Image Of Islamic Quotes

Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without images, the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire: that is MUHAMMAD. As regards all the standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask IS THERE ANY MAN GREATER THAN HE?

Afghanistan is not only the mirror of the Afghans: it is the mirror of the world. 'If you do not like the image in the mirror, do not break the mirror, break your face,' says an old Persian proverb.

Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs. fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them.

each generation has to create the image of God that works for it.

The Shah stayed on the throne until 1979, when he fled Iran to escape the Islamic revolution. Since then, this old and great civilization has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. As an Iranian who has lived more than half of my life in Iran, I know that this image is far from the truth. This is why writing "Persepolis" was so important to me. I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists. I also don't want those Iranians who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive regimes, or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland to be forgotten. One can forgive but one should never forget.

Although signs may be found in everything that comes to us, as though a river at our doorstep carried these messages on its surface, the Quran (like other sacred books) speaks in terms of empirical experience, since it is intended to endure through the ages and cannot bind itself to the ‘scientific’ theories of any particular time. Its images are the phenomena of nature as they appear to us in our experience — the rising and setting of the sun, the domed sky above and the mountains, which are like weights set upon the earth. Scientific observations change according to the preconceptions of the observer and the instruments at his disposal, and the speculations which blinkered human minds construct on the basis of these observations change no less swiftly. But man’s experience of the visual universe does not change. The sun ‘rises’ for me today as it ‘rose’ for the man of ten thousand years ago.

You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance, you cannot kill a dream or an ambition. God, manufactured by mortals in their own quintessential image, exists only to make daily life bearable despite the path that every one of us treads toward extinction. As long as men are obliged to die, some of them, unable to endure the prospect, will concoct fond illusions.We cannot assassinate or kill an illusion. In fact, illusion is more likely to kill us — for God puts to death everything that stands up to him, beginning with reason, intelligence, and the critical mind. All the rest follows in a chain reaction.

Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts--its precise date is unknown. The iconclasm laid down by Muhammed was absolute: you must resist attachment not only to painted images, but to natural ones. Ramadan, Muharram, the Eids; you associate no religious event with the tang of snow in the air, or spring thaw, or the advent of summer. God permeates these things--as the saying goes, Allah is beautiful, and He loves beauty--but they are transient. Forced to concentrate on the eternal, you begin to see, or think you see, the bones and sinews of the world beneath its seasonal flesh. The sun and moon become formidable clockwork. They are transient also, but hint at the dark planes that stretch beyond the earth in every direction, full of stars and dust, toward a retreating, incomprehensible edge

Efforts to silence the people who raised their voice – whether through violence, intimidation or the courts – meant that three decades after the Rushdie affair there was almost no one in Europe who would dare write a novel, compose a piece of music or even draw an image that might risk Muslim anger. Indeed, they ran in the other direction. Politicians and almost everybody else went out of their way to show how much they admired Islam.

All spiritual techniques seek to awaken fallen man from the dream in which he lives : he dreams continuously of individual state of being, and of the many forms through which the external world presents itself to him; he builds for himself a paradise of illusions, so as to forget the absence of God. To recover the vision of the spiritual world, the soul of man must "die" to this dream, this ceaseless flow of images which fallen man regards as normal, everyday state of his consciousness.

Christianity is a creed embraced by billions, but rarely chosen by anyone. The same is true of Islam, whose followers now make up about one-fifth of the world’s population of sex billion people. Jews are racially born into their religion. Today we have utterly forgotten that heresy derives from the Greek heraisthai, “to choose.” To be heretical means to have choices and not be forced or obligated to believe what one is told to believe. A heretic is free to choose what to believe, or not to believe.

Aucune cause n'a causé plus de tort à l'image de l'Islam dans le monde que le wahhabisme

The detailed gorgeousness of Orthodoxy was the reversed image of the sparse purity of Islam.

People say that America has no religion, but it's the opposite: America has every religion, all the old ones, and produces more new ones than anywhere else on earth. America;'s religious life is like the photo mosaic in which a thousand little images add up to one big picture, except there's no big picture, just a blob of unrelated and unrelatable images, texts, and poses, the freedom to take what you want from a religion and reject hte rest and be lonely, standing outsdie the warm shelters of temples with your own goon god that no one else can understand.

collapsed.” The scientific words overhead evaporated, and were replaced by images of Islamic religious texts. “Revelation replaced investigation. And to this day, the Islamic scientific world is still trying to recover.” Edmond paused. “Of course, the Christian scientific world did not fare any better.” Paintings of the astronomers Copernicus, Galileo, and Bruno appeared on the ceiling. “The Church’s systematic murder, imprisonment, and denunciation of some of history’s most brilliant scientific minds delayed human progress by at least a century. Fortunately, today, with

In March 2008, the Al-Arabiya news channel denounced my book The Truth about Muhammad, claiming that it contained “lies and hate.” Its article quoted the Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong as saying that the book was “written in hatred” and contains “basic and bad mistakes of fact.”8 The jihad terror group Hamas soon joined in the denunciation, thundering that my book was not just full of “lies,” but was actually part of a “campaign by Western extremists against the religion of Islam and values that are sacred to Moslems,” and was “another in a series of actions designed to distort the image of Islam in the public eye.”9

In America the gay world touched my life at the margins, though references and images and occasional conversations with men and women who celebrated their homosexuality with pride. As far as I could see there was nothing to be proud about. There was only pain, humiliation and shame. If I were to join this group, I would have to act proud and hide my feelings of rejection and loneliness. If I were to show these men and women that I was terrified for my future, I would be regarded as misguided or a victim of Islam or Arabness. But if there was one thing I wsa certain of it was that there was nothing misguided about my feelings, and I did not feel that Islam or my Arabness was to blame. If I were to join this group, I would simply go from the repressiveness of secrecy to the repressiveness of pride. I didn't despise my shame. I had no reason to do so. My shame illuminated my intense attachment to the world, my desire to be connected with others.

For example, it’s difficult to say, “God created man in His own image,” when we are forced to inquire whether humans really look like God, or if God has a favorite intelligent species among all others in His Creation. Neither governments nor religions want their followers questioning their faith or authority. But as I would find out later, Catholicism and now even Islam

After reading the Qur'an, I realized that I couldn't possibly endorse Islam as a religion, as a philosophy, as a moral standard, as an ethical code, or even as useful fiction. I determined that these philosophies and this image of Allah could only come from an extremely warped and disturbed person who suffered from an aggregation of the most severe and profound human weaknesses.

The Koran puts forward a clear, consistent image of the Jews: they are scheming, treacherous liars and the most dangerous enemies of the Muslims. Regardless of the actions of Jewish individuals today, and regardless of what policies the State of Israel follows, the Koran justifies an unrelenting form of anti-Semitism that will be extremely difficult to root out from the Muslim world.

In any case, the Christian world is not one, neither is the Islamic, nor does their combined authority speak to or for the entire world, but the world of the fanatic IS one and it cuts across all religions, ideologies and vocations. The tributaries that feed the cesspool of fanaticism may ooze from sources separated by history, clime and race, by injustices and numerous privations, but they arrive at the same destination - the zone of unquestioning certitude - sped by a common impetus that licences each to proclaim itself the pure and unsullied among the polluted. The zealot is one that creates a Supreme Being, or Supreme Purpose, in his or her own image, then carries out the orders of that solipsistic device that commands from within, in lofty alienation from, and utter contempt of, society and community.

The "peace" which Islam seeks in its arts arises not from hatred of the image, but rather from an alchemical spiritualization or sublimation of the senses. All Islamic art implies an Image, but one that cannot be openly stated: the Image of the One. Islamic art asks us to use our Imagination in an active relation between art-object and viewer, to allow the object to evoke our own creative apperception of Oneness.

The detailed gorgeousness of Orthodoxy was the reversed image of the sparse purity of Islam. One offered the abstract simplicity of the desert horizon, a portable worship that could be performed anywhere as long as you could see the sun, a direct contact with God, the other images, colors, and music, ravishing metaphors of the divine mystery designed to lead the soul to heaven. Both were equally intent on converting the world to their vision of God.

Average Egyptians take pride in their pharaonic history, but there’s also a disconnect, because the tradition of the Islamic past is stronger and more immediate. This is captured perfectly by the design of Egypt’s currency. Every denomination follows the same pattern: On one side of a bill, words are in Arabic, and there’s an image of some famous Egyptian mosque. The other side pairs English text with a pharaonic statue or monument. The implication is clear: the ancients belong to foreigners, and Islam belongs to us.

Islam's prohibitions against pictoral representation of the human being have prevented the ubiquitous spread of the use of the female body for corporate purposes. Advertisements do not feature superfluous female body there to titillate potential buyer. In advertisements...image is not advanced as an ideal to which other women should aspire. Hence the use of images of women (and men) does not promote the phenomenon of self-correcting and self-policing, as is the case with the use of images in the mainstream Western culture.

The differences between religions are reflected very clearly in the different forms of sacred art: compared with Gothic art, above all in its “flamboyant” style, Islamic art is contemplative rather than volitive: it is “intellectual” and not “dramatic”, and it opposes the cold beauty of geometrical design to the mystical heroism of cathedrals. Islam is the perspective of “omnipresence” (“God is everywhere”), which coincides with that of “simultaneity” (“Truth has always been”); it aims at avoiding any “particularization” or “condensation”, any “unique fact” in time and space, although as a religion it necessarily includes an aspect of “unique fact”, without which it would be ineffective or even absurd. In other words Islam aims at what is “everywhere center”, and this is why, symbolically speaking, it replaces the cross with the cube or the woven fabric: it “decentralizes” and “universalizes” to the greatest possible extent, in the realm of art as in that of doctrine; it is opposed to any individualist mode and hence to any “personalist” mysticism. To express ourselves in geometrical terms, we could say that a point which seeks to be unique, and which thus becomes an absolute center, appears to Islam—in art as in theology—as a usurpation of the divine absoluteness and therefore as an “association” (shirk); there is only one single center, God, whence the prohibition against “centralizing” images, especially statues; even the Prophet, the human center of the tradition, has no right to a “Christic uniqueness” and is “decentralized” by the series of other Prophets; the same is true of Islam—or the Koran—which is similarly integrated in a universal “fabric” and a cosmic “rhythm”, having been preceded by other religions—or other “Books”—which it merely restores. The Kaaba, center of the Muslim world, becomes space as soon as one is inside the building: the ritual direction of prayer is then projected toward the four cardinal points. If Christianity is like a central fire, Islam on the contrary resembles a blanket of snow, at once unifying and leveling and having its center everywhere.

