Posts Tagged ‘(Al Ka3ba)’
Revisiting “Satanic Verses” of Salman Rushdi
Posted by: adonis49 on: November 4, 2008
“The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdi, Part 1 (October 30, 2008)
This manuscript is of 547 pages and divided into nine parts: The Angel Gabriel (Gibreel), Mahound, Ellowen Deeowen, Ayesha, A city visible but unseen, Return to Jahilia, The Angel Azraeel, The Parting of the Arabian Sea, and A Wonderful lamp.
I will review the chapter “Mahound” because this section is crucial for setting the geo-political, commercial and society structure in Mecca and the neighboring towns. This description would help comprehend the climate within which Islam was born and grew.
Mahound is one of several names given to the Devil. It is very unfortunate that Rushdie decided to represent the Prophet Muhammad by this name just to state that one of the verses was inspired by the Devil, and thus forbade over one billion Moslems from reading this essentially wonderful and most informative book.
Many “fatwas” in the Moslem World, and especially in Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini, permitted the killing of Salman Rushdi for this blasphemy.
Rushdi has been since then protected by the British police and been mostly in hiding. Actually, Moslems should be thankful to Rushdi in not naming Muhammad as the one who delivered the two “Satanic” verses that deviated from the message of One God. I will use the name of Muhammad in the remaining review.
Mecca at the time of Muhammad was built four generation ago to cater for desert caravans bringing goods from Zafar and Yemen to bifurcate toward Egypt, Iraq/Iran, or Syria/Turkey and back to Mecca.
It barely rains in that region and the only potable well was called Zamzam. The story goes that Abraham abandoned his Egyptian wife Hagar and his son Ismail to their fate in this unforgiving area. Luckily for Hagar, Angel Gabriel (Gibreel) uncovered for Hagar the well Zamzam and she survived with her newly born son.
Once a year, the Bedouins of Arabia who adored 360 idols, which are imported from the neighboring countries to encourage pilgrimage to the Black Stone (Al Ka3ba), celebrated the passage of this same Abraham (Ibraheem) in the vicinity!
Mecca was structured around concentric dwellings starting from the Black Stone and fanning away. Houses closest to the Black Stone belonged to the most prominent personalities in the city council and their respective clans in the extended Kuraich (Shark) tribe.
There were four main clans and each clan was specialized in one kind of commerce; the Scarlet tents sold spices and scents, the Black tents the cloth and leather, the Silver tents precious metals and swords and the fourth colored tents or the owners of the Dappled Camels specialized in entertainments, wine, hashish, and the slave trade. Water carriers were despised because any overflowing of water would damage the streets and homes built out of sand.
Around the year of 600 the businessmen in Mecca were losing trade to the sea transports; worse, another new and famous Temple was built in Sheba in Yemen and pilgrims were investigating these new regions. The pilgrims were getting scarce in Mecca because they realized that they were being bilked (milked) from every penny they had and young girls were abducted for ransom. Consequently, in order to keep afloat the Kuraich tribe encouraged vile entertainment activities during the pilgrimage season to attract more customers.
The Black Stone enshrined around 360 idols brought from around the neighboring civilizations to entice pilgrims in from all around the regions. The colossus Hubal the shepherd was sent by the Amalekites of Hit, the idol Kain was the patron of musicians and blacksmiths, Astarte (He-of-Shara) was brought by the Nabataen as well as saturnine Nakruh. Manaf was the sun-god, in the eagle-form Nasr, Quzah or rainbow; Uzza the goddess of beauty and love, and Lat the all-powerful mother goddess.
The idol Allah had some sort of overall authority, an all-rounder in an age of specialist idols and thus was not that popular and didn’t generate money.
Hind, the all-powerful wife of the preeminent Karim Abu Simbel owned the three most famous goddesses of Al Lat, Manat, and Uzza.
Muhammad was rich (he married one of richess women in Mecca Khadija), but he was an orphan and his clan was of lower stature and thus was not represented in the city council. His wife Khadija was 10 years older than him and she had hired Muhammad to lead and manage her caravans heading to Damascus.
Khadija was the first person to believe in the predication of Muhammad. By the age of 44 Muhammad message of “no God but Allah” was not making any major breakthrough among the city dwellers. The lampoons of the very young and most famous poet named Baal were pinned up all over town “Messenger, do please lend a careful ear. Your monophilia, your One, One, One, isn’t for Jahilia. Return to sender”
Beside his uncle Hamza and a few poor fellows not many were paying any attention to Muhammad revelations. Among those poor individuals were Khalid the water carrier, Salman from Persia (who later would suggest to dig a wide ditch around Medina to prevent the cavalry of Kuraich to enter the town), and Bilal the mighty slave that Muhammad set free from his owner and would later be appointed the first official “muezzin” calling the believers to the five prayers of the day.
In order for his message to breakthrough Muhammad was inclined to accept the deal of Abu Simbel. Abu Simbel would recognize Allah as the mightiest God and would offer Muhammad a seat in the city council in return of recognition of Al Lat, Manat, and Uzza as Gods or the best interceding goddesses to Allah.
The clan of Hind, the Umayyad, owned these three most privileged Goddesses from pilgrimage revenues. Muhammad thus returned from the Mount Cone and delivered publicly the verses stating that “Lat, Manat, and Uzza are the exalted birds, and their intercession is desired indeed”. I guess these were the “Satanic verses” alluded to by Rushdie
The disciples of Muhammad were beside themselves and could not assent to accepting a God but Allah. Muhammad did not dare face his wife Khadija that night and did not enter his house.
Follow the story in the next part or the chapter “Return to Jahilia” https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/the-satanic-verses-part-2/
Foundations and history of the monolithic religions (written on May 15, 2008)
Discovering the mysteries of life and the Universe might not be attainable: for the simple reason that any paradigm would not stick long enough to capture the mind of any generation.
This article is intended for those who accept the validity of the hypothesis that
1. earth is billions years old and that a form of mankind emerged over at least more than one million years ago;
2. that human kind was on the verge of extinction several times due to drastic climatic changes and the eruption of monster volcanoes.
Thus, prior civilizations, which may have been as developed as today, could have vanished with no traces left.
We need to accept the fact that if the number of the world population was far less than it should have been at the beginning of the 19th century, from simple mathematical computation in the last 2,000 years, it is because most of our ancestors were the product of incest and not from couples of different families, even after accounting for the casualties of wars, pestilence, famine and climate calamities.
I also would like to state that mythologies were based on real events and the transmitted verbal stories accounted for their longevity: the verbal communication of these stories extended the imagination and gave the various mythologies the religious power and the dimension that are interpreted nowadays.
When dealing with religions, people feel the need to contrast faith versus facts and logic.
People who have sincere faith must have experienced supernatural revelations or gone through a moment of irrational state of out-of-body exposure.
I believe that faith cannot be acquired by reason or logic and those who repeat frequently the word “truth” in their conversations are not sincere in their belief because truth is plainly, simply and absolutely a subjective attitude and it means “do not bother using facts, science or logic. All those reasoning principles do not mean a thing and would not change my mind”.
Truth is for me the most dangerous term that man has invented: Truth blocks any consensus or negotiation or meaningful conversation and it connote an extremist disposition based on ignorance and lack of intellectual interactions. Thus, the concept of truth is practically opposite to faith, although people positively correlate it with faith.
Logic is a construct, a system of the mind used to expose a coherent hypothesis, hopefully based on some facts, or a story that hold a convincing alternative. Logic can be used in science, in rhetoric and as well in religion.
Institutionalized religions heavily make use of logic, though they hammer out the concept of faith because its concept is not founded on anything tangible or can be proved rationally.
Religion is basically a theological philosophy that has been manipulated to be grounded in myths, symbols, and secrecy to satisfy the initiated High Priests and generates its power through scare tactics within the psychic of man.
Let me offer a logical story, one of the alternative stories, of the monotheist religions of the Jewish, Christian, and Moslem religions.
The root of these three religions is the religion practiced in the Kingdom of Sumer, in southern Iraq, 6,000 years ago. This ancient religion believed in a trinity and its mythology stated that out of space creatures, arriving from the tenth dying planet, landed on earth to exploit gold and oil because the environment of their planet required abundant quantities of gold to be pulverized and injected in their outer atmosphere to rejuvenate the deteriorating environment of their planet.
