FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Rant Number 615 bis - 9 January 2015 SLAYING BLASPHEMERS

A CHILLING IDEOLOGY THAT KILLS BLASPHEMERS. WHERE WILL IT STOP?


Islam’s Prophet is insulted and the infidel culprits are slain in revenge. That’s it.

Mocking one of Heaven’s envoys is no light matter. The Bible relates how the Prophet Elisha was going his way when a gang of boys came out of the city of Bethel. They jeered at the holy man’s bald pate: ‘Go up you baldhead, go up!’ But you cannot take liberties with a Prophet of God. Elisha turned around and, in the name of the Lord, cursed the offenders. Thereupon two huge she-bears came out of nearby woods and tore the miscreants to pieces – 42 of them. The Prophet then continued on his way.

They are probably having a ball in places like Saudi right now. ‘It serves the kuffaar blasphemers right!’ How to blame them? Offending Muhammad is deeply wounding to a Muslim. As my faith is vilified daily in the un-Christian West and Jesus Christ made the object of the most scurrilous satires and representations, I know how other believers feel when their beloved Messenger is attacked. Further, I won’t be a hypocrite. Would I really shed tears if people who have besmirched what I hold dearest came to sticky end? I think not. Still, feelings assail you unbidden, they cannot be easily controlled. Deeds however can, otherwise streets would be strewn with corpses.

‘Do not avenge yourselves, dearly beloved. Leave it to the wrath of God’, urges St Paul. Remember that God’s punishment is not divorced from his justice. It gives offenders their just deserts. Bloody vengeance by men is not like that. It is a low, inferior and sub-human emotion. It contradicts the sublime ethics of the New Testament. Christ could have summoned legions of angels to his defence. He could have come down from the Cross and smitten his persecutors. He did not. He left it to his Father. (Note that the Prophet Elisha did not unleash the she-bears. God did.)

The Charlie Hebdo journalists (the priest too was a journalist once) were not far-right or traditionalists or Front National. Yes, they specialised in fiercely targeting religious figures and sacred symbols but their ideological milieu was the Left. A secular, rationalist, progressive and pro-immigrant mindset. Their English counterparts would be pressmen from The Guardian, The Independent, The New Statesman, and typical BBC and Channel 4 material. Individuals who usually denigrate Christianity while at the same time bending over backwards to be fair to Islam. Well, it made no difference to the ruthless gunmen.

The Paris killings are not just criminal. They are deeply symbolical. A savage blow directed at the values of the Enlightenment. Religion to champions of the French Siecle des Lumieres like Voltaire meant superstition, obscurantism and fanaticism. The light of reason dispelled those medieval mists. Church and State got sharply separated. People no longer fought and died for abstruse theological opinions. Faith, chased off the public sphere, was restricted to harmless Sunday morning prayers. The Stock Market replaced the Church. But now… reaction has set in. God is back! It is a paradigm shift. The ideological matrix which has dominated Western thinking and praxis since the XVIII century is over. People again fight, kill and are killed in the name of God, in the public arena. Ya Allah!

As a steadfast critic of the Enlightenment I should rejoice, only…a tiny doubt arises: where will this stop? Five years ago in Pakistan 94 people were killed and 120 wounded in an attack on a Lahore mosque. By Islamophobes? No, by Taleban fanatics targeting the minority Ahmadiyya sect. Considered heretical by most Sunnis, the Ahmadiyya are subjected to regular persecutions and killings. ‘They blaspheme against the Prophet Muhammad’, a Taleban spokesman said. Hence fair game for Islamist extremists.

It will not stop there. The Shia minority also suffers regular outrages in Pakistan and elsewhere. ‘They worship their Imams. They are polytheists. Insult our Prophet’, Salafi literalists shout. The murderous fury of ISIS fundamentalists against Shia in the Levant is going on daily. Thousands have been killed and their mosques destroyed in Iraq and Syria. Two years ago four Shia were lynched by a mob in Egypt, egged on by a Sunni cleric. Shias are also persecuted in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. ‘Insult the Prophet’, eh?

Will it at least stop at the Shia? No, the Sufis also are deemed fair game. Sufis belong to the mystical tradition of Islam. Although historically quite a bellicose lot, many Sufi practices are treated as idolatrous by literalists like the Wahhabis. Muhammad al-Wahhab indeed started a campaign to destroy Sufi shrines, graves of holy people and sacred trees. He boasted to have cleansed Arabia from those. Centuries before the famous scholar Ibn Taymiyyah condemned Sufis and Christians alike and his narrow teaching lives on. Today in Egypt Salafis accuse the Sufis of shirk, polytheism or idolatry because they revere their sheikhs. ‘They insult the Prophet!’ Here you go again.

No, it won’t stop there either. Many thoughtful Muslims who cherish peaceful coexistence and moderation will be hit too. Like Schwarzenegger’s robot terminator, this chilling ideology feels neither compassion nor pity for its victims, Muslims or otherwise. It cannot be argued or reasoned with. This is a monster that will never be sated.

Yet, it must be stopped. For the sake of all.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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