Category: The Dish

Here’s a segment of Toby Lester’s 1999 article on the Koran:

…outside an Islamic context, proposing that the Koran has a history and suggesting that it can be interpreted metaphorically are not radical steps. But the Islamic context—and Muslim sensibilities—cannot be ignored. "To historicize the Koran would in effect delegitimize the whole historical experience of the Muslim community," says R. Stephen Humphreys, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

"The Koran is the charter for the community, the document that called it into existence. And ideally—though obviously not always in reality—Islamic history has been the effort to pursue and work out the commandments of the Koran in human life. If the Koran is a historical document, then the whole Islamic struggle of fourteen centuries is effectively meaningless."

The orthodox Muslim view of the Koran as self-evidently the Word of God, perfect and inimitable in message, language, style, and form, is strikingly similar to the fundamentalist Christian notion of the Bible’s "inerrancy" and "verbal inspiration" that is still common in many places today…Not all the Christians think this way about the Bible, however, and in fact, as the Encyclopaedia of Islam (1981) points out, "the closest analogue in Christian belief to the role of the Kur’an in Muslim belief is not the Bible, but Christ." If Christ is the Word of God made flesh, the Koran is the Word of God made text, and questioning its sanctity or authority is thus considered an outright attack on Islam—as Salman Rushdie knows all too well.

From Hitchens’ 2002 article on Matthew Scully’s book about animal cruelty:

….when I read of the possible annihilation of the elephant or the whale, or the pouring of oven cleaner or cosmetics into the eyes of live kittens, or the close confinement of pigs and calves in lightless pens, I feel myself confronted by human stupidity, which I recognize as an enemy. This would be so even if I didn’t much care about the subjective experience of the animals themselves.

For example, although I find that I can’t read Peter Singer for long without becoming dulled by his robotic utilitarianism, the parts of his famous book Animal Liberation that I find most impressive are the deadpan reprints of animal-experiment "reports," written by white-coated dolts or possibly white-coated sadists. (The connection between stupidity and cruelty is a close one.) If you subject this chimp or this dog to these given experiences, of shock or mutilation or sensory deprivation, it will exhibit just the responses any fool could have predicted. No claim of usefulness or human application is made; only requests for further funding. Such awful pointlessness and callousness had, I thought, been set back a bit by Singer and others—and so it has. But Dominion is replete with examples of pseudo-scientists who still maintain that animals cannot feel pain, let alone agony. (By "agony" I mean pain accompanied by fear—protracted, repeated anguish and misery.)

The dumb academics who mouth this stuff are legatees, whether they know it or not, of René Descartes, who held that animals were machines and that their yelps or cries were the noises emitted by broken machinery. One doesn’t require much conceptual apparatus to refute this, and Scully is, I think, taking its current advocates too seriously. The morons who torture animals would obviously not get the same thrill from battering a toaster. Children, who are almost always en rapport with animals, do not treat them as toys. (And maltreatment of animals by a child is a famously strong indicator, as our investigators of psychopathology have found, of hideous future conduct. Hogarth intuited this centuries ago, in his sequence of illustrations The Four Stages of Cruelty.) The many old or lonely or infirm people who find therapeutic value in animal companionship do not get the same result even from a semi-animate object such as a TV.

Ted Genoways defends Virginia Quarterly Review’s right to do original reporting.

I’ve been festooned with so many versions of the Leonard Cohen masterpiece. But this simple group version seemed worth sharing one more time:

Parsley disowns McCain.

There is some controversy over who wrote the religious poem "Footprints":

Although nearly all of these authors claim they wrote the poem in longhand, dictated by God, the controversy didn’t surface until everyone began putting their versions online. There are hundreds of “Footprints”-inspired Web sites. One has a soundtrack of waves lapping against the shore; another features lines of the poem jiggling to the beat of Christmas songs. In Andrew Keen’s 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur, he writes that the Internet has induced a state of communal amnesia; we’ve lost “our memory for things learnt, read, experienced, or heard.” Perhaps the "Footprints" writers are living a version of this peculiar situation. There’s not only an abundance of amateur authors, but they’ve all written the exact same thing.

Along with Webb, Carty, Stevenson, and Powers, at least a dozen other people have claimed, less rigorously, to have penned this poem. None of their accounts are particularly convincing, yet they all seem to genuinely believe they wrote the poem. They describe the words coming out effortlessly, even uncontrollably, as if they were finally articulating something they’d always known.

(Hat tip: Bookbench)

Leonard Cohen’s own version.

Thanks, George:

Her racial comments in this campaign may come back to haunt her at home:

State Sen. Bill Perkins, who represents Harlem, said constituents recently phoned him because they wanted to demonstrate outside Bill Clinton’s Harlem office against comments by the former president.

Michael Benjamin, a state assemblyman who represents parts of the Bronx, said his wife removed a photograph of Bill Clinton from her office wall — an expression of the misgivings that some black New Yorkers feel.

Assemblyman Karim Camara of Brooklyn contributed $500 to Hillary Clinton’s Senate reelection campaign in 2006 and described Bill Clinton as a political hero. He said: "Once the campaign is over there has to be a lot of work to heal the wounds. She needs to go back to the black churches she visited in the course of her campaign and have a frank conversation about who she is and how much the support of the black community means. There would not have been a first Clinton presidency in 1992 if not for the African American community." …

"The Clintons have their die-hard fans who would never abandon them," said Eric Adams, a state senator who represents Brooklyn. "But there are those New Yorkers who feel there was a lot of insult, slight and disrespect toward an African American candidate, and it translated as a slight to the African American community."