Travel hint: Don’t mock Islamic beliefs about Paradise. Not even a John Milton connection about Paradise Lost. There are laws in Paradise, and its no place some some funky anarchist. Screw the Enlightenment. More Heidegger and less Voltaire. Although in this case cutting off hands would be a downer in terms of career.Best case scenario: Might be entertaining the troops on the Kurdish front. In January. No gloves.
--- Just as Rambam had been chased out of Andalusia (Spain) by marauding Muslim armies from the Maghreb, the Jews of Yemen were being persecuted by the Muslim mujahideen in the Arabian Peninsula. In this famous letter, Rambam terms Mohammed the psychopath (Meshugah) and describes the ugliness and the viciousness of the Muslims toward Jews as the worst the Jews had experienced since the Exile. Indeed, Rambam, who most certainly understood the theology of Islam, points out in this letter that Islam was theologically corrupt as well, having taken the Jewish Torah and effectively rewritten it for its own purposes. Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/a_response_to_rabbi_shmuly_yanklowitz.html#ixzz1wbCovxZe----image: Wiki
( see link at end) …A Turkish court on Friday formally charged an internationally known pianist and composer with insulting Islamic religious values in comments he made on Twitter.
The court in Istanbul voted to approve an indictment against Fazil Say, who has played piano with the New York Philharmonic, Berlin Symphony Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, National Orchestra of France and Tokyo Symphony….
Gentile Bellini drawing of Janissary. ----World Public Opinion Survey in 2006 of Muslim attitudes in the Muslim world (where 98% of the global 1.2 billion Muslims live), found that between 50% to 70% (depending on the specific country) of Muslims surveyed desired a regional if not global caliphate and an al-Qaeda-like sharia. Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/a_response_to_rabbi_shmuly_yanklowitz.html#ixzz1wbAavRWl image:http://www.armenian-history.com/military/Janissaries_Armenian_boys_recruited_to_fight_for_Islam.htm
…Akyol said Say’s tweets and retweets on social media cannot be considered as public remarks because only people who follow him can see them. In one tweet cited in the indictment, Say said: “What if there is raki (traditional anisette drink) in paradise but not in hell, while there is Chivas Regal (scotch) in hell and not in paradise? What will happen then? This is the most important question!!”
Islam forbids alcohol and many Islamists might consider such remarks unacceptable. In one of the pianist’s retweets, one excerpt questioned whether paradise was a “brothel?” according to the indictment.
Akyol claimed that line belonged to the wine-loving 11th century Persian poet Omar Khayyam, most known for his work the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” But Murat Bardakci, a historian, wrote in HaberTurk newspaper in April that the alleged line did not belong to Khayyam….
----Depicting a late 17th-century Ottoman garden party hosted by the Queen Mother (Valide Sultan) for Madame Girardin, wife of the French ambassador, paintings such as this provide valuable insight into Ottoman garden design. In Istanbul, the first three decades of the 18th century, under the reign of Ahmet iii, became known as the “Tulip Era.” Tulip festivals grew in popularity, and the influence of French rococo spread through the decorative arts and architecture, a result of the sultan’s embassy to the French court at Versailles.---Read More:http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/201006/an.ottoman.garden.grows.in.st.louis.htm
Every time something like this comes up, it brings up a shivering of the spine for the salad days of Christopher Hitchens, and the jarring of memory to the Armenian massacre of 1915; a quick perusal of Franz Werfel’s forty Days of Musa Dagh is compelling enough that Christianity and its emancipatory seeds of liberality remain anathema to an ideology where Islam dictates the narrative. That eerie catch phrase “submit” is a challenge both within and without. Its hard to know whether these legal sallies by Turkey are just polemics, poses, gestures without substance to play to the gallery or gain street cred among the even more sparkling zealotry in other Islamic nations.
…“He has lately incur
the wrath of some people,” Akyol said. “He has even been receiving death threats.”Say had floated the idea of leaving Turkey and moving to Japan earlier this year, his lawyer said. The pianist was abroad and not available for comment. He was expected to return to Istanbul this weekend following a concert in Slovenia on Friday.
Say was the latest prominent Turk to run into trouble in the country for expressing his views. He could face a maximum 1 1/2 years in prison if he is convicted.
The European Union has long encouraged Turkey to improve freedom of speech if it wants to become a member one day….
---The right question, he said is “do we have something helping us toward peace?” Ramadan seemed to be saying that Islam served that purpose, though he never said so outright. “The Koran is the word of God,” he said. “The problem is not the book. The problem is the reader.” In his rebuttal, Hitchens would agree with Ramadan about the perils of reading, but said that the fault did not always lie with the reader. “In reading the Koran,” Hitchens said, “I can’t tell if it’s the word of god, but I can hope it’s a sign of god having a bad day.” ---Read More:http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/10/christopher-hitchens-and-tariq-ramadan-spar-over-the-peacefulness-of-islam image:http://blogs.princeton.edu/graphicarts/2010/03/auguste_roubille_1872-1955.html
…Turkey’s Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has been prosecuted for his comments about the mass killings of Armenians under a law that made it a crime to insult the Turkish identity before the government eased that law in an amendment in 2008.
In 2007, ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who received death threats because of his comments about the killings of Armenians by Turks in 1915, was shot dead outside his office in Istanbul. Read More:http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/internationally-known-turkish-pianist-is-charged-with-insulting-islamic-religious-values/2012/06/01/gJQAfyFo6U_story.html
ADDENDUM:
David Yerushalmi: What Rambam does appreciate and pay respect to are a handful of Muslim neo-Aristotelians, notably Alfarabi (especially as noted in Rambam’s letter to Ibn Tibbon [see, e.g., Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. by Shlomo Pines, v. 1, “Translator’s Introduction,” pp. lxxviii-cxxxii). But the Muslim neo-Aristotelians — those who sought to apply Reason to Revelation — lost out. Islam thoroughly rejected such innovations and never adopted Reason. Thus the end of the “Golden Age.” Al Ghazili, Ibn Taymiyyah, and their progeny — the Muslim Brotherhood, the Wahhabis, and the Deobandis, among the Sunni — were the theological, legal, and social victors, especially as we scan the contemporary surveys noted above. Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/a_response_to_rabbi_shmuly_yanklowitz.html#ixzz1wbDcIwWY
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When it came to the near-ubiquitous solicitations for his opinion on the Armenian genocide, Zizek was at his subversive best, encouraging Turkey to apologize for 1915 but rejecting the notion the Turkey “should apologize to Europe” given the continent’s own barbaric legacy of nation-building.
“The answer is, when it comes to the Armenian slaughter, why should Turkey refuse to apologize? But in doing so, it also should implicate Europe in this event. Genocide has been central to Europe’s own practice of state-making, Turkey was adopting what the West taught them,” he told students during a talk at Mimar Sinan University.
“Look at why the people did this, what they were reading. They were not traditionalist Muslim political forces but military modernizers who sought to turn Turkey into a European nation-state,” Zizek said. The military junta that ruled the Ottoman Empire in 1915 drew upon an odd mix of European ideologies, including scientism, materialism and social Darwinism, to justify its fiercely authoritarian rule.Read More:http://www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?newsId=269928
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