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.
>
I assume the terrorists believed that their mission was totally laudable.
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. 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. (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_.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
|