Sayyid Al-Qemany - Speaking of Islam?
Culture of Lies?
In the transcript to Memri Clip No. 5072 (August 20, 2015), the "Egyptian Author Sayyid Al-Qemany [Claims]: Using One's Mind Has Become a Crime; Any Free Thought Has Become Heresy":
When the [Arab Spring] events took place in Tunisia, I was asked whether I expected this to happen in Egypt. I said that I hoped it would not. I said that our people is controlled by a Wahhabi mentality. The entire people is Wahhabi. What is a Wahhabi? A criminal with a license, a divine license. Our Lord gives him a license to be a criminal . . . . Unfortunately, our culture is built upon lies, and our history is a fabrication. This has ruined our memory. A colleague said to me that the Muslim Brotherhood should rise to power, so that people would feel what it was like, and would then chuck them forever. I asked him: Haven't we been trying them for 1,400 years? He said: The people has no memory, because what students learn at school is . . . . about the glory of the caliphate and the greatness of the Islamic nation . . . The focus is on the nation and on its greatness, at the expense of the citizen. That's one problem. The nation is great, and Islam is great, and it does not matter who gets chopped to pieces underneath. It does not matter if the citizen gets chopped to pieces, if he gets burned, if his property is taken from him, if he suffers injustice, or if he is killed for no reason. The caliph would wake up one morning in a good mood, and would give a sack of gold to the first person he would meet. When he would get up on a bad day, he would give the order for his tailor to be killed.Al-Qemany seems to be speaking of Islam itself in referring to Wahhabism and the Muslim Brotherhood, as though there were no difference between Islam and Islamism - but we know, of course, that this is not true and should never be stated because that would be "Islamophobic," and no one should ever have any fear of Islam. Fear of Islamism is fine because it's a political religion, but fear of Islam is bad because it's only a political religion!
That's the crucial difference . . .
Labels: Dark Humor, Egypt, Islam, Islamism
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 10:05 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Around the time of Jesus' life, Jewish people were beginning to reject harsh punishments like stoning prescribed in the Torah while maintaining that their sacred core text is the inalterable word of their god. Most Muslims are good and decent people who seem to focus on the positive messages of the Quran. They read the same texts as violent Islamists, yet their behaviors are vastly different. While one can and should draw important distinctions among the texts and actual practices of major religions, when I look at believers with the eyes of an atheist, I see good people using religion as a tool of self-improvement and bad people as a tool of manipulation and control of others, ISIS is a perfect example. Bloody Islamists make headlines while the resurrected Old Guard from Saddam's regime are the masterminds acting from behind a curtain, obtaining funding from sources whose true motives may be geopolitical, not religious.
Sonagi
You might be too optimistic on this issue, Sonagi, but time alone will tell.
Jeffery Hodges
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