The Sharing Group Discussion: Is Swalah al-Khusuf a Superstition?

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

Brother Naushad Omar posted, on The Sharing Group, on the 26^th September 2015: “Some lady on Facebook said that there will be a lunar eclipse on the 28^th September, and the Prophet (s.a.w.) said, according to Swahih al-Bukhari, that we must hasten to make two raka’at of swalah.  My response was: It is not necessary to make swalah now for an eclipse, since we are not superstitious anymore.  The Jahilliyah Arabs were superstitious because they had all kinds of weird beliefs about comets, eclipses and other heavenly aberrations.  Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.) advocated swalah to wean the Arabs off this superstition.  It is totally unnecessary and weird that we make swalah now for eclipses.  Rather make swalah for the wars, poverty, corruption and mass migrations afflicting the ummah.” 

Brother Terence Helikaon Nunis: That is not true.  Are you saying that for 1,400 years, we have performed a sunnah al-muthlaq because we are superstitious?  That is a fitnah against the ummah. 

The prayer of lunar eclipse is known as swalah al-khusuf.  It is a sunnah al-muthlaq, meaning that it is a sunnah that can only be performed in specific conditions.  In this case, during the eclipse.  The reason why we perform these sorts ‘ibadah is to engender within the ummah the recognition of the Divine in all phenomena. 

Brother Hossein Turner: Is it not amazing that only during the time on this planet when sentient life began - the Moon, which is continuously moving away slowly from Earth, was in the right place to eclipse the Sun?  Before that, it was closer to the Earth and total eclipses were not seen.  It seems, events co-develop in order for there to be witnesses to perceive it; just as flowers did not exist before insects were around to appreciate them. 

Sister Ramla al’Aalam: Where do we come up with strange arguments like this?  I have heard, earlier, why swalat itself is no longer required.  Maybe, for some tribe that has retreated in the caves and has compelled over itself extraordinary conditions of perception, swalah may no longer be required.  For the rest of us, there was, perhaps, never a time before when swalah was so strongly needed. 

Brother Colin Turner: Brother Naushad Omar, prayer during events of cosmic significance, such as earthquakes, eclipses and so forth is performed not for the sake of escaping the effects of the event but in acknowledgment of the awesomeness of the Creator, our existential poverty and the absolute need we have of Divine Succour and Protection.  It has nothing, whatsoever, to do with superstition. 

Brother Naushad Omar: Here is the hadits: As narrated by Sayyidina Abu Bakr ‘Abdullah ibn ‘Utsman asw-Swiddiq (r.a.), “We were with the Prophet (s.a.w.) when the Sun eclipsed.  The Prophet (s.a.w.) stood up, dragging his cloak until he entered the mosque.  He led us in two raka’at prayer until the eclipse had cleared.  Then, the Prophet (s.a.w.) said, ‘The Sun and the Moon do not eclipse because of someone’s death.  So, whenever you see these eclipses, pray and invoke until the eclipse is over.’” 

In the 7^th century, this set of statements applied: The Sun and the Moon do not eclipse because of someone’s death.  This means the Arabs believed the eclipse of the Sun and the Moon led to someone’s death, which implies that Allah (s.w.t.) is not the cause of death; the eclipse is actually the cause of death.  Therefore, the eclipse is a superstition. 

Brother Colin Turner: You seem to be confusing things.  The eclipse is not a superstition; belief that it cause death is the superstition.  Are you claiming that the Qur’anic exhortation to pray during the eclipse is actually encouraging superstitious behaviour?  I would say that it is the opposite, and that the Qur’an is telling us to offer prayers because we are impotent and ignorant. 

Brother Naushad Omar: In the 21^st century, this set of statements applies: The Sun and the Moon do not eclipse because of someone’s death.  This means the Arabs believed the eclipse of the Sun and the Moon led to someone’s death, which implies that Allah (s.w.t.) is not the cause of death; the eclipse is actually the cause of death.   The eclipse is an alignment of heavenly bodies.  Therefore, we do not have to pray and invoke Allah (s.w.t.) any more since we do not believe in superstition any more. 

