Tag Archives: Quran

Abuse of religion and political power

with thanks to wikipedia.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

thanks to wikipedia.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I am writing these lines, someone in a far away land has for long seated himself on a throne-like device from which downward he is ruling over his people.  He had been able to win some of them for their lifetime support of any and all regulations as well as laws he would so desire to sketch out from his make-believe world.  For, those followers seem to have found in him a true believer and a practitioner of a religion they believe to know at its core themselves.  One of that religion’s teachings, they all claim to this day, regards the female appearance: for her to cover herself from head to toe, to be truthful to their public decrees.  Seeing that not all of his land’s women obey God’s law, he supposes, and therefore appoints himself to be the ultimate word.  He, thus, sorts – according to every woman’s appearance: the covered are good without condition; others, evil.  As for men, he resorts to the same way of elimination: those who are with the covered women are good unconditionally; others, evil.

It is suspected that the ruler of mention above has never bothered to check what the book of God he claims to be a dedicated follower of says about the same matter he violates his people’s rights for.  That – through the pure imagination of his mind – he has been dictating his wife and daughters to be all covered except for their faces.  A reader of the Holy Book this self-deceiving ruler claims to know inside and out, who also misleads too many in his land of govern on account of his immense arrogance about it, speaks below to correct the ongoing deception of massive proportions:

[Source-beginning]

THERE IS NO ISLAMIC CODE FOR WOMEN TO DRESS COVERED FROM HEAD TO TOE

Many Muslim scholars have invented extreme rules for women’s dress [that] are not found in the Quran. Some say that women should be totally covered except for her face, while others who are even more extreme, say that all women must be covered from head to toe except for two holes for the eyes to see!

1- There are no words anywhere in the Quran [that] command women to cover all their bodies. Those who preach such un-Quranic rules cannot find words in the Quran to justify this extremity, so they manipulate various words in 24:31 and 33:59 to justify the falsehood.

2- The fact that God says in 24:31 to specifically cover the bosom indicates clearly there are other parts of the woman’s body that do not have to be covered.  To elaborate on the indication of the words in 24:31, let us ponder on the following example:

Think of your house and in it you have a garden. You have a gardener who comes to look after your garden. One day you tell the gardener: please water the area under the big tree and also water the back of the garden.

What does this example tell us?
It tells us that since you specified only areas to be watered, then this is a clear indication that there will be other areas in the garden that are not to be watered. If you wanted the gardener to water the whole garden you would have asked: please water the whole garden.

When we apply this example to the issue of women’s dress code in the Quran, the same principle applies. If God wanted the whole body of the woman to be covered, God would not have bothered saying “cover your chest” since an overall command to cover all the body would be all that is needed to say. But since God specifies certain parts of the woman’s body to be covered, then there are other parts that do not have to be covered, as long as they are not beauty spots of sexual connotation and as long as righteousness in dress is maintained.

3- The command to “lengthen the garment” also proves that women are not commanded to be covered from head to toe. For if that were the case, and women had to be covered down to their toes, there would be no meaning to “lengthen the garment”. How can a woman lengthen a garment that is already down to the ground?

[Source-end]

Previous posts of relevance:

Unrest in Turkey and the Prime Minister’s Appeal to Allah to End it

Massacre in Turkey and Father’s Day

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Unrest in Turkey and the Prime Minister’s Appeal to Allah to End it

“It all started with a tree”

 

 

What can penguins, pots and pans, jazz, folk music, police, Allah, a woman in red, gas grenades, nail polish, Noam Chomsky, children, alcohol consumption, family values, Turkish Airlines, red lipstick, possibly have in common?

If you are as puzzled now as I had been on May 30, 2013, then we are in good company for each other, when it comes to my attempt today to help us all understand and make sense of what has been happening in Turkey since.

