The Quran-Hadith Complex
Apr 09, 2007
Do read this Front Page symposium that includes Kenneth Levin, Nancy Kobrin, Peter Raddatz, David Gutmann and Robert Spencer.
They discuss these questions: "Why are Jews in particular called these names by Arabs and Muslims? What gratification is involved when one needs to turn others into animal form?"
Jamie Glazov asks a few more questions later. Peter Raddatz replies:
Your questions are more than justified but based on partially wrong or rather incomplete assumptions. You insinuate that there is a logic of some sort that might be compatible with the one we are basing this talk around. Intentionally or not, you come up with a few expressions which are central to the whole problem: logic - pathological - reality - contradiction - belief - science - Allah. What misses here is the counter piece to reality which we might call utopia or rather pipe-dream.
Let me try to unravel your chain of questions the answering of which you are quite entitled to. They comprise a beautiful example for the aporetic character of the so-called "dialogue with Islam" as it deals with logical levels completely different from what we are used to in the Western world.
What follows after this is the most spectacularly illuminating explanation of Islam and its supreme vileness.
You know the original quote is really easy to understand.
Mohamad was a psychotic. He was angry with the Jews/Christians (I think the context was the realization that no one was going to welcome him as the messiah or prophet).
So he had a delusion/hallucination/nightmare reflecting his the change of his image of the attitude of these people. In his hallucination, in his delusion he did experience a mental representation the Jews and the Christians as pigs and apes.
We misunderstand this when we consider his utterance as being meant to communicate something about the world or about God... It was a communication about the delusions of a mentally ill man. And as such it isn't even unusual!
Posted by: Josh Scholar | Apr 09, 2007 at 02:41 PM
I had a friend whoes girlfriend was perhaps a bit brain damaged from diabetes (and perhaps not being careful to avoid sugar). When she was upset she would express her emotions as concrete images.
I remember one time she was upset that he had had too many friends over for too long and started saying, to no one in particular, things like "Shit flying across the room!"
Posted by: Josh Scholar | Apr 09, 2007 at 02:53 PM