Qur’an Down the Toilet! An Insult Beyond Belief
By Dr Ghulam M. Haniff
US

“Down the toilet is where Islam belongs” is the vulgar message symbolically conveyed to the Muslims by the offensive act of flushing into the pit-hole a copy of the Qur’an. When the report of this incident first surfaced Muslims were aghast, stunned beyond belief, that such a thing could happen in the bastion of western civilization at the beginning of the 21st century.
During their long and glorious history Muslims have experienced innumerable indignities, with insults to their faith galore, but humiliation of this magnitude, with Qur’an thrown in the toilet, stands in a class by itself. No Muslim would have imagined such a barbaric act of sacrilege, anywhere, least of all in a society that claims for itself the moral high ground worthy of universal emulation.
Muslims have come to believe that desecration of the Qur’an is meant not only to torment the detainees, many of whom are naïve, innocent and young, and picked up randomly on mere suspicion, but is designed to degrade the spiritual foundation of Islam and to emotionally bankrupt its followers. It is indeed a form of mental torture that many Muslims find incredible, and unbearable.
The world is gradually coming to understand the mind-set of the people who run the detention facilities. Almost everyone is struck by their obsession with sexual perversion, graphically dramatized by the pictures taken at Abu Ghraib, and scatological matters, centering on human excreta and toilet, of which there are so many, with most shocking ones involve the defilement of the Qur’an with feces. In the Muslim mind this is the ultimate insult.
Reporters around the world have noted with disgust the increasing evidence on “the sexual humiliation of Muslim prisoners, their shackling to seats in which they defecate and urinate, the use of pornography to make Muslim prisoners feel impure” and the active role of “female interrogators” who, teasingly and titillatingly, touch their genitalia and that of their victims.
Physical beatings and the use of dogs to frighten and bite prisoners is so routine that eye-witness accounts are beginning to be written with decreasing frequency. One recent exception is the story of an innocent Afghan taxi driver Dilawar, reported by Tim Golden in the New York Times, who was beaten to a pulp and spent the final days before his death tormented and chained to the ceiling. He died begging for water, which was denied but was forcefully sprayed on his face.
Responding on ABC News about questions on sadomasochism and toilet related means as aspects of torture Colonel Patrick Lang, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency who specialized on the Middle East, wondered out loud whether this was a “scene from Dante’s Inferno” and rhetorically asked “what level of hell are we on to?”
Reference to feces and sex is not only confined to the military’s “culture of filth” but is widespread in the mainstream society. Most people who watch television and have conversation with others are familiar with at least two four letter words used in the vernacular culture. When Newsweek retracted the Qur’an story the New York Post jumped to headline: “Holy Shiite – Newsweek Retracts its Deadly Toilet Tale.” No one is left wondering what that headline meant. Readers, of course, grasped right away that Muslims have been equated with feces.
Not to be outdone even a church got in the act. The Danieltown Baptist Church in Rutherford County, North Carolina, put up a sign on its billboard proclaiming: “Koran Needs to be Flushed.” The pastor, when interviewed, expressed pride in the sign by saying that it is “only to affirm and exalt the Bible and its teachings.”
A joke going around in some circles has the punch line which says that Muslims have been finally put where they belong - right in the toilet. And Ariel Sharon will flush them down into the cesspool. No one should be confused how Muslims are seen by the powers that control the Middle East.
“Make no mistake about it,” is what one person said recently at a gathering, “the clash of civilizations is alive and well. It is in full swing. Muslims are the selected victims.” When Qur’an is so abhorrently desecrated in the worst possible manner it is hard to believe anything else.

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Editor: Akhtar M. Faruqui
© 2004 pakistanlink.com . All Rights Reserved.