> Candice wrote:
>
> I was interested--given the
>> Koran/Bible comparisons some listees were proposing--to read the comments on
>> the letter by Dr. Faroque Khan of the Long Island Islamic Center, who said
>> that some excerpts sounded "like a pep rally for someone going on a very
>> laudable mission" rather than "an evil mission," adding: "The Prophet laid
>> down clear guidelines that, even in the case of a war, you don't harm women
>> and children." I think we lost sight of how anachronistic it is to compare
>> ancient and (relatively) modern sacred texts and attitudes toward war.
Alison wrote:
> I assume the terrorists believed that their mission was totally laudable.
Well, apart from the fact that we can't know this, one point of the NY TIMES
story was how incredulous a number of leading Islamic spokespeople were
about that very possibility because of the way the mission contradicted the
Prophet's teachings, contradictions reflected in the letter itself with its
jumble of "injunctions to prayer, instructions to kill" (as the article is
entitled).
> It seems to me that sacred texts are so full of contradictions - that
> contradiction is in fact built into their molecular structure, since they
> are by their nature deeply poetic - that to try any practical kind of
> exegesis on them, like evaluating them in terms of contemporary politics
> say, is invariably disastrous.
Well, smart people have been doing it for centuries without "disastrous"
consequences, although a good many exegetical endeavors are tedious beyond
bearing for _someone_. I might regard the whole enterprise of patristic
exegesis in medieval studies as unfortunate, but I can't really get away
with calling it "disastrous" (alas)!
> That in fact fundamentalisms of various
> kinds, from Christian sects to the Taliban, are a direct result of
> misunderstanding this, of establishing a univocal reading on texts which
> shimmer with paradoxical tensions.
There's no misunderstanding from their respective vantage points, of
course, and it's _their_ perspective that we need most crucially to
understand if we're to negotiate any conditions under which we can share
this planet--as opposed to extinguishing certain people's from its very
face. I don't think we'll get too far by generalizing others or dismissing
their religious worldview as a misunderstanding of their relationship to
their sacred texts.
> (Octavio Paz says some interesting
> things about the relationship between poetry and a wide variety of
> religious texts in _Conjunctions and Disjunctions_).
> In the context of the "Pearl" it's worth mentioning Douglas Oliver's
> wonderful contemporary version of that, a satire of Thatcher's Britain,
> _The Infant and the Pearl_.
Er, this is a whole 'nother thread, in the course of which several
different works to do with pearl imagery have been introduced--but I'd love
to know which one was the basis for Doug Oliver's satire.
Cheers,
Candice
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