The most sacred thing
In other news, a teenage girl was arrested for burning a booklet. The booklet was a translation of the Koran, so she was arrested “on suspicion of inciting religious hatred.” She wasn’t sent to have a talk with the head teacher, she was arrested. She is currently out on bail.
Catherine Heseltine, chief executive officer of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, said burning the Koran was one of the most offensive acts to Muslims that she could imagine.
She said: “The Koran is the most sacred thing to over a billion Muslims worldwide.”
“You can see that in the way Muslims treat the Koran, washing before touching it and in many Muslim homes you will find it on the top shelf above all other books and we will never destroy the Koranic texts.”
“We believe it is the word of God. God’s guidance for us in this life,” she added.
Therefore, everyone in the world is required to treat the Koran the same way. Because over a billion people make a fetish of a particular book, including all editions and all translations of said book, however flimsy the edition or bad the translation, failure to treat all editions and translations with deference is criminal, whether particular jurisdictions agree or not. Happily the UK apparently does agree.
This is one thing the American founders got right. Good Onion piece.
Challenging that principle did real, and deserved, damage to multiculturalism in the US.
Cue worldwide picketing of McDonald’s franchises by Hindus…..
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vegan Mind, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: The most sacred thing http://dlvr.it/9HqMb […]
As PZ Myers noted, Heseltine’s imagination must be rather limited if this is one of the most offensive acts she can imagine.
I wonder how much she’ll have to pay as a victim surcharge. . .
First a clarification: Burning books is in general reprehensible and not justified, not even ostensibly evil religious books like the quran.
Heinrich Heine once proclaimed: “Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen…..-Where one burn books, one will in the end burn people….
But I cannot resist pointing to the irony in the situation. The West Midland police apparently acts according to laws of by-laws against “incitment to hatred”
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‘West Midlands Police will investigate and monitor any crime reported by individuals who may have been targeted because of their disability, gender, race, religion or belief, sexual orientation or transgender.’
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The youths are then charged for burning (parts of) a book which in itself brims with hate and discimination against other believers, females, etc etc.
It is obvious that any written material containing the ugly diatribes against others as found in the quran would be prosecutable under the very laws(by-laws?) those kids have been charged under.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
Well, Heinrich Heine not withstanding (and just because you quote someone doesn’t make the quoted words true), I’d cheerfully burn harlequin romances and absolutely anything by barbara cartland. I’d also burn most books by Nietzsche, anything by freud plus ‘mein kampf’ and maybe ‘hard times’…….I don’t see a problem with someone burning any book they themselves own.
As for the koran, along with the bible and the torah and all the commentaries, why not burn them? they shouldn’t be printed in the first place. There’s nothing in any of that crap that’s worth the life of a single tree!
What has happened to the brits? Are these the descendants of the women and men of 1940?
This, BTW, from a post by Marie-Therese O’Loughlin early last year:
“I thought the comment by Ibrahim on Holy Smoke was also very interesting.
Here is a wee snippet.
“A translated version of the Koran isn’t considered a Koran at all, simply because you cannot recite it in the Arabic original. A Koran with bilingual text is considered a learning medium and not true Koran either. To attribute to a written text an intrinsic holiness is not really Islamic and Muslims who exploit this are simply exploiting the ignorance of the liberals who have not bothered to find out for themselves what Muslims, in their variety, actually believe”
So no koran was burnt at all!
There might, after all, be something to Heinrich Heine’s dictum. I have never burned a book, but I did once flush a book down the toilet; (it was a selection of Shelley, and it took ages). Since then I have flushed three people down the toilet.
Oh please. A person exercising political speech by burning their own book is not reprehensible and certainly justified. The State burning books in order to restrict freedom of speech is an entirely different matter. One needs to be cognizant of the difference.
Yes, let’s not get too fetishistic about book burning.
So, if the Quran is like super sacred or whatever, are they not elevating it to almost iconic status? And we know what Mo did to all the icons in the kaaba..
Once you start semi worshipping it like this, you are straying from it’s message.. Lovely! Go on!
From what I’ve can glean over the past couple of years, the West Midlands police are sharia-complaint. More and more of the force is made up of Muslims, and it appears that enforcing Britian’s secular laws is but a sideline from some.
A 50 year old, let alone a mere fifteen year old, would never be arrested for burning a Torah or a Bible.
This young teen has committed no crime according to most precepts of English common law. The West Midlands police, by arresting her, are applying sharia, they are accting in accordance with certain principles of islamic ‘jurisprudence’.
Unbelievable.
Well, well
I am happy to clarify any misunderstandings my comment may have caused.
If you apply Heine’s aphorism to the private/personal realm, it (selv-evidently) becomes rather silly. So rest assured, I have no strong opinions on what flammable personal property (including written material) people stuff in their own oven or on a bonfire.
Heine’s (and mine) point were aimed at expression/thought control by “the power” -be it religious or secular. Index Librorum Prohibitorum and Giordano Bruno, ..The Nazis: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005852 ….Farenheit 451…
It might anyway be noteworthy that Heine was a German-born jew (late 18th to first half of 19th century). His books were put on index and burnt by the nazis approx. one century after his death. I am confident that I don’t have to repeat the technical details of the “Final Solution” to you.
But to avoid a new round of pseudodisagreements: I do not claim that this will happen by neccessity.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust