From the Pen of the Twelfth Imam

The depth of ignorance which prevails in America regarding the history and tenets of Islam is astonishing, considering the importance of the Arab world to US policy since 1949, and the fact that we have largely regarded ourselves as being at war with Muslim fanatics of one kind or another since 2001.  This is an ignorance from which I am myself not immune.

Muslims regard their religion as superior to all others, from the inarguable standpoint that it is unquestionably monotheistic and eschews even the barest trappings of polytheism, in history or practice.  Orthodox Jews may resent imputations of polytheism stemming from the Worship of the Golden Calf, but Muslims harbor an unconquerable belief that only their own faith is absolutely monotheistic and therefore righteous.  Unless one wishes to seem to argue for polytheism, it is difficult to fault their logic, at least so far as the Christian Trinity, the Community of the Saints, or the Adoration of the Virgin are concerned.  Whether this quasi-polytheism is mirrored by the reverence of the Jews for the Torah, as Huston Smith implies, seems less obvious.

I must say that I was surprised and pleased at the Koranic injunction for all believers to donate a fortieth of their net worth to the eligible poor on an annualized basis.  Except for the mandatory taxes on wealth enacted by the Roman Senate after the debacle of Cannae in 218 BCE, I am unaware of any similar exactions against wealth, as opposed to income.  This is, socially speaking, an extremely progressive notion which would be regarded as utterly poisonous by most conservative Americans today, and one can only admire the fact that it has been an integral part of Muslim society for nearly fourteen centuries.

I must confess that I have always harbored a deeply-rooted prejudice against Islam which will be very difficult for me to overcome.  This prejudice derives exclusively from its strict, even Calvinistic and Puritanical tendencies, as is amply demonstrated by what is for me its single most problematic dictum; namely, the absolute prohibition against figurative art.  Although far from universally adhered to (one remembers the glories of Rajput painting, e.g.), the proscription served to prevent the Islamic world from experiencing the glorification of the human form which was such a huge and positive element in the Italian Renaissance, the which served to strip Western Civilization of much of the morbid and moribund asceticism which had prevailed during the late Medieval period.  (The draperies of the columnar sculptures at Chrtres, for example, bear an astonishing resemblance to the draperies in early Buddhist sculpture, particularly the now destroyed Buddhas of Bamiyan. This is a remarkable similarity in art forms expressing congruent world-denying belief-systems despite having had no possible artistic interactions.)

358 days, 50 novels, 49 books of non-fiction to go.