8. Is not God the most equitable of all judges?Well, no, he's not. We've already seen how he obliterates anybody who questions him, and only raises up gullible saps. The prosecution rests.
Still in Bumfuck, Arabia, chapter 106 talks about Mohammad's own tribe the Quaraysh. It says they are prosperous due to the Lord of this House, and they should worship his ass. 'This house' is the Kaaba, centered around the Black Stone. The Lord of the Kaaba was Hubal, the moon god. Wait, ...what???? A pagan shrine to a pagan god. WTF?
It seems like, if you no longer believed in a religion, you'd stay away from their church, doesn't it? But Mo could see how that worked out, because he hung out with another heretic, a poet named Zaid bin Amr. He was Hanifist, sort of a Jew-Christian hybrid, and he wasn't too welcome in Mecca, so he moved out into the mountains where he faded into obscurity.
Obscurity is not how Mohammed rolls. Mo was a businessman: he knew you don't launch a new product with no brand recognition. He needed brand leveraging, and he got it by stealing market share from the Meccan Moonies. So most of the symbols of Islam are remnants of the old pagans. Crescent moon? That's Hubal. The star with it? Uzza. The color green? Hey, what color would you like if you lived in a huge sandbox where seeing any runty little bush was a big deal?
I cannot pass up this opportunity to talk about The Black Stone. Have you seen this thing? Does it remind you of anything? Sure it's been rebuilt a few times, but why that particular shape? It originally honored the Goddess Uzza, with naked orgies in tribute to fertility. It just cracks me up that Mo prayed by kissing a giant vagina! And even though they now give their temples a completely opposite look, those woman-hating moslems still make pilgrimages to do it.
They should stay home and pay a little homage to real females. I'll have more to say about this whole matritheism bit, but in separate rant--you has been warned. Chapters 106 and 101 are a lot of poetic sounding stuff about judgment day, doesn't really say anything except good peeps go to heaven, bad ones go to hell. And that's the last of the Early Mecca period; it's supposed to be different from here on out. Think it'll get better? Wanna buy a bridge in Alaska?
2 comments:
>>the fig, the olive, Mt Sinai, and 'this soil secure'. No one knows what the first three of those are, but they all agree that the 'soil' refers to Mecca. I'd love to see them get Mt. Sinai in the witness box, but the fig and company's testimony is supposed to establish the following...<<
I know you don't know Arabic and all, but for the first time I feel compelled to say something. The fig, the olive, Mt. Sinai, and the secured land are not witnesses... the Arabic text is using a device where you "swear by" something. The way English speakers say "I swear on my grandma's grave" or something. It is just swearing by these objects, just as elsewhere in the text, the pen, the moon, the sun, and some other things are "sworn by." I'm not sure how to explain this in English, but the gist of it is that you know the fig, you see it and eat it, you know it exists, so you're saying, "By the fig, such and so." It's just something we have in Arabic, it doesn't mean anything particularly religious, because Christians and atheists say it too.
I am all for making fun of the Quran, but we should concentrate on the points that are truly mock-worthy, and not on features of a language that we don't understand.
To swear: to utter an oath; to call on god as a witness, is a concept that exists in every language, and Arabic is no different. It's ridiculous to say that the Arabic word for “swear” means something other than “swear”, especially when the Ahmed Ali translation that I used says; “I call to witness...”. Others say “by oath of...” or “swear”, all synonyms for invoking something one considers sacred in order to back up one's testimony. The religious aspect may be obsolete today, but it certainly wasn't 1400 years ago, and it's pretty mock-worthy to say Mohammed didn't mean anything particularly religious in reciting the koran. He called on the fig as a witness, and it's just as silly in Arabic as it is in English or Russian.
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