Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the requirements that dhimmi educators in France will very soon have to meet:
Now that Europe is busy accommodating Muslim sensibilities, think of all the authors whom Muslim students in France will refuse to read right off the bat, writers who are known to be Jews or partly-Jewish: Montaigne, Proust, Perec. The writers of lai-de-France chivalry (too close to the Crusades, and besides, who wants to read about men taking women seriously). The writers who are too much in praise of Infidel France, such as that Infidel Du Bellay, with his nationalism ("France, mere des armes, des arts, et des lois" -- when it is Muslims who are the arms-bearers, and Islam which will decide which "arts" are halal and which haram, and "lois" mean nothing if they do not accord with the Shari'a or Holy Law of Islam). The writers who are homosexuals (with a taste for Arab boys picked up during their trips in Tunisie and Algerie), such as Gide. The writers who take Christianity seriously, whether or not they believe in it: Roger Martin du Gard in "Jean Barois." The writers who are, flat out, too Christian: no more sonorities of Bossuet's "Oraisons funebres," no more Francois Mauriac, no more Maritain, no more Charles Peguy. No more study of those who glorified the individual rather than the umma -- no Reveries d'un promeneur solitaire, no “Confessions.” Rousseau will not do.None of that stuff about the pre-Islamic period. All those Roman places by Racine and Corneille will have to go. All that stuff about the heaving passions of women -- what does Islam have to do with that? Baudelaire, with his mistresss's chevelure, and his drugs, and his "nuits" meaning "nuits st.-georges"? Impossible. Ditto with Apollinaire for "Alcools." By the time we are done, there will scarcely be a single author in French literature who will not turn out to be verboten in Islamic terms.
Even where a writer has done something that works on Islam's behalf, that can be cancelled out by something else he has done. Take Chateaubriand, of Combourg and points east, west, south and north. He did, after all, produce "Le Dernier des Abencerages" about the last Arab dynasty in Grenada. In French-reading Europe that work did as much as Washington Irving's "Tales of the Alhambra" did in America and England to promote myths about the wonderfulness of the convivencia in Islamic Spain. That myth lives on in college courses today, wherever (as in those taught by Mesanostrans -- google "MESA Nostra" for more) The Ornament of the World about Cordoba is included, so carefully, on the syllabus. That book, the writing and marketing of which deserves to be studied by students of the state of Western scholarly standards, was turned out by the former head of the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale, who was just recently appointed to be one of four new Sterling Professors, Professor Maria Rosa Menocal. Menocal, who presumably reads French easily, cannot explain her failure to consult the major Western scholarship on Islamic Spain, including above all the work of Evariste Levi-Provencal, who along with many others is not even mentioned in Menocal's bibliography. The enthusiasm for this feel-good project, beginning with the early encouragement of a train-riding companion, Harold Bloom's wife, and the failure of Menocal to address any of the severe and unanswerable criticisms made of that book (glowing reviews by apologists for Islam do not convince), tell us much about "scholarship" today both at Yale and outside Yale. Feelgoodness in many places triumphs over mere facts, or even obviates the felt need for presenting such facts. And it also triumphs over consulting the recognized authorities whose lifetimes of scholarship are not to be ignored.Chateaubriand was writing nearly two hundred years ago. He and Irving can be forgiven their errors about Islamic Spain; they were having fun. It was as much fun as tales of Atala in the American wilderness. A professor enjoying the scholarly resources that Yale provides, and failing to take advantage of them as she writes a book of false history, not a romance, cannot be so easily forgiven.
And Chateaubriand of course will not be forgiven by Muslims for another reason. Though he did write "Le Dernier des Abenceratges," he also wrote two works of Christian apologetics: "La vie de Rance" and "La genie du Christianisme." Those works would certainly offend Muslims and outweigh, in the Muslim scale, his abenceragiste moor's-last-sigh fantasia.
