Winter Waning Moon of Long Nights
Thoughts on fundamentalists of the mosque, church and street
excerpts from a BBC article forwarded by my brother, Mark:
Three churches have been attacked in Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur
…some vocal groups, including the Muslim Youth Movement, Abim, have cast the use of the word Allah as a surreptitious effort on the part of Christians to try to seduce Muslims away from Islam.
The government will take whatever steps it can to prevent such acts Prime Minister Najib Razak.
Church officials say that although the word Allah originated in Arabic, Malays have used it for centuries to refer generally to God, and Arabic-speaking Christians used it before Islam was founded, reports the BBC’s religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott.
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Mass nationwide demonstrations failed to materialise on Friday, but protesters at mosques in Kuala Lumpur carried placards reading “Allah is only for us” and “Heresy arises from words wrongly used”.
“I hope the court will understand the feeling of the majority Muslims of Malaysia,” said Ahmad Johari, at the National Mosque.
“We can fight to the death over this issue,” he told Associated Press news agency.
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Comment: Some Islamic communities seem to react like street gangs in south L.A. Disrespect comes from every angle and must be met, not just with resistance, but with deadly force. This pattern is difficult to break because the thought world that underlies them both is a suspicion of inferiority covered over by a thin layer of superiority. Even plain conversation about the issues involved can be read as condescending, insults delivered in a plain brown wrapper. Without conversation, dialogue, there is little to no chance of defusing their blasting cap sensitivity.
This is the same phenomenon that fuels the Hindu nationalist parties reaction against Muslims in India. It is the same phenomenon that fuels the gay-bashing and abortion clinic violence in the US.
These are out groups who recognize their relative powerlessness and seize upon one or two issues as central, defining wedge matters. They then focus their frustration and despair on any who violate the boundaries of Allah use, or sign throwing or color wearing, of being Muslim in India, of having same sex preferences or active participation in abortion in America.
This is the kind of politics that created the Moral Majority and the Karl Rove wins in Texas and the US for GW. At the level of its manipulation by a man like Rove or Richard Nixon it is naked demagoguery. At the level of the street gang, the Islamist community, the gay bashers and the abortion clinic bombers it is inchoate rage, a form of speech uttered when no words will form.
Both forms are dangerous and can, witness 9/11, upset civilizations, so they cannot be taken lightly.
