition of both the building and the garden and the rebuilding of a new structure. Why? Because the structure consisted of triangles — a geometric shape considered inauspicious in astrology.
The online magazine https://Scroll.in, writing about this incident, explains that to understand this Shia ruler’s actions, one must look at the neighboring Kingdom of Bijapur, ruled by his brother-in-law Ali Adil Shah I. “The Bijapuri ruler had written a significant treatise called Nujūm al-‘Ulūm (The Science of the Stars). This text had a particular description for Mirrikh (Mars/Mangal) — that ‘his buildings are triangular (musallas).’ Anyone worth his salt in medieval India would know that the planet Mirrikh was considered inauspicious in the Indic, Persianate and Hellenistic traditions. So, it was no surprise that Nizam Shah ordered the demolition of a stunning garden upon seeing triangular structures.”
According to Marika Sardar’s (Department of Islamic Art, the New York Metropolitan Museum) essay “Astronomy and Astrology in the Medieval Islamic World,” “Horoscopes were also devised at the foundation of Capital Cities such as Baghdad, Capital of the Abbasids and al-Mahdiyya, capital of the Fatimids, to foretell their futures.” Emperor Jahangir (d. 1627) minted coins with zodiac symbols, which are now very expensive and hard to find — especially his gold zodiac coins. It is widely believed in numismatic circles that this dearth is due to his son and successor Emperor Shah Jahan’s order that all these coins be melted down to eliminate this heretic practice/belief.
At the Battle of Khanwa (1527), when Emperor Babur’s 12,000 troops were facing a sea of 250,000 enemy soldiers, and when 750 of his elite horsemen on a probing mission had just been surrounded and killed, he was suddenly faced with a new dilemma: An astrologer newly arrived from Central Asia had appeared in his camp, “foretelling” that any army in Mars’ house would surely be defeated. Babur’s army was in Mars’ house, and this “prophecy” was having a negative impact on his army’s morale. And yet despite this, Babur’s army emerged victorious in the second-largest battle ever fought in India, which consolidated his position as the Subcontinent’s unchallenged emperor — and, more importantly, revealed the absurdity of astrology.
Astrology itself has a long history of failed predictions. For instance, during India’s crucial 1971 elections, The Astrological Magazine overflowed with predictions that Indira Gandhi would lose; she won with an overwhelming majority. During the 1980 international conference organized by the Indian Astrologers Federation, both its president and secretary predicted a war with Pakistan in 1982, which India would win, and a world war between 1982 and 1984; no such events happened. Ironically, no astrologer on the planet predicted Gandhi’s 1984 assassination or, lest we forget, the devastating outbreak of the global Covid-19 pandemic.
The word astrology comes from two Greek words, astron (a star) and logia (treatment of), and refers to the study of the movement of the planets and the stars and their supposed influence upon people’s daily lives. Babylonian omen ideas arrived in India around 450 bce when Persia occupied various north-western portions of the Subcontinent (Sixth to Fourth centuries bce), followed, around 200 ce, by Greek astrological ideas. To these were added new ideas to suit Indian culture. Indian astrology also incorporated a major change — a Hindu zodiac fixed to the constellations instead of, as with the Western zodiac, Earth’s poles. This created a difference of 22 degrees.
The Indian astrological system remains in use today, which leads to the question: What does Islam say about astrology?
First, astronomy is a physical science field that is completely halal. Moreover, the following hadith indicates that one of the reasons why God placed the stars in their positions is to help people with navigation.
Muslims have used astronomy for 1,500 years to navigate the seas and the deserts, as well as to determine the prayer direction. Various Quranic verses and hadith clearly distinguish between these two, encourage astronomy and prohibit astrology.
“God created these stars for three purposes: to adorn the heavens, to stone the devils and as signs by which to navigate. Whoever seeks anything else in them is mistaken and does not benefit from them, and he is wasting his time and effort in seeking something of which he has no knowledge” (“Sahih al-Bukhari,” Bab fi al-Nujum, 2/240).
Ghayb means future in Arabic. These verses show that astrology cannot predict the future: “Say: None in the heavens and Earth knows the ghayb except God, nor can they perceive when they shall be resurrected” (27:65).
“Say (O Muhammad): I possess no power over benefit or hurt to myself except as God wills. If I had the knowledge of the ghayb, I should have secured for myself an abundance of wealth, and no evil should have touched me. I am but a warner, and a bringer of glad tidings unto people who believe” (7:188).
“Whoever approaches an oracle or a fortune-teller has disbelieved in what was revealed to Muhammad” (“Sunan Abu Dawud,” vol. 3, p. 1095, no. 3895). In other words, such a person falls directly into kufr (disbelief), a major sin.
Ups and downs are part of everyone’s life. The Quran instructs us not to despair of God’s mercy. So if we are going through a rough patch, instead of falling prey to the astrologers’ deceptions, amulets and talismans, we should put our trust in God and hope for the best, as He has promised to hear and answer our pleas for help. During difficult times, therefore, we should follow the Quranic advice of resorting to prayer and patience.
Misbahuddin Mirza, M.S., P.E., is a licensed professional engineer registered in New York and New Jersey. He served as the regional quality control engineer for the New York State Department of Transportation’s New York City Region, authored the iBook “Illustrated Muslim Travel Guide to Jerusalem” and has written for major U.S. and Indian publications.
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