When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today. Yet if we look at our three religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective view of “God”: each generation has to create the image of God that works for it. The same is true of atheism. The statement “I do not believe in God” has meant something slightly different at each period of history. The

By 1986 the CIA was spending 70 per cent of its entire operations budget funding a Muslim jihad to kill Russians. The whole campaign was managed by a bunch of Islamists who were giving the lion’s share of the US money and weapons to people who wanted to kill Americans. The US was happy to use Islam as a rallying cry. The CIA funded the printing of Korans to be distributed throughout the region, and the University of Nebraska produced primary-school textbooks, known as ‘the ABC of Jihad’, which taught children the alphabet and to count with Kalashnikovs and swords instead of apples and oranges, and were filled with images of Islamic warriors. Alphabet

Ruth and I often share the stories that we have heard and the things that we have learned to help the western church and many of its congregations grasp a new, and perhaps more biblical, perspective on suffering and persecution in our faith. We share often about how suffering and persecution relate to our faith. We desperately want our western brothers and sisters in Christ to realize that the greatest enemy of our faith today is not communism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Atheism, or even Islam. Our greatest enemy is lostness. Lostness is the terrible enemy that Jesus commissioned His followers to vanquish with the battle strategy that He spelled out for them in Matthew 28:18-20. He was addressing this same enemy when He plainly clarified His purpose in coming: 'I have come to seek and to save those who are lost.' Our hope is that believers around the world will get close enough to the heart of God that the first images that come to mind when we heard the word 'Muslim' are not Somali pirates or suicide bombers or violent jihadists or even terrorists. When we hear the word 'Muslim,' we need to see and think of each and every individual Muslim as a lost person who is loved by God. We need to see each Muslim as a person in need of God's grace and forgiveness. We need to see each Muslim as someone for whom Christ died.

Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them. When he seems to fail to prevent a catastrophe or seems even to desire a tragedy, he can seem callous and cruel. A facile belief that a disaster is the will of God can make us accept things that are fundamentally unacceptable. The very fact that, as a person, God has a gender is also limiting: it means that the sexuality of half the human race is sacralized at the expense of the female and can lead to a neurotic and inadequate imbalance in human sexual mores. A personal God can be dangerous, therefore. Instead of pulling us beyond our limitations, “he” can encourage us to remain complacently within them; “he” can make us as cruel, callous, self-satisfied and partial as “he” seems to be. Instead of inspiring the compassion that should characterize all advanced religion, “he” can encourage us to judge, condemn and marginalize. It seems, therefore, that the idea of a personal God can only be a stage in our religious development. The world religions all seem to have recognized this danger and have sought to transcend the personal conception of supreme reality.

There is a growing intolerance of inadequate images of the Absolute. This is a healthy iconoclasm, since the idea of God has been used in the past to disastrous effect. One of the most characteristic new developments since the 1970s has been the rise of a type of religiosity that we usually call “fundamentalism” in most of the major world religions, including the three religions of God. A highly political spirituality, it is literal and intolerant in its vision. In the United States, which has always been prone to extremist and apocalyptic enthusiasm, Christian fundamentalism has attached itself to the New Right. Fundamentalists campaign for the abolition of legal abortion and for a hard line on moral and social decency. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority achieved astonishing political power during the Reagan years. Other evangelists such as Maurice Cerullo, taking Jesus’ remarks literally, believe that miracles are an essential hallmark of true faith. God will give the believer anything that he asks for in prayer. In Britain, fundamentalists such as Colin Urquhart have made the same claim. Christian fundamentalists seem to have little regard for the loving compassion of Christ. They are swift to condemn the people they see as the “enemies of God.” Most would consider Jews and Muslims destined for hellfire, and Urquhart has argued that all oriental religions are inspired by the devil.

Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.

Like other people in the ancient world, the Babylonians attributed their cultural achievements to the gods, who had revealed their own lifestyle to their mythical ancestors. Thus Babylon itself was supposed to be an image of heaven, with each of its temples a replica of a celestial palace. This link with the divine world was celebrated and perpetuated annually in the great New Year Festival, which had been firmly established by the seventeenth century BCE. Celebrated in the holy city of Babylon during the month of Nisan—our April—the Festival solemnly enthroned the king and established his reign for another year. Yet this political stability could only endure insofar as it participated in the more enduring and effective government of the gods, who had brought order out of primordial chaos when they had created the world.

What would have made [seeing Göbekli Tepe from Harran] easier, in antiquity, would have been a tall tower annexed to the temple that once stood here--a temple dedicated to Su-En (usually contracted to Sin), the Moon God of the Sabians. After telling us that there were "powerful images in this temple," the Greek Philosopher Libanius (AD 314-394), describes the tower, noting that "from its top one could overlook the entire plain of Harran." [...] A team from the Chicago Oriental Institute was about to start a major dig around the ruins of the Grand Mosque in 1986, but it seems that the Turkish authorities insisted on such restrictive practices that the project had to be abandoned. Current excavations by Harran University and the Sanliurfa Museum Directorate show little interest in recovery of substantive remains from the city's pre-Islamic period.

It remains to be asked why today it is the image of the woman of the "Golden Age" [the Abbasid dynasty] - a "slave" who intrigues in the corridors of power when she loses hope of seducing - who symbolizes the Muslim eternal female, while the memory of Umm Salama, A'isha, and Sukayna awakens no response and seems strangely distant and unreal. The answer without doubt is to be found in the time-mirror wherein the Muslim looks at himself to foresee his future. The image of "his" woman will change when he feels the pressing need to root his future in a liberating memory. Perhaps the woman should help him do this through daily pressure for equality, thereby bringing him into a fabulous present. And the present is always fabulous, because there everything is possible - even the end of always looking to the past and the beginning of confidence, of enjoying in harmony the moment that we have.

Looking at a situation like the Israel-Palestine conflict, Americans are likely to react with puzzlement when they see ever more violent and provocative acts that target innocent civilians. We are tempted to ask: do the terrorists not realize that they will enrage the Israelis, and drive them to new acts of repression? The answer of course is that they know this very well, and this is exactly what they want. From our normal point of view, this seems incomprehensible. If we are doing something wrong, we do not want to invite the police to come in and try and stop us, especially if repression will result in the deaths or imprisonment of many of our followers. In a terrorist war, however, repression is often valuable because it escalates the growing war, and forces people to choose between the government and the terrorists. The terror/repression cycle makes it virtually impossible for anyone to remain a moderate. By increasing polarization within a society, terrorism makes the continuation of the existing order impossible. Once again, let us take the suicide bombing example. After each new incident, Israeli authorities tightened restrictions on Palestinian communities, arrested new suspects, and undertook retaliatory strikes. As the crisis escalated, they occupied or reoccupied Palestinian cities, destroying Palestinian infrastructure. The result, naturally, was massive Palestinian hostility and anger, which made further attacks more likely in the future. The violence made it more difficult for moderate leaders on both sides to negotiate. In the long term, the continuing confrontation makes it more likely that ever more extreme leaders will be chosen on each side, pledged not to negotiate with the enemy. The process of polarization is all the more probably when terrorists deliberately choose targets that they know will cause outrage and revulsion, such as attacks on cherished national symbols, on civilians, and even children. We can also think of this in individual terms. Imagine an ordinary Palestinian Arab who has little interest in politics and who disapproves of terrorist violence. However, after a suicide bombing, he finds that he is subject to all kinds of official repression, as the police and army hold him for long periods at security checkpoints, search his home for weapons, and perhaps arrest or interrogate him as a possible suspect. That process has the effect of making him see himself in more nationalistic (or Islamic) terms, stirs his hostility to the Israeli regime, and gives him a new sympathy for the militant or terrorist cause. The Israeli response to terrorism is also valuable for the terrorists in global publicity terms, since the international media attack Israel for its repression of civilians. Hamas military commander Salah Sh’hadeh, quoted earlier, was killed in an Israeli raid on Gaza in 2002, an act which by any normal standards of warfare would represent a major Israeli victory. In this case though, the killing provoked ferocious criticism of Israel by the U.S. and western Europe, and made Israel’s diplomatic situation much more difficult. In short, a terrorist attack itself may or may not attract widespread publicity, but the official response to it very likely will. In saying this, I am not suggesting that governments should not respond to terrorism, or that retaliation is in any sense morally comparable to the original attacks. Many historical examples show that terrorism can be uprooted and defeated, and military action is often an essential part of the official response. But terrorism operates on a logic quite different from that of most conventional politics and law enforcement, and concepts like defeat and victory must be understood quite differently from in a regular war.

The independence movements in the colonies and protectorates came into being, not through return to indigenous values on the part of those concerned, but through the absorption of occidental ideas and ideologies, liberal or revolutionary as the case might be. The process of modernization - a euphemism for Westernization - far from being halted by this withdrawal, was in fact accelerated. The enthusiasm of the new rulers for everything 'modern' was not restrained, as had been the enthusiasm of their former masters, by any element of self-doubt. The irony implicit in this whole situation was tragically apparent in the Vietnam war, when the people of that country fought, not to preserve their own traditions or to gain the right to be truly themselves, but under the banner of a shoddy occidental ideology and for the privilege of imitating their former masters in terms of nationalism and socialism. The west was at war with its own mirror image in a vicious dance of death.

My own observations had by now convinced me that the mind of the average Westerner held an utterly distorted image of Islam. What I saw in the pages of the Koran was not a ‘crudely materialistic’ world-view but, on the contrary, an intense God-consciousness that expressed itself in a rational acceptance of all God-created nature: a harmonious side-by-side of intellect and sensual urge, spiritual need and social demand. It was obvious to me that the decline of the Muslims was not due to any shortcomings in Islam but rather to their own failure to live up to it. For, indeed, it was Islam that had carried the early Muslims to tremendous cultural heights by directing all their energies toward conscious thought as the only means to understanding the nature of God’s creation and, thus, of His will. No demand had been made of them to believe in dogmas difficult or even impossible of intellectual comprehension; in fact, no dogma whatsoever was to be found in the Prophet’s message: and, thus, the thirst after knowledge which distinguished early Muslim history had not been forced, as elsewhere in the world, to assert itself in a painful struggle against the traditional faith. On the contrary, it had stemmed exclusively from that faith. The Arabian Prophet had declared that ‘Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim man and woman’: and his followers were led to understand that only by acquiring knowledge could they fully worship the Lord. When they pondered the Prophet’s saying, ‘God creates no disease without creating a cure for it as well’, they realised that by searching for unknown cures they would contribute to a fulfilment of God’s will on earth: and so medical research became invested with the holiness of a religious duty. They read the Koran verse, ‘We create every living thing out of water’ - and in their endeavour to penetrate to the meaning of these words, they began to study living organisms and the laws of their development: and thus they established the science of biology. The Koran pointed to the harmony of the stars and their movements as witnesses of their Creator’s glory: and thereupon the sciences of astronomy and mathematics were taken up by the Muslims with a fervour which in other religions was reserved for prayer alone. The Copernican system, which established the earth’s rotation around its axis and the revolution of the planet’s around the sun, was evolved in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century (only to be met by the fury of the ecclesiastics, who read in it a contradiction of the literal teachings of the Bible): but the foundations of this system had actually been laid six hundred years earlier, in Muslim countries - for already in the ninth and tenth centuries Muslim astronomers had reached the conclusion that the earth was globular and that it rotated around its axis, and had made accurate calculations of latitudes and longitudes; and many of them maintained - without ever being accused of hearsay - that the earth rotated around the sun. And in the same way they took to chemistry and physics and physiology, and to all the other sciences in which the Muslim genius was to find its most lasting monument. In building that monument they did no more than follow the admonition of their Prophet that ‘If anybody proceeds on his way in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him the way to Paradise’; that ‘The scientist walks in the path of God’; that ‘The superiority of the learned man over the mere pious is like the superiority of the moon when it is full over all other stars’; and that ‘The ink of the scholars is more precious that the blood of martyrs’. Throughout the whole creative period of Muslim history - that is to say, during the first five centuries after the Prophet’s time - science and learning had no greater champion than Muslim civilisation and no home more secure than the lands in which Islam was supreme.

