July 10, 2006

Blasphemy of the Day

For your edification, here is your satanic verse of the day, which is attributed to Mohammed:

SatanicVerse.JPG

"These [Allāt, al-'Uzzā and Manāt] are the exalted high-flying ones, whose intercession is hoped for."

Why has this "satanic" verse caused so much trouble? Historians of Mohammad's life document the story of Mohammed's attempts to woo the Quraysh to Islam. Many of the Quraysh worshipped the goddesses Allāt, al-'Uzzā and Manāt, and turning to the moon god Allah required--according to Mohammed--rejecting the goddesses of their ancestors. This fact had originally precluded the Quraysh from accepting Islam. They were not opposed to worshipping Allah so much as they were opposed to rejecting their traditional goddesses.

The conflicts between the non-Muslim Quraysh and the Muslims had been quite a serious headache for Mohammed. Mohammed was pressuring the Quraysh to convert to Islam, but the non-Muslim Quraysh were unwilling to abandon their own religious traditionals. According to the historians, this impasse was broken when Mohammed publicly uttered the above verse, thereby endorsing the idea that Allāt, al-'Uzzā, Manāt were accepted as goddesses under Islam. In other words, this shift allowed the non-Muslim Quraysh to join Islam and still retain their worship of their traditional goddesses.

Sometime later (several years by some estimates), after the Quryash had largely converted to this polytheistic Islam, Mohammed received a new revelation that Allāt, al-'Uzzā, Manāt were not, in fact, goddesses. Mohammed explained that he had merely been tricked by Satan. Accordingly, the Quraysh could no longer worship the three goddesses and continue to be Muslims.

Historians do not agree on why it took Allah several years to correct his prophet. Some conjecture that the memo from Allah to Gabriel addressing the fiasco was misaddressed and ended up lost in a bureaucratic limbo. Others conjecture that a first memo was properly addressed, but conveniently "lost" by a loyalist for the three goddesses.

Whatever the reason, Allah be praised that the mistake was eventually corrected.

By Ragnar Danneskjold, Typical Bitter Gun-Clinger at 11:06 AM | |