#And of course the lack of Christianity and Islam has some interesting implications

[realitys-ex]

One kinda fun/odd bit about Discworld is the place of Jews/Judaism in it (no, this probably won't go where you expect).

So there are the 2 obvious places and one arguably subtle/debatable place:

Feet of Clay/Golems very clearly drawing from Judaism (though in subsequent books that was toned *way* down)

Omnianism is a very clear stand in for/amalgamation of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism (the amount of each is left as an exercise to the reader).

and Lastly / debatably many people find a similarity between the description of the Dwarf religion and Judaism (I am not stating I agree, just I would have been remiss if I didn't bring it up)

Now the one thing that kinda gets forgotten is that: Judaism as a whole independent religion is somewhat confirmed in Discworld leaving arguments about the above somewhat moot! (you can't have a stand in for a religion if you already have the religion itself).

In both Feet of Clay and Fifth Elephant it mentions Vampires working at Kosher Butchers (for those unaware blood is not kosher so it needs to be drained extra well from meat, a perfect job for a vampire).

Now what does that actually imply? Absolutely nothing.

PTerry often had off the cuff jokes, as well as mucked about with continuity (remember how Trolls originally would continue to grow until they died, and could get up to the size of a small mountain, which only came up in one of the early books and was ignored in the rest?) and (I am sure) just liked that joke and did not intend to imply any theological ramifications or serious world building from it.

But dammit, it is (to me) incredibly funny to step into a (semi) serious discussion about Judaism in Discworld and completely derail it with a throw away line.

[skinfeeler]

i read twisted road to genocide by henri zukier today. the original published paper published in 1994.

it was an interesting read in a couple ways i hadn’t expected. while i feel that its portrayal of functionalism wasn’t exactly fair — functionalists are (to my knowledge and limited methodological expertise) mostly not ‘fluke historians’ and i feel a lot of this paper could have been written in a way that it would fit the archetypal functionalist canon, or at least the newer groupshift synthesis — there still were a lot of rebuttals of rhetoric that exists now still in some shape or form. turns out that the ‘financial anxiety’ type of apologia has existed for a long time, as noted under the ‘economic hardships’ section in the enumeration of various attempts to explain away necessary insights about the holocaust. i don’t think one can really say that ‘history repeats itself’ (or could be at risk to) in a methodologically sound sense, but it was certainly a great overview overview of rebuttals of those who would seek to replicate its horrors with the qualities of balance in cadence and formulaism that i find lacking in many papers. i will probably send it to family too since so far i’ve had little success in convincing anyone but my siblings of the structural complicity that was present in general but especially in the netherlands specifically. hopefully a well-cited academical source not written by the family’s problem child might do more to sway them. i visited the ‘resistance museum’ in amsterdam last summer. i kind of knew what to expect but it was disheartening to see it match the propaganda (mostly in the form of fictional quasi-historical narratives read to children in my circles, including me) in which a certain volksgeist of lionised mass resistance (of protestant bent) was attributed to the netherlands which seems largely unsusceptible to anything in the realm of coherent  histiography. this holds true even with the elucidation that many ministers preaching against the nazis and collaboration were also communists (who in this museum were framed as ‘socialists’ to be equated with the ‘national-socialists’, and therefore any and all communism in any advocates at all was erased) with every present piece of history (clippings of newspapers, pamphlets, photographs, and so on and so forth) framed with the appropriate text to soothe the sensibilities of visitors who were seemingly presumed to be gentile and generally culturally christian (and therefore, not queer or communist) and to appropriate both self-defense of targeted communities as well as leftist resistance (which of course largely overlapped) to this particular contingent.

no mention was made of the connections between say, calvinism and the general complicity of civil servants in doing the administrative work — wordly powers are not to be questioned, as all power derives from god according to paul of tarsus — that precipitated the majority of jewish people in the netherlands being murdered, with one of the highest death rates per capita in europe. while the netherlands wasn’t mentioned in this article, denmark was, which largely appears to have exhibited the opposite qualities in at least the bureaucracy and thus also largely yielded inverse results. there is more to say on this with regards to the dutch history of (ethno)religious segregation/pillarisation/federalism and the particular role that dynamic played in our country’s history (and continues to, with some would-be social planners with ambiguous intentions wanting islam to become a new ‘pillar’), but that’s not really what i want to focus on right now.

