Precipitous Departure
August 30, 2008
According to a report of the Netherlands’ biggest newspaper De Telegraaf on August 29, Dutch secret service AIVD has recalled a Dutch citizen who was involved in espionage in Iran. The ultra-secret operation, which was described as extremely successful in infiltration and sabotage of the weapons industry in the Islamic Republic, had been halted in connection with plans for a US attack on Iran, as Netherlands Info Services (NIC) reports in its news bulletin today (NIS mentions erroneously Iraq, but it is clear that it means Iran).
As De Telegraaf writes, the precipitous departure may be related to plans of impending bombing certain targets which are connected with the Dutch espionage action.
In the meantime, senior Iranian commander Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri warns any attack on Iran would start a world war.
There are two more months until the US election. And almost five until the elected president takes office.
Not Really an Accolade
August 26, 2008
A country which is preparing itself for a possible naval blockade and military attacks is not going to reveal inner conflicts or power struggles. On Saturday, at a meeting with cabinet ministers, Iran’s Velāyat-e faqih Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei exhorted his President to be prepared for a second term. According to the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution praised the president for standing up to the West and predicted he would retain the office for four more years at the 2009 election. “Do not think that this year is your final year. Work as if you will stay in charge for five years” he said.
Different messages may be perceived here. Although seemingly backing Ahmadinejad in public, Khamenei might demand, at the same time, more realistic and future-oriented politics of his President. After upcoming US American elections, the pack will be reshuffled anyway. Continuity plans have to be worked out. Maybe even Khamenei is a bit irritated of the continuous apocalyptic sentiment of Ahmadinejad’s speeches. There will also be new developments in the reformers’ camp, of course, before Iran’s 2009 election campaign, which will not start before Nowruz in March.
So, let’s wait for the November 4 results first.
Children
August 25, 2008
Today, a 13-year-old school girl wearing a vest packed with explosives fortunately turned herself to authorities north of Baghdad. She doesn’t want to be a suicide bomber, she told the police. I have reported here and at Salmiya about the recent incredible rise of terrorist activities of women in Iraq. What kind of cowards and abject criminals these accomplices (mothers? fathers? husbands?) in the back must be!
What a shame that the Muslim world seems to keep silent about this scandal that women and (again!) defenseless and innocent children are sent in a ‘war’ against ….actually whom?
Almost a Revelation
August 24, 2008
The Book of Job in the Jewish Tanakh (and adopted in the Christian Old Testament) is a difficult one. It may reveal a lot about the character of God and it’s perception in the two monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity. Many years ago, long time before I decided to move to the Middle East, I became interested in the development of God’s character in the Bible when reading Jack Miles’ Pulitzer Prize awarded Book God: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf New York 1995). The book of Job, a centerpiece of Miles’ work, is a monolith in the Tanakh in its radical description of God’s transcendence and might, even if limited comprehension of us human beings would perceive Him in this case definitely as pretentious and evil. Then, it marks the end of any discussions He used to have with his creation. After Job, He never talked to humans in the Tanakh again.
Good and Evil in the Book of Job
I’ll start with a brief summary for people not so familiar with the book’s disturbing content.
One day Satan (the ‘Accuser’) meets God who initiates a discussion about His whole-hearted and upright servant Job, who fears God and shuns the evil. Does he fear Him for naught? Satan asks God. Only touch all that he has, surely he will blaspheme You in Your face. While God agrees, Job’s catastrophe commences. Job lost oxen and asses, servants, sons and daughters. He himself only dared to exclaim his eternized sigh: The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. Ironically, after some time Satan and God met again and had the same discussion about hapless Job. This time, God agrees on permitting Satan to hit Job with a painful skin disease. “Only spare his life,” he exhorts the Accuser. And so it went on. Thus, God bet twice about his servant, with the fallen Angel Satan, the Accuser of Men.