Brother Colin Turner: There is a very subtle straw man in your “logic”, brother.  The Prophet (s.a.w.) commands us to offer prayers during the eclipse, not because we believe that the eclipse is a precursor of death, but precisely the opposite, namely that the eclipse is merely a demonstration, or a manifestation, if you like, of Divine Power.  Our prayers, therefore, are an acknowledgment of Divine Majesty and an expression of our awe and, I contend, our existential poverty. 

Sister Ramla al’Aalam: It seems that Brother Naushad Omar is suggesting that the exhortation to the eclipse prayer was to counter the superstitions of those times, and because those superstitions are no longer remaining, the prayer as an antidote to that is not required.  This may or may not be a correct position. 

Brother Colin Turner: In fact, what you are saying, brother, is that the hadits about praying during the eclipse has been abrogated.  Yet, the verse is not saying what you claim it is saying.  It is not telling us not to pray; on the contrary, it is telling us to pray, but not for the superstitious reasons that the pre-Islamic Arabs believed. 

Brother Naushad Omar: I did not divert from the argument to create a straw man.  How can an alignment be a Manifestation of Divine Power?  It is only an alignment of three heavenly bodies in a straight line.  There is no power there.  If you want to see real power and not superstition, look at an exploding supernova or the expanding universe or the two pillars keeping the universe in a controlled expansionary phase …  I think you need to read up a bit on astronomy.  Also, the hadits is not speaking to us who live in the 21^st century and who do not believe in superstitions.  It is talking to the 7^th century Arabs, who did believe in superstitions.  A big difference.  Most of the problems Muslims have today is that they are reading the text literally, without contextual transformation. 

Brother Colin Turner: Brother Naushad Omar, you have a very strange notion of “power”.  Are you saying that an alignment of three heavenly bodies is not a manifestation of Divine Power? 

Brother Colin Turner: And why do I need to read up on astronomy to know that the alignment of three planetary bodies is not a manifestation of Divine power?  Is this what you are saying?  Do you realise how illogical that sounds? 

Brother Naushad Omar: An alignment of heavenly bodies has no astronomical value, only astrological value.  Astrology is based on superstition. 

Brother Terence Helikaon Nunis: Actually, the alignment do have astronomical and other values.  They cause the tides, for example.  That is why we have the highest astronomical tide and lowest astronomical tide.  They affect gravity, which affects all the bodies we have in orbit.  They sometimes affect our magnetosphere and that affects all electronics on Earth.  So, what you have said is incorrect. 

Brother Naushad Omar: Why would an alignment of 3 heavenly bodies have any power, they only happen to be in those positions.  It is like saying a coincidence has some power beyond the coincidence itself. 

Brother Colin Turner: Yes, an alignment means nothing astronomically.  That was not my point.  And I do not give astrology any credence whatsoever.  Maybe we have been talking at cross purposes here.  My contention that even a single atom is a Manifestation of Divine Power. 

Brother Naushad Omar: Then why not worship when all the atoms are anywhere? 

Brother Colin Turner: We have clearly been talking at cross purposes.  I was not trying to impute power to the alignment or give it astrological significance.  My contention is that an eclipse is a manifestation of Divine Power, just as the conjunction of a sperm and an egg is a manifestation of Divine Wisdom, and so on.  Nothing to do with astrology or superstitions. 

I guess that the exhortation to offer prayers during the eclipse is because eclipses are not a frequent occurrence.  One might ask why pray five times a day; why not four, why not fifty, why not a hundred?  Eclipses are rare events, and they showcase Divine Wisdom pretty dramatically.  It is possible that for this reason, swalat al-kusuf was introduced. 