These creatures created human artificially (test tube for example) to serve as cheap and mechanical slaves in the mines. After many centuries, the created human revolted against their masters and fled from the Eden of the super cruel creatures and had to fend for themselves to survive and develop their intelligence.
The Kingdom of Sumer and its far developed civilization that discovered the existence of ten planets (there is nine in our solar system so far, and lately this year the tenth planet was discovered) and their rotations; the Sumerians divided the day into 24 hours, the hours into minutes and minutes into seconds.
Ancient mythologies mention that this kingdom was destroyed by a natural calamity (resembling to an atomic explosion used by the outer space creatures). The Sumerian mythology had ramifications into all the neighboring civilizations that came after it when it was weakened.
It is narrated that Abraham left the Kingdom of Sumer with his tribe during a period of famine and carried with him the verbal mythology of the country.
Moses was a High Priest in Egypt and fled persecution because he adhered to the Akhenaton new religion of the one God the Sun and carried with him the ten laws and the secrets of the Egyptian religion.
Jesus was initiated by the Essen sect (indirectly related to Jewish religion), located in upper Galilee by Mount Carmel and had their Great Temple on the Mount.
The members of the Essen sect believed in knowledge and spirituality and shared the resources in common. It is also narrated that Jesus lived for a time in Sidon teaching in its famous law school. Mary, his mother and part of her family were from the town of Qana (closer to the main port of Tyr that was the administrative district of Upper Galilee) and lived there when Jesus was a lecturer in the law school.
It is no fluke of an incident that Jesus and Mary attended a wedding in Qana; it is also very rational that Jesus decided to start his message after Qana when his mother removed the cover of secrecy and exposed his supernatural gifts of turning water to wine.
Jesus was a high priest in the Essen sect and preached a message based in symbolism and fables and was highly spiritual and staunchly anti-Pharisee, this Jewish sect that believed that adhering to the Laws was sufficient to be saved.
The Jewish cabala sect is a branch of the Essen sect and is founded on the Sumerian theology and myths.
Albert Schweitzer, a theologian, physician, thinker, organ player and Nobel Peace laureate offered his version on Jesus. He said, based on the first two testaments of Mathew and Marc, that Jesus preached his message to the general public in the last year before his crucifixion.
Just six months, all in all, Jesus was accompanied with the public and the remaining months he spent them among his close disciple around Caesarea of Philippi.
In the beginning, Jesus accepted the label of a prophet among the prophets but then he reached the belief that he is the Messiah of the Jews. Thus, he sent his disciples two by two to preach the message of the end of time. Jesus was very surprised when all his disciples returned safe and sound; he expected his disciples to suffer terribly and be put to death in order for the prophesy to be accomplished.
Jesus then decided that God would accept his sacrifice and save his close disciples from atrocious deaths before the first coming of the Messiah.
The apostles and disciples of Jesus believed that Christ would return to Jerusalem during their life time and thus they stayed in Jerusalem for as long as they could before they were forced to leave that city out of persecution by the Jews.
The Christian-Jews would not relinquish the Jewish Laws and they harassed and even persecuted St. Paul for preaching to the gentiles and establishing Christian communities based on faith in Christ who came to absolve our sins and who was resurrected from death.
St. Paul insisted that without the belief that Christ resurrected there would be no foundations for Christianity. That is true because Christianity would be another extremist and salafist Orthodox Jewish sect.
The Council of Nicea in 325 adopted only four out of the hundreds of testaments that were written and accounted for more credible eye-witness testimonies before four testaments were adopted as not apocryphal (teaching of wisdom).
The authors of the four testaments were biased toward the message of their respective gurus.
For example, Marc followed Paul for a while and then he proselytized with Peter and wrote the biography of Peter; Luca stuck with Paul for the longest parts of his trips and the foundations of Christian communities. The Talmudic Mathew outdid himself forcing the genealogy of Jesus to descend from David. The educated Jean was of a noble family and wrote his testament when he was already senile at the age of 95; he had acquired the Hellenistic culture and symbolism.
It is unfortunate that Jean had to write the apocalyptic hallucination that is wrecking havoc at the beginning of every millennium. Apparently, the apocalypse is not from the same Jean the disciple.
The Arab Prophet Mohammad was not illiterate and he was initiated to the Jewish-Christian sect (the Ebionites) located in Mecca with his uncle as Patriarch of the sect.
Mohammad read the Books and listened to the proselytism of the Eastern Christian sects during his caravan commerce to and within Syria. These Christian sects believed in the monophysism of Jesus (no divine spiritual identity, in contrast to other monophysism sects that believed Jesus was spiritual, for example the Orthodox Church of Byzantium) and were staunchly adhering to the Jewish Laws, the Jewish prophets and their books.
Consequently, the religion of Mohammad during its first 13 years was almost a duplicate of these Christian sects with strong Jewish foundations in their religions.
At that period of his message, Mohammad had decreed that Moslems should face toward Jerusalem for prayer; when Mohammad had to fight the Jewish tribes in Yathreb he changed the direction for prayer to facing Al Ka3ba (the Black Stone) in Mecca. Mohammad had to flee to Medina after the Kureich tribe decided to terminate him; he then endeavored to establish firmly his community of Moslems in Yathreb (Medina).
The next phase of taking up the civil social responsibilities and politics for maintaining this community forced upon Mohammad to linking the spiritual dogma with the civil laws and regulations. It was while strengthening the community of Islam in Medina that Mohammad had to wage many wars against a few Jewish communities who ended siding with Mohammad’s archenemy the Kureich tribe in Mecca.
Mohammad thus learned to discriminate between the practices of the Jews and the Jewish religion and hundreds of Jews were displaced.
After Mohammad showed clemency twice with Jewish rebellions he finally ordered the beheading of 700 members of the Jewish Khyber tribe. For some reason, Mohammad selected his nephew and son-in-law Ali to have the honor of the decapitation; it is no wonder that the Jews have an animal hatred for Ali and his followers.
To comprehend the nature of Islam it would be beneficial to collect the revealed verses before relocating to Yathreb or Medina. Most of the verses generated in Medina were generally rules and laws designed for managing the daily lives of the believers. You will realize that most of these laws are identical to the desert and Bedouin customs of the Jews before and long after they got established in Palestine.
Personal hypothesis:
The ancestor of all the Gods that were created since antiquity is this scary total Silence before a coming major natural cataclysm. It is the silence of death when the whole earth is still and the atmosphere suffocating, no breezes of any kinds, that generates in all living creature a terrible reaction of wholesome anger of pure revolt against the sense of death in this universal silence.
It is the silence and quietude before tornadoes, cyclones, sand desert storms and all the kinds of whirling at great magnitude in the atmosphere, the seas, deserts and the bowel of earth in volcanoes. There is no avoiding the silence of coming cataclysms as there is no avoiding death, a correlation that people noticed and prayed for their own God of Total Silence to keep chatting through winds, birds, animals, rains, thunderstorms, shouting, crying and anything that can be heard lest miseries, devastations and evil spirits hovering over the land befall their region.
The same behavior is applied to the starting of wars and their ending. It is no wonder that men shout stupid songs, curse loudly at fictional enemies like if drunk, bang on batteries and metals, light and heavy metals, blow on air instruments and all the hysterical trepidation at the announcement of a major war, an ancient psychic custom within our deepest pre-historic brain to ward off the cataclysm wrapped into maddening songs of patriotism and cursing at the evil enemies.
Indeed, heavy silence is the root of our fundamental fear and dealing with fear should pass through learning to accept silence as a necessary step to investigating our soul.
“The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie (Started October 30, 2008)
This manuscript is of 547 pages and divided into 9 parts:
The Angel Gibreel (Gabriel), Mahound, Ellowen Deeowen, Ayesha (Aicha), A city visible but unseen, Return to Jahilia, The Angel Azraeel (Satan), The Parting of the Arabian Sea, and A Wonderful lamp.
I will only review Mahound because this section is crucial for setting the geo-political, commercial and societal structure in Mecca and the neighboring towns. This description would help comprehend the climate within which Islam was born and expanded.
Mahound is one of several names given to the Devil.
It is very unfortunate that Rushdie decided to represent the Prophet Muhammad by this name which forbade over a billion of Moslems from reading this essentially wonderful and most informative book.
Many “fatwas” in the Moslem World and especially in Iran of Khomeini permitted the killing of Salman Rushdie for this blasphemy.
Rushdie has been since then protected by the British police and been mostly in hiding. Actually, Moslems should be thankful to Rushdie in not naming their Prophet for two verses that deviated from the message of One God. I will use the name of Muhammad instead.
Mecca at the time of Muhammad was built 4 generation ago to cater for desert caravans bringing goods from Zofar and Yemen to bifurcate toward Egypt, Iraq/Iran, or Syria/Turkey. It barely rain in that region and the only potable well was called Zamzam.
The mythical story goes that Abraham abandoned his Egyptian wife Hagar and his son Ismail to their fate in this unforgiving area. Luckily for Hagar, Angel Gabriel (Gibreel) uncovered for Hagar the well Zamzam and she survived with her newly born son.
Once a year, the Bedouins of Arabia who adored 360 idols, and imported from the neighboring countries to encourage pilgrimage to the Black Stone (Al Ka3ba), celebrated the passage of Abraham (Ibraheem) in the vicinity!
Mecca was structured around concentric dwellings starting from the Black Stone and fanning away. Houses closest to the Black Stone belonged to the most prominent personalities in the city council and their respective clans in the extended Kuraich (Shark) tribe.
There were 4 main clans and each clan was specialized in one kind of commerce: the Scarlet tents sold spices and scents, the Black tents the cloth and leather, the Silver tents precious metals and swords and the fourth colored tents or the owners of the Dappled Camels specialized in entertainments, wine, hashish, and the slave trade. Water carriers were despised because any overflowing of water would damage the streets and homes built out of sand.
Around the year of 600, the businessmen in Mecca were losing trade to the sea transports; worse, another new and famous Temple was built in the town of Sheba in Yemen and pilgrims were investigating these new regions.
The pilgrims were getting scarce in Mecca because they realized that they were being milked from every penny they had and young girls were abducted for ransom. Consequently, in order to keep afloat the Kuraich tribe encouraged vile entertainment activities during the pilgrimage season to attract more customers.
The Black Stone enshrined around 360 idols brought from around the neighboring civilizations to entice pilgrims in from all around the regions. The colossus Hubal the shepherd was sent by the Amalekites of Hit, the idol Kain was the patron of musicians and blacksmiths, Astarte (He-of-Shara) was brought by the Nabataean as well as saturnine Nakruh. Manaf was the sun-god, the eagle-form Nasr, See Quzah that hold the rainbow; Uzza the goddess of beauty and love, and Lat the all-powerful mother goddess. The idol Allah had some sort of overall authority, an all-rounder in an age of specialist idols and thus was not that popular and didn’t generate money.
Hind, the all-powerful wife of the preeminent Karim Abu Simbel owned the 3 most famous goddesses of Lat, Manat, and Uzza.
Muhammad was rich after marrying Khadija, but he was an orphan and his clan was of lower status and thus was not represented in the city council. His wife Khadija was about 7 years older than him and she had hired him to lead and manage her caravans heading to Damascus.
Khadija was the first person to believe in the predication of Muhammad. By the age of 44 Muhammad message of “no God but Allah” was not making any major breakthrough among the city dwellers. The very young and most prominent poet lampoonist Baal had pinned up all over town “Messenger, do please lend a careful ear. Your mono-philia, your One, One, One, isn’t for Jahilia, return to sender”
Beside his uncle Hamza and a few poor fellows, not many were paying any attention to Muhammad revelations. Among those poor individuals were Khalid the water carrier, Salman from Persia (who later would suggest to dig a wide ditch around Medina to prevent the cavalry of Kuraich to enter the town), and Bilal the mighty slave that Muhammad set free from his owner and would later be appointed the first official “muazen” calling the believers to the five prayers of the day.
In order for his message to breakthrough Muhammad was inclined to accept the deal of Abu Simbel.
Abu Simbel would recognize Allah as the mightiest God and would offer Muhammad a seat in the city council in return of recognition of Lat, Manat, and Uzza as gods or the best who can intercede with Allah. Muhammad thus returned from the Cone Mountain and delivered the verses stating that “Lat, Manat, and Uzza are the exalted birds, and their intercession is desired indeed”
The disciples of Muhammad were beside themselves and could not assent to accepting a God but Allah. Muhammad did not dare face his wife Khadija that night and did not enter his house.