That old time religion
What major political party hosted a a preacher who said in his invocation “guide us to the right path. The path of the people you bless, not the path of the people you doom”? (The fire and brimstone is so retro, don’t you know.) Does it surprise you that said preacher led a large pro-Hezbollah rally a few months ago? When the preacher said “the people you doom”, to whom was he referring?
February 6th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
If a Republican preacher said anything like that it would be quoted everyday for the next year on Daily Kos or Huffinton … or some other lefty hangout.
February 7th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
These words are from (or at least paraphrase) the so-called “al-Fatiha” or “The opening one”, i.e. the Koran’s short first sura. Sura 1 is the only real exemption from the rule that the suras of the Koran are ordered according to decreasing length (not chronologically or thematically, or anything the like).
The Fatiha is more or less a brief prayer, and it is immensely popular in the Islamic world. Though not in content, it may in status be compared to The Lord’s Prayer in Christianity.
Now, I am as fiercely critical of Islam as anybody, but for the sake of fairness I feel compelled to remark that the Fatiha is, as religious texts go, pretty innocuous. In fact I, a Christian, even find it appealing (in those moments in which I can manage to look at it “abstractly”, that is disentagled from the Islamic contexts in which it inevitably pops up). Without being a theologian, it is my impression that non of the themes and motives invoked in it run directly counter to Christian (and Jewish?) ideas: Acknowledging G-d as the creator of the universe who will also eventually judge us; therefore imploring him for His guidance, so as not to be eventually doomed.
Now the Fatiha of course also suggests that G-d has sort of pre-ordained salvation and doom, independent of our good or bad deeds, and that certainly is a problem. But it is a problem that also Christianity had (has?) to grapple with.
Furthermore, the “erring ones” and the doomed ones” of the Fatiha have been, and are, conventionally understood in Islam to be the Christians and the Jews, and that certainly is a big problem. Nonetheless I would maintain that the Fatiha in and of itself, stripped of all its tangled and problematic history, is a short text worthy of meditation. My two cents.