And what about Diderot and D'Alembert and all that Enlightenment, Les Lumieres, Aufklarung stuff? How can Muslims, knowing that all of wisdom is contained in Qur'an and Hadith, be expected to endure discussion of some silly Encyclopedistes and their pointless enterprise? It makes no sense. It offends them. And Muslims are not in French schools to be offended by Infidels, Infidel history, Infidel literature, Infidel teachers, Infidel syllabi and lesson plans. No. Out with the 18th century and of course with the Revolution itself. Who really cares what one group of Infidels does with another group of Infidels? Does it really matter to Muslims? Should it? Should they be expected to spend their time learning about European history, quarrels among Europeans? Why? What business is it of Muslims?
And even in a vast corpus, a single misstep can be fatal in the Muslim scheme of things. Think of the prolific Victor Hugo. Americans may think first of his prose writings, especially as brought to the stage by Andrew Lloyd Weber, but Hugo was mainly a poet, the author of some 158,000 lines of verse. And here are four of those lines:
"Le divin Mahomet enfourchait tour à tour
Son mulet Daïdol et son âne Yafour;
Car le sage lui-même a, selon l'occurrence,
Son jour d'entêtement et son jour d'ignorance."This is translated by the indefatigable Blackmores (in “Selected Poems of Victor Hugo”) thus:
“Sacred Muhammad rode alternately
On Doldo and Yafur, his ass and mule,
Because a sage himself is apt to be
Stubborn the one day, and the next a fool.”There may be more lines by Hugo that will be deemed islamically unacceptable. But four lines out of 158,000 will do to cause Muslim students to reject Victor Hugo, and all his works and days.
So to that list of French Authors Muslim students in French schools will believe themselves entirely justified in rejecting, not only in refusing to read, but in disrupting classes where such authors are being taught to non-Muslim students, one must add, as a final summing-up, one more name -- that of
Victor Hugo, hélas!
What about Beckett? Would he count, even though he was Irish? If so, well every cloud has a silver lining.
And why can't Victor Hugo-Helas hyphenate his name properly? Robbe-Grillet managed it.
"What about Beckett?"
-- from a posting above
No, sorry. Friend and secretary of Joyce, and Joyce was too damned philosemitic (see Leopold Bloom of Rudolph Virag fame), and had close friends and supporters who were Jewish. Think, for example, in Paris of Lucie and Paul Leon, the latter seized and then murdered by the Nazis when he stayed behind in Paris one more day because of his son's scheduled taking of the bac) in Paris, or in Trieste of Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo).
And Beckett took part in the Resistance, for all the right reasons. And was a friend of Avigdor Arikha (for whom he wrote a short piece: "Pour Avigdor Arikha"). And so much more that would disqualify Beckett from being sympathetically received by Muslim students.
But there is always that great man Tom Paulin. Now there's someone Muslim students should enjoy.
I suppose Camus would never do either. The Plague is a satire on the German occupation of France, after all, and I take it that occupation will no longer regarded as an entirely bad thing in the New France.
Sir, you still owe use the answer to that abominable quiz you posed some months back.
Longtime Lurker -- you are right. And furthermore, I have been told by a Higher Authority that if I do not post the answers soon, I will not be allowed to offer another contest. A knuckle-rapping that still aches.
Hugh, that was a *great* piece. You would be an excellent lit prof. Another pity that the academy is so PC today.
I'm sure you're just scratching the surface of what will be banned in French culture. Charles Martel will be out (how dare he try to stall the islamic invasion of France), as will Charles Fourier (how silly of him to think of a socialist state when the quran tells us how to properly organize society). Pasteur and Lavoisier will be gone, too, since some clown will allege that an obscure Arab "scientist" actually made the same discoveries in 10th century Baghdad.
Where is the Little Corsican when you need him?
The annual meeting of the James Joyce Underappreciated Society will this year be held at 7 Eccles Street, Dublin, on a date to be decided. Under no circumstances, however, will the date chosen turn out to be June 16, for all the obviously obvious reasons. We've had quite enough, thank you, of Bloomsday Ceremonies, marathon readings by too-enthusiastic enthusiasts, agents the Irish National Tourist Board, and the rest of it, on poor little over-exploited June 16 in dear dirty Dublin.
There is a Call for Papers. Topic:
A Cross Examination of "Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress."
Special attention will be given by prosecutors and defenders alike to the contribution to "Our Incamination for Factification of His Exagmination of Work in Progress" by the late