Three of Job’s friends appear, each giving lengthy speeches about Job’s guilt and just chastisement. But Job rebuts each of them. A fourth individual, Elihu, steps on the scene before God Himself chimes in in two fulminating speeches: arguing out of the thunderstorm, immoral, unjust, blaming, pompous, and pretentious. Who won’t be shocked and awed by such a Creator who willingly destroys any confidence in divine justness? But Job does. And in withstanding God’s affronts, he manages that Satan disappears from the scene and God finally gives in and fully restores Job’s life and even his wealth. The bright side of God captures a victory over the dark one. It is the defeat of the former but also that of God. It is, in fact, a victory of Man, represented by Job.
Miles points to the in fact corrupted last few dozens of words in response to God’s speeches out of the tempest. It is not retreat but irony when quoting God’s words (in verses 3 and 4) in his reply:
Job 42: 1-6
1 Then Job answered the LORD, and said:
2 I know that Thou canst do every thing, and that no purpose can be withholden from Thee.
3 “Who is this that hideth counsel without knowledge?”
Therefore have I uttered that which I understood not, things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.
4 “Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak; I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto Me.”
5 I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth Thee;
6 Therefore I abhor my words, and repent seeing I am dust and ashes.
Note that in the above translation quotation marks for verses 3 and 4 were removed and speaker and addressee exchanged (as identified by choosing upper case for Him). Here, the verses are given in the same way as Martin Luther in the revised version of the Bible translated them.
But what has that to do with almost a revelation as mentioned in the title? First, the obvious dualism of Good and Evil here and in other Books of the Bible is interesting. God is apparently not always good. And He used to deal with Satan, usually regarded as the Evil. It seems to be a standard characteristic of monotheism as represented by the Jewish and Christian Faith.
Jews and Zoroastrians
One has to consider the origins of the Tanakh, when it was written and why. The Tanakh, and thus the Old Testament adopted by Christianity, are not as old as many might believe. Much of the Holy Book had been compiled and canonized during the Babylonian Captivity (after 597 BCE) and in the times after the Jews had been freed by the Achaemenian Emperor Cyrus the Great (after 539 BCE) and one of his successors, Darius the Great (522-486 BCE), ordered them to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple must not be considered as a mere place of worship. The main administration was located there and it was, of course, a much fortified building, securing Persia’s power in the periphery of the empire. One of Persia’s envoys in Yehud was Ezra, a loyal but most probably low-level Persian bureaucrat and priest, who had to unify the King’s Law and Yahweh’s religious rules of the Jews in Jerusalem. Darius’ strong influence as a lawgiver who respected local laws, represented also in the monumental multilingual inscriptions in Behistun in the West of Iran near the Iraqi border, expedited the canonization of Yehud’s religious texts, of course.
When reading the respective Books in the Tanakh it is important to realize that it was Persia’s administration which appointed governors such as Zerubbabel, Ezra, or Nehemiah in Jerusalem. Their main task was the implementation of the King’s Law in the colony of Yehud. Thus, traditions, religious laws, worship of Yaweh, all had to be streamlined in a way that would fit with Persian rules, regulations and laws.
The religion of the Achaemenian Emperors in Persia was Zoroastrianism. In a way, it might be considered the oldest of the revealed monotheistic faiths with the divine authority of Ahura Mazda. While it is not clear when its founder Zoroaster had actually lived, one may assume that the 6th century saw a first flourishing of the religion in Greater Persia and Central Asia. Most Achaemenian Emperors were tolerant as regards to local faiths of conquered people as long as they were loyal to the new rulers. However, the influence of Zoroastrianism as the state religion in the Persian centers Susa, Ecbatana, and Persepolis was definitely strong. It might taken for granted that, besides a desire for establishing its own founding myth and religious independence, the origins of Judaism’s core faith might lie Zoroastrian Persia. When considering the developing path of the three main monotheistic religions, we may trace also the origins of Christianity and Islam to teachings and revelations of Zoroaster.
Dualism in Zoroastrianism
In Zoroastrianism, at the cosmic level, Ahura Mazda, the Creator of the World, is opposed by the Evil principle of chaos and negative energy (Angra Mainyuh). While a pure world is created by God’s creative energy, this is continually attacked by Angra Mainyuh making it impure. Respective attributes are aging, sickness, famine, death, and natural disasters.