At the present time, political power is everywhere constituted on insufficient foundations. On the one hand it emanates from the so-called divine right of kings, which is none other than military force; on the other from universal suffrage, which is merely the instinct of the masses, or mere average intelligence. A nation is not a number of uniform values or ciphers; it is a living being composed of organs. So long as national representation is not the image of this organization, right from its working to its teaching classes, there will be no organic or intelligent national representation. So long as the delegates of all scientific bodies, and the whole of the Christian churches do not sit together in one upper council, our societies will be governed by instinct, by passion, and by might, and there will be no social temple. ...We are beginning to understand that Jesus, at the very height of his consciousness, the transfigured Christ, is opening his loving arms to his brothers, the other Messiahs who preceded him, beams of the Living Word as he was, that he is opening them wide to Science in its entirety, Art in its divinity, and Life in its completeness. But his promise cannot be fulfilled without the help of all the living forces of humanity. Two main things are necessary nowadays for the continuation of the mighty work: on the one hand, the progressive unfolding of experimental science and intuitive philosophy to facts of psychic order, intellectual principles, and spiritual proofs; on the other, the expansion of Christian dogma in the direction of tradition and esoteric science, and subsequently a reorganization of the Church according to a graduated initiation; this by a free and irresistible movement of all Christian churches, which are also equally daughters of the Christ. Science must become religious and religion scientific. This double evolution, already in preparation, would finally and forcibly bring about a reconciliation of Science and Religion on esoteric grounds. The work will not progress without considerable difficulty at first, but the future of European Society depends on it. The transformation of Christianity, in its esoteric sense would bring with it that of Judaism and Islam, as well as a regeneration of Brahmanism and Buddhism in the same fashion, it would accordingly furnish a religious basis for the reconciliation of Asia and Europe.

Three years after the United States and the Israelis reached across Iran’s borders and destroyed its centrifuges, Iran launched a retaliatory attack, the most destructive cyberattack the world had seen to date. On August 15, 2012, Iranian hackers hit Saudi Aramco, the world’s richest oil company—a company worth more than five Apples on paper—with malware that demolished thirty thousand of its computers, wiped its data, and replaced it all with the image of the burning American flag. All the money in the world had not kept Iranian hackers from getting into Aramco’s systems. Iran’s hackers had waited until the eve of Islam’s holiest night of the year—“The Night of Power,” when Saudis were home celebrating the revelation of the Koran to the Prophet Muhammad, to flip a kill switch and detonate malware that not only destroyed Aramco’s computers, data, and access to email and internet but upended the global market for hard drives. It could have been worse. As investigators from CrowdStrike, McAfee, Aramco, and others pored through the Iranians’ crumbs, they discovered that the hackers had tried to cross the Rubicon between Aramco’s business systems and its production systems. In that sense, they failed.

Heaven's eucharistic irruption into earthly space and time prompted classical Lutheranism not to join the Reformed and Anabaptists in their campaign of iconoclasm which rendered Christian churches little different in external appearance from Islamic mosques. While conceding the adiaphorous quality of images representing various aspects of the Incarnate Life, as early as his conflict with Karlstadt the Reformer defended the appropriateness of the crucifix and sculptures of Mary with the Christ Child. Orthodox Lutheran architecture and church decor attested the confession of our Lord's presence among His own in the means of grace, forging a style which goes hand in hand with precious doctrinal substance. Increasing accommodation to the North American Puritan milieu over the past century has led to a loss of the genuinely Lutheran understanding of the altar as a monument to the atonement, which is Christ's throne in our midst. ... If our chancels' decoration (or stark lack thereof) bespeaks the absence of our Lord and His celestial companions, can we be surprised at waning faith in the real presence and at waxing conviction of the rightfulness of an open communion practice? A deliberate opting for Puritanism's aesthetic barrenness can only make the reclaiming of Lutheran substance an even harder struggle.

Bannon thrived on the chaos he created and did everything he could to make it spread. When he finally made his way through the crowd to the back of the town house, he put on a headset to join the broadcast of the Breitbart radio show already in progress. It was his way of bringing tens of thousands of listeners into the inner sanctum of the “Breitbart Embassy,” as the town house was ironically known, and thereby conscripting them into a larger project. Bannon was inordinately proud of the movement he saw growing around him, boasting constantly of its egalitarian nature. What to an outsider could look like a cast of extras from the Island of Misfit Toys was, in Bannon’s eyes, a proudly populist and “unclubbable” plebiscite rising up in defiant protest against the “globalists” and “gatekeepers” who had taken control of both parties. Just how Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty figured into a plan to overthrow the global power structure wasn’t clear, even to many of Bannon’s friends. But, then, Bannon derived a visceral thrill anytime he could deliver a fuck-you to the establishment. The thousands of frustrated listeners calling in to his radio show, and the millions more who flocked to Breitbart News, had left him no doubt that an army of the angry and dispossessed was eager to join him in lobbing a bomb at the country’s leaders. As guests left the party, a doorman handed out a gift that Bannon had chosen for the occasion: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” imprinted above an image of a honey badger, the Breitbart mascot. — Bannon’s cult-leader magnetism was a powerful draw for oddballs and freaks, and the attraction ran both ways. As he moved further from the cosmopolitan orbits of Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, there was no longer any need for him to suppress his right-wing impulses. Giving full vent to his views on subjects like immigration and Islam isolated him among a radical fringe that most of political Washington regarded as teeming with racist conspiracy theorists. But far from being bothered, Bannon welcomed their disdain, taking it as proof of his authentic conviction. It fed his grandiose sense of purpose to imagine that he was amassing an army of ragged, pitchfork-wielding outsiders to storm the barricades and, in Andrew Breitbart’s favorite formulation, “take back the country.” If Bannon was bothered by the incendiary views held by some of those lining up with him, he didn’t show it. His habit always was to welcome all comers. To all outward appearances, Bannon, wild-eyed and scruffy, a Falstaff in flip-flops, was someone whom the political world could safely ignore. But his appearance, and the company he kept, masked an analytic capability that was undiminished and as applicable to politics as it had been to the finances of corrupt Hollywood movie studios. Somehow, Bannon, who would happily fall into league with the most agitated conservative zealot, was able to see clearly that conservatives had failed to stop Bill Clinton in the 1990s because they had indulged this very zealotry to a point where their credibility with the media and mainstream voters was shot. Trapped in their own bubble, speaking only to one another, they had believed that they were winning, when in reality they had already lost.

Few things once seemed to me more frigid and far-fetched than those interpretations […] of the Song of Songs, which identify the Bridegroom with Christ and the bride with the Church. Indeed, as we read the frank erotic poetry of the latter and contrast it with the edifying headlines in our Bibles, it is easy to be moved to a smile, even a cynically knowing smile, as if the pious interpreters were feigning an absurd innocence. […] First, the language of nearly all great mystics, not even in a common tradition, some of them Pagan, some Islamic, most Christian, confronts us with evidence that the image of marriage, of sexual union, is not only profoundly natural but almost inevitable as a means of expressing the desired union between God and man. The very word ‘union’ has already entailed some such idea. Secondly, the god as bridegroom, his ‘holy marriage’ with the goddess, is a recurrent theme and a recurrent ritual in many forms of Paganism […] And if, as I believe, Christ, in transcending and thus abrogating, also fulfils, both Paganism and Judaism, then we may expect that He fulfils this side of it too. This, as well as all else, is to be ‘summed up’ in Him. Thirdly, the idea appears, in a slightly different form, within Judaism. For the mystics God is the Bridegroom of the individual soul. For the Pagans, the god is the bridegroom of the mother-goddess, the earth, but his union with her also makes fertile the whole tribe and its livestock, so that in a sense he is their bridegroom too. The Judaic conception is in some ways closer to the Pagan than to that of the mystics, for in it the Bride of God is the whole nation, Israel. This is worked out in one of the most moving and graphic chapters of the whole Old Testament (Ezek. 16). Finally, this is transferred in the Apocalypse from the old Israel to the new, and the Bride becomes the Church, ‘the whole blessed company of faithful people’. It is this which has, like the unworthy bride in Ezekiel, been rescued, washed, clothed, and married by God—a marriage like King Cophetua’s.

Islam tells us that on the unappealable Day of Judgment, all who have perpetrated images of living things will reawaken with their works, and will be ordered to blow life into them, and they will fail, and they and their works will be cast into the fires of punishment. As a child, I knew that horror of the spectral duplication or multiplication of reality, but mine would come as I stood before large mirrors. As soon as it began to grow dark outside, the constant, infallible functioning of mirrors, the way they followed my every movement, their cosmic pantomime, would seem eerie to me. One of my insistent pleas to God and my guardian angel was that I not dream of mirrors; I recall clearly that I would keep one eye on them uneasily. I feared sometimes that they would begin to veer off from reality; other times, that I would see my face in them disfigured by strange misfortunes. I have learned that this horror is monstrously abroad in the world again. The story is quite simple, and terribly unpleasant. In 1927, I met a grave young woman, first by telephone (because Julia began as a voice without a name or face) and then on a corner at nightfall. Her eyes were alarmingly large, her hair jet black and straight, her figure severe. She was the granddaughter and greatgranddaughter of Federalists, as I was the grandson and great-grandson of Unitarians,* but that ancient discord between our lineages was, for us, a bond, a fuller possession of our homeland. She lived with her family in a big run-down high-ceiling'd house, in the resentment and savorlessness of genteel poverty. In the afternoons— only very rarely at night—we would go out walking through her neighbor-hood, which was Balvanera.* We would stroll along beside the high blank wall of the railway yard; once we walked down Sarmien to all the way to the cleared grounds of the Parque Centenario.*Between us there was neither love itself nor the fiction of love; I sensed in her an intensity that was utterly unlike the intensity of eroticism, and I feared it. In order to forge an intimacy with women, one often tells them about true or apocryphal things that happened in one's youth; I must have told her at some point about my horror of mirrors, and so in 1928 I must have planted the hallucination that was to flower in 1931. Now I have just learned that she has gone insane, and that in her room all the mirrors are covered, because she sees my reflection in them— usurping her own—and she trembles and cannot speak, and says that I am magically following her, watching her, stalking her. What dreadful bondage, the bondage of my face—or one of my former faces. Its odious fate makes me odious as well, but I don't care anymore.

If the curtain is indeed about to drop on Sapiens history, we members of one of its final generations should devote some time to answering one last question: what do we want to become? This question, sometimes known as the Human Enhancement question, dwarfs the debates that currently preoccupy politicians, philosophers, scholars and ordinary people. After all, today's debate between today's religions, ideologies, nations and classes will in all likelihood disappear along with Homo sapiens. If our successors indeed function on a different level of consciousness (or perhaps possess something beyond consciousness that we cannot even conceive), it seems doubtful that Christianity or Islam will be of interest to them, that their social organizations could be Communist or capitalist or that their genders could be male or female. And yet the great debates of history are more important because at least the first generation of these gods would be shaped by the cultural ideas of their human designers. Would they be created in the image of capitalism, of Islam, or of feminism? The answer to this question might send them careening in entirely different directions. Most people prefer not to think about it. Even the field of bioethics prefers to address another question: 'What is it forbidden to do?' Is it acceptable to carry out genetic experiments on living human beings? On aborted fetuses? On stem cells? Is it ethical to clone sheep? And chimpanzees? And what about humans? All of these are important questions, but it is naive to imagine that we might simply hit the brakes and stop the scientific projects that are upgrading Homo sapiens into a different kind of being. For these projects are inextricably meshed together with the Gilgamesh Project. Ask scientists why they study the genome, or try to connect a brain to a computer, or try to create a mind inside a computer. Nine out of ten times you'll get the same standard answer: we are doing it to cure diseases and save human lives. Even though the implications of creating a mind inside a computer are far more dramatic than curing psychiatric illnesses, this is the standard justification given, because nobody can argue with it. This is why the Gilgamesh Project is the flagship of science. It serves to justify everything science does. Dr Frankenstein piggybacks on the shoulders of Gilgamesh. Since it is impossible to stop Gilgamesh, it is also impossible to stop Dr Frankenstein. The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, the real question facing us is not 'What do we want to become?, but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.

IDENTITY CLUE 9: “THEY ARE MAD UPON THEIR IDOLS”            “…for it is the land of graven images, and they are mad upon their idols” (Jeremiah 50:38b)            What is America’s currently most watched television program? Is it NBC News? Or ‘In Touch Ministries’ with Dr. Charles Stanley? No, and really, it could not have been more appropriately named. AMERICAN IDOL draws more viewers than any other television program, week after week. In the most recent season over 624,000,000 votes were cast. In the Old Testament, Israelites persisted in ascribing to hand carved idols powers and abilities that only God retains. In our day, we provide to actors and sports figures, not only mega wealth, we also ascribe wisdom to these human idols. We listen attentively to the political and governmental views of people who are paid to be something they are not. Voters are actually swayed in determining how they vote by what an actor or sports figure may say, or whom he or she may endorse. We are “mad upon our idols.

The Bible also affirms that in the end times God’s people will be martyred by beheading.            “And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received his mark on their foreheads or their hands.”  (Revelation 20:4)

Judaism and Christianity both agree with Islam in affirming a downward trend for humanity which is to continue until the cataclysms heralding Doomsday. Sometime during the late stages of this process, the Antichrist shall appear, who is not only the epitome of all evil but also the inverted image of Jesus, may peace be upon him, whom he will claim to personify. The Prophet, may God’s blessings and peace be on him, called him the ‘Impostor’ (al-Dajjal) since his characteristic attribute will be relabeling good as evil and evil as good, Heaven as Hell and Hell as Heaven, himself as the Christ and Christ as the Antichrist. And this is precisely what the West has already succeeded in doing. They have redefined the human being by bringing his physical form to the fore and denying his spirit, redefining him thus as an animal; and they have set the stage for putting everything to the service of the body and thinking solely in material terms. Whereas all religions say that man is degenerating, the West claims that, on the contrary, he is improving by the day; with the implication that they are now far more ‘advanced,’ far more clever and mature than anyone in the past. This evidently gives them the right to dismiss lightly the Prophets and sages of old and their timeless wisdom and speak of them in condescending and derogatory terms. Religion has been redefined as superstition, and the life-to-come as a childish belief deriving from an inability to face reality.

Although the hyperreal operates as its own type of reality, this does not mean that its provenance is divorced from the material conditions in which we live. The fact that the images that the media project can be readily identified as "representations," rather than the truth of the matter, works to further mask the political, social, and cultural interests involved. At the same time, these images have the force of reality and serve as a conduit of meaning. No doubt, viewers can recognize the Arab terrorists in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film True Lies (1994) as fictional characters ("It's just a movie!"), but these images undoubtedly reinforce, if not substantially inform, American viewers' notions of Islam and the U.S.-Middle East conflict.

The event that galvanized the rebel movement was the Islamic govern-ment’s law outlawing images, and its subsequent decision to destroy the Statue of Liberty because it was an image that they considered an idol. The original objective of the rebel movement was to liberate the United States and Canada. After years of fighting, their objective changed to the establishment of religious freedom. They have been fighting now for more than twenty years.

In 571 Mohammed was born in Mecca, and at his death in 632 the religion of Islam, of which he was the founder and prophet, had spread over the greater part of Arabia. Islam, or “submission to the will of God”, had as its creed: “There is no God but God and Mohammed is His Prophet”. It utterly repudiated images or pictures of any kind. Its book, the Koran, contains many confused references to persons and events spoken of in the Bible. Abraham as the Friend of God, Moses the Law of God, Jesus the Spirit of God, are all venerated, but are excelled by Mohammed the Prophet of God. This religion was mercilessly spread by the sword, and such was the resistless energy of the new enthusiasm that in less than a hundred years from the death of Mohammed, the dominion and religion of his followers stretched from India to Spain. The choice of conversion to Mohammedanism or death constantly reinforced the armies of Islam, but untold numbers died rather than deny Christ.

As for Islam, the orthodox conception of Allah is hostile to the scientific quest. There is no suggestion in the Qur’an that Allah set his creation in motion and then let it run. Rather, it is assumed that he often intrudes in the world and changes things as it pleases him. Thus, through the centuries many of the most influential Muslim scholars have held that all efforts to formulate natural laws are blasphemy in that they would seem to deny Allah’s freedom to act. Thus did people’s images of God and the universe deflect scientific efforts in China, ancient Greece, and Islam.

Rhetoric is not a substitute for image but it is the most flawless way of expressing meaning or truth. Through it the meaning of beauty and the aesthetic values of Islam are revealed. What is beautiful in Islam is what cannot be represented. It is what escapes the sensual and what transcends sensory perception. Beauty is lofty and supreme; it cannot be contained in a sensory form, nor can it be evaluated by the senses. Artistically, this means that aesthetic value is not contained in the ‘image’ or ‘form’ but in its meaning, and that beauty can be found only in infinity, which cannot be represented or in what cannot be ‘given form’.

There are no images or idols in Islam, so that man doesn’t limit God to a form. Nonetheless, true monotheism is not just belief in a single God, but the ability to see a reflection of God in everything for everything is infused and animated through the love of

The fact that many Europeans, including Fortuyn, were less liberated from religious yearnings than they might have imagined, made the confrontation with Islam all the more painful. This was especially true of those who considered themselves to be people of the Left. Some swapped the faiths of their parents for Marxist illusions, until they too ended in disillusion. The religious zeal of immigrants was a mirror image of what they themselves once had been.

Jewish self-image and its historiographic reflection were transformed by the destruction of the state and temple and the exile of the Jewish people. But continuity was preserved in language and scripture, memory and commemoration. The rabbis were not only the supplanters but also the heirs and custodians of the old tradition from which they claimed to derive their own legitimacy. The situation in Persia and in other Middle Eastern countries was radically different. Here the conquest and conversion of these peoples to Islam brought radical change and, above all, discontinuity. Muslim conquest brought a new religion and the consequent changes were far greater than, for example, in Christendom. Christianity triumphed in the Roman Empire, but it did so by conversion, not by conquest, and it preserved the Roman state and the Roman law and learned to live with the Latin and Greek heritage. Islam created its own state, the Caliphate, and brought its own language, Arabic, and its own scripture, the Qur’an. The old states were destroyed. The old languages and even the old scripts were forgotten. The rupture was not as complete as was once thought, or as Muslims claimed, and much pre-Islamic custom survived under an Islamic veneer. [...] There was no usable past from a Muslim point of view—hence the Muslim neglect both of history and of epic, with only minor exceptions. There was thus complete discontinuity in the self-image, the corporate sense of identity, and the collective memory of the Islamic peoples of the Middle East.

Lorsque la demeure islamique se remplit d’images et d’objets distrayants, et que l’on marche avec des souliers sur les tapis et les nattes, qui normalement sont réservés à la prière, l’unité de la vie islamique est rompue, et il en va de même quand les vêtements que l’on porte dans la vie courante ne sont plus adaptés aux rites de la shariah. A ce propos, il faut remarquer que l’art islamique ayant pour fonction essentielle de créer un cadre pour l’homme qui prie, le vêtement y occupe un rang qui n’est pas négligeable, comme le rappelle ce verset : « O fils d’Adam, revêtez vos parures (zeynatakum) en vous approchant d’une mosquée » (Coran, VII, 31). Le costume masculin des peuples de l’Islam comprend une multitude de formes, mais il exprime toujours le double rôle que cette tradition impose à l’homme : celui de représentant et de serviteur de Dieu. De ce fait, il est à la fois digne et sobre, nous dirions même majestueux et pauvre en même temps. Il recouvre l’animalité de l’homme, rehausse ses traits, tempère ses mouvements, et facilite les différentes postures de la prière. Le vêtement européen moderne, au contraire, ne fait que souligner le rang social de l’individu, tout en niant la dignité primordiale de l’homme, celle qui lui fut octroyée par Dieu. "Valeurs pérennes de l’art islamique

accompanied by a man that Revelation 19:20 calls the “False Prophet,” also possessed and empowered by Satan, who will perform “miraculous signs on his behalf,” that is, on behalf of, and to build the authority and power of the Antichrist. The False Prophet’s signs and astounding acts will deceive the inhabitants of the earth (Revelation 13:14). For example, he will be able to call fire down from the sky (Revelation 13:12). He will have the power to give breath to a statue of the Antichrist, “so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed” (Revelation 13:15). Richardson writes: “Imagine for a moment, a miracle-working evangelist who is completely possessed by Satan and refuses to take no for an answer at the threat of death. This is exactly what the False Prophet will be.

