The notorious death fatwa that began to awaken the world to the nature of Islamic Sharia — although most still slumber — is still in effect. Even less well known is the fact that all "apostates" from Islam labor under the same death sentence, and that Islamic law mandates second-class status for non-Muslims and women. "Iran adamant over Rushdie fatwa," from the BBC, with thanks to Twostellas:
Iran's hard-line Revolutionary Guards have declared the death sentence on British author Salman Rushdie is still valid - 16 years after it was issued.The military organisation, loyal to Iran's supreme leader - said the order was "irrevocable" on the eve of the anniversary of the 1989 fatwa.
The order was issued after publication of Mr Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses", condemned as blasphemous.
Iran's reformist government has in the past distanced itself from the fatwa.
The Revolutionary Guards, who answer directly to Iran's current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said: "This statement, while stressing the irrevocability of the death verdict against Salman Rushdie, says history shows that the Muslims have in no era accepted their sanctities being defiled."
"The day will come when they will punish the apostate Rushdie for his scandalous acts and insults against the Koran and the Prophet (Mohammed)," they said, two days before the anniversary of the order.
I am very pessimistic about this war. Given the depth of indoctrination and the intensity of religious fervor present in the culture, only a complete and humiliating defeat for the forces of Islam -- with the associated destruction of their leaders, edifices, symbols, and ideology -- will shake them from their triumphalism and force them to reassess their creed.
The only reason islam is always singled out as the 'religion of peace', is because it so blatently is not.
This death sentence isn't the spoutings of some tiny group of extremists, but affirmed by the supreme religious authority in shia islam!
When's the last time a pope or dalai lama called for somebody's death?
Religion of violence and hatred is more apt decription of islam. The apologists can lie all they want, but islam's own words can be used against it. There is no god named allah, and mohammed was a liar.
Why not they kill everyone else identified as others or whatever they feel like at the time.
islam is a convenient excuse to cover up mental reterdation.
There are also those who want the Iranian ayatollahs dead--and the Revolutionary Guard to meet the same fate as that of other highly tauted Guard next door (to the West).
The moral of this horrendous tale is that no Muslim should ever write anything that might be taken as cause for the issuance of a fatwa requiring his (her, if it's a Muslima) death. Anybody that would willigly convert to Islam should discard any ideas about having a critical mind. In fact, having any mind of his/her (Muslima again) own. All thinking has already been done for him/her, a millenium and then some ago.
But, hey, who needs to think?
The fury of Khomeini, some media suggested, was directed toward a dream sequence in the book wherein prostitutes take the names of Mohammed's wives.
“When the news got around Jahilia that the whores of The Curtain had each assumed the identity of one of Mahound’s wives, the clandestine excitement of the city’s males was intense. ... The men of Jahilia flocked to The Curtain, which experienced a three-hundred per cent increase in business. For obvious reasons it was not politic to form a queue in the street, and so on many days a line of men curled around the innermost courtyard of the brothel, rotating about its centrally positioned Fountain of Love much as pilgrims rotated for another reasons around the ancient Black Stone.”
-- “Return to Jahilia”
The Satanic Verses
Mob stops closure of porn CD shops on Hall Road
By Aayan Ali
LAHORE: A large crowd beat back a city government team that tried to close shops selling pornography on Hall Road on Saturday.
Some city government employees ended up in hospital with minor injuries and members of the crowd fired in the air, forcing the raiding team to retreat, according to official sources.
A city government official, who was part of the raiding team and was injured by the mob, alleged that the Hall Road Traders Union (HRTU) was behind the action. A complaint from the city government has reached Qila Gujjar Singh police station against the union on charges of attempted murder, terrorism and interfering in official matters.
“We are registering the case on the complaint of Mr Khalid Sultan (district coordination officer),” Cantt Superintendent of Police Dr Waseem told Daily Times.
The official said union members had approached the city government a couple of weeks ago and asked it to remove encroachments, resolve a row over parking stands and close porn shops.
The encroachment and parking problems were resolved, and a team of community development officials and Civil Defence policemen gathered at Hall Road on Saturday to tackle the porn problem. However, when the team started raiding shops in a Hall Road plaza, around 300 people gathered and started shouting slogans against the local government.
“We tried to talk to them, but the mob attacked us,” the official said. The mob smashed the windows of cars and attacked some of the raiding party members, some of whom landed in Services Hospital. Some members of the crowd fired in the air, forcing the raiding team to retreat.
The official said the union had asked Mr Sultan, the DCO, to clear Hall Road of porn CDs, but the union was hoping only for action against the porn sellers who had set up stalls on footpaths.
“They wanted the crackdown because the vendors outside were taking customers from the plazas. Once the team started raiding porn shops inside the two plazas, the union immediately turned against us because it damaged their own business,” he said.
Pornographic CDs are available for less than a hundred rupees each at Hall Road. Some of the shops are just behind schools and colleges. A porn CD vendor said his customers were mostly young boys, but included college-going girls.
East is Blue
Salman Rushdie is great. If you want to know how to work it after a fatwa, look to this man. He hangs around celebs, marries a model he picks out on the telly, writes op-eds supporting other authors and perennially remains the Occident's only interlocutor with the Orient.
His latest "controversy" is porn. Yes, that cutting edge issue that hangs heavy on the minds of intellectualls everywhere. Rushdie is one of the authors of an upcoming book of photographs XXX: 30 Porn Star Portraits. The other luminaries featured in the book are Gore Vidal, John Malkovich(?), Lou Reed(huh?), and John Waters (that makes sense). Oh, and a bunch of porn stars.
Anyways, Rushdie's essay claims (disclaimer: I haven't read it, nor all the others condemning it.) that pornography is an essential freedom in repressed societies and he backs that up with internet traffic statistics from Pakistan! From the book's website is the following blur:
It may be that more permissive societies have less need for porn, and certainly they don’t need to turn blue movies into icons of revolution or peace ... If the restrictions on ordinary social, romantic and sexual relations that [less permissive] societies impose were to wither away, the need for pornography would very likely diminish, too ... If Western pornography is a symptom of Western decadence, then Eastern pornography is a side-effect of Eastern repressions. Pornography is almost always an effect, or a dramatic symptom of some non-pornographic social malaise. It is almost never a cause.
Last I checked, there were no "essential freedoms repressed" in the US (ok, a few for the brown man) but "the need for pornography" has not shown ANY signs of diminishing. None. I would like to show Rushdie stats for internet usage in the US. I quibble needlessly. In that excerpt, at least, he is hinting broadly at the way Muslim society tries to limit personal freedom. I don't think he is off the mark at all. I have written here many times about the side-effects of repression. People will find what they need and if society pushes the lid shut, those activities will continue in the dark with far more corrosive outcomes. Blue movies, videos, books are easily available throughout the length and breadth of the Land of the Pure.
Press in Pakistan and India is breathlessly reporting this latest attack by Rushdie on basic human dignity, which will give him more publicity and which, like Satanic Verses, no one will actually bother to read.
is that what this is all about?pentup sexual frustration?
dont think a goat/sheep compares with a lady at all so they may well be pent up...and that other guy thing they do is repulsive...what up with dem ladies?oo right....who would want to?
Canadian lit scene queen Margaret Atwood once told a university class she taught that writers write to make money. What was the last commercial success Rushdie had? Been a while, hasn't it?