Another, moral, dualism refers to good and evil in the mind of mankind. It is important to note that God gave human beings a free will, so man has to choose between Good and Evil. While the path of Evil (druj) is leading to misery and eventually hell, the path of Truth (asha) will inevitably lead to peace and everlasting happiness in heaven.
Ayyub in the Qur’an
It has to be emphasized here that, although Judaism is downright monotheistic, conceptual similarities with (dualistic) Zoroastrianism are more than obvious. The quasi-familiarity in the talks between God and Satan as it is narrated in the Book of Job may be more than disturbing when considering traditional views of the Evil principle, especially in Christianity. However, that Satan is a fallen angel does not entirely disqualify him as an angel. As the Holy Qur’an knows, Iblis (i.e., Shaitan, Satan) denied prostrating before His new creature, Adam.
11 And We created you (humans), then fashioned you, then told the angels: Fall ye prostrate before Adam! And they fell prostrate, all save Iblis, who was not of those who made prostration.
12 He (Allah) said: “What hindered thee that thou didst not fall prostrate when I bade thee?” (Iblis) said: “I am better than him. Thou createdst me of fire while him Thou didst create of mud”.
In Fariduddin Attar’s (d. 1221) Musibatname, the tragedy of Satan’s outsized love for God who won’t submit to anybody else than Him (he is regarded by many Sufis as the only true monotheist), may lead to deep compassion in the reader for the fallen angel, irrespective of Satan’s clear misconception. Adam might have been created from mud. But he received the Almighty’s breath of life.
Attar’s work as well as new aspects of Job’s fate have come to my attention a couple of years ago when reading German/Iranian orientalist Navid Kermani’s book about Attar, Job and the metaphysical revolt (Der Schrecken Gottes, C. H. Beck, Munich 2005). Attar, who was most probably killed in the Mongolian Storm of the 13th century in the city of Nishapur in Khorasan, has something in mind which will be described as theodicy in 1710 by German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, the problem of Evil. Kermani’s brilliant work assembles much of the medieval, enlightenment and contemporary literature on the topic without providing the reader with a final answer (except strengthening views of an agnostic). One impression I got is that in what the West in a misconception calls Middle Ages (in fact, darkness was prevalent but not in the Islamic World which was bright in these long centuries), Jews, Zoroastrians, Christians and Muslims were living in peace in, say, what is now Eastern Iran, knowing each other’s Holy Books, and getting their inspirations for spiritual journeys from both the Qur’an and the Bible.
The knowledge of our common spiritual origins may really matter when it comes to mutual respect and understanding. When comparing the sober verses about Job in the Holy Qur’an and colorful legends most Muslims are able to tell about the fate of this just, whole-hearted and upright man which are nowhere narrated in the Qur’an, we have to assume that the common traditions are still alive.
No Muslim will, of course, believe that the Almighty was betting with Satan on poor Job. There are only four suwar briefly naming Ayyub, Q4:163 and Q6:84 listing him among the other prophets; and Q21:83f and Q38:41ff where his suffering and patience is mentioned. I was long wondering, why. I had my respective revelation when reading Kermani’s book. All stories differ when told by different protagonists. Each of us has a different viewpoint, and conclusions may be to the contrary. Muslims believe that the Qur’an is God’s uncreated Word. But the Bible has been written by many authors, edited, compiled, over many centuries, by humans. God’s words may be reported, but it is not God who is speaking.
In the Book of Job, one protagonist, wretched Job, tells his version of the events. In the Qur’an, it is God Himself, who won’t admit that He was betting with the devil (actually, he did it twice!) of His servant. He would not report on His disturbing speech out of the tempest.
Regardless any theories about when and how the Holy Qur’an has been revealed or written, one has to realize the consistency when compiling God’s word, and only God’s word. It is very clear throughout that it is not Muhammad who is ever speaking.
Prophet Ayyub’s (Job’s) tomb may be found in the vicinity of Salalah in Oman’s Dhofar Province.
Obstacles
August 23, 2008
The almost four-decade-old territorial dispute about the Persian Gulf islands Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs again culminated this week when the Secretary General of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Abdulrahman AlـAttiyah, compared Iran with Israel occupying Arab land, as Kuwait’s Al Watan reported on Thursday this week, quoting the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al Awsat.
The statement reveals, if not simply stupidity, exorbitance in arguments and the usual striking double standard of Arab leaders and authorities whenever dealing with US interests and issues regarding Israel.
Here are some facts about the islands. Greater (Tonb-e Bozorg) and Lesser Tunb (Tonb-e Kuchak) are two tiny islands about 20 km south of the larger Qeshm Island. The Greater Tunb (about 10 km2) might be inhabited by a few dozens of people. The Lesser Tunb (about 2 km2) is uninhabited. The islands are lying in the middle of the main sea lanes of the Persian Gulf making them strategically important.
As regards to Abu Musa, oil comes into play. The 12 km2 large island is located more centrally in the Persian Gulf and inhabited by several hundred people, Iranians and Arabs. The island harbors a rich supply of untapped oil deposits. Currently, oil is being extracted from a filed close to the shores of Abu Musa.
The UEA, in claiming these islands, which are close to the main sea lanes near the Strait of Hormuz, may indeed be under misapprehension. The issue has quite a long history and may be seen under different perspectives, much depending on how former allies of the US are seen today. Iran has more or less controlled Abu Musa since 1971 when Britain ended its protectorate of the region, which included also Bahrain and Qatar. When the small Emirate Sharjah signed an agreement with Iran accepting Iranian presence on the island with neither side yielding its claim of total sovereignty, Ras Al Khaymah refused and Iran occupied the Tunbs. The Iranian take-over was acquiesced by the US and Britain since the pro-western Shah-regime was considered more reliable in providing stability in a by and large uncertain region. Thus, the Shah’s control over traffic through the Strait of Hormuz was welcomed as the by far better solution.
In 1992, one year after Kuwait had been freed from Saddam Hussein’s occupation, the UAE claimed that Iran had annexed also Abu Musa and Arab inhabitants even expelled from the Island, a frank violation of the agreement with Sharjah. Iran never acknowledged that claim. In a series of military exercises in the Gulf Iran had also sent its message of not accepting any US hegemony in the region.
The again shrill tone by the Emiratis may well be seen as a prelude to new threats imposed on Iran. While the preparations for a naval blockade of the country (most probably in accordance with House Resolution 362) have been denied last week by Strategic Studies Think Tank (Stratfor) it might still be one option of the outgoing Bush Administration ‘on the table’. Tehran had, in the meantime, openly announced a possible closure of the Strait of Hormuz in order to protect its sovereignty.
The anew dispute about the Gulf islands may indicate how leaders of UAE are under pressure of the US. The possible obstruction of the world’s most important lifeline is the main obstacle for a more diplomatic approach.
Intercultural competence
August 21, 2008
Random House has cancelled the scheduled publication of a novel about the life of Aisha, the favorite wife of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) by Sherry Jones. The prologue of the apparently childish book, “The Jewel of Medina”, which is intended to draw a rather positive, even feminist picture of Aisha, has found its way to the internet anyway. Random House became alerted when University of Texas Associate Professor Denise Spellberg warned that the book would turn history into a mere burlesque.
So, the Wallstreet Journal titled on August 6: “You Still Can’t Write About the Prophet Muhammad.” Yes, you can. I liked, for example, Eliot Weinberger’s “Muhammad” (Verso 2006, a booklet of 56 pages) a lot, which certainly induced mixed feelings in Muslims, too. But so far, I have not heard about any protests (I have purchased it in Kuwait). In the 2nd chapter, Muhammad is described as a womanizer, to whom all women surrender. About Aisha, Weinberger writes (p. 30):
“He married Aisha known for her learning and wit, when she was six, and consummated the marriage when she was nine; she was the only virgin among his wives. When she was accused of adultery, Muhammad received a verse that proved her innocence. They took baths together; he prayed lying in her arms; he received verses lying in her arms; he died in her arms, when she was eighteen, and was buried in her house. Muhammad was once asked what was his favorite person. “Aisha.” “No, I mean among men.” “Her father (i.e., Abu Bakr),” Muhammad replied. He said that Aisha, compared to other women, was like tarid, a dish of meat and bread, to mere food.”
