In the corner of Sunday's Oliphant cartoon titled "Pastor Jones goes to New York", a small character quips, "Your 15 minutes are up, Reverend" (Bangkok Post, Sept 12).
That may be true about Terry Jones' personal fame, since a month ago no one on this side of the globe had heard about him or his tiny Protestant church in Gainesville, Florida, nor of his 2010 book, Islam is of the Devil.
But when he announced the "International Burn a Koran Day" from 6pm to 9pm supposedly to be held on Sept 11, the world's attention descended upon him.
The outcry against his proposed act from religious leaders around the world notwithstanding, world leaders from President Barack Obama to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to David Howell Petraeus _ a former professor of international relations who received his PhD from Princeton and is now the commander of US forces in Afghanistan _ all were in unison in appealing to the pastor to call off this act, fearing it would provide some Muslims with justification for "holy anger" that could fuel further violence around the world, and American lives, among others, would be endangered.
After the intervention of Imam Muhammad Musri, who arranged a meeting with another New York imam concerning the construction of an Islamic centre and a mosque near the site of the 9/11 atrocity, Pastor Jones told the press that his Koran burning act would be put on hold for the time being.
If one agrees with Dominique Moisi in his recent book, The Geopolitics of Emotion (2010), that one cannot fully understand the world today without trying to construe the ways in which emotions such as fear, humiliation and hope shape world politics, and that a clash of emotions between fear in "the West" and humiliation in the Muslim world is going on, then I would argue that what Pastor Jones did was to show us how vulnerable to global violence the world has become. More importantly, to live with such vulnerability, a genuine appreciation of such a danger is to understand both the meaning of the Koran in the lives of Muslims, and the dangerous implications of book burning, sacred and otherwise, for freedom and violence.
Koran and the Muslim Mind
I've just read a short Thai novel about a Buddhist teacher who falls in love with the daughter of an imam in a southern province. The man is first captured by the beauty of her voice reciting the sacred Koran.
It is believed that the sound of the holy book being read can soften the human heart. I myself try to read the Koran every day, and in the silence of the night I can feel its power consoling my sometimes restless soul.
To be a Muslim, there are 6 articles of faith one has to believe: in God, in His angels, in His books _ and Koran is not the only one _ in his prophets, in the end of days, and that all good and ill come from God.
The Koran is a book arranged into 114 chapters with more than 6,000 verses. The Koran has many names. Apart from being called "al-huda" or guidance post, it is called "Kalam-ul-lah" or "Words of God". As a revealed religion, similar to Christianity and Judaism and different from Buddhism as an enlightened religion, Muslims believe that the Prophet Muhammad, who was illiterate, received God's first revelation in a cave in the Mountain of Light in 610 AD. And the first time it came to him, it came in 5 verses:
"Recite in the name of your Lord who created
Man from blood coagulated.
Recite for your Lord is Most Generous,
Who taught by the pen,
Taught what they did not know unto men."
(Chapter 96: verse 1-5)
If he or she is unclean, a Muslim cannot touch the Koran (which literally means "to read" or "to recite"). Only after making ablutions can he or she touch the book. Even when the books are worn out, they must be treated with respect. A Durban magazine, al-Ummah (2008) reports the case of Baker Wahid, a South African farmer who used to collect worn copies of the Koran and respectfully bury them in his own farmland. In the town of Quetta in western Pakistan next to the Afghan border, in 1992 Haji Allan Noor Daavi began digging a cave in his friend's quarry, to create a depot for old, worn copies of the Koran which he packed in linen sacks. Presently his endeavour became a foundation called Jabal-e-Noor al -Qur'an (Koran, Mountain of Light) which continues to collect old and damaged copies of the book to either be restored or buried.
Such reverence for the Koran in the minds of Muslims needs to be understood. So when Pastor Jones, in one of his interviews, points out that he will burn the Koran, and that though he may not like it the Muslims could do the same to the Bible, he misunderstands two important points.
First, as earlier indicated, Muslims have to believe in God's other holy books, which include the Bible and the Torah as well, and therefore to even think about such a possibility should be abominable to the Muslim mind in general. Second, Muslims believe that words in the Koran are "Words from God" written right into the pure heart of an illiterate man untouched by other books. In this sense, from a comparative, theological perspective, the Koran as the word of God cannot be compared to the Bible, but to Jesus as Logos and for Christians in general as the Son.
A proposal, now or in the future, to burn the Koran would therefore be a dangerously easy way to ride the escalation of existing conflict involving Muslims anywhere in the world, into the sphere of deadly violence when the sacred text is violated, and Muslims' humiliation resulting from global politics becomes highly charged with a collective anger.
The Danger of Book Burning
From a secular perspective, the threat to burn the Koran is another episode in the last 45 centuries of book burning. From 259 to 210 BC, the Chinese Emperor Shih Huang Ti burned so many books and at least 460 Confucian scholars with them. In 640, Caliph Omar burned all the volumes in the library of Alexandria. The Mongols under Hulagu sacked Baghdad in 1258 and devastated its centuries-old libraries. The Christian missionaries who accompanied the conquistadors made bonfires of the Aztec and Mayan codices. In 1650, a religious pamphlet by William Pynchon was confiscated by Puritan authorities in Massachusetts, condemned by the General Court and burned by the public executioner in the Boston marketplace _ perhaps the first incident of book-burning in America.
Closer to our time, on May 10, 1933 in most university towns, German university students burned more than 25,000 "un-German" books in ceremonies complete with band-playing and "fire oaths". Among the books burned were those by Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, and the book All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. In 1992, a Serbian commander spent three days destroying the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo.
What is it about books that they get burned and destroyed and desecrated throughout history?
Baez in A Universal History of the Destruction of Books (2010) raises the question why the destruction of books provokes a distinct sense of horror among us. People would rather give away a book than destroy it. Books, unlike any other inanimate object, are extensions of human memory and imagination. They are burned precisely because of this connection to personal or communal identity. Books are made of words, and if it is through words that define who we are, burning them turn part of our identity into fire, and then into ashes.
Perhaps it is also important at this time to be reminded of the wise words of the beloved 19th century German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, whose books were also burned by the Nazis. Heine wrote in his 1820-1821 play Almansor the famous admonition: "Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people."
Bangkok Post: Published: 14/09/2010 at 12:00 AM