Brother Naushad Omar: How can the alignment of three heavenly bodies be a Manifestation of Divine Power?  What Divine Power is there when the orbits of these bodies are so, that they happen to create a straight line?  Allah (s.w.t.) has Created each heavenly body to swim in its own orbit.  Allah (s.w.t.) did not come up with worshipping the Moon, worshipping the Sun, seeing comets and eclipses as spells, magic and superstition.  In the ancient world, science did not exist, only superstition, magic and witchcraft.  The story of the eclipses come from that background, not from Allah’s (s.w.t.) Creation. 

Brother Terence Helikaon Nunis: Everything in Creation is a Manifestation of the Divine.  This goes back to tawhid.  Your argument is that God Created and left things to be.  That is not the Muslim belief.  We believe that not only is He Involved, but the origin of every action, the manifestation of every attribute is His. 

Your assertions are full of errors.  Firstly, the time of the Prophet (s.a.w.) does not belong to the “ancient” world.  Most historians date the end of the ancient world to the end of the Western Roman Empire or the death of Justinian I.  Islam began at the advent of the feudal age.  Also, this idea that science did not exist in the ancient world is patently false.  We know for a fact that early hominids were methodical in their study of the environment and the flora and fauna.  That is science.  We know that the Sumerians developed cultivation and fermentation.  That is science.  We know that the Hittites were the first to successfully smelt iron at a large scale.  We know that the Egyptians pioneered surgery.  That is science.  And this is only the Near East, I am mentioning.  We even know the names of many of these classical scientists, and have copies of their research. 

Superstition is when people forget the reason for phenomena and assign a supernatural reason to it.  And since there is no danger whatsoever of that happening, there is no hint of superstition in the practice of a sunnah al-muthlaq.  You are neither a scholar of Islam nor a historian.  This idea that the practice of swalah al-kusuf and swalah al-khusuf is a form of superstition is nothing more than a fitnah to prevent Muslims from practising an established sunnah. 

Brother Naushad Omar: You are confusing Allah’s (s.w.t.) Creation with astrology and superstition which came from the positional alignments of the planets or of the Earth, Sun and the Moon.  I will give you some background history of the massive superstition existing in the Roman Empire and the other empires which influenced the desert Arabs. 

The majority of lunar and solar eclipses mentioned in ancient works are presented as coinciding with wars, battles, or the deaths of prominent persons, and these coincidences are by and large invented without reference to astronomical fact.  Dr. Claire Préaux counted two hundred and fifty such reports, of which at least two hundred are fictional or assimilated from another time to the nearest historical event.  Describing the process of “assimilation” by which an eclipse is assumed by a later historian to coincide with a nearby historical event, Isaac Newton remarked, “This procedure perhaps accounts for the remarkable tendency of people to fight battles during a solar eclipse”.  This shows what manner of portent the eclipse could be.  Plutarch summed this up when he wrote that “men regard as monstrous and as a sign sent from god portending some great misfortunes.”  And such omens could be self-fulfilling. 

“Because of his terror,” wrote the Gaius Plinius Secundus Pliny the Elder, “the Athenian general Nicias, ignorant of the cause, and afraid to lead his fleet out of the port, ruined the Athenian navy.”  Thus, the fact that Nicias believed it was a dire omen led him to react in just such a way that it became one.  Likewise, Plutarch told the story that Pelopidas could not take all his troops to confront Alexander, because of their fear at a solar eclipse.  This depletion of his forces, resulting from regarding the portent as dire, led to the portent becoming dire.  This particular event illustrates the more specific nature of the eclipse as portent. 

Since, apparently, the Sun and Moon were the governing bodies of the skies, their eclipse naturally suggested the “eclipse”, of a ruler or prominent person on Earth.  Thus, Plutarch noted that the same eclipse of the Sun met by Pelopidas was interpreted by the seers at Thebes as boding ill for a “brilliant man.”  The prediction was usually one of death, as makes sense considering the semantic connections made between eclipses, closing the eyes, and dying, to be mentioned below.  Even fictional solar eclipses were used as retrofitted portents of death, and Dio Cassius records just such an eclipse predicting the death of Augustus.  But this was a general principle, as the fifth century antiquarian, John Lydus recorded, “If the Sun fails, it warns of desolation for men.  If the Moon during the second watch seems muddy, then men will die.” 