The False Prophet’s signs and astounding acts will deceive the inhabitants of the earth (Revelation 13:14). For example, he will be able to call fire down from the sky (Revelation 13:12). He will have the power to give breath to a statue of the Antichrist, “so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed” (Revelation 13:15). Richardson writes: “Imagine for a moment, a miracle-working evangelist who is completely possessed by Satan and refuses to take no for an answer at the threat of death. This is exactly what the False Prophet will be.

From its early days, Islam remained a European measure of what real heresy was all about. In the fifteen and sixteenth centuries, however, after most Muslims had been expelled from Spain and as real knowledge of them dwindled, the European image of Islam grew more distorted, becoming a colossal parody of Catholicism. From a well-defined other, its face was recast as a monstrous double, a reverse image of Christianity in all its virtue: the face of the scapegoat. This was not due to new thinking on the subject. Rather, cultural propaganda from the Crusades was simply dusted off and reapplied to the Inquisition. In the intellectual history of the West, Islam was delivered full circle, back to the demonizing portraits enshrined in the Old French epic of Roland. A Muslim became everything a good Christian was not. Islam was reduced to a set of self-referential signs and symbols.

It was Lippmann who gave us the concept of the “stereotype” (1922), which was basically a continuation of the Jungian concept of the archetype (1919) by other means. To Lippmann, the world outside our borders exists in a different space, consciously, from our own. We develop notions about life in those countries, their cultures, attitudes, and values, without ever go­ing there. Yet, their political situation affects our own; they exert a political influence—either through trade, communications, or transportation—on life in our own country even though we live in a constant state of unawareness of those countries, cultures, politics. The effect of these forces on us is invis­ible, but real. We then develop mental images—stereotypes—of the citizens of these countries, and it is upon the stereotypes that we act. The stereotypes determine our actions and reactions; like the stereotypes of the Islamic fun­damentalist, the Vietcong revolutionary, the Red Peril, they are easy targets, and the stereotype communicates a specific message, is, in terms familiar to the deconstructionism of Derrida, a text. Stereotypes can be created, and manipulated, by the gurus of mass com­munication and psychological warfare. Stereotypes are culturally-loaded and therefore not “value neutral.” We make snap judgments based on the nature of the stereotype; in the hands of the psy-war expert, a stereotype does not contain much complexity or depth. The idea is not to make the target think too clearly or too profoundly about the “text” but instead to react, in a Pav­lovian manner, to the stimulus it provides.

God’s people will be martyred by beheading. “And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received his mark on their foreheads or their hands.”  (Revelation 20:4)

Many have observed that Hollywood has the unique talent to ‘weave magic spells’ in its movies. But that will come to an end, apparently, as Jeremiah tells us that “Her images will be put to shame and her idols filled with terror” (Jeremiah 50:2d). Price Waterhouse Coopers projects that Americans will spend $495 Billion on entertainment in 2013. No other nation on earth spends so much of its national treasure on entertaining itself.

[...] si la Kaaba est le cœur de l’homme, les idoles qui la peuplaient représentent les passions qui obsèdent le cœur et l’empêchent de se souvenir de Dieu. Dès lors, la destruction des idoles [par le prophète] – et par extension le rejet de toute image susceptible de devenir une idole – est pour l’Islam la parabole la plus évidente de la « seule chose nécessaire », à savoir la purification du cœur en vue du tawhîd, du témoignage ou de la conscience qu’« il n’y a pas de divinité hormis Dieu »

Les caractères chinois s’étalent verticalement, de haut en bas ; ils imitent le mouvement d’une théogonie descendant du ciel sur terre. L’écriture arabe, elle progresse horizontalement, sur le plan du devenir, mais elle va de la droite, champ de l’action, vers la gauche, région du cœur. Elle décrit donc un mouvement allant de l’extérieur vers l’intérieur. Les lignes successives d’un texte sont comparables à la trame d’un tissu. En fait, le symbolisme de l’écriture s’apparente à celui du tissage et se réfère comme lui à la croix des axes cosmiques. Pour comprendre ce à quoi nous faisons allusion, il faut se représenter le métier à tisser primitif : les fils de la chaîne sont tendus verticalement et la trame les unit horizontalement par le va-et-vient de la navette, mouvement qui rappelle l’écoulement des cycles tels que jours, mois ou années, tandis que l’immobilité de la chaîne correspond à celle de l’axe polaire. Cet axe est en réalité unique mais son image de répète dans tous les fils de la chaîne, de même que l’instant présent, qui reste toujours un, semble se répéter à travers le temps. Comme dans le tissage, le mouvement horizontal de l’écriture, mouvement qui est en fait ondulé, correspond à la dimension du devenir et du changement, tandis que le vertical représente la dimension de l’Essence ou des essences immuables.

L’Islam rejette l’image pour les raisons théologiques que nous avons exposées. Or c’est un fait que les nomades sémites ne possédaient pas de tradition figurative – les arabes préislamiques importaient la plupart de leurs idoles –, et que l’image n’est jamais devenue, pour l’Arabe, un moyen d’expression naturel et transparent. La réalité du verbe a éclipsé celle de la vision statique : comparé à la parole toujours « en acte », et dont la racine plonge dans la primordialité du son, une image peinte ou sculptée apparaît comme une inquiétante congélation de l’esprit. Pour les Arabes païens, elle relevait de la magie.

Marie est la « servante du Seigneur », la servante par excellence, ce qui indique une similitude annonciatrice de la fonction du Prophète de l’islâm. Ce caractère servitorial est lié au symbolisme du voile. Selon Michel Vâlsan : « La Réalité muhammadienne constitue le mystère du Verbe suprême et universel, car elle est en même temps la Théophanie intégrale (de l’Essence, des Attributs et des Actes) et son occultation sous le voile de la Servitude absolue et totale ». C’est parce qu’elle est la servante parfaite que Marie est toujours voilée, aussi bien dans ses apparitions que dans les représentations de l’Art sacré, notamment celui des icônes. Comme elle est, par ailleurs, le modèle de toutes les vertus, l’Eglise aurait été bien inspirée de reconnaître que l’attachement islamique au port du voile pouvait constituer un exemple pour les femmes catholiques. Les querelles et les résistances modernes sur ce point sont révélatrices d’un état d’esprit antitraditionnel. Ibn Arabî enseigne que le statut subordonné de la femme exprime, non pas un abaissement, mais au contraire sa supériorité spirituelle sur l’homme qui, créé directement à l’image de Dieu, a tendance à oublier sa servitude et à se poser en rival de son Créateur . Toute forme traditionnelle est fondée sur une alliance impliquant une soumission à la volonté divine ; c’est ce qu’indique parfaitement le terme « islam » qui apparaît, par là même, comme une désignation de la Tradition universelle. Au lieu de reconnaître cette signification traditionnelle du voile de Marie, l’Église, sur cette question comme sur beaucoup d’autres, donne l’impression de suivre l’air du temps et, sans doute pour mieux se démarquer de l’islâm, d’encourager les femmes catholiques, en particulier les souveraines, à se montrer tête nue ailleurs qu’au Vatican. L’enseignement de saint Paul est cependant fort clair, et semblable à celui de l’islam : « Femmes, soyez soumises à vos maris, comme il se doit dans le Seigneur » (Col, 3, 18) ; « Je ne permets pas à la femme d’enseigner ni de faire la loi à l’homme. Qu’elle se tienne tranquille. C’est Adam en effet qui fut formé le premier, Eve ensuite. Et ce n’est pas Adam qui se laissa séduire » (I Tim, 2, 12-13).

Ce n’est pas à cause de son caractère sexuel purement physique que la femme musulmane se voile, même si cela correspond à une certaine nécessité sociale ; c’est parce que son apparence physique livre en quelque sorte son âme. L’épouse qui dévoile sa beauté à l’époux est, pour la sensibilité du musulman, une image évoquant non seulement l’ivresse sensuelle mais toute ivresse dont la vague quitte les rivages pétrifiés du monde extérieur pour s’épancher vers l’illimitation intérieure. Pour le « serviteur aspirant à la spiritualité », c’est l’image par excellence de la contemplation de Dieu… », que le Prophète Muhammad (‘alayhî salât wa salâm) a exprimé par «la fraîcheur de ses yeux»

jihad—God’s lawful war against nonbelievers. To drive the point home, the ambassador left Jefferson and Adams with a final image of what American sailors would face on the high

In Islam, only after standing before the judgment is someone's eternal destiny to be sealed. Jesus claimed to do only what His Father did, taught only what His Father taught, and in every way was the servant of the faithful. Thus it becomes more and more difficult to understand how God could speak so clearly through Jesus against violence (turning the other cheek) and then (supposedly the same God speaking through a later prophet) set up Sharia law, call for death for converts from Islam to any other religion (but especially to Christianity), or call for ritual death for anyone who might criticize or in any way portray an image of the prophet Muhammad.