simply put, i could declare myself content with being more critical than my culturally christian family and the narrative of the culturally christian netherlands in general, especially as i am exiled from these structures and therefore have little personal interest in defending them— or even from refraining to attack them. however, especially after reading this paper, i have to come to the conclusion that i haven’t really developed beyond these relatively straightforward insights (even if they are rare in my country) in any real way for a few years now. what i think was extremely valuable in this article for me was not only the denunciation of the anti-sociological assertion that good and evil are essential properties of a human being but building on that, that they are ‘nurtured qualities of the mind’. i do not agree with this proposition without caveats for reasons beyond the scope of this piece of writing, however, the way that zukier expounds on this is, i believe, of timeless relevance. the nazis constantly stressed the horrors of their actions and indeed many battalions weeded out those too eager to engage in them — as one example people who volunteered to perform executions were summarily dismissed — but nevertheless viewed them perhaps not even so much as duties in service of some larger goal. however, first, crucially, considerations of such were seen and treated as largely external to any notion of morality or ideology worth considering, which he expounds on at length over the course of the history of nazi germany.

here lies something i think is crucial to any such person or people who see themselves as grand architects of ideology and the future (and i myself have been partial to this at some points): you cannot let yourself become callous to the existence of such forces of which you are not the primary target. there is no excuse for letting orthogonal ideological interests outweigh the threat of mass oppression and violence, especially in a time where such things are emergent again. there is responsibility in what projects one considers themselves part of and in the scope of these projects, to root out such indifference. even in light of certain zionist histiographies who have constructed a new continuity to integrate the holocaust in a historical and metaphysical scheme that leads from there to redemption through the state of israel in the levant (quoting zukier almost verbatim), one cannot allow themselves to be caught into cooperating with this sophistry where to disagree with such narratives must necessarily co-implicate indifference (or even hostility) to the people involved. no antizionist or antitheist schema can permit any form of ideological reductionism or bargaining of the still very real threat of genocide which may very well become institutional in a number of countries in the near future, as it has before.

to acknowledge this much in spite of the muddying of this issue by bad faith actors (whether in the form of zionist genocide enthusiasts or white supremacists and their useful idiots who seek to bargain or deny the holocaust) is necessary for everyone, and i very much also assert this to myself as an un-christian (and queer and trans and so forth) but still nevertheless gentile person. this much is clear regardless of any and all complex geopolitical reasonings which in the scope of this particular issue are really only worth mentioning in the abstract, even if they are very much worth discussing on their own terms— indeed, criticisms must exist which separate the struggle against bigotry from certain imperialist and pro-family agendas and to refuse such actors the monopoly on these issues. i’ll make sure to send this piece to my various academical peers and to discuss this with them to keep in mind even as we strive towards other common goals together— which must be and are by definition synonymous with exactly this refusal to equate the two. however, as established, defining and stating one’s owns interests is hardly enough when it comes to this kind of subject, and failure to do so cannot be tolerated, and this i insist to any fellow adversaries of organised religion who might read this.

[wisdomrays]

IS THE QURAN THE WORK OF THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD?: Part 1

Much has been said and written in response to the allegation that the Qur’an is the work of the Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace, and not, as Muslims know and believe, the Word of God. Here, I shall confine myself to the most pertinent points.

This particular allegation is put forward by modern orientalists, just as it was by their predecessors, Christian and Jewish writers who deeply resented the spread of Islam. But the allegation is one familiar to Muslims, discussed within the Qur’an itself. The Qur’an records how the pagan Arabs of the jahiliyya (the period of ignorance before Islam) used to allege that the Prophet had forged the revelations: Whenever Our signs are recited to them in a clear way, those who deny say concerning the truth, when it (the truth) comes to them: This is plain magic’. Or do they say: He has forged it?’ (al-Ahqaf, 46.7-8). They were desperate to protect their interests against the rising tide of the new faith and hoped, just as their modern counterparts do, that by causing some Muslims to doubt the authorship of the Qur’an they might cause them to doubt its authority also.

Let us begin by affirming that the Qur’an is unique among scriptures in two very important respects which even the Qur’an’s enemies are obliged to acknowledge. Firstly, we have the Quran in its original language and this language is still in living use. Secondly, the text of the Qur’an is entirely reliable. It has been as it is, unaltered, unedited, not tampered with in any way, since the time of its revelation. By contrast, other scriptures-the Christians’ Gospels, for example-have not survived in their original language, nor is the language of the earliest surviving version of these scriptures a language still in living use. Furthermore, their texts have been conclusively shown to be the work of many human hands over many generations, edited and reedited, altered and interpolated, to promote the interpretations of particular sects. They are rightly said to have lost their authority as scriptures; they serve primarily as a national or cultural mythology for the groups whose remote ancestors created their particular versions of them. That is, more or less, the Western scholarly consensus on the status of these once Divine Books. For almost two centuries, Western scholars have subjected the Qur’an to the same rigorous scrutiny. However, they have failed to prove, as they expected, that the Qur’an too is the work of many hands over many generations. Certainly they found, as happened among Christians, that the Muslims split into disputing factions but, unlike the Christians, the warring Muslim factions sought to justify their position by reference to one and the same Qur’an. It is still possible that other versions of the Gospels remain to be discovered or uncovered from where they were lost or hidden. By contrast, all Muslims know but one Quran, perfectly preserved in its original words, just as at the time of the death of the Prophet, upon him be peace, when revelation ended, with no variations of the least significance.

