Allah? Oh. You mean this guy!
Posted on 01/16/2005 6:17:09 AM PST by tjwmason
In these pages two weeks ago the Archbishop of Canterbury explained why his faith could survive the Asian tsunami disaster. For Fawzan al-Fawzan, on the other hand, a Saudi professor who preaches sermons on a religious satellite television channel, al-Majd, no struggle with his beliefs was required. Far from it: for him the deaths of 150,000 merely proves the existence of a munificent God.
"Some of our forefathers said that if there is usury and fornication in a certain village, Allah permits its destruction," he told the faithful on December 31 while the rest of the world was extending sympathy and aid to the victims. "We know that at these resorts that unfortunately exist in Islamic and other countries in South Asia, and especially at Christmas, fornication and sexual perversion of all kinds are rampant."
Anyone who missed Fawzan al-Fawzan's new year message could find plenty of explanation for the tsunami elsewhere. In the wake of the disaster, Islamic television stations, newspapers and chatrooms were full of theories as to why Allah should have targeted the beaches of South-East Asia. "Don't these countries have witchcraft, sorcery, deceitfulness and abomination?" asked Ibrahim al-Bashar, an adviser to the Saudi justice minister, also on al-Majd TV. Preaching on Palestinian Authority TV, Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris reasoned that the waves struck Indonesia because of "Zionist and American investments".
However much America and Israel might invest in Indonesia, the tsunami would surely have been a more effective piece of divine retribution had it been directed at Tel Aviv and New York. If there was one place in the Indian Ocean one might have expected Allah to smite it would have been the US military base at Diego Garcia, where servicemen reported seeing nothing more than a harmless ripple.
Well, if it wasn't Allah's work, suggested Mahmoud Bakri in the Egyptian weekly newspaper Al-Usbu, then "it was some kind of human intervention that destabilised the tectonic plates, an intervention that is caused only in nuclear experiments and explosions – the three most recent tests appeared to be genuine American and Israeli preparations to act together with India to test a way to liquidate humanity". He went on to theorise that America's nuclear tests were also responsible for the devastating Turkish earthquake in 1999 that killed 18,000 people. If they were, the Americans clearly still have to perfect the technology: presumably they were aiming for Iraq or Iran rather than one of their allies.
It is popularly assumed that backwoods Americans tapping away on computers in log cabins in Nebraska lead the world in conspiracy theories, but it isn't true. At least Midwesterners who believe that we are being controlled by Martians or that God heaves around tectonic plates in anger tend to be confined to internet chatrooms.
In the Islamic world, on the other hand, bizarre conspiracy theories and a belief in divine retribution are part of respectable thought.
Typifying the Western response to the tsunami last week, Gordon Brown said that the disaster "shows just how closely and irrevocably bound together are the fortunes of the richest persons in the richest country to the fate of the poorest persons in the poorest country".
This might be true, in that Westerners and Asians died on the same beaches and are sharing in the relief effort. But to compare the response to the disaster between Islam and the West is to remind oneself just how large a philosophical divide lies between us.
TROP = The Religion of Paranoids.
And all along I thought it was the earthquake.
I had no idea that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell were Muslim.
AHA!
Just what I thought. We are making the war on terrorism way too hard.
All we have to do is "invest" in 3M (Maniacal Murdering Muslims)
Allah? Oh. You mean this guy!
Well since Islam is the Cult of Satan. I'll go for this theory.
There is usury and fornication in every village, some much more than others. The question is not, why did Allah strike these certain villages, but why were so few struck? Some of those that were struck, were really pretty high up on the scale of righteousness, not at all like Sodom or Gomorrah.
Mother Nature can be an unmitigated baytch sometimes, that will forgive every human frailty by allowing some few to escape and repopulate the planet.
Reminds me of Conan's god Crom, who only thought of his worshippers when he was angry.
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