Weinberger relies on the Qur’an, Ahadith, Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari’s Tarikh al rusul wal-muluk, and Muhammed Baqir ibn Muhammad al-Taqi al-Majlisi’s Hiyat al-Qulub.
In his Afterword Weinberger writes:
“During the first Gulf War, I began to read the poetry and history written during the Abbasid caliphate, from the period, a thousand years ago, when Baghdad was the most civilized city in the Western (!) world. With the invasion of Iraq, my antidote to the daily newspaper was books on Islamic philosophy and traditional sources on the life of Muhammad.
“Writers are irresistibly drawn to retelling old stories, and particularly the stories from the major religions. In this case, I thought that recaounting some fragments of the legends and biographical facts about Muhammad – familiar to Muslims, but little-known elsewhere – might give a small sense of the awe surrounding this historical and sacred figure, at a time of the demonization of the Muslim world in much of the media.”
A similar motivation as my engagement in Islam while living in Kuwait.
Even the Prologue of Sherry Jones’ book does not correspond much with the respective report in the Prophet Muhammad’s (pbuh) biography by Ibn Ishaq (d. 767).
Intercultural competence is at least as important as freedom of expression, especially when it comes to idiocy.
Independence
August 18, 2008
Everything is connected. Exactly 100 years ago, in May 1908, the first oil in the Middle East was discovered in a huge oil field near Masjed-e Soleiman in the Khuzestan Province in southwestern Iran. It was William Knox D’Arcy, a British millionaire, who negotiated an oil concession with Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar, the ruler of Persia. He got the exclusive rights to prospect for oil for the next 60 years in a territory including most of Iran. The British government paid ₤2 million for the controlling interest in the field.
The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) was founded and became the British Petroleum Company (BP) after the 1953 CIA coup d’état when the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh, who had nationalized the oil industry, and his cabinet were overthrown and the extremely unpopular Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlevi re-installed.
One has to question whether Great Britain ever gave the Iranians a fair deal when exploiting the country’s wealth, still about 5% of the world’s oil production.
In fact this is a key reason for the deep suspicions in all of Iran’s dealings with the outside world. The striving for independence from the West is obvious. It is also mirrored by the fact that Iran managed last week to launch a dummy satellite into space by its Safir 1 rocket. Iran has definitely the aspiration to become a regional (super)power. Further isolating the country will rather lead to acceleration of its more uncontrolled technological developments.
First published at Salmiya.
Monicagate and the Rise of Al-Qaeda
August 17, 2008
About 10 years ago, the infamous impeachment attempt of he former President Bill Clinton took place. The public scandal started when Linda Tripp provided Kenneth Starr with her surreptitiously recorded tapes of talks with Monica Lewinsky. On February 12, 1999 the attempt to remove Clinton from office eventually failed. Clinton’s impeachment was based on an alleged, negligible sin; not of having sex with a trainee, but rather not admitting that in public. His prosecutor Kenneth Starr as well as Monica Lewinsky later vanished from the scene. Starr himself was applying the morals of a hypocrite.
When focusing on tackling foreign affairs, Clinton was certainly one of America’s weakest presidents. Only 5 weeks after his inauguration, on February 26, 1993, the New York’s World Trade Center was shaken by an enormous bomb blast in the underground garage. The explosion yielded a 60 meter wide crater in the car park. One may wonder what Clinton would have done if the Twin Towers had actually collapsed with probably far more casualties than the second attack of September 11, 2001. The 1993 bombing was the first assault on American territory by Al-Qaeda, which wasn’t known at that time very much. I remembered the attack recently when listening to a CD with Steve Reich’s ‘City Life’ (Warner Nonesuch, 1995) which contains original voices of fire fighters after the assault in the WTC. Clinton’s later military activities and skirmishes in Mogadishu, Yugoslavia, or Operation Desert Fox in Iraq were generally strictly local operations not with the claim of a global war, which wages his successor now in the 7th year.
It is an interesting speculation how the Lewinsky Affair would later have occupied the ’lame duck’ of 1998 so that urgent tasks with regards to foreign affairs in Afghanistan with its catastrophic development under the Taliban regime were carelessly neglected. Or with respect to Iran, which had just ‘elected’ his more liberal reform president Mohammad Khatami, who would have deserved any support from the US Administration.
Clinton’s emotional condition in early 1999 may be better understood when reading his biography (Clinton, B. My Life, Hutchinson, London 2004). He writes, for instance, on p. 854:
“After the impeachment ordeal, people often asked me how I got through it without losing my mind, or at least the ability to keep doing the job (sic!). I couldn’t have done it if the White House staff and cabinet, including those who were angry and disappointed over my conduct, hadn’t stayed with me. It would have been much harder if the American people hadn’t made an early judgment that I should remain President and stuck with it. If more congressional Democrats had bailed out when it looked like the safe thing to do in January, after the story broke, or in August, after I testified to the grand jury, it would have been tough; instead, they rose to the challenge. Having the support of world leaders like Mandela, Blair, King Hussein, Havel, Crown Prince Abdullah, Kim Dae Jung, Chirac, Cardoso, Zedillo, and others whom I admired helped to keep my spirits up. When I compared them with my enemies, as disgusted as I still was with myself (!), I figured I couldn’t be all bad.
“The love and support of friends and strangers made a big difference; those who wrote to me or said a kind word in a crowd meant more than they will ever know. The religious leaders who counseled me (!), visited me at the White House, or called to pray with me reminded me that, notwithstanding the condemnations I had received from some quarters, God is love (!).
“But the biggest factors in my ability to survive and function were personal. Hillary’s brothers and my brother were wonderfully supportive. Roger joked to me that it was nice to finally be the brother who wasn’t in trouble. Hugh came up from Miami every week to play UpWords, talk sports, and made me laugh. Tony came over for our family pinochle matches. My mother-in-law and Dick Kelley were great to me.
“Despite everything, our daughter still loved me and wanted me to stand my ground. And, most important, Hillary stood with me and loved me through it all. From the time we first met, I had loved her laugh. In the midst of all the absurdity, we were laughing again, brought back together by our weekly counseling and our shared determination to fight off the right-wing coup (!). I almost wound up being grateful to my tormentors (!): they were probably the only people who could have made me look good to Hillary again. I even got off the couch (!).” (Any additions in brackets).
And all the rest of it. A completely paralyzed president of the only superpower. A few months before that, Pakistan’s atomic bomb had exploded (May 28, 1998), American Embassies in Dar es Salaam und Nairobi had been bombed (August 7, 1998), the Mazar-e Sharif massacre of the Hazara had taken place (a full week in early August of 1998). Osama bin Laden had moved from Sudan to Afghanistan and had already started operating from Kandahar and even Tora Bora, and he and Zawahiri had written and signed a Fatwa of the Islamic Jihad against Jews and Crusaders (see Wright L. The Looming Tower. Al Qaeda’s Road to 9/11. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2006).
As compared to the massive impact on global peace of the current administration in Washington, the Lewinsky affair appears completely ridiculous, of course. One might speculate, however, whether assaults which had been prepared during periods of forced inactivity of a more self-absorbed president could have been prevented if the American public had not paid so much attention to that kind of absurdity (given the support of other world leaders was in fact granted as described by Clinton). Nota bene, not of having sex with a trainee in the Oval Office or White House’s kitchen, but not saying the truth when it came to admit that in the public. I remember the day well when the Starr report was published in the internet and people all around the world could see the deconstructing of the most powerful man on Earth.
