Blogging The Qur’an
I have just noticed on my travels across the internet that the Guardian website has a new section called ‘blogging the Qur’an’. And no, I’m not going to link to their website.
Apparently each week, writer, broadcaster and cultural critic (whatever that may be) Ziauddin Sardar will blog on a different verse of the Qur’an. The blurb in the about section describing the reason behind the site says:
Muslims have been wrestling with the meaning of the verses and words of the Qur’an from the early days of Islam. Non-Muslims, meanwhile, often have wildly inaccurate notions of its content … Through Blogging the Qur’an, we hope to try and untangle some of those meanings and misconceptions.
Can you imagine, for example, the Guardian affording this level of treatment to Christians and the Bible, or indeed any other religion? Of course not, they would be ridiculing Christianity as a backwards, intolerant religion as they have done for decades, and would have no interest in ‘untangling’ some of the ‘meanings and misconceptions’ surrounding the Bible.
The development of this site, along with many other things the Guardian and the likes of the BBC have said, makes you wonder why it is that they are clearly so desperate to appease Muslims rather than shower them with scorn as they do Christianity.
Could it be that hidden behind a hastily constructed façade of reverence, is the fact that those on the left actually rather fear Islam. They know that most Muslims won’t quietly or meekly surrender their beliefs in the face of adversity or opposition as some Christians might, but instead would vocally and sometimes explosively fight back.
Your Comments:
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- Matthew Butler
Remember too the ‘Jerry Springer the Opera’ affair - the BBC would never in a million years have dared show anything that offensive about Islam. Indeed, if it had, it would probably have found Television Centre blown to kingdom come in a few days.
The problem is that because Christianity is seen as part of the old order, part of the ‘conservative establishment’ that many people still delude themselves into thinking we have, it is therefore, for the left, fair game for attacking and demeaning.
Hence the recent abolition of the blasphemy laws, which was not about freedom of speech since no-one was being prosecuted by them anyway, but quite simply about openly attacking Christianity. As a few (noteworthy, but unfortunately few) Conservative MPs such as Edward Leigh said, the abolition would only send out a sign that being gratuitously offensive towards Christianity was acceptable - and was proved right when the National Secular Society announced it was organising a public recitation of the extremely offensive poem about homosexual acts at the Crucifixion (which was the subject of the last successful prosecution for blasphemy back in the 1960s), just because it could.
The Left actually couldn’t care less about ‘untangling misconceptions’ about Islam or indeed about religious freedom. For them, anything old and bound up with Britain’s ancient heritage invites derision, while anything foreign and antithetical to British tradition is to be welcomed. Their pious talk about religion is nothing less than thinly-veiled iconoclasm.