What distinguishes us above all from Muslim-born or converted individuals—“psychologically”, one could say—is that our mind is a priori centered on universal metaphysics (Advaita Vedānta, Shahādah, Risālat al-Ahadiyah) and the universal path of the divine Name (japa-yoga, nembutsu, dhikr, prayer of the heart); it is because of these two factors that we are in a traditional form, which in fact—though not in principle—is Islam. The universal orthodoxy emanating from these two sources of authority determines our interpretation of the sharī'ah and Islam in general, somewhat as the moon influences the oceans without being located on the terrestrial globe; in the absence of the moon, the motions of the sea would be inconceivable and “illegitimate”, so to speak. What universal metaphysics says has decisive authority for us, as does the “onomatological” science connected to it, a fact that once earned us the reproach of “de-Islamicizing Islam”; it is not so much a matter of the conscious application of principles formulated outside of Islamism by metaphysical traditions from Asia as of inspirations in conformity with these principles; in a situation such as ours, the spiritual authority—or the soul that is its vehicle—becomes like a point of intersection for all the rays of truth, whatever their origin. One must always take account of the following: in principle the universal authority of the metaphysical and initiatic traditions of Asia, whose point of view reflects the nature of things more or less directly, takes precedence—when such an alternative exists—over the generally more “theological” authority of the monotheistic religions; I say “when such an alternative exists”, for obviously it sometimes happens, in esoterism as in essential symbolism, that there is no such alternative; no one can deny, however, that in Semitic doctrines the formulations and rules are usually determined by considerations of dogmatic, moral, and social opportuneness. But this cannot apply to pure Islam, that is, to the authority of its essential doctrine and fundamental symbolism; the Shahādah cannot but mean that “the world is false and Brahma is true” and that “you are That” (tat tvam asi), or that “I am Brahma” (aham Brahmāsmi); it is a pure expression of both the unreality of the world and the supreme identity; in the same way, the other “pillars of Islam” (arqān al-Dīn), as well as such fundamental rules as dietary and artistic prohibitions, obviously constitute supports of intellection and realization, which universal metaphysics—or the “Unanimous Tradition”—can illuminate but not abolish, as far as we are concerned. When universal wisdom states that the invocation contains and replaces all other rites, this is of decisive authority against those who would make the sharī'ah or sunnah into a kind of exclusive karma-yoga, and it even allows us to draw conclusions by analogy (qiyās, ijtihād) that most Shariites would find illicit; or again, should a given Muslim master require us to introduce every dhikr with an ablution and two raka'āt, the universal—and “antiformalist”—authority of japa-yoga would take precedence over the authority of this master, at least in our case. On the other hand, should a Hindu or Buddhist master give the order to practice japa before an image, it goes without saying that it is the authority of Islamic symbolism that would take precedence for us quite apart from any question of universality, because forms are forms, and some of them are essential and thereby rejoin the universality of the spirit. (28 January 1956)

[...] un art sacré n’est pas nécessairement fait d’images, même pas au sens le plus large du terme. Il peut n’être que l’extériorisation pour ainsi dire muette d’un état contemplatif et, dans ce cas ou sous ce rapport, il ne reflétera pas des idées mais il transformera l’environnement qualitativement, en le faisant participer à un équilibre dont le centre de gravité est l’invisible. Il est facile de constater que telle est la nature de l’art islamique : son objet est avant tout l’environnement de l’homme – d’où le rôle dominant de l’architecture – et sa qualité est essentiellement contemplative. L’aniconisme n’amoindrit pas cette qualité, bien au contraire, car en excluant toute image qui invite l’homme à fixer son esprit sur quelque chose en dehors de lui-même, à projeter son âme en une forme « individualisante », il crée un vide. A cet égard, la fonction de l’art islamique est analogue à celle de la nature vierge – notamment du désert – qui favorise aussi la contemplation bien que, sous un autre angle, l’ordre créé par l’art s’oppose au chaos du paysage désertique. La prolifération de l’ornement dans l’art musulman ne contredit pas cette qualité de vide contemplatif. Au contraire, l’ornement à formes abstraites la corrobore par son rythme continu ou son caractère de tissage sans fin : au lieu de capter l’esprit et de l’entraîner dans quelque monde imaginaire, il dissout les « fixations » mentales, de même que la contemplation d’un cours d’eau, d’une flamme ou d’un feuillage frémissant dans le vent peut détacher la conscience de ses « idoles » intérieures.

IDENTITY CLUE 9: “THEY ARE MAD UPON THEIR IDOLS” “…for it is the land of graven images, and they are mad upon their idols” (Jeremiah 50:38b) What is America’s currently most watched television program?

Se convertir d’une religion à une autre, c’est non seulement changer de concepts et de moyen, mais aussi remplacer une sentimentalité par une autre. Qui dit sentimentalité, dit limitation : la marge sentimentale qui enveloppe chacune des religions historiques prouve à sa manière la limite de tout exotérisme et par conséquent la limite des revendications exotériques. Intérieurement ou substantiellement, la revendication religieuse est absolue, mais extérieurement ou formellement, donc sur le plan de la contingence humaine, elle est forcément relative ; si la métaphysique ne suffisait pas pour le prouver, les faits eux-mêmes le prouveraient. Plaçons-nous maintenant, à titre d’exemple, au point de vue de l’Islam exotérique, donc totalitaire : aux débuts de l’expansion musulmane, les circonstances étaient telles que la revendication doctrinale de l’Islam s’imposait d’une façon absolue ; mais plus tard, la relativité propre à toute expression formelle devait apparaître nécessairement. Si la revendication exotérique — non ésotérique — de l’Islam était absolue et non relative, aucun homme de bonne volonté ne pourrait résister à cette revendication ou à cet « impératif catégorique » : tout homme qui lui résisterait serait foncièrement mauvais, comme c’était le cas aux débuts de l’Islam, où on ne pouvait pas sans perversité préférer les idoles magiques au pur Dieu d’Abraham. Saint-Jean Damascène avait une fonction élevée à la cour du calife de Damas (4) ; il ne s’est pas converti à l’Islam, pas plus que ne le fit Saint-François d’Assise en Tunisie ni saint Louis en Egypte, ni saint Grégoire Palamas en Turquie (5). Or, il n’y a que deux conclusions possibles : ou bien ces saints étaient des hommes foncièrement mauvais, — supposition absurde puisque c’étaient des saints, — ou bien la revendication de l’Islam comporte, comme celle de toute religion, un aspect de relativité ; ce qui est métaphysiquement évident puisque toute forme a des limites et que toute religion est extrinsèquement une forme, l’absoluité ne lui appartenant que dans son essence intrinsèque et supraformelle. La tradition rapporte que le soufi Ibrāhīm ben Adham eut pour maître occasionnel un ermite chrétien, sans que l’un des deux se convertît à la religion de l’autre ; de même la tradition rapporte que Seyyid Alī Hamadānī, qui joua un rôle décisif dans la conversion du Cachemire à l’Islam, connaissait Lallā Yōgīshwari, la yōginī nue de la vallée, et que les deux saints avaient un profond respect l’un pour l’autre, malgré la différence de religion et au point qu’on a parlé d’influences réciproques (6). Tout ceci montre que l’absoluité de toute religion est dans la dimension intérieure, et que la relativité de la dimension extérieure devient forcément apparente au contact avec d’autres grandes religions ou de leurs saints. ---- Notes en bas de page ---- (4) C’est là que le saint écrivit et publia, avec l’acquiescement du calife, son célèbre traité à la défense des images, prohibées par l’empereur iconoclaste Léon III. (5) Prisonnier des Turcs pendant un an, il eut des discussions amicales avec le fils de l’émir, mais ne se convertit point, pas plus que le prince turc ne devint chrétien (6) De nos jours encore, les musulmans du Cachemire vénèrent Lallā, la Shivaïte dansante, à l’égal d’une sainte de l’Islam, à côté de Seyyid Alī ; les hindous partagent ce double culte. La doctrine de la sainte se trouve condensée dans un de ses chants : « Mon gourou ne m’a donné qu’un seul précepte. Il m’a dit : du dehors entre dans ta partie la plus intérieure. Ceci est devenu pour moi une règle ; et c’est pour cela que, nue, je danse » (Lallā Vākyāni, 94)

L’état humain — ou tout autre état « central » analogue — est comme entouré d’un cercle de feu : il n’y a là qu’un choix, ou bien échapper au « courant des formes » par le haut, en direction de Dieu, ou bien sortir de l’humanité par le bas, à travers le feu, lequel est comme la sanction de la trahison de ceux qui n’ont pas réalisé le sens divin de la condition humaine; si « la condition humaine est difficile à atteindre», comme l’estiment les Asiates « transmigrationnistes », elle est également difficile à quitter, pour la même raison de position centrale et de majesté théomorphe. Les hommes vont au feu parce qu’ils sont des dieux, et ils en sortent parce qu’ils ne sont que des créatures; Dieu seul pourrait aller éternellement en enfer s’il pouvait pécher. Ou encore : l’état humain est tout près du Soleil divin, s’il est possible de parler ici de « proximité »; le feu est la rançon éventuelle — à rebours — de cette situation privilégiée; on peut mesurer celle-ci à l’intensité et à l’inextin-guibilité du feu. Il faut conclure de la gravité de l’enfer à la grandeur de l’homme, et non pas, inversement, de l’apparente innocence de l’homme à l’injustice supposée de l’enfer. [...] Bien des hommes de notre temps tiennent en somme le langage suivant : « Dieu existe ou il n ’existe pas ; s’il existe et s’il est ce qu’on dit, il reconnaîtra que nous sommes bons et que nous ne méritons aucun châtiment » ; c’est-a-dire qu’ils veulent bien croire à son existence s’il est conforme à ce qu’ils s’imaginent et s’il reconnaît la valeur qu’ils s’attribuent à eux-mêmes. C’est oublier, d’une part, que nous ne pouvons connaître les mesures avec lesquelles l’Absolu nous juge, et d’autre part, que le « feu » d’outre-tombe n’est rien d ’autre, en définitive, que notre propre intellect qui s’actualise à l'encontre de notre fausseté, ou en d’autres termes, qu’il est la vérité immanente qui éclate au grand jour. A la mort, l’homme est confronté avec l’espace inouï d’une réalité, non plus fragmentaire, mais totale, puis avec la norme de ce qu’il a prétendu être, puisque cette norme fait partie du Réel ; l’homme se condamne donc lui-même, ce sont — d’après le Koran — ses membres mêmes qui l’accusent ; ses violations, une fois le mensonge dépassé, le transforment en flammes ; la nature déséquilibrée et faussée, avec toute sa vaine assurance, est une tunique de Nessus. L’homme ne brûle pas que pour ses péchés; il brûle pour sa majesté d’image de Dieu. C’est le parti pris d’ériger la déchéance en norme et l’ignorance en gage d’impunité que le Koran stigmatise avec véhémence — on pourrait presque dire : par anticipation — en confrontant l’assurance de ses contradicteur avec les affres de la fin du monde (1). En résumé, tout le problème de la culpabilité se réduit au rapport de la cause à l’effet. Que l’homme soit loin d'être bon, l’histoire ancienne et récente le prouve surabondamment, l’homme n’a pas l’innocence de l’animal, il a conscience de son imperfection, puisqu’il en possède la notion ; donc il est responsable. Ce qu’on appelle en terminologie morale la faute de l’homme et le châtiment de Dieu, n’est rien d ’autre, en soi, que le heurt du déséquilibre humain avec l’Equilibre immanent ; cette notion est capitale.[...] (1) C'est la même un des thèmes les plus instamment répétés de ce livre sacré, qui marque parfois son caractère d'ultime message par une éloquence presque désespérée.

