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Do Muslims worship idols? By Spengler
... As a practical matter, Benedict XVI stands closer to [Pat] Robertson than to [George] Bush. He did not say that Muslims worshipped idols, but he denounced the "martyr ideology of terrorists", which "turns God into an idol by which man worships his own will". Given that the great majority of Muslims, and particularly Muslim clerics, support suicide bombing, the pope in effect averred that idol-worshippers comprise the Islamic mainstream. Unlike American evangelicals, the pope does not eschew Islam as such. On the contrary, in a May 13 speech before the Italian senate, he stated: The rebirth of Islam is not only bound up with the new material riches of the Muslim lands, but also it is fed by the knowledge that Islam is in a position to offer a spiritual base that is valid for the life of a people. The traditional Christian basis that made Europe seems to be fleeing from the land of the old Europe, which, notwithstanding the persistence of its political and spiritual power, has come to be seen ever more as condemned to decline and crumble. Benedict's respect for Islam does not vitiate his abhorrence of religious terror, however. Here is the full citation from the December 2004 speech: God, or divinity, can turn into the means to make absolute one's own power and one's own interests. An image of God that has been turned thus into an instrument of partisan interests, that identifies God's absoluteness with one's own community or its set of interests, destroys law and morality, by elevating what is relative into the absolute. The good then becomes whatever serves one's own power. The actual difference collapses between good and evil. Morality and law become instruments of partisan policy. This gets even worse when religious fanaticism, the fanaticism of the absolute, informs the will to put everything in the service of one's own interests, and thus turns completely blind and brutal. God has become an idol by which man worships his own will. That is what we see in the martyr ideology of the terrorists, which, to be sure, in isolated cases simply expresses desperation at the injustice of the world. By the way, we also have before us Western sects that are examples of irrationalism and perversion of the religious, and show how dangerous religion becomes when it loses its compass.Because Islam has no centralized religious leadership, it is hard to quantify the extent to which Muslim clergy promote terrorist "martyr ideology", but anecdotal evidence is overwhelming that the great majority of Muslim religious leaders support suicide bombings, for example. Among Sunni Muslims, the leading authority is Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, the Grand Sheikh of Cairo's al-Azhar mosque. Sheikh Tantawi has gone back and forth on the issue several times, but his most recent pronouncement (in May 2004) held that circumstances warranted Palestinian suicide attacks against Israelis, adding that anyone who blew himself up while defending Islam against an aggressor died a martyr's death. [6] A survey of the debate among Muslim clerics about suicide attacks by Haim Malka appeared in the Spring 2003 issue of the Middle East Quarterly, concluding: Since the outbreak of the current Palestinian intifada, in September 2000, the Palestinian resort to suicide attacks has won widespread Arab public acceptance as a legitimate form of resistance against Israeli occupation. Some Muslim clerics and other commentators justify them on political, moral and religious grounds. Even those attackers who bomb and kill women and children are hailed as martyrs for their heroism in confronting the enemy. Posted by: anonymous5089 2005-07-10 |
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