It all began in Gezi Parkı, in Taksim, İstanbul with a hard core female terrorist.  Please, heed particular attention to her white bag over her right shoulder and her left hand.  You, too, will be convinced as to what type of destructive acts a ‘Woman in red’ is capable of:

 

 

The country’s unarmed, unprepared police force has, thus, suffered first in this heavily armed woman’s hands, as we all saw in the news coverage above; then, they were attacked by other terrorists:

 

 

Turkey’s current prime minister knew of the peaceful march initiated by his unarmed citizens to raise awareness for their rights to Gezi Parkı in Istanbul’s Taksim quarters, their public space since the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923.  Standing by his public alone, he did all in his power to help raise awareness and nation-and worldwide support for their actions.  The significance of the park – other than its ancient old trees, benches, strolling paths offering the only natural haven in the middle of one of the world’s largest cities, was, after all, apparent to everyone who had basic knowledge about modern Turkey’s historical and cultural past.  He, too, didn’t want any drastic steps erasing the city’s post-Ottoman Empire landscape.  He, too, knew bulldozing this park would be unforgiveable.  Therefore, the night of the first day of the protests by thousands of his people across the country, he ordered CNN-Turk – the nation’s primary source of information, to contribute to the spreading of the word with a penguin documentary .  At the risk of becoming a source for mockery inland and abroad.

The protesting citizens just didn’t and wouldn’t appreciate his good intentions, or what he meant by his reference to them as çapulcu and “terrorist”, and their actions, “tencere tava, hep aynı hava” (“pots and pans, the same tune as always”).  First, a few among them but then in growing numbers, were so unthankful that they composed folk music using pots, pans and other everyday items, now known as Tencere Tava Havası:

 

Then, students from Bosphorus University, one of the oldest and most prominent higher education institutions in Turkey, had the nerve to form a jazz ensemble, following in the footsteps of their pots-and-pans-musical counterparts:

 

Why did at least the half of his public end up with unrest that has been going on as I am writing?  Despite the killings, being subjected to indiscriminate, horrific injuries, the debilitating blows to the face to take the eyes out, and other horrendous crimes against their rights to live as a human?  After all, it is not that the Turkish prime minister has been tyrannizing the thinking, analyzing, alert population among his public with his multiplying, human rights-disregarding decrees of random conception, like his  call for three children.

Why not abide by his iron fist that falls onto everyone’s bedroom scene and bring into his world for his sake a minimum of three children?

And what about this obsession of the same population with alcohol consumption?  After all, drinking even a mere cup of wine –however occasional or frequent that may be, equates alcoholism.

Oh, then there is red lipstick!  And, nail polish! Every woman not only in Turkey but in the rest of the world would be much better of living without the red and the polish.

~ ~ ~

Let me, at this point, lend these events the somber tone they deserve in any re-narration.  And mine won’t be an exception.  (Not that I can think even for a minute you having taken me seriously throughout my preceding notes of dark humor.)

Amnesty International calls for prompt action against the use of “brutal police repression” and for ‘investigation’ of “abuses” in the “İstanbul protest”.  A Reuters article, then, sums up how Turkey’s prime minister invokes Allah, demands protests end immediately.  While routinely ordering his police to conduct their violent attacks on his own unarmed and peaceful public, in full knowledge of the ensuing consequences of senseless human suffering, he “invokes Allah”.

What has Allah to do with brutality against fellow human beings?  Defenseless, at that?  In a May 29, 2013 interview about the murder of a British soldier, Imam Ajmal Masroor (an imam is the head of a Muslim community) answers the question as clearly as can be: Nothing.

Though unrelated to the violence-inclined Allah invoking Turkish leader – Imam Masroor asserts in angry disbelief repeatedly how killings don’t belong in the Kuranic teachings (Kuran as the Holy Book of Muslims):

 

 

For the time being, it is the people of Turkey who need our fact-based knowledge about what is taking place in their part of the world.  Tomorrow, it will most certainly be in a different segment of our planet.  For greed, lust in and abuse of power, violation of human rights, brutality, the killing of the innocent does not solely a Turkish agenda make.  In heart-felt empathy for but unfortunately geographically distant collaboration with those who presently suffer or may be subjected to suffering within their own country’s borders at another point in time, I end my words with a call to the world by Noam Chomsky in support of the Gezi Parkı Resistance:

 

 

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