Flushing Korans

Am I the only one who sees "flushing a Koran down the toilet" as funny? It seems this image is just too much for everyone, not just some traditional Muslims. I wonder... had there been no violent outrage about this by Muslims in Afghanistan and other regions, would there be much attention given to this "event"? Would the American media have bothered? Would any media have bothered?

Would the American government have bothered to express outrage? It seems likely that most all the drama around this "event" has more to do with "face" and manipulative posturing than sincerity. And on some level everyone knows it, even the players themselves. Everyone is caught in spin.

And now to top it off, we don't even know whether the offending incident ever happened! Is this latest revelation just more political "spin"? Even the White House, a bastion of Christian belief and not at all viewed as a defender of the values of traditional Islam, is expressing outrage at this event. And now it seems even more so at its possible/probable fabrication! Can there be anything in any of this except posturing?

And their description of what happened: ABHORRENT.

Amazing how infrequently we hear this word "abhorrent", as body counts rise and people's homes and lives are blasted away in this dispute, or in some other Middle East violence or in clashes elsewhere. Those events are not particularly abhorrent, it seems.

Perhaps imagining the passage of a copy of the Koran squishing down a deep porcelain throat amid a sucking gurgle, the White House saw that it might instead have been a copy of the Bible. What to say about all those other faiths and their holy texts? ...well you get the idea.

Now we live in a world where "religious feelings" are of more importance than life itself. People are killed for religious feelings. Yes, I realize this is hardly news. But am I the only one who sees this as just a tad off-balance?

Then there's that really important religious issue, which, it seems, no imam dares to discuss. You see, Islam is particularly against idol worship. In fact, if you check the history of Mohammed and how Islam arose, you will find it was particularly against idol worship from its outset, as that was a prominent practice at that time of history. I think it is fair to say idol worship was abhorrent to Muslims then. And I believe, if I am not mistaken, the avoidance of idol worship is required quite clearly by the Koran. The basic message: Muslims are not to be idol worshippers.

So why now is a copy of the Koran viewed as something worthy of worship? Why is the a copy of the Koran to be defended as if it were Mohammed himself? Why has the Koran become effectively an idol? OK, I understand it is not a statue or some other anthropomorphic representation, but it certainly SEEMS to be an object of worship today. What are Muslims defending? And why? It's not as if the words will be lost forever if a copy of the Koran is destroyed. Have the Muslim clergy across the world become blind to how they have made into an idol one of the icons of their practice? What would Mohammed say?

This of course says nothing about that other idol so central to Muslim belief: the Kaaba. But I'll not go into that.

It remains peculiar that people have become so skewed about their values, that a non-Muslim living in a country not considered even close to Islamic, has to point out these inconsistencies. How many people have died because of these practices? How many more are sure to?

If the Middle East and the West ever plan to find their common humanity, there will need to be a meaningful conversation between all parties involving belief, its place in life, and how absurdities like the one revealed by recents events such as the "toilet incident" can occur. This of course is going to unmask the contradictions in every belief system. How unsettling. How liberating.

OK, so that won't happen. I guess we will just have to keep on killing and hating and fearing each other.