Professor Harrow,
In the name of love and reverence for life, how do you to put an end to the violence that's motivated by a sense of religious righteousness?
SÄPO (The Swedish Security Service) has just woken up to the reality; they can now smell the coffee and the gunpowder too as they upgrade the number of radicalised Muslims in Sweden from a mere 200, to "thousands" - although - so they say - only a tiny number of the thousands have the operational ability to make bloody hell in our country. But radical being such a broad term, it probably includes those who would resist oppression of any kind " by any means necessary"
Just for the record:
As you have rightly said, without any room fort miss-understanding, you are not The Lord. Sure, Hallaj was misunderstood. He would have got away with it if his executioners had thought that he was mad. Wasn't Jesus also crucified for saying "ana anal haq"? / "I am the truth"? In Jesus' case he is being reported to have said, "I am the way, the truth and the life ; No one comes to the father except through me." That must have sounded like a challenge to the other Rabbis, Pharisees, making them see red > the blood of Jesus - a Rush-die type fatwa on his head because of what he said.
Of course nowadays, with or without your students or disciples, should you arrive in Jerusalem around the time of the Passover / Easter and make such a claim even at the Mea Shearim, nobody would take you seriously or threaten you with crucifixion. On the other hand if you were to assert that kind of identity in Saudi Arabia any time of the year, that could cause some trouble for you (at which time some leverage from Trump could be your only hope. In such circumstances, I think that preaching Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' Not in God's Name would just make matters worse for you or whoever.
There are two hadiths in this link which illustrate how some of the true Believers (Mumin) believed in those days. The women in question preferred to submit to the punishment ordained by the Sharia in this life - in order to avoid the everlasting fire in the life after death, the olam ha ba
You say that I can chose which side I am on.
My first Sufi teacher Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh said that after the Prophet of Islam sallallahu alaihi wa salaam blessed the Hereafter the Muslim community that he left behind was divided into
(1) The Arab Nationalists who became the Sunnis
(2) Those who chose to follow Ali ibn Abi Talib (a.s/ r.a) i.e. the Shia
(Incidentally, Imam Ali ( a.s.) was martyred on exactly this day the 21st of Ramadan - having been attacked with a poisoned sword in the mosque at Kufa on the 19th of Ramadan 40 A.H
( 3) The Sufi who transmitted (and still transmit) the esoteric teachings
to which group belonged your Mansur al Hallaj and this book by him : Tawasin
I have heard two of Dr. Nurbaksh's close disciples, one by the name of Terry Graham and the other by the name of Leonard Lewisohn refer to (1) and ( 2) as "the legalists "
My second Sufi teacher Hazrat Sultan Husayn Tabandeh Reza Ali Shah was also a trained Mujtahid and his father's compendium Pand-i Salih ( Salih's Advice) outlines the general rules of that order...
There's also the Rifai order . There are also other orders...
The problem for the Mumin is that he may rightly or wrongly understand that he is obeying orders from Allah the One and Only ALMIGHTY.
I had some difficulty coming to terms with the mass execution of Jews in Medina - I asked some alims/ scholars about it and was given the ultimate Quranic injunction as an answer: Quran 5: 33
Both the Bible and the Quran have their say on homosexuality for example - and you may call them fundamentalists if you want , the zealots who would like to wipe out / " purify" Tel Aviv which is currently "the Mecca of the Gay" in the Holy Land of Israel. The fundamentalists of the 21st century are keen to implement the death penalty, according to their own understanding of what they believe to be a Divine punishment.
The alims say that the Almighty's word cannot be abrogated.
As Chief Bolaji usually says,
And there you have it.
Cornelius
On Thursday, 15 June 2017 14:32:28 UTC+2, Kenneth Harrow wrote:
A sufi mystic al-hallaj of the 11th century said, I am the lord (in our prayers on shabbat we say, quoting god, ani adonai elochechem.The war between the sufi and the cleric, the mystic and the uploader of the law, the beautiful spirit and the stern legalist, has existed in islam for a thousand years.You can chose which side you areon.The sufi was killed because of his words, which were never properly understood.rushie's blasphemous words were pronounced by a troubled character and they expressed his crisis of faith. When the words came to the point of pointedly insulting not allah or muhammed, but rather ayatollah komeini, it is said, he put the book down and pronounced the fatwa.
The nazis burnt the books they didn't like and tried to exterminate the people they didn't like
To condemn someone because of his attacks on one's beliefs or identity or anything, as if the words carried harm like acts is not to distinguish words and acts. If the words promote acts, like encouraging people to commit a crime, the responsibility for the words falls on the speaker, who incurs punishment, in most countries, though not the u.s.
If the crime, however, is blasphemy then the community that is offended should use words back, not deeds to punish the speaker.
I base this not on first amendment rights, but my sense of basic human decency—not on the sense that I am the lord.
but then I am not a figure in power, not given the chance to prove how awful a ruler I am. Instead, I dream of al-hallaj who submerged himself in the divine like a wave in the ocean, about which he could only say the words that resulted in his death.
In fact, jesus was not any different; if I worked on it, I could easily put moses or muhammed in the same position.
Gotta go and get ready for tomorrow
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
Michigan State University
619 Red Cedar Rd
East Lansing, MI 48824
517-803-8839
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com > on behalf of Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com >
Date: Wednesday, 14 June 2017 at 20:29
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com >
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Achuzia and Realuzation of BiafraMuhammad's dead poets society
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