>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).
>
>
Aside from my feelings that I don't want to venture into territory that is
not mine - this seems a little ingenuous to me, Candice. Islam, as
someone pointed out earlier, is like Christianity not a monolithic religion
divided between nice mainstream types and fanatics, but a complex
tradition. There have been many extremely pious Christians, like Henry V,
for example, who didn't let their religion get in the way of slaughtering
the entire populations of towns; and religion has often made its
accommodations with ruthless military/economic realities (eg, the
Renaissance Popes).
>> 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)!
>
I meant, as I said, readings of contradictory texts which attempt to pin
them down to a singular uncontradictory meaning.
>
>> 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.
I'm sure they don't misunderstand their own relationships to their texts,
how can they? Seems to me, though, that the desire to erase complexities
in favour of scorched-earth simplicities, the way of Right, is something
common to a lot of sects we call Fundamentalist. Common also to extreme
Marxists like Pol Pot. The delusions of absolute certainty have a lot to
answer for. Absolute certainty is also a non-negotiable position.
>
>> 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.
>
I don't know, nor do I know how illuminating that would be - maybe it was a
conflation of texts and sources, bent and distorted, as is the way of all
artists, to his own purposes and diction.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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