Seneca told us, in his parable of the “science lesson”, that Archelaus was “a king so ignorant of nature that on a day when there was a failure of the Sun, he closed his palace and cut his son’s hair”.  The Latin and surviving Greek recensions agree without needing comment.  Préaux, p. 310, suggests that “second watch” means April, but it is more probable that it refers to the time of night.  But there could be variation.  Lunar eclipses, according to Philochorus, are propitious for fugitives, since concealment is what they need.  And according to Autocleides, apparently from his lost work the exegetics, solar and lunar events of any kind are only portentous for three days.  Of course, we have already seen in Quintus Curtius the record of the interpretation made by the Egyptian dates that solar eclipses bode ill for Greeks, while lunar ones for Persians.  This possibly has a Persian precedent, as suggested by the story told by Herodotus.  This gets even more complicated, however, when we examine the other method of divination in which eclipses figure: astrology. 

Brother Terence Helikaon Nunis: So essentially, you know how to cut and paste from somewhere and based on this one document, you have come to the conclusion we should not pray a sunnah al-muthlaq because you find nothing in it. 

Firstly, we are Muslims, and that means we take from the Prophet (s.a.w.) first.  And he has established a sunnah.  For those of piety, they follow, as they wish.  And the reason has been established in our fiqh based on a foundation of tawhid. 

From the Muslim perspective, there was never the idea that this was based on superstition.  That would be against the ‘aqidah.  We do acknowledge that the Arabs of Jahiliyyah were polytheists and beliefs in astrology were prevalent in that age, even in Christian civilisation.  But the Qur'an, the foundation of our entire doctrine, is explicit in denouncing this.  As such, there is no such foundation within our acts of ‘ibadah pertaining to this.  The basis of fiqh al-‘ibadah cannot be reactionary, but based solely upon the acknowledgement of the Creator. 

Brother Naushad Omar: That is why the 7^th century Arabs were told not to swalah when the Sun is rising, at its zenith and when it is setting since the Arabs worshipped the Sun besides idols. 

Brother Terence Helikaon Nunis: The time for the swalah for fajr ends with the rising of the Sun, ishraq.  Muslims are told not to perform any sunnah prayers after fajr, and after ‘aswr because these are the times set aside for adzkar, specific litanies to be recited.  Most Muslims do not practice them any longer.  However, if a person were to wake up late, and the Sun is rising, then he is to pray is swalah al-fajr.  And if a person has a specific sunnah prayer that is mu’akkadah or muthlaq, he may still do so.  This includes the swalah al-jana’iz, the sunnah prayers upon entering a mosque or completing the wudhu’, or a specific hajat based on a nazar. 

The time for dhuha’ ends when the Sun hits its zenith.  It is not the time for zhuhr until the sun passes it.  As such, unless a Muslim is performing swalah adh-dhuha, which is a sunnah an-nawafil, he may not pray. 

All this discredits your contentions.  This is basic fiqh.  If you do not even know that, you should be telling people not to pray based on your wild imagination of things. 

Brother Naushad Omar: Basic fiqh from whom, from 9^th century Sunni or Shi’ah scholastic paradigm or from the 7^th century Qur’an and Prophet (s.a.w.).  You are obviously brainwashed as much the 99% of Muslim ummah born into Islam who also believe that we must blindly follow scholars without thinking.  All I said that the Arab mentality was steeped in superstition and Islam came to remove superstition and replace it with knowledge, and that people were told not to swalah when the Sun rises since the Prophet (s.a.w.) could not trust his followers who may still be fire worshippers so there you go off on a tangent giving me a lesson in fiqh which was not relevant to the argument of superstition, idol worshipping, Sun worshipping and Moon worshipping of the 7^th century Arabs. 

