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Sunday, October 22, 2006

Paradise as an al Fresco Bordello

While I continue to think about the sense in which American voters may have lost their innocence, you might like to consider this information from Sam Harris's book The End of Faith (pp. 124-127): The Pew Research Center for the People in 2002 conducted a survey of 38,000 people. "The survey included the following question, posed only to Muslims:
Some people think that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets are justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies. Other people believe that, no matter what the reason, this kind of violence is never justified. Do you personally feel that this kind of violence is often justified to defend Islam, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?"
Harris's estimate from the Pew findings that there are at least "more than 200 million avowed supporters of terrorism" [among the world's billion Muslims] is extremely conservative, because "places like Saudia Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories were not included in the survey."
We must not overlook the fact that a significant percentage of the world's Muslims believe that the men who brought down the World Trade Center are now seated at the right hand of God, amid "rivers of purest water, and rivers of milk forever fresh; rivers of wine delectable to those that drink it, and rivers of clearest honey" ([Koran] 47:15). These men—who slit the throats of stewardesses and delivered young couples with their children to their deaths at five hundred miles per hour—are at present being "attended by boys graced with eternal youth" in a "kingdom blissful and glorious." They are "arrayed in garments of fine green silk and rich brocade, and adorned with bracelets of silver" (76:15). The list of their perquisites is long. But what is it that gets a martyr out of bed early on his last day among the living? Did any of the nineteen hijackers make haste to Allah's garden simply to get his hands on his allotment of silk? It seems doubtful. The irony here is almost a miracle in its own right: the most sexually repressive people found in the world today—people who are stirred to a killing rage by reruns of Baywatch—are lured to martyrdom by a conception of paradise that resembles nothing so much as an al fresco bordello.

3 comments:

  1. Those findings scare me much more than North Korea does. N. Korea is but a tiny speck on the map. I find the sheer numbers of people who subscribe to the "terrorists' paradise" fantasy, in point of fact, terrifying.

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  2. Yes, the Pew findings do tend to strip away our "innocence" about Islam and the Koran. We'd like to believe our moderate Muslim friends who ignore the "bad stuff" in their holy book the way most Christians ignore that passage in Deuteronomy (13:7-11) that I quoted on October 7. But apparently these friends (and most Christians) are subject to a "syllogism" similar to the one I propounded yesterday. Something like: It is inconceivable that words inspired by God could condone or encourage murder, therefore that bad stuff in the Bible and the Koran must be a mistake (as it "has to be a mistake" for good Americans to believe that George W. Bush doesn't have a good reason for what he's doing). Harris is glad that most Christians do indeed ignore the Bible's bad stuff. But he, too, is terrified that there are so many Muslims who do not ignore the Koran's. The Koran (and/or the Sharia, the accounts of the Prophet's sayings and doings) even calls for Muslims who question Islam's tenets to be put to death (witness the fatwa against Salmon Rushdie over his novel, "The Satanic Verses"). Harris contends that that is a serious reason why Muslim cultures are generally so backward. Islam's adherents are penalized for invention and entrepreneurship.

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  3. It may be true that more Muslims than Christians take their holy book literally, but Harris's next chapter (after "The Problem with Islam") is titled "West of Eden" and begins (p. 153): "Compared with the theocratic terrors of medieval Europe, or those that persist in much of the Muslim world, the influence of religion in the West now seems rather benign. We should not be misled by such comparisons, however. The degree to which religious ideas still determine government policies--especially those of the United States--presents a grave danger to everyone."

    By the way, there is a little write-up about Sam Harris (with a photograph of him) in the current issue of Newsweek ("BELIEFWATCH: The Atheist," p. 12). His Letter to a Christian Nation is said to be in the sixth spot in the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list.

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