Koran control

Since a Koran wielded by the wrong person kills, perhaps it is time to start background checks on potential purchasers to ensure none fall into the hands of the mentally unstable. Considering the second paragraph in the quote below, even those that are sold should have a page capacity limit of 10.

Incidentally, when I grew up in the capital of Wales, Cardiff, not even the police carried Korans.

From here:

In the summer of 2010, mourners lined the streets of Wales’s capital city to pay tribute to a seven-year-old boy killed in a house fire. In fact, Yaseen Ali Ege was brutally beaten to death, and then set alight with barbecue fuel. By his mother. For failing to learn the Koran. Over the preceding months, Mom had used a stick, a rolling pin, and a hammer on her son, but, despite these incentives, he had memorized only a couple of pages. And so she killed him, and subsequently declared she felt “100 percent better.”

[….]

Of course not all Muslims brutalize their families — although the ten-year-old daughter of Asia Parveen of Stoke Newington was treated for 56 injuries after being beaten for not reading enough verses of the Koran, and Hesha Yones of west London had her throat cut by her father for being too “Westernized,” and a five-month-old baby in Halmstad, Sweden, was beaten to death with a Koran

 

Diocese of New Westminster: Christians have much to learn from the Koran

Lest anyone should start with the wrong idea: it’s not that we have much to learn about Mohammed’s paedophilia or the finer points of exactly which part of the anatomy must be amputated for various and sundry crimes. No, apparently, we Christians are simply too loving and the Koran can teach us how to balance our love with “justice”. No, no, not the stoning adulteresses type of justice, the “tolerating economic systems which keep whole nations in poverty” justice, about which the Koran has much to enlighten us, apparently. When it isn’t waxing eloquent on the joys of removing the heads of infidels.

From here (page 11):

My impression (from, admittedly, a reading of this book alone) is that the Qur’an has much of value to say about justice and how we should build, and live in, what the author calls a community of the middle way. It has less to say about the Christian virtue of love.

This discrepancy may permit us to correct our own faith. It often seems that many Christians will go the extra mile and more in loving response to an individual in distress while at the same time tolerating economic systems which keep whole nations in poverty. The message of the Qur’an might help us attain a better balance between love and justice. In all events, we have much to learn and even perhaps much to make use of.

Fatwa 40378

This particular Fatwa saw the light of day – in a manner of speaking – in 2003, so it isn’t exactly news. What makes it interesting is to view its description of Islamic contempt for the Bible in the light of Islam’s maniacal protectiveness of the Koran.

Here are the Rabelaisian ruminations on new uses for the Bible, courtesy of Fatwa 40378. Emphasis mine:

Judgment: Despising the Torah or the New Testament

Question: “Does someone who insults the Torah or the New Testament engage in apostasy, given that these include some words of God?”

Answer: “It would be impermissible to disdain the Torah and New Testament if they contained the truth and the name of the exalted, such as the name of God the Most High. Whoever does this [i.e., disrespect the books] knowingly and by choice would be considered an apostate and would be despised by God. But [in fact] the Torah and New Testament do not have anything exalted in them. They are known to have been corrupted, so there is no problem disdaining them.

Ash-Shams[ad-Din] Ar-Ramli [d.1004 A.D.] said in [his book of fiqh] Nihayat al-Muhtaj: “It is impermissible to use respected books like those of hadith and fiqh for anal cleansing after defecation (al-istinja’,الأستنجاء ), but non-respected books like philosophy, Torah and the New Testament, which are known as corrupt and which do not contain exalted names, can be used for anal cleansing after defecation.”