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Muslim anguish, Western
condescension
By Spengler
Why do Muslims riot over alleged
desecration of the Koran? For the same reason that
Christians used to riot over alleged desecration
of the Host, the wafer that when consecrated
becomes the body of Jesus Christ, according to
Catholic belief. For Muslims, the Koran is not a
holy book, like the Christian Gospels or the
Jewish Torah, but the incarnate presence of Allah
on Earth, dictated to the Prophet Mohammed
word-for-word by the Archangel Gabriel. It is not
prophecy, but the presence of divinity, as a
number of commentators have observed, including
this one (The crescent and the
conclave, April 19, 2005).
Under the rubric Muslim anguish and Western
hypocrisy (Nov 23, 2004), I observed
that Christianity once killed apostates as a
matter of routine, an action defended in
retrospect by Catholic theologians such as Michael
Novak as appropriate to the times. Western
commentators condemn the guards of the US prison
at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for desecrating the
Koran, while regarding Pakistani or Afghan Koran
rioters as primitives. Condescending Westerners
should look more closely at their own history. [1]
Host-desecration riots by Christians in
1298 led to an estimated 100,000 deaths in Germany
and Austria, starting with the execution by fire
of the entire Jewish community of Rottingen.
Enraged Christians killed 3,000 Jews in Prague
after a priest carrying a consecrated Host wafer
was sprayed by sand. Other killings took place in
Rome in 1021, Strasbourg in 1308, Posen in 1399,
Silesia in 1451, and so forth. Medieval Jews, to
be sure, were less likely to have tortured a
consecrated Host than Marine guards were to have
flushed a Koran down the toilet, and historians
agree that the charge was a fabrication. [2]
Christian sensitivities, nonetheless, were just as
bloodthirsty as in today's Pakistan.
Worshipping divine incarnation in a book,
to be sure, has quite different implications than
worshipping the incarnate presence of God in bread
and wine. Textual criticism becomes heresy as a
matter of course. And without the sort of textual
criticism that busied the Christian reformers at
the turn of the 16th century, it is odd to speak
of an Islamic reformation. A book in whose very
words God reveals his presence must remain stuck
in time like a fly in amber.
Muslim
violence over desecration of the Koran is not
uncommon, as a matter of fact. According to the
Nigerian Christian journalist Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo:
In December of 1994, a Nigerian
Christian trader, Gideon Akaluka, was accused of
tearing pages out of the Koran in the northern
city of Kano. Muslim youths launched an attack
on him. He was rescued by the police and locked
up in Bompai prison. On December 26, 1996,
Muslim groups stormed the prison, pulled Akaluka
out and beheaded him. They hoisted his head on a
pike and paraded through the streets of Kano.
On December 12, 2001, a Nigerian
Christian truck driver, Saint Moritz, was
reversing his truck near a fruit market in Kano.
His truck accidentally ran into an area occupied
by a Koranic study group. As students fled, one
dropped his Koran. The truck trampled on a copy
of the Koran. Muslim groups pursued the man. He
ran to a police station. Mobs stormed the police
station, overpowered the few cops on post and
dragged the man to the street. They beat the man
unconscious. He later died in a
hospital. No one, of course, is
accused of desecrating a consecrated Host any
longer, so Catholics have no one against whom to
riot. Few Catholics, for that matter, still
believe that the wafer really turns into the flesh
of Jesus Christ (according to a 1992 Gallup Poll,
only 30% of American Catholics polled clearly
expressed this belief), and therefore are unlikely
to riot even if someone really were to desecrate a
Host. Unlike the skeptical Catholics, Muslims
actually believe in the divine character of the
Koran, and thus have something to riot about.
It now seems clear that some of the
Guantanamo guards did abuse copies of the Koran,
even if they did not, as Newsweek reported, flush
one down a toilet. It would be surprising if US
interrogators never resorted to Koran abuse as a
technique for breaking down the will of prisoners.
Like sensory deprivation, psychotropic drugs and
physical stress, desecrating the Koran may be an
effective interrogation technique. That does not
make the practice any less deplorable, but the
fact that it is likely to be quite effective in
destroying the morale of Muslim prisoners
increases the probability that it will be applied
on occasion.
Two things explain the
effectiveness of Koran desecration as a means of
breaking Muslim morale. The first is that the
Koran hosts Allah's incarnate presence, so to
speak. The second is the peculiar importance of
success to Islam. Unlike Christianity or Judaism,
worldly success is the ultimate testimony of
Islam; the muezzin calls, "Come to prayer. Come to
success!", and its emblem is the crescent, a
symbol of secular growth, as opposed to the cross,
a symbol of renunciation of worldly things. As I
wrote in Horror and humiliation in
Fallujah (April 27, 2004),
The West cannot endure without faith
that a loving Father dwells beyond the clouds
that obscure His throne ... The Islamic world
cannot endure without confidence in victory,
that to "come to prayer" is the same thing as to
"come to success". Humiliation - the perception
that the ummah cannot reward those who submit to
it - is beyond its capacity to endure.
Abusing the Koran is the equivalent
of abusing Allah himself, and tells the Muslim
prisoner that his god is powerless to avenge
insults. Again, I do not condone such things, but
merely observe that an effective weapon is more
likely to be put to use. As I wrote in "Horror and
humiliation in Fallujah:
Radical Islam has risen against the
West in response to its humiliation -
intentional or not - at Western hands. The West
can break the revolt by inflicting even worse
humiliation upon the Islamists, poisoning the
confidence of their supporters in the Muslim
world. The ultimate in American
condescension is the "Muslim World Outreach"
strategy exposed by US News and World Report on
April 25. [3] As David E Kaplan reported:
Although US officials say they are
wary of being drawn into a theological battle,
many have concluded that America can no longer
sit on the sidelines as radicals and moderates
fight over the future of a politicized religion
with over a billion followers. The result has
been an extraordinary - and growing - effort to
influence what officials describe as an Islamic
reformation. Attempting to engineer an
Islamic reformation may be the silliest initiative
in foreign policy in the history of the world. The
theological department of the Central Intelligence
Agency will not persuade Muslims to loosen their
grasp on the living presence of Allah on this
Earth. In its tragic encounter with Islam, the
West cannot help but inflict humiliation.
The Koran desecration affair, with its
parallels to medieval Christian violence,
reinforces the conclusion I drew in my November 22
essay:
Jews and Christians had centuries to
accomplish the transition from public and
political religion to private and communal
religion, whereas circumstances press moderate
Muslims to do this on the spot. The two older
religions did so under duress, chaotically, and
with limited success. Whether Islam can make
such a transition at all remains
doubtful. Notes
[1]
See for example Kenneth Woodward, "Newsweek and
the Koran" in The Wall Street Journal, May 18,
2005, p A14.
[2] According to Wikipedia,
"Host desecration is an anti-Semitic myth similar
to the blood libel myth. It started in late
13th-century England and France (a century after
Christians started making blood libel accusations
against Jews), where it was claimed that Jews
would steal consecrated Host wafers and torture
them. According to the Roman Catholic dogma of
transubstantiation, a consecrated Host wafer
becomes the flesh of Jesus, so it was believed
that Jews would steal and torture these wafers to
reenact the crucifixion of Christ."
[3]
"Hearts, Minds and Dollars" by David E Kaplan, US
News and World Report, April 25, 2005.
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