[lit-ideas] Re: Desecrating the Qur'an
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 08:44:54 -0500
Thanks for posting that, Austin. It's a wonderful anecdote -- bizarre and
frightening but deliciously funny. Human beings out-Twain Mark Twain every
day of the week. We Americans are guiltless of this kind of behavior, thank
God. Sure there are those who would send someone to prison for burning a
flag that symbolizes among other things the right to burn the flag. But
that's different.
I especially love the fact that it was the women who wanted you dead. What
did you do to piss them off so much?
Mike Geary
Memphis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Austin Meredith" <Kouroo@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 6:16 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Desecrating the Qur'an
> > 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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