Brother Terence Helikaon Nunis: On one hand, you talk about knowledge, and yet on the other hand, you display a startling lack of it.  In case you were not aware, being a Muslim means submitting to certain basic ideas.  And one of them is tawhid.  Your assumptions demonstrate a lack of understanding in that subject.  That precludes you having any credibility talking about superstition.  You would note that I have defined the relevant aspect of tawhid and the understanding of superstition. 

Islam did not come to remove superstition.  Islam came to remove the worship of other than God.  And the worship of the ego is also the worship of other than God.  In this case, it is your ego that presupposes that 1,400 years of scholarship is irrelevant. 

On the issue itself, it pertains to fiqh, and I have given a fiqh answer, and the reason for that.  In and of itself, that should demolish your mistaken assumption that the purpose of certain acts of ‘ibadah, or the alleged prohibition of certain acts of ‘ibadah, pertain to superstition. 

Brother Naushad Omar: How does tawhid relate to the alignment of three heavenly bodies?  I have not seen one verse, one hadits, or even logic that suggests this.  I think you should get some books on philosophy and logic and raise the quality of your scholarship.  As for me, learning from poorly educated scholars, that is not possible since that is a contradiction.  If our scholars were that well-educated, how come they cannot run an Islamic state and people have, for the past 200 years, chosen secularism and Qur’anism.  I think your knowledge lacks historical content as well.  And I am still waiting for what tawhid has to do with positional alignment of planets and heavenly bodies, unless it be to do with ancient superstition. 

Brother Terence Helikaon Nunis: Tawhid relates to everything.  Did the Qur’an not State that nothing moves except by the Command of Allah (s.w.t.)?  And that everything has a time and place?  And that everything is Decreed to the minute level? 

You are putting too much stock in a natural phenomenon and extrapolating something that is not there.  If you want to change the sunnah of the Prophet (s.a.w.), then the onus is upon you to show a dalil about it.  Otherwise, it is merely your opinion, and by itself, it has no worth in religious doctrine. 

Brother Naushad Omar: Agreed.  But how is this related to the superstitions held by ancients relating to the alignment of planets, the Sun, Moon and the Earth?  The ancients were saying that if there is an alignment, then someone will die or something bad will happen, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  If you are correct that the swalah was for “nothing moves without Allah’s (s.w.t.) Permission”, then surely we must swalah continuously since everything is moving continuously.  The only conclusion is the swalah was to do with the superstition held by the Arabs. 

Brother Terence Helikaon Nunis: There are several leaps in logic here and miscontruement. 

First, you take these “ancients” to refer to everybody.  That is a generalisation. 

Secondly, you are assuming that a Muslim religious act is based on a superstition, and not, as the Prophet (s.a.w.) said, a recognition of phenomena. 

Thirdly, I did not say this swalah was for “nothing moves without Allah’s (s.w.t.) Permission “; I said this is for the recognition of the eclipse as a phenomena Decreed.  There is one for rain, one for death, one for drought, one for fear, one the absent; are they all based on superstition then? 

Allah (s.w.t.) Did tell us that we must be continuously in a state of ‘ibadah.  Swalah is the highest aspect of it. But that is another topic in and of itself. 

So no, that is not the “only” conclusion.  What you have actually done is made a conclusion and then tried to justify it based on anecdotal evidence you thought relevant. 

Brother Colin Turner: Everything is a Manifestation of Divine power.  This is nothing to do with superstition, and you are now purposefully twisting my words.  I admitted that we had been talking at cross purposes.  If you do not see, in an eclipse, a Manifestation of Divine wisdom - the fact that the Moon and the Sun, vastly different in size, align to appear identical in size - if you do not see wisdom in this, then you are impervious to it.  Furthermore, the swalah al-kusuf has nothing to do with astronomy, astrology or superstition.  No one is worshipping the heavenly bodies, for heaven’s sake. 

Brother Naushad Omar: We are not talking at cross purposes; I understand you perfectly.  You regard the coincidence of the positions and alignments as divine manifestations, and I am asking you how. 

