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Thursday, March 03, 2005For the record: The TurkeyBlog is fairly open-minded about religion. He is more than open to the suspicion once expressed by a Scott Adams character (the Avatar) that the multiplicity of religions represent a multiplicity of plausible roadmaps to a contented existence in a civilized society.I even think Islam has a lot to offer. In my younger days, I even learned a bit of Arabic so I could work through the words of the Prophet in the original. I don't remember much, but it's hard to forget this bit: b-ism allahi ar-rahmani ar-rahimi... In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate... Voltaire had trouble with the idea of a loving God on account of a nasty earthquake in Lisbon. I have trouble with the idea of a loving Muslim God on account of too many girls and young women slaughtered in the name of "family honor." I don't think Allah, if He is Merciful and Compassionate, could possibly smile on the barbaric behavior of so-called believers who claim their misogynistic behavior is at God's bidding but who are really acting on pre-Hejira customs. They aren't (as some assert) trying to recapture the Muslim heyday of five or six centuries back. In fact, they're trying to go back before the time of the Prophet and pretend that customs they still haven't outgrown are Islamic because they are believers. This is like Andrea Yates drowning her children to keep them from danger. It is equally awful and destructive. And equally deranged. In the Holy Books of the Christians and Jews, we are sometimes offered some pretty barbaric notions. We learn of prostitutes saved from stoning because of the connections of their johns. We learn of little children rent to bits because God's messenger had a short temper and no perspective. We see one of God's finest offering his daughters to a rape mob to cool things down while he chats with some bigwigs. Somehow, somehow, we manage not to emphasize these passages too strongly. Yeah, we think, they meant something then. Maybe they mean something now. But what? If we can't find a meaning that coheres with the advances brought by 2,000 years of civilization, we focus on other passages that offer better guidance. Even Jerry Falwell isn't calling for us to stone homosexuals and adultresses. Will the Muslims, likewise, grow up? In some places, they have. The Black men I've known who converted to Islam, for example, never seemed to know that much about their obligation to turn into sexually repressed freaks. The Turks, by and large, seem to have a handle on things. So wassup with the Middle East? I don't think it's Islam. Because if you're going to swear by the Koran, you have to start with that opening book and those opening words. The nutjobs who go in for honor killings may have their favored passages, but they've missed that every last book starts with "In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate..." I say this so that you'll know, when you get to the next posting, that I am not blasting Islam. Am not blasting the religion that has brought prison inmates in America and wandering souls the world over a sense of solace and a sense of purpose. I am blasting a fifth century tribalism that has grafted Islam onto its culture the way that voodoo grafts Catholicism onto a pre-existing animism. I am blasting a backward, vulgar abuse of Islam that has nothing to do with submission to God and everything to do with submission to pride and paranoia. 
posted by gbarto at 12:04 AM |
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