FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Subverting the Qur’an

Rant Number 480 6 March 2012

Insulting the Qur’an brings poor dividends, as the Yanks are finding out in Afghanistan. And no need to recall the Rushdie case. However, a sacred text can be perverted in subtler, more insidious ways. The latest BBC4 episode of the Sicilian detective series, Inspector Montalbano, proved it well.

The Mystery of the Terracotta Dog shows the eponymous, shaven-headed policeman investigating a cache of arms in a cave. A run-of-the-mill mafia hide-out, it seems, but the plot thickens when the bodies of a boy and a girl killed long ago are found, lying in an adjacent, sealed chamber. A handful of coins and a huge terracotta dog, as if standing guard, are by them. Mystery indeed...

Inspector Montalbano patiently pieces together the pieces of the puzzle. The uncle of the dead girl when a student had written an essay on a certain ‘Mediterranean legend’. About some young men sleeping in a cave, guarded by a faithful dog, Qitmir. For centuries they sleep, till miraculously, they wake up again. A copy of the Qur’an is then produced...Muslim readers, by now you have twigged it. So does the policeman, of course.

It is like this. To escape persecution by Emperor Decius, a brutal and savage pagan, seven Christian youths are walled up in a cave near Ephesus, in Asia Minor, guarded by their dog. After 200 years, they wake up. One of the boys goes into town to buy food. He offers a coin and the shopkeeper is astonished: the coin bears the image of a hated emperor from long ago. Now a Christian monarch rules, Theodosius II. After initial incredulity, the people rejoice. Later, the boys are canonised – Feast Day 27 July – God be praised!

Now look up Sura al-Kahf, 18^th in the Qur’an. The same wonderful narrative appears. Commentator Abdullah Yusuf Ali acknowledges the Christian origin of the story. He calls it an allegory and says that the Prophet Muhammad treated it as a parable (under inspiration, Ali adds), to teach various lessons. Other pious commentators might baulk at the term ‘allegory’ but that is not for the priest to judge. Allah and the saintly sleepers know the truth. (The Book does not name the dog, by the way, but it is charming that that goodly beast plays such a fine, protective role of believers.)

Back to Inspector Montalbano. The jigsaw comes together. A dark, painful case. The student, now a very old man, was the uncle of the dead girl. Her father, aflame with incestuous passion, had raped her. When he realised the girl was in love with the boy, he paid an assassin to have them murdered in bed. (It is Sicily, after all...) Arriving on the scene of the crime, the uncle decided that the couple, denied union and happiness in this world, must be united in the next. So he arranged the bodies, coins and terracotta dog in a cave. The Qur’an gave him the idea. Simple.

What is wrong with this, you might ask? A lot, an awful lot. Sura al-Kahf does not tell a tale about lovers. It is about some pious, chaste, believing youths. They are strong monotheists, in flight from a murshik, polytheistic persecutor. That is why the Lord performs the great miracle of causing them to fall asleep and then awake again after centuries. They may well have thought they were going to die but death is not the end but the door to life for one who trusts in the One, True God.

The Mystery of the Terracotta Dog is not about faith. Not about belief. Not about martyrdom. Not about standing up to an unholy system. The tragic lovers simply are in love with each other. They love the flesh, not the Lord. Their illicit love dooms them forever. From their sleep they would not awake again, not to eternal life, anyway, no.

Love, even earthly love, is of course something eagerly desired. We have all been young, haven’t we? We all – well, most of us – have hankered after the forbidden fruit. So, few would not feel sorry for the lovers in the story. Dante too sympathises with Paolo and Francesca, the doomed lovers in the Inferno. Yes, he still places them down below, amongst the damned. He has no choice. Dante knows the difference between sentimentality and divine law. Andrea Camilleri, the author of the Montalbano novels, apparently does not.

So, here you have it. An insidious subversion. A holy text, a book revered by billions, is used and misused to convey a message opposite to what it intends. The companions of the Cave, the faithful, self-denying and heroic youths of Sura al-Kahf vanish from view. Instead, they become a couple of rutting physical lovers. The dog, the coins turn into props, gimmicks, clues scattered to inspire the sleuth to solve his mystery. The supernatural narrative, the vertical dimension, the enigmatic drama of God’s power and grace are replaced with a purely horizontal, natural and sentimental intrigue. Maybe the viewers lapped it up. But it troubled the priest...

It does not happen only to Muslims, of course. Dan Brown subverted the sublime mystery of the Incarnation, the glory of St John’s Gospel, to produce a vulgar fantasy about a supposed carnal affair between Christ and St Mary Magdalene. It is not just subversion, it is inversion. St John’s Gospel is about love of God, not love of man. The Greek word for erotic love, eros, never appears in the New Testament. Instead, agape is used. Non-physical love. Brown could not bear that. He had to twist it, to soil, to besmirch it. And he made a lot of money into the bargain. It figures.

Inspector Montalbano is actually a jolly good thriller. The Sicilian atmosphere is great, the plots grip you, the characters are gritty and earthy, unlike the rather schmaltzy, insipid suburban figures of Midsommer. Hope no one wishes Andrea Camilleri ill. He is no Rushdie. Can’t believe he meant to disrespect a holy text. Yet, unwittingly, the Terracotta Dog illustrates what the Zeitgeist is relentlessly at: the occult war, the subversion, the inversion of the sacred.

