ALLAHU AKHbrrrrr?
By marion ds dreyfus
Excuse us. We know enough Arabic to understand what the above phrase signifies to muslims. It translates into “G-d is Great.” This is, mind you, approximating the Anglophile name for the Deity.
Since Allah as a concept is so far to the edge of what civilized non-muslims consider when they think of Deity, especially the Judeo-Christian concept of Deity, even including the Hindu notion of forbearance, comfort, love and forgiveness, it would be much more logical to translate the hair-raising phrase as “Allah is Great,” since devotees of this “religion”—more a politico-societal cult with world domination goals no one denies and most solid advocates congratulate themselves on—follow a different drummer when it comes to the heavenly Director of earthly actions.
We are puzzled: What exactly is connoted when the umbrella, one-size-fits-all-muslims phrase is rendered, as it so grievously is at the moment when a muslim of sorts is administering ‘last rites’ to a kufar, infidel, using whatever knife, machete, garrotte, scimitar, explosive device, airplane cum building-destroying bomb and the like is ready to hand?
When we called Cassius Clay, a marvel of speed and poetic dervishness, The Greatest, we were acknowledging his terrific entertainment-washed fighting virtuosity. Admirers of calls for liberty dub Mark Levin “The Great One,” because his knowledge base and constitutional chops are immense, he is fearless in the defense of our rights, and he has a resume that backs up what he says on the radio and on TV (from his underground bunker) with impressive real-world White House and congressional credentials.
Even on the magic side of things, Harry Houdini, The Great Houdini, is the name that exemplifies “escape artist.” Born Erich Weiss (thought: Why are so many magicians of Hebraic background? A topic for another day), Houdini derived his name from that of great French magician, Jean Robert-Houdin. Not incidentally, Houdini was also noted as a ferocious debunker of fraudulent self-appointed “mystics.” He was a marvel, entertaining myriads during his brief life—1874-1926—with tricks that delighted and amazed.
So the term The Great is clear: It connotes and denotes brilliant, supernal talents/traits that usually engage, stimulate, favor and grace human beings with their remarkable gifts and benisons.
Can we then apply this to those who gleefully invoke their favorite Deity when they are out for devotions? Is Allah demonstrably “great,” or His lustre embellished, when 19 of the cult’s acolytes (from firmly islam-entrenched Saudi Arabia and Egypt) crash several large 767s into iconic buildings in New York City, killing themselves—of course—all the passengers in their air carriers, nearly 3,000 innocent citizens of New York, and into a thwarted effort to burn and destroy Pentagon walls in Washington, DC, as well as another guessable target at the center of our national Capitol? One would think any Deity worth his salt would consider this a knavish blemish at the very least. And object to His name being flamboyantly wahoo’ed at the moment of maximum evil.
Can we apply “the Great” to the frenzied shootings by Maj. Nidal Hasan, a member of the US Armed Services—a psychiatrist, amusingly enough—a man seen by hundreds as he wielded his weapon of mass murder, slaying 14, injuring more than 30 colleagues and one infant in utero?
Was that “Great”? Did Allah lick his chops and give Hasan, still alas among the living, the equivalent of honeyed baklava points for disturbing the lives and families and state he moiled by his uniquely savage eruption? Hasan’d been kid-gloved through a decade of increasingly disturbed behavior, promoted, accorded all the considerable goodies lavished upon military rank, left to his own peculiar avocations, apparently, aside from performing, notably poorly, the minimal duties assigned. But in honor of his “Great” Allah, he chose to murder a random assortment of fine individuals who had done him no harm, snuffing out their lives without mercy or time for prayer to their Deity.
Can we say that the Tsarnaev brothers late of Chechniya were extolling their “Great” upside idol when in April they calmly planted bombs at the annual Marathon, pulverizing several blameless Bostoners and visitors, crippling dozens of finishing-line runners? Where is the “Great” in that act of craven brutishness? Does Allah feel parental pride in the months of rehabilitation, the mountains of debt engendered by the attempted repairs to these athletes and families?
And close to mind, how “Great” were the two recent converts to the islam cult who beheaded a British drummer, Lee Rigby, with meat cleavers in broad daylight in Woolwich, a sleepy town in Great Britain for the crime of being on the street and wearing a T-shirt these two extrusions of vile protoplasm did not approve of?
When else do the minions of this cult shout in their curdling tones this meaningless bracer to accompany their activities? Are there recorded events where peaceful and loving circumstances are burnished by the more typically sanguinary duadic phrase?
In other words, what’s so “great” about this Allah that he’s preened by the sacrifice of totally innocent men, women, infants, elderly, animals and nature?
Is the Allah these killers evoke when they cry Allahu etcetera a being afflicted with a massive personality disorder?
You can’t label Him a “normal” Deity in the pantheon of Deities worshiped by most of the world’s longtime religions. Religions that mind their own business, ask but that their devotees do justice and good deeds, and live as others would live, in an efforted nimbus of compassion and generosity.
If He celebrates, even tolerates, the likes of cultists Copt-burning innocents in Egypt, slaying Christians in Nigeria, and Hindu-virgin raping in India, the wholesale enslavement of pantheists and animists of the Sudan, and all the phantasmagorical homicidal assaults the world over for the past 1,400 years since the unfortunate ascent of this cult into the world’s history book, this Allah is a stone-cold sociopath. An ice-cold racist, too, most likely: The worst word one can assign anything.
Are we sure we ought to keep mouthing the platitudes? Don’t we usually do something more definitive with dangerous, disordered beings? Isn’t there more to do than wringing our hands and pointing vaguely at the sunset, hoping the latest heinous provocation of a disturbed cult will get a grip and realize that super-pathology is not the way to get to a storied tomorrow or an elegiacal Next?
And what’s so great about inheriting five dozen sexual know-nothings in the Elysian foothills?
On second thought, the best that should be said by these avatars of death ought to be a max of Allahu So-So.
marion d s dreyfus . . .
june 20(c)13
Posts
