Your faiths tonight
A round-up of things I have learnt recently:
In the confusing array of obscure Muslim sects, the Druzes were among the most obscure. They were a schism of a schism of a schism. Their roots led back to Shi’ite Islam, but the tie was tenuous. So secretive was the Druze religion that even most Druzes didn’t know the details of its teachings. Women and children were told almost nothing. Of the men, only about 10 per cent, al-uqal (the initiated) were allowed to study the ancient manuscripts. The rest, al-juhal (the ignorant, were not even expected to pray.
To say that the religion was obscure was no slight. The Druzes themselves admitted as much. The Druze Faith by Dr Sami Makarem, a Druze professor at the American University of Beirut, was on of the only books ever produced with the blessing of the religious authorities that provided a ray of enlightenment for the ignorant ones. It summed up the religion this way: “Druzism is an esoteric faith. To understand it one needs to be acquainted with Arabic esoteric terminology and with the way esoteric beliefs were written. The latter include deliberate disarrangement of arguments, brevity, and the introduction of trivial subjects while discussing issues of utmost importance.” A real incentive to delay further.
Lawrence Pintak, Seeds of Hate
EDIT: Obviously the Druze still exist now. Lawrence is setting the scene in 1982.
An Easter tradition called “strike the Jew”, whereby members of the Toulouse Jewish community would be batted around a public square by Christians, was ended in the middle of the twelfth century, after hefty payments had been made to count and capitouls. The clergy protested, but the ban held.
Stephen O’Shea, The Perfect Heresy
The former chief mufti, Shaikh Abdullah bin Baz... was a hugely influential figure in the [Saudi] kingdom. In 1982 he won recognition of the King Faisal award for international services to Islam. The same year he published a book entitled The Motion of the Sun and Moon, and the Stationarity of the Earth which held to the pre-Copernican, geocentric cosmology according to which earth is the centre of the universe and the sun moves around it. The cosmology is consistent with Quranic references to the “seven heavens” which modern scholars would see as referring to the Ptolemaic cosmology that held sway before the discoveries of Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo...
In an earlier article the venerable shaikh had threatened all who challenged his pre-Copernican views with a fatwa of takfir, pronouncing them infidels. He did not repeat this fatwa in his 1982 book, which was just as well, as it would have anathematized Prince Sultan bin Salman bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, the son of the mayor of Riyadh and grandson of the kingdom’s founder. Prince Sultan is the Muslim world’s only officially certified astronaut. “Carried aloft in NASA’s space shuttle, [he] could certainly have commented on the Shaikh’s thesis if he had not been preoccupied with the urgent task of determining the direction of [Mecca] for his prayers.”
Malise Ruthven, A Fury for God
The only clear guiding principle [of Hinduism] is ambiguity. If there is a central verse in Hinduism's most important text, the Rig Veda, it is the Creation Hymn. It reads, in part, Who really knows, and who can swear,
How creation came, when or where!
Even gods came after creation's day,
Who really knows, who can truly say
When and how did creation start?
Did He do it? Or did He not?
Only He, up there, knows, maybe;
Or perhaps not even He.
Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World
In the confusing array of obscure Muslim sects, the Druzes were among the most obscure. They were a schism of a schism of a schism. Their roots led back to Shi’ite Islam, but the tie was tenuous. So secretive was the Druze religion that even most Druzes didn’t know the details of its teachings. Women and children were told almost nothing. Of the men, only about 10 per cent, al-uqal (the initiated) were allowed to study the ancient manuscripts. The rest, al-juhal (the ignorant, were not even expected to pray.
To say that the religion was obscure was no slight. The Druzes themselves admitted as much. The Druze Faith by Dr Sami Makarem, a Druze professor at the American University of Beirut, was on of the only books ever produced with the blessing of the religious authorities that provided a ray of enlightenment for the ignorant ones. It summed up the religion this way: “Druzism is an esoteric faith. To understand it one needs to be acquainted with Arabic esoteric terminology and with the way esoteric beliefs were written. The latter include deliberate disarrangement of arguments, brevity, and the introduction of trivial subjects while discussing issues of utmost importance.” A real incentive to delay further.
Lawrence Pintak, Seeds of Hate
EDIT: Obviously the Druze still exist now. Lawrence is setting the scene in 1982.
An Easter tradition called “strike the Jew”, whereby members of the Toulouse Jewish community would be batted around a public square by Christians, was ended in the middle of the twelfth century, after hefty payments had been made to count and capitouls. The clergy protested, but the ban held.
Stephen O’Shea, The Perfect Heresy
The former chief mufti, Shaikh Abdullah bin Baz... was a hugely influential figure in the [Saudi] kingdom. In 1982 he won recognition of the King Faisal award for international services to Islam. The same year he published a book entitled The Motion of the Sun and Moon, and the Stationarity of the Earth which held to the pre-Copernican, geocentric cosmology according to which earth is the centre of the universe and the sun moves around it. The cosmology is consistent with Quranic references to the “seven heavens” which modern scholars would see as referring to the Ptolemaic cosmology that held sway before the discoveries of Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo...
In an earlier article the venerable shaikh had threatened all who challenged his pre-Copernican views with a fatwa of takfir, pronouncing them infidels. He did not repeat this fatwa in his 1982 book, which was just as well, as it would have anathematized Prince Sultan bin Salman bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, the son of the mayor of Riyadh and grandson of the kingdom’s founder. Prince Sultan is the Muslim world’s only officially certified astronaut. “Carried aloft in NASA’s space shuttle, [he] could certainly have commented on the Shaikh’s thesis if he had not been preoccupied with the urgent task of determining the direction of [Mecca] for his prayers.”
Malise Ruthven, A Fury for God
The only clear guiding principle [of Hinduism] is ambiguity. If there is a central verse in Hinduism's most important text, the Rig Veda, it is the Creation Hymn. It reads, in part, Who really knows, and who can swear,
How creation came, when or where!
Even gods came after creation's day,
Who really knows, who can truly say
When and how did creation start?
Did He do it? Or did He not?
Only He, up there, knows, maybe;
Or perhaps not even He.
Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World