Revd Frank Gelli

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Next Big Thing - A PREDICTION

Rant Number 447 6 July 2011

Poverty to worsen in Welsh valleys! Desperate jobseekers! Public sector squeezes drains people of hope! Students in debt! And so on. Not just in Wales but in Britain as a whole. And it is going to get worse.

Doom and gloom are all around in the Britain that was once great. But the priest has the brightest of all bright ideas. I know how to fix poverty, unemployment, student debt, joblessness, the lot. The next big idea – I have got it!

Insight flashed from a pellucid paragraph in Anthony Daniels’ brisk Zanzibar to Timbuktu. A man in the Nigerian state of Sokoto was arrested for trying ‘to sell his son to another man’. Don’t rush to condemn the fellow: it was a time of economic hardship, you see?

The penny dropped. That’s it! That nifty Nigerian guy, unjustly apprehended by the benighted authorities, blazed a trail. The unemployed, the poor, the debt-laden students now can lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. Snap out of despondency! How? Have a child and sell it. Or two children. Or three. More cash to be made. Excellent. A burgeoning industry beckons. Profits. Enlightened self-interest. Happiness maximised. Superb! This is going to be big, real big, man!

Necessity is the mother of inventions. Child-selling is not new. The comprachicos in Victor Hugo’s The Laughing Man are a case in point. OK, that was three centuries ago. But Curzio Malaparte’s fact-based novel, The Skin, harks back to 1944. Set in Naples after the ‘Liberation’, it shows the utter misery and degradation in which the Neapolitans had fallen because of the war. Malaparte narrates how wretched, starving mothers were reduced to selling their young children for a pittance to the Moroccan soldiers in the French Army. For purposes perhaps less than paternal. An extreme, lamentable case. But there is no need for things to get so dire. Child-selling can be done properly, decently and in order. As a fair business transaction. On e-Bay. And Facebook. You can tweet it. Put an ad in the papers – if you are really old-fashioned. Regardless, you can make money – we are, after all, a capitalist society. Built on buying and selling. Why should only the bloody bankers get all the lolly? Let little people make a bit of cash, for goodness’ sake! The seller sells and the buyer buys and gets what he wants.

The child....hmmm, let me figure that out.

A child’s best interest...Why wouldn’t that be served by being given to another man, or woman? So long as they are, as they say, caring...Biological parenthood is considered old fashioned, anyway. A Times editorial yesterday attacked the superstition of the ‘preservation of the biological family’. ‘Pink parents’ (gays) are spreading, anyway. ‘Social’ parenting can work out best in adoption, so, what’s so wrong about selling and buying a child, eh?

It would be illegal, yes. But that’s no ultimate bar, surely. Many things were once illegal and they no longer are. Abortion was illegal – now no more. Ditto with same sex unions. Good. People progress. Evolve. Improve. In time, shortly, people will come to see the virtue, the utility, I daresay the beauty of the next big thing – child selling.

Human Rights activists would make trouble, I figure. But look here. The HR industry does not object to abortion, does it? That is kosher in their book. It is all right to terminate a life in the womb, right? But would it not be better to let that child be born? To give that live being a chance of a better life with prosperous parents? If the foetus could be asked, do you not think it would prefer to live, rather than to die? Wouldn’t you?

Bertrand Russell once said he never understood the argument that it is better to exist than not to exist. I wonder. Soon science might be able to make contact with the baby in the womb. Ask him – in the appropriate, instinctive, sub-rational ways – whether he prefers life to death. Methinks the tiny thing might well opt for living, pace philosophy.

189.100 babies were ‘terminated’ in 2009. They were, presumably, unwanted. But, if the mother had realised she could make some cash out of the little blighter, might she not have had an incentive to make him live?

Today the State and our fiendish, PC Local Authorities have a monopoly on things like adoption. They also grab vulnerable children away from families deemed unsuitable. Dogmatically determine, on racial grounds, whether blacks can adopt whites or the other way around. This is intolerable, totalitarian and racist. Let private enterprise regulate matters, instead of a clapped out, discredited public sector. If you can sell a cat or a puppy, why not your child? They are all yours. Private property is a fundamental right of man, as John Locke stipulated. Private enterprise is the key to a nation’s wealth. People are essentially buyers and consumers, so let us sell and buy children, too. Verily, this will be the Next Big Thing.

Prejudice of course will raise its ugly head. Like in Michel Houellebecq’s visionary novel, Platform. The controversial, Islam-hating French writer postulates the creation of Aphrodite Clubs. Basically, offering sex-based travel tours to the Third...oops! I mean, the developing world. With the best of intentions. It happens already, anyway, but hypocritically hidden. The idea, again, is to encourage private enterprise, relieve poverty, maximise people’s felicity. Feminism and women’s rights have made many European men miserable. The exotic East offers an inexhaustible reservoir of tame, domesticated females. Would make ideal wives and lovers. And the birds, of both sexes, hanker after life in Europe, a promised land of milk and honey to them. So...why not?

Alas, bourgeois prejudice (and terrorism) spoils it all. People are not ready, yet. But, in the case of child-selling I have no doubt its time will, must come. It is an empirical thing. Poverty and unemployment are not going to go away – no government, of whatever hue, can solve them. Only the people concerned can. In this simple, sensible and rational way.

I hear the cacophonies of protest. Disgusting! Immoral! Illegal! The priest answers: today, perhaps. But, again, society evolves. And the law changes. Empiricism and pragmatism must guide us, not outdated, primitive notions of obligation, natural attachments and the like. A brave new world beckons. And money, money, money galore! Child-selling will be the Next Big Thing!

Revd Frank Julian Gelli