Robert Spencer has started an illuminating new daily series at Jihad Watch: Hatred and Violence in the Qur'an Awareness Month. Running through the month of December, it was inspired by the Pat Condell video above, which utterly destroys the trumped-up and manipulative propaganda concept of "Islamophobia Awareness Month." Toward the end of the video, Condell says that a Hatred and Violence in the Qur'an Awareness Month would be much more appropriate, and Robert took him up on it.
Spencer explains: "After all, November was Islamophobia Awareness Month, and certainly the hatred and violence in the Qur'an kills many, many more people than 'Islamophobia' ever has or ever will, and so it is far more deserving than 'Islamophobia' of a month of its own."
Here is today's installment:
One of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, and the niche where it used to be
Why do some Muslims hate pre-Islamic art with such frenzied intensity
that they would destroy it, despite its historical and archaeological
value? Why did the Taliban blow up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, and why do
some Islamic supremacists in Egypt today want to do the same thing to the Sphinx and the Pyramids?
It isn't just because they are artifacts of a religion that Islam rejects as false and idolatrous, although that is a large part of it. It is also because the Qur'an says that the ruins are a sign of Allah's punishment of those who rejected his truth:
Many were the Ways of Life that have passed away before you: travel through the earth, and see what was the end of those who rejected Truth. (Qur'an 3:137)
This is one of the foundations of the Islamic idea that pre-Islamic civilizations, and non-Islamic civilizations, are all jahiliyya – the society of unbelievers, which is worthless. Obviously this cuts against the idea of archaeological preservation. V. S. Naipaul encountered this attitude in his travels through Muslim countries. For many Muslims, he observed in Among the Believers, “The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology.” Naipaul recounted that some Pakistani Muslims, far from valuing the nation’s renowned archaeological site at Mohenjo Daro, saw its ruins as a teaching opportunity for Islam, recommending that Qur’an 3:137 be posted there as a teaching tool.
Their hatred for their own heritage and past was a point of pride for them, inculcated by the Qur'an.
