[lit-ideas] Re: Desecrating the Qur'an
- From: Austin Meredith <Kouroo@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 07:16:00 -0400
> I like a term Huston Smith invented in THE WORLD'S RELIGIONS. He said
> that for Muslims, the Quran is God "inlibriate" much the way Christians
> would say that Jesus is God "incarnate." One may disagree with either
> of these, or both, but one must understand the depth of the belief in
> order to deal with either. Desecrating a consecrated host for Catholics
> by defecating on it, or peeing on Jesus, would feel the same to
> Christians as flushing a copy of the Quran would feel to Muslims.
I'll illustrate this with an experience from my own life. In early 1979
during the Iranian Revolution, I was trapped in Iran because the US Embassy
and Consulate in Tehran were refusing to help me exit the country (well,
that's another story) and during Ashura --the insane religious holiday on
which columns of Shi'ites march through the streets whipping themselves
across their backs with chains and hacking at their heads with knives,
chanting, with blood flying everywhere-- I was hiding out in a small
village just to the west of Tehran's Mehrabad Airport. A young
revolutionary friend has offered me refuge in his family's village home.
They were Mahdists, which is to say, they were waiting for the Ayatollah
Khomeini, the Mahdi, to materialize himself at Mehrabad Airport and bring
history to an end. Basically, I gathered from the little Farsi that I
understood, and from the "body language," the family was split along gender
lines, with the womenfolk arguing that the menfolk should kill me because I
was an infidel, and the father of the family arguing that they couldn't as
long as I was a guest in the home.
At one point during this argument over my life, what I mean by "body
language" is that they were throwing boiled potatoes at one another. Then
the old lady of the family came rushing at me holding out with both hands
at arm's length an enormous gilt-bound volume. She was gesturing that I
should accept the volume to look at it. I was wary of her toothless grin
and kept backing away, putting my hands behind my back and shaking my head
no, no, no. (Something from my childhood in the fundamentalist Indiana
cornfields was warning me.) The father of the family grabbed his wife, who
was ululating loudly, shoved her into the back room, and slammed the door.
Eventually, everyone calmed down, and an oilcloth was spread on the floor,
and we sat down around it and had supper -- which turned out to consist of
the potatoes that they had been throwing, and nothing else. Eventually,
with my hands still carefully behind my back, one of them opened their
volume and held it up so that I could inspect it from a distance. This was,
of course, the family's Qur'an with their multi-generation record of births
and deaths on the front flyleaf. I watched as they traced through the
Arabic script for me, indicating the dates of birth of each of the current
crop of kiddies, and pointing one by one at the kiddies. I was, of course,
acting very polite.
This grandma had been trying to force the issue. Had my unclean hand
touched their family Qur'an they would have needed to have taken it to
their mulla for it to be ritually burned in the mosque incinerator. My
touching this book that was being pushed at me would have meant my death
right there and then -- if the men hadn't done it the ululating women would've.
I'm glad I lived to point the moral: a holy scripture is to a true believer
what an accelerant is to a needy arsonist. Now that our troops have
desecrated the Qur'an, we might as well just fold our tent in the middle of
the night and silently sneak away. It's over.
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