Les lois sacrées (sharâ’i’) sont toutes des lumières. La loi de Muhammad – qu’Allâh répande sur lui Sa Grâce unitive et Sa Paix !- est parmi ces lumières comme le soleil (5) : les lumières des planètes sont à la fois présentes et cachées, ce qui est comparable aux abrogations opérées par sa loi – sur lui la Grâce et la Paix ! – en dépit de la présence des Lois antérieures. C’est pourquoi cette Loi universelle qui est nôtre implique nécessairement pour nous la Foi en l’ensemble des prophètes ; nous devons croire que les Lois qu’ils ont communiquées sont l’expression d’un Droit sacré véritable (haqq) (6). Leur abrogation ne signifie nullement qu’elles sont mensongères : cette dernière opinion est celle des ignorants ! » (7) (5) Il ne s’agit pas d’une simple image, mais d’un symbolisme précis lié à la fonction solaire de sayyidnâ Idrîs, ce que confirme l’indication complémentaire donnée aussitôt, selon laquelle les Lois antérieures à l’Islam sont compatibles aux « lumières des planètes ». (6) Ceci est lié selon Ibn Arabî, à la fonction de la Pierre Noire qui, au Jour du Jugement, témoignera en faveur de ceux qui l’auront « touchée avec vérité », c’est-à-dire qui auront été fidèles au Pacte primordial conclu entre Allâh et les « descendants d’Adam », quelle que soit la Loi sacrée qu’ils auront suivie. (7) Futûhât, chap.339. [Extrait du chap 339 des FUTUHAT AL-MAKKIYYA traduit par Charles-André Gilis,in "L'Esprit universel de l'Islam".]

Islamic View of Sin and Humanity Traditional Islamic teaching does not accept that humans were created in the image of God. Islam has no doctrine of a sin nature and therefore does not believe that humanity is either depraved or fallen. Instead, men and women have the innate capacity to believe and submit to the Islamic revelation. Islam classifies the entire human race into four categories. The first is jahiliyyah, meaning those in a “state of

In the Discourse, a few verses further along: “Immediately after the distress of those days the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from the sky and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then the sign of the Son of man will appear in heaven; then, too, all the peoples of the earth will beat their breasts; and they will see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory” (Matthew 24:29-30). It’s almost like a mythological description of depression. Have you ever had a day when it all doesn’t make any sense? Emptiness has to precede fullness. Usually our old securities have to be wrested from us before we will move into the new. We seldom do it deliberately. Spirituality is always about letting go—not just in Christianity, but in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. All the great world religions at their higher levels teach the mystery and the art of letting go. You let go, and hopefully collapse back into your true self, into who you really are. The work of religion is to guide us on the path of the fall and onto the path of the return. What Jesus is painting here with his words is a cosmic liturgy, a cosmic image of everything falling apart. Out of that emptiness comes the possibility of a new kind of fullness. “Take

In this regard, professor of Islamic Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Washington Dr. Brannon M. Wheeler states, “The Muslim exegetical image of Moses in the Quran is linked with ancient Sumerian stories of Gilgamesh...”1678 Wheeler further says: In Muslim exegesis on the episode of Moses at the well of Midian there are several allusions to elements from the Epic of Gilgamesh....

The fact that Muslims do not believe man is created in the image of Allah,35 combined with the doctrine of tawheed, prevents any connection between Allah and man. Allah’s lack of unconditional love and mercy is expressed in the Muslim mind-set as well, especially in the way Islam views and treats non-Muslims. The impersonal and distant nature of Allah engenders a ritualistic and formalistic religion in which the individual can have no hope of personal salvation through faith alone.36 Instead, a Muslim must earn salvation through his works.37 Even a devout Muslim who diligently performs good works throughout his life has no true assurance that he will enter paradise in the afterlife. Continually working toward the goal of being “good enough” is thus extremely important in Islam.38 Unfortunately, according to the Quran, jihad is among the good works that earn Allah’s favor.39 In fact, martyrdom for Allah, dying in the way of Islam, is the only way to ensure acceptance into heaven.40 This explains why suicide bombing is attractive to so many radical Muslims.

But long before that, even before any of you were born, God knew your names. He has a plan for your lives. He created each of you in His image. That’s what the Bible says in Genesis 1:27 (NIV): ‘So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.’” Once more, I was startled. In Islam it would be regarded as blasphemous to think we were created in Allah’s image. “Allah has no offspring,” we are taught. Out of the 99 names for Allah in Islam another name missed is that of “Father.” That’s because Muslims are descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abraham, who was rejected by his father and then sent out with his mom, Hagar, to the wilderness. Ishmael then became an orphan. That is why Muslims believe Jesus cannot be the Son of God, because the god of Islam—Allah—has no children and is not a father.

was surprised by the scene because of the strict Islamic prohibition against graven images.

In his theorizaton of crisis racism under Thatcherism and in the France of an insurgent Front national, Etienne Balibar describes how the invocation of crisis licenses the ‘crossing of certain thresholds of intolerance […] which are generally turned on the victims themselves and described as thresholds of tolerance’ (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 219, italics in original). Establishing the intolerable is crucial to the exercise of racisms integral to but disavowed in national and European imaginaries (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998: 78). This preserves a hegemonic self-image of the tolerant acting intolerantly under duress: the 2004 redesignation of the wearing of the hijab in France as intrinsically an act of proselytization, the defence of the publication of the Jyllands Posten cartoons as an inclusive act of mockery, the objection to a Muslim cultural centre and ‘inter-faith prayer space’ near the former site of the World Trade Center in New York as an ‘assertion of Islamic triumphalism that we should not tolerate’ (see Pilkington 2010).

J'admire Shakespeare. Son théâtre est à l'image de la vie, qui juxtapose sans fausse honte le rire et les larmes, l'amour et la haine, la religion et le sexe. Les tragédies les plus émouvantes de Shakespeare comportent des scènes drôles et salaces. Ce livre-ci s'inscrit dans la même recherche d'authenticité que les pièces de Shakespeare, mais à la différence de Roméo et Juliette ou de La Tempête, ce n’est absolument pas une fiction. Il est très difficile à écrire parce que je n'édulcore rien, je ne déguise rien, et pour une musulmane c'est une démarche inédite, un effort à contre-courant. Les musulmanes sont censées choisir entre deux options opposées mais également insatisfaisantes : soit se taire comme des saintes-nitouches en plâtre, soit clamer haut et fort leur allégeance sans faille à République. Entre le destin de la potiche voilée et celui d'Henda Ayari, il n'y aurait rien à vivre. Je m'insurge contre cette dichotomie. Avec ou sans voile, une musulmane a le droit de dire tout ce qu'elle pense et de parler d'absolument tout ce dont elle veut parler, de la même manière qu'un homme lambda a ces droits-là. Elle a même le droit de parler de ses pulsions.

Jinnah had, among other things, criticized the singing in government schools of the patriotic hymn ‘Vande Mataram’. Composed by the great Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the poem invoked Hindu temples, praised the Hindu goddess Durga, and spoke of seventy million Indians, each carrying a sword, ready to defend their motherland against invaders, who could be interpreted as being the British, or Muslims, or both. ‘Vande Mataram’ first became popular during the swadeshi movement of1905–07. The revolutionary Aurobindo Ghose named his political journal after it. Rabindranath Tagore was among the first to set it to music. His version was sung by his niece Saraladevi Chaudhurani at the Banaras Congress of 1905. The same year, the Tamil poet Subramania Bharati rendered it into his language. In Bengali and Tamil, Kannada and Telugu, Hindi and Gujarati, the song had long been sung at nationalist meetings and processions. After the Congress governments took power in 1937, the song was sometimes sung at official functions. The Muslim League objected vigorously. One of its legislators called it ‘anti-Muslim’, another, ‘an insult to Islam’. Jinnah himself claimed the song was ‘not only idolatrous but in its origins and substance [was] a hymn to spread hatred for the Musalmans’. Nationalists in Bengal were adamant that the song was not aimed at Muslims.The prominent Calcutta Congressman Subhas Chandra Bose wrote to Gandhi that ‘the province (or at least the Hindu portion of it) is greatly perturbed over the controversy raised in certain Muslim circles over the song “Bande Mataram”. As far as I can judge, all shades of Hindu opinion are unanimous in opposing any attempts to ban the song in Congress meetings and conferences.’ Bose himself thought that ‘we should think a hundred times before we take any steps in the direction of banning the song’. The social worker Satis Dasgupta told Gandhi that ‘Vande Mataram’ was ‘out and out a patriotic song—a song in which all the children of the mother[land] can participate, be they Hindu or Mussalman’. It did use Hindu images, but such imagery was common in Bengal, where even Muslim poets like Nazrul Islam often referred to Hindu gods and legends. ‘Vande Mataram’, argued Dasgupta, was ‘never a provincial cry and never surely a communal cry’. Faced with Jinnah’s complaints on the one side and this defence by Bengali patriots on the other, Gandhi suggested a compromise: that Congress governments should have only the first two verses sung. These evoked the motherland without specifying any religious identity. But this concession made many Bengalis ‘sore at heart’; they wanted the whole song sung. On the other side, Muslims were not satisfied either; for, the ascription of a mother-like status to India was dangerously close to idol worship.

To mimic the Prophet is nothing but an impersonation, for his sublimity cannot be simulated. The instant his majesty is animated, it is reduced and degraded. The replication of his Sunna becomes a grotesque parody of images and sounds - a demeaning forgery and an insolent falsification. The authenticity of the Prophet does not mean imitation, but impersonation.

The era that began in 1979 is over,” he announced. From here on, Saudi Arabia would be the home of “moderate Islam.” To drive home the point, he declared, “We will destroy the extremists.” To emphasize the change coming in the country for the young Saudis who were watching online, he pulled out what looked like an “old” BlackBerry—circa 2005—and a current iPhone. The difference between the two, he said, is how Saudi Arabia would change. The image went viral.

I felt safe that people weren't judging me and making assumptions about my character from the length of my skirt or the size of my bra. I felt protected from all the crap about beauty and image. As scared as I was walking around the shops in the hijab, I was also experiencing a feeling of empowerment and freedom. I know I have a long way to go. I still dressed to impress and I took ages to get my make-up, clothes and hijab just right. But I didn't feel I was compromising myself by wanting to make an impression. I was looking and feeling good on my own terms, and boy did that feel awesome.

Actually I started that back in 1959. I was reading Science and Civilization by Joseph Needham, and I was thinking that I agree with the Taoists more than any other religion. And I started asking myself why. It occurred to me that in the Western World Judaism, Christianity and Islam all refer to God as He. That creates an image of a cosmologically huge human being and, I thought, “Now I can’t take that literally.” Yet, at the same time, although I’m not absolutely convinced, I do have a very strong intuition of some kind of cosmic intelligence. I’m an agnostic on the level of not being passionately convinced. I just have a strong intuition of cosmic intelligence.