Brother Colin Turner: Brother, I regard everything in Creation as Divine Manifestations.  These are just more examples of them, that is all.  And there are no “coincidences” in Creation - at least not in the sense of accidental or incidental occurrences.  Everything is a Manifestation of the Divine. 

Brother Muhammad Harun Riedinger: I salute and commend the learned members of this group, Brother Terence, Brother Colin, and others, for rejecting and refuting the preposterous proposition, which started this thread, and our thanks also to Brother Naushad for providing us with a living example of how Shaythan tries to derail our iman by inspiring us with logical arguments “explaining” and eventually questioning the Wisdom of the Divine Guidance and then making us feel so “enlightened” that we give a higher priority to our reason than Allah’s (s.w.t.) Guidance.  This is exactly how he succeeded to bamboozle Adam (a.s.) and Hawa into disobeying God’s Command in the very beginning, telling them that God only forbade them the fruit, so that they would not become like the angels and have eternal life. 

سُوۡرَةُ الاٴعرَاف

فَوَسۡوَسَ لَهُمَا ٱلشَّيۡطَـٰنُ لِيُبۡدِىَ لَهُمَا مَا وُ ۥرِىَ عَنۡہُمَا مِن سَوۡءَٲتِهِمَا وَقَالَ مَا نَہَٮٰكُمَا رَبُّكُمَا عَنۡ هَـٰذِهِ ٱلشَّجَرَةِ إِلَّآ أَن تَكُونَا مَلَكَيۡنِ أَوۡ تَكُونَا مِنَ ٱلۡخَـٰلِدِينَ (٢٠) 

Then began Satan to whisper suggestions to them, in order to reveal to them their shame that was hidden from them (before): he said, “Your Lord only forbade you this tree lest you should become angels or such beings as live forever.” (Surah al-A’araf:20) 

This is not to discredit logic and reason; they are precious Gifts of our Rabb, but they are Given to us to facilitate our worldly tasks.  To apply them in – and more so against – the fulfilment of our spiritual purpose and concerns is very dangerous, and ultimately fatal, if not checked. 

Brother Naushad Omar: If you read the hadits carefully, it is to remove the superstition attached to solar and lunar eclipses in the ancient world.  Then let us revive another sunnah, the one that says we must determine swalah times using the Sun and shadow sticks.  Better still, if we are going to get all cock-eyed about a defunct sunnah, let us revisit the hadits on which the whole Islamic system of legislating law and the issuing of fatawa for the past 1,400 years is based on, the one that says, “My community shall not agree upon an error”.  Send this hadits to the local university professor of philosophy and logic and ask him if we can change that hadits to “My scholars shall not agree upon an error”.  Are the two logical propositions the same?  Of course not.  The former is a democracy since it says the whole community shall not agree upon an error and the latter is a dictatorship of the scholars like the one found in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the system practised by ISIS and the system about to be introduced by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt before they were deposed by Sisi.  This also shows one cannot use qiyas willy-nilly without understanding logic, a science which our esteemed Islamic scholars do not learn at their religious seminaries.  The two fundamental issues afflicting the Muslim world today are: the literal interpretation of text; the lack of understanding of the deeper meanings of text and the context of why the text was issued in the first place; the inability to understand that Islam is inimically democratic and egalitarian; that the Qur’an was Revealed to all people; that there are no middlemen in Islam; that each individual is a vicegerent of God, on Earth and not a single dictator as was practised by the early rulers of Islam and the various empires including ISIS; that each individual will be accountable for both individual sins and state and societal malfunction on the day of judgement; that ignorance of the law will not be accepted by God since the Qur’an is replete with verses extolling believers to read, to think and to reflect.  Why did Islam become a dictatorial system and one based on taqlid?  It is due to historical reasons and not due to the principles of Islam.  Islam developed its political and legal institutions in a culture of authoritarian rule.  The dictators of those days developed a partnership with the class of people known as the ‘ulama, who did not exist in the time of the Prophet (s.a.w.) and whose sine qua non does not exist in the Qur’an or ahadits.  This was done to control the access to knowledge and to control the minds of the masses.  The rulers used this partnership with the clergy based on the Greek philosopher, Plato’s advocation of the rule of scholars, philosophers and experts in his “Republic” to be the best for society.  The reason we have these massive Greek, Christian and Jewish influences is that Iraq and Syria became the intellectual heartland of Islam.  Most Muslims who lived in Iraq and Syria at that time were converts from Christianity and paganism.  Therefore, it is obvious that much of Islamic teachings have Greek, Christian and pagan influences emanating ironically from the same territory now controlled by ISIS.  The foundations of political and jurisprudential Islam are, therefore, not based on the Qur’an and the ahadits, but based on Greek, Roman, Christian and pagan teachings and culture.  Christianity is even worse off after assimilating much of Greek and pagan teachings. 

