Proud Infidel ranting about the ongoing war against democratic and secular values (Don't fool yourselves)! Maybe a voice of sanity in a wide ocean of madness.

20070605

Where the dragons went

This is where the dragons went.
They lie...
Not dead, not a sleep. Not waiting, because waiting implies expectation. Possibly the word we´re looking for here is...
...dormant.

And although the space they occupy isn´t like normal space, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. Not a cubic inch there but is filled by a a claw, a talon, a scale, the tip of a tail, so the effect is like one of those trick drawings and your eyeballs eventually realize that the space between each dragon is, in fact, another dragon.

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The Fatiha (Opening) is the first sura (chapter) of the Qur’an and most common prayer of Islam. If you’re a pious Muslim who prays the five requisite daily prayers of Islam, you will recite the Fatiha seventeen times in the course of those prayers.

According to an Islamic tradition, the Muslim prophet Muhammad said that the Fatiha surpassed anything revealed by Allah (“the God” in Arabic, and the word for God used by Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews, as well as Muslims) in the Torah, the Gospel, or the rest of the Qur’an. And indeed, it efficiently and eloquently encapsulates many of the principal themes of the Qur’an and Islam in general: Allah as the “Lord of the Worlds,” who alone is to be worshiped and asked for help, the merciful judge of every soul on the Last Day.
In Islamic theology, Allah is the speaker of every word of the Qur’an. Some have found it strange that Allah would say something like “praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds,” but the traditional Islamic understanding is that Allah revealed this prayer to Muhammad early in his career as a prophet (which began in the year 610 AD, when he received his first revelation from Allah through the angel Gabriel – a revelation that is now contained in the Qur’an’s 96th chapter) so that the Muslims would know how to pray.

It is for its last two verses that the Fatiha is of most concern to non-Muslims, and for which it has been in the news lately. A Shi’ite imam, Husham Al-Husainy, ignited controversy by paraphrasing this passage during a prayer at a Democratic National Committee winter meeting, giving the impression that he was praying that the assembled pols convert to Islam. Then Imam Yusuf Kavakci of the Dallas Central Mosque prayed the Fatiha at the Texas State Senate, giving rise to the same concerns.

The final two verses of the Fatiha asks Allah: “Show us the straight path, the path of those whom Thou hast favoured; not the (path) of those who earn Thine anger nor of those who go astray.” The traditional Islamic understanding of this is that the “straight path” is Islam — cf. Islamic apologist John Esposito’s book Islam: The Straight Path. The path of those who have earned Allah’s anger are the Jews, and those who have gone astray are the Christians.

Go ahead and read the rest here.

1 Comments:

Blogger Yankee Doodle said...

Well, that can be taken any way we want.

The way it comes off to me is that this guy is asking his Creator to show the correct path to anyone in error. And, as he looks out into the room and realizes he alone is an adherent of a barbaric dark-age faith, he wants to be shown the light that the others see.

(Snicker, snicker.)

Seriously, though, it's in the interpretation of the prayer that the problems arise, and even an "orthodox" Muslim (I have a post explaining the use of that term) may wish others to convert to his faith, just as a Jew may think a Christian has been misled by a con artist.

The real danger is when Wahhabis and Khawarij start using expressions like that, because then anyone who isn't following the guy in power closely enough is going astray. Wahhabism and Khawarijism are the most real forms of "Islamofascism"; it's the Saudi Wahhabis and their Khawarij allies, for the most part, who are causing the problems either directly or by radicalizing the others.

Tuesday 5 June 2007 at 13:06:00 CEST

 

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