As well as the Qur’an, Muslims also have a record of the Prophet’s teaching, in the form of practical example and precept (the Sunna) which is extensively (though, of course, not fully) preserved in the Hadith. It is in the Hadith that the Prophets own words are recorded. These two sources, Qur’an and Hadith, could not be more dissimilar in quality of expression or content. The Arabs who heard the Prophet speak, whether they were believers or not, found his words to be concise, forceful, persuasive, but nevertheless like their own normal usage. By contrast, when they heard the Qur’an, they were overwhelmed by feelings of rapture, ecstasy, awe. One senses in the Hadith the presence of an individual human being addressing his fellow human beings, a man pondering weighty questions who, when he speaks, speaks with an appropriate gravity and in profound awe of the Divine Will. The Qur’an, on the other hand, is immediately perceived as imperative, sublime, with a transcendent, all-compelling majesty of style and content. It defies sense and reason to suppose that Qur’an and Hadith are works of the same or a single origin.

The Qur’an differs absolutely from any human artefact (whether literary or otherwise) in the absolute transcendence of its perspective and viewpoint. Occasionally in other scriptures, in a few scattered phrases or passages, the reader or listener feels that he is indeed in the presence of the Divine Message addressed to mankind from their Creator. In the Qur’an, every syllable carries this impression of sublime intensity of communication from One who is the All-Knowing and the All-Merciful. Furthermore, the Qur’an cannot, as can merely human works, be contemplated at a distance, it cannot be discussed and debated in the abstract. The Qur’an requires us to understand and to act, to amend our lifestyles; by God, it also enables us to do so because it can touch the very depths of our being. It addresses us in our full reality as spiritually and physically competent beings. It addresses our whole being as the creatures of the All-Merciful. It is not addressed to just one or other of our faculties. The Qur’an is not a message that engages only our capacity for philosophical reasoning, or only our poetic, artistic sensibility, or only our power to alter and manage the natural environment, or to after and manage our political and legal affairs, or only our need for mutual compassion and forgiveness, or only our spiritual craving for knowledge and consolation. Nor is the Qur’an a message addressed to one man only or one tribe or one nation, nor is it addressed only to men and not to women, or only to the oppressed and weak and not to the wealthy and powerful, or only to the sinful and self- indulgent and not to the virtuous and self-disciplined. The Quran addresses the whole of mankind and, by God, its message is relevant (as it is so preserved) for all time.

This transcendence and fullness of the Qur’anic perspective can be felt in every individual matter which it particularly mentions. For example, the Qur’an sets side by side caring for one’s parents in their old age with belief in the Oneness of God; it sets the command to provide decently for a divorced wife side by side with the reminder to fear the All-Knowing and All-Seeing. God knows best the full implications of such juxtapositions. But His believing servants do know, and can report, their effect: they enable the inward self-reform which is necessary if the virtuous actions are to be performed steadily, cheerfully, and with the degree of humility which makes a virtuous action also a graceful one and prevents it from becoming a burden upon the mind of the person who is supposed to be benefited by it.

The Qur’an reiterates in several verses a challenge to any who doubt its authenticity to bring or produce a surah (chapter) that can equal it. No one has ever met, or can ever meet, this challenge. For the reasons we have explained, none but God could assume the Qur’an’s all-transcendent and all-compassionate perspective. The thoughts and aspirations of even the best of human beings are affected and conditioned by the circumstances within which, by God, their lives begin and end-that is an inevitable consequence of their being creatures. That is why, sooner or later, all merely human works fail or fade in influence and force: their style drifts out of fashion, or their subject-matter is no longer relevant; they are too general and lack a sufficient attachment to the reality of human experience, or they are too attached to some particular circumstance and so lacking in generality and applicability. For any number of reasons, and irrespective of good or bad intentions, the works of human minds and human hands are of only limited value. That is why to this day the challenge stands unanswered: not even if all mankind, using all known resources, collaborated together, or if the jinn joined in to help them, assuming they could, would they be able to produce even a part of the Qur’an. In the Book’s own words: Say: If all of mankind and the jinn were to gather together to produce the like of this Qur’an, they could not produce the like of it even if they backed each other with help and support’ (al-Isra’, 17.88).