Brother Terence Helikaon Nunis: Let us examine your points in a systematic manner.  You should consider the benefits of paragraphs. 

The hadits in question is not about superstition.  You are the only person I know who reads it that way.  Every hadits has a sharh, an exposition of the circumstances and its relationship with other sources of Revelation.  And it is clear in every one of them that this is about cognisance of Divine Decree in phenomena. 

Secondly, no sunnah is ever defunct.  It may not be practised due to the circumstances, but should they arise, they are.  So, your example about determining the times of swalah are still used in some places.  Not everybody has a watch, not everybody memorises the prayer timetable.  On my travels, I have used it myself. 

Now, on the narration of the Prophet (s.a.w.), “My ummah will not agree upon error.”  Again, you have shown a misunderstanding of another hadits.  What this means is that the entirety of the ummah will not agree on something that is obviously wrong.  There is no ijma’ on anything contrary to the spirit of Islam.  An example would be this ridiculous contention of yours.  This hadits does not preclude differences in opinion in minor matters or variances.  The Prophet (s.a.w.) also said, “The ikhtilaf in my ummah is a rahmah.”  They are all valid positions.  And that is why Islam is flexible. 

The idea that taqlid is a form of dictatorship is also problematic.  There cannot be democracy in the finer issues - either one knows or does not.  The vast majority of the ummah cannot all be experts in religious science, just as we all cannot be scientists or doctors.  We specialise.  And the scholars are specialists in their field. 

I agree with you on the point that there is too much literal interpretation of the text.  In fact, that is precisely your problem here with this hadits: you are only interpreting the text literally, and from a translation at that.  So, you are guilty of the very thing you rail against. 

On the other point, no, Islam is not inimically democratic.  There is no democracy in any field of knowledge.  You cannot have a democracy of lay people and doctors deciding on the best course of medical treatment, or a democracy of amateurs and professionals on how to build a car.  There is no democracy in the religious sciences.  There has to be that foundation of knowledge.  Either people know or do not know.  There is no pretension. 

You have also misinterpreted numerous verses of the Qur’an and ahadits and that makes me suspect that you are using translations of the text and do not know Arabic.  If you do not know the language of the Qur’an, you have no credibility in major exegesis of the text.  For example, not everybody is a khalifah.  Everybody has the potential to be one.  And the Qur’an details the steps required.  It is only after all that is done, and the self is effaced, then one becomes nafs al-kamilah, the perfected soul.  Before that, no one is a khalifah, so do not flatter yourself. 

I am going to discount your comparisons with the Romans and your misreading of Platonic and Neo-Platonic ideas.  Evidently, you read the “Republic” and fancy yourself as some sort of intellectual.  Our religion is based on the Qur’an and ahadits.  And this is what the Prophet (s.a.w.) has said about the scholars: “The scholars are the inheritors of the prophets.”  And that is enough for the people of piety.  The trick, in this age of fitan and pretenders, like you, is how to discern a gnostic and a scholar from a charlatan.