Israel’s social media warriors know that connecting its mission to Washington’s post-9/11 struggles is vital to eliciting sympathy and support. “The so-called threat of Palestinian terror constitutes a key component of Israeli trauma narratives—a quotidian threat layered on top of multigenerational trauma over exile and genocide,” Tramontano argued: More concretely, Israel’s actions are presented as moral and legal, and the state’s current plight is explained in light of Israel’s tragic past. Images of New York City burning then directly connect Israel’s military operations to the American military response to the “trauma” of 9/11. Conversely, Hamas is cast as a barbarous and irrational enemy with no legitimate claims to trauma, much like narrations about al Qaeda, the self-declared Islamic State, and the like.16

People desire to be promoted to the heavenly planets because they have no information about the Supreme Lord and His eternal kingdom. Although many scriptures mention the Lord and His abode, due to material desires, the soul’s understanding about God is obscured. Clouded, the intelligence has less power to receive real knowledge about the Lord. As clouds darken the sky and obscure the bright sun from shining; as a dusty mirror cannot reflect a clear image; and as muddy water cannot reflect the visage of one that looks at it, material desires cloud the memory, mind and intelligence.

Islam is aniconic. In other words, images, effigies, or idols of Allâh are not allowed, although verbal depiction abounds. There was a question long debated in Islam: can we see Allâh? The Prophet said in a hadith, "In Paradise the faithful will see Allâh with the clarity with which you see the moon on the fourteenth night (the full moon)." Theologians debated what this could mean, but the Sûfîs have held that you can see Allâh even in this world, through the "eye of the heart." The famous Sûfî martyr al-Hallaj said in a poem, "ra'aytu rabbi bi-'ayni qalbî" (I saw my Lord with the eye of my heart). Relevant to the focus of this paper is that Sûfîs have always described this theophanic experience as the vision of a woman, the female figure as the object of ru'yah (vision of Allâh).

Finally, in keeping with Islam’s perennial threat and primordial boast, they used Hagia Sophia and many other churches as “a stable for their horses,” which they fed from toppled altars turned into troughs. Indeed, lest the jihadi pedigree of the sack be missed, the invaders everywhere set to desecrating and mocking all vestiges of Christianity—a sort of “Islam was here.” Thus, “they paraded the [Hagia Sophia’s main] Crucifix in mocking procession through their camp, beating drums before it, crucifying the Christ again with spitting and blasphemies and curses. They placed a Turkish cap… upon His head, and jeeringly cried, ‘Behold the god of the Christians!’” They “gouged the eyes from the [embalmed] saints” and dumped their corpses “in the middle of the streets for swine and dogs to trample on… and the images of our Lord Jesus Christ and His Saints were burned or hacked to pieces.

The Egyptian’s asset,” Ron Carter began, tapping a brief command into his laptop to bring an image up on the screen at the front of the room, “is this man. Amr Shafik. He was a member of Egypt's Freedom and Justice Party from 2012 to 2013, and was imprisoned when the military overthrew Morsi and cracked down on Muslim Brotherhood activities in the country. In prison, he made contact with extremist elements, and was drawn into the orbit of the Islamic State. It's not completely clear even at this juncture whether he did so of his own accord or at the order of the Mukhabarat.” Egypt's intelligence service, Kranemeyer thought, looking over at Bell to see the DNI listening intently. As feared and brutal today as it had ever been in the days of Mubarak. A brutal necessity, perhaps. Or at least that’s what they told themselves. He wondered sometimes, about cause and effect. “What we do know is that he was re-arrested for such affiliations soon after release and it was then, if not before, that Egyptian intelligence brought him on side. And that, according to what they’ve shared with us, is where he’s been ever since. Providing intelligence on the Islamic State’s leadership in the Sinai, particularly Umar ibn Hassan. As he’s done now, in giving us Hassan’s location for noonday tomorrow, local time.

For validation of knowledge about something, seeing something is not necessary. We use inference to know about things we have not seen, but which nevertheless are considered as true by inference. We would infer that someone put book on table if it was lying in cupboard when we last saw it. If we see an infant crying in a stroller in park and is unattended, we would immediately search for the parent or attendant who would have accompanied the infant to this place. Inference can be used to derive valid knowledge about unseen concepts whose physical manifestations can however be observed like gravity, for instance. We know that dark energy and dark matter, detectable only because of their effect on the visible matter around them, make up most of the universe. We knew black holes exist even before we observed them through a visible image in 2019.

The Sufi Way is to follow the model provided by the Prophet‘s representatives on earth, the saints, who are the shaykhs or the spiritual masters. Once having entered the Way, the disciple begins to undergo a process of inward transformation. If he is among those destined to reach spiritual perfection, he will climb the ascending rungs of a ladder stretching to heaven and beyond; the alchemy of the Way will transmute the base copper of his substance into pure and noble gold. The Truth or „attainment to God“ is not a simple, one-step process. It can be said that this third dimension of Sufi teaching deals with all the inner experiences undergone by the traveler on his journey. It concerns all the „virtues“ (akhlaq) the Sufi must acquire, in keeping with the Prophet‘s saying, „Assume the virtues of God!“ If acquiring virtues means „attaining to God,“ this is because they do not belong to man. The discipline of the Way coupled with God‘s grace and guidance results in a process of purification whereby the veil of human nature is gradually removed from the mirror of the primordial human substance, made in the image of God, or, in the Prophet‘s words, „upon the Form of the All-Merciful.“ Any perfection achieved by man is God‘s perfection reflected within him. (p. 11-12)

Un exemple de symbolisme, à première vue arbitraire et excessif mais en fin de compte plausible, est le hadîth qui voue les peintres et les sculpteurs au fond de l’enfer. On objectera évidemment que les arts plastiques sont naturels à l’homme, qu’ils existent partout et qu’ils peuvent avoir une fonction sacrale, – c’est là même leur raison d’être la plus profonde, – ce qui est vrai, mais passe à côté de l’intention essentielle du hadîth. C’est-à-dire que le sens littéral de la sentence, par sa violence même, représente une « guerre préventive » contre l’abus ultime de l’intelligence humaine, à savoir le naturalisme sous toutes ses formes : naturalisme artistique d’une part et naturalisme philosophique et scientiste d’autre part ; donc imitation exacte, extériorisante et « accidentalisante » des apparences, et recours à la seule logique, à la seule raison, coupée de ses racines. L’homme est homo sapiens et homo faber : il est un penseur et par là même aussi un producteur, un artisan, un artiste ; or, il est une phase finale de ces développements qui lui est interdite, – elle est préfigurée par le fruit défendu du Paradis, – une phase donc qu’il ne doit jamais atteindre, de même que l’homme peut se faire roi ou empereur mais non pas Dieu ; en anathématisant les créateurs d’images, le Prophète entend prévenir la subversion finale. Selon la conception musulmane, il n’y a qu’un seul péché qui mène au fond de l’enfer, – c’est-à-dire qui ne sera jamais pardonné , – et c’est le fait d’associer d’autres divinités au Dieu unique ; si l’Islam place les dits créateurs dans la géhenne, c’est qu’il semble assimiler fort paradoxalement les arts plastiques à ce même péché gravissime, et cette disproportion prouve précisément qu’il a en vu, non les arts dans leur état normal, – bien qu’il les interdise assurément, – mais la raison pour laquelle il les interdit ; à savoir la subversion naturaliste dont les arts plastiques sont, pour la sensibilité sémitique, les symboles et les préfigurations (1). Cet exemple, auquel nous nous sommes arrêté un peu longuement, peut montrer comment les formulations excessives peuvent véhiculer des intentions d’autant plus profondes, ce qui nous ramène une fois de plus au principe credo quia absurdum [je le crois parce que c'est absurde]. (1) En condamnant les images, l’Islam – bienheureusement « stérile » – refuse en même temps le « culturisme » qui est la plaie de l’Occident, à savoir les torrents de créations artistiques et littéraires, qui gonflent les âmes et distraient de la « seule chose nécessaire ».

Le rapport entre les positions respectives du Christ et de Saint Pierre dans la crucifixion est alors celui entre les deux triangles dans le « sceau de Salomon », et à propos de cette figure il est intéressant de remarquer que Guénon a écrit ceci : « ...dans le symbolisme d'une école hermétique à laquelle se rattachaient Albert le Grand et saint Thomas d'Aquin, le triangle droit représente la Divinité et le triangle inversé la nature humaine (« faite à l'image de Dieu » et comme son reflet en sens inverse dans le « miroir des Eaux »), de sorte que l'union des deux triangles figure celle des deux natures (Lâhût et Nâsût dans l'ésotérisme islamique) » (53). En simplifiant les choses, on pourrait donc dire aussi que les positions respectives des deux crucifiés figurent elles-mêmes — d'une façon globale — les deux natures, et alors le symbolisme qui en résulte pourrait concerner par exemple l'Eglise en tant que constituée par l'alliance entre la présence christique et sa base apostolique. La signification de cet aspect des choses peut être même soulignée par cette autre phrase que Guénon ajoutait dans le contexte évoqué : « Le rôle du Verbe, par rapport à l'Existence universelle, peut encore être précisé par l'adjonction de la croix tracée à l'intérieur de la figure du « sceau de Salomon » : la branche verticale relie les sommets des deux triangles opposés, ou les deux pôles de la manifestation, et la branche horizontale représente la « surface des Eaux » (54) ». Là encore on retrouverait le signe de la croix relié de quelque façon à la conception des deux natures. (53) Le Symbolisme de la Croix, ch. XXVIII (54) Ibid.

[M]osques in Mughal India, though religiously potent, were considered detached from both sovereign terrain and dynastic authority, and hence politically inactive. As such, their desecration would have no relevance to the business of disestablishing a regime that had patronised them. Not surprisingly, then, when Hindu rulers established their authority over the territories of defeated Muslim rulers, they did not as a rule desecrate mosques or shrines, as, for example, when Shivaji established a Maratha kingdom on the ashes of Bijapur's former dominions of Maharashtra, or when Vijayanagara annexed the former territories of the Bahmanis or their successors. In fact, the rajas of Vijayanagra, as is well known, built their own mosques, evidently to accommodate the sizeable number of Muslims employed in their armed forces. By contrast, monumental royal temple complexes of the early medieval period were considered politically active, in as much as the state-deities they housed were understood as expressing the shared sovereignty of king and deity over a particular dynastic realm. Therefore, when Indo-Muslim commanders or rulers looted the consecrated images of defeated opponents and carried them off to their own capitals as war trophies, they were in a sense conforming to customary rules of Indian politics. Similarly, when they destroyed a royal temple or converted it into a mosque, the ruling authorities were building on a political logic that, they knew, placed supreme political significance on such temples. That same significance, in turn, rendered temples just as deserving of peace-time protection as it rendered them vulnerable in times of conflict.

the rise of the IS was due to incompetence, then it is likely due to the error of “mirror imaging” among Westerners—the tendency to assume that the other “thinks like me.” When the IS, or al-Qa`idah, states that they are waging “holy