The most significant adverse effect might indeed have been the catastrophic escalation of global terrorism two 2 years later and, as a consequence, what people sometimes call World War IV.
First published as Adverse Effects at Salmiya.
Sha’abaniya
August 16, 2008
But on Thursday this week, a suicide attack in a town near Iskandariya south of Iraq’s capital has again killed at least 19 people, leaving another 75 wounded. Two female suicide bombers blew themselves and their victims, who had stopped their walks for evening meal, with explosives which they had hidden under their abayas. This is not even three weeks after three female suicides had killed 25 pilgrims on the occasion of the Kadhimiya festival in Baghdad.
Since the fall of Iraq’s tyrant Saddam Hussein in April 2003, mainly Sunni Arab militants targeted also religious festivals which have become shows for the Iraq’s Shi’a majority in recent years. In 2005, on the occasion of the Kadhimiya, nearly 1000 people died in a stampede on a bridge over the river Tigris which was triggered by rumors of a suicide bomber among the pilgrims. But this year’s increase in bombings by women (almost 30 this year as compared to eight in 2007) is in fact alarming. It is an especially abhorrent act of probably Al Qaeda militants deploying female bombers because explosives can be easily hidden beneath loosely fitting robes and male police officers cannot search for it.
Last month, a number of female police graduates were recruited to a special unit of, called “Banat al-Iraq” or Daughters of Iraq. They are supposed to approach young women thought to be vulnerable to Islamist manipulation, and persuade them that suicide operations are wrong.
Circular Reasoning
August 13, 2008
In the May 2008 issue of New English Review, Ibn Warraq briefly reports on the proceedings of an “Inarah Conference On the Early History of Islam And the Koran” earlier this year in Otzenhausen, Germany. The well-known ‘revisionists’ had been gathering there in order to express their ‘disturbance’ about “the fact that Christoph Luxenberg’s insights were not discussed by other Islamologists because of their implications for the traditional history of the Koran.”
Elsewhere, I had recently written, with regard to the upcoming English translation of Ohlig and Puin’s book about the hidden origins of Islam:
“Famous German orientalists Tilman Nagel and Angelika Neuwirth criticized the approach of, in particular, Christoph Luxenberg, and his new interpretation of the oldest still visible Qur’anic inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem may in fact be very peculiar. As an example, Luxenberg reads muhammad and abdullah not as nouns but rather gerundives (the praised one, the servant, respectively) and assigns both to Jesus (Isa bin Maryam) rather than to the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad.”
It might actually be stated that Luxenberg’s approach of re-reading the Qur’an, and his implications are not really compatible with sound scientific research but rather highly speculative. How his methods may have misled other scholars may be illustrated by Ibn Warraq’s mentioning of the presentation of Dr. Christoph Heger:
“Christoph Heger, convinced of the validity of Christoph Luxenberg and Volker Popp’s thesis that early documents, inscriptions and coins that contain the terms “muhammad” and “ali” should not be understood as proper names of the putatively historical figures of Islamic historiography but as honorific titles of Jesus Christ, argued that confirmation of the said thesis could be found in the old text of an inscription of a talisman in the possession of Tewfik Canaan. The text of the talisman should be read as:
“O healer, O God! Help from God and near victory and good tiding of the believers! O praised one [muhammad], O merciful one, O benefactor. There is no young man like the high one ['ali] and no sword like the two-edged sword of the high one. O God, O living one, O eternal one, O Lord of majesty and honor, O merciful one, O compassionate one”.
This text should be understood as an invocation of Jesus Christ – the healer, the good tiding, the praised, merciful and high one, the young hero, “out of the mouth [of whom] went a sharp two-edged sword” [Apoc. 1:16], namely “the word of God,” which is “sharper than any two-edged sword” [Hebrews 4:12].”
This is, of course, untenable. One gets in fact the impression of circular reasoning. Have a look at the kind of amulets Tawfiq Canaan, a rather famous collector of Palestinian folk art, had described.
The respective publication of Dr. Heger with the title “yā muḥammad“– no „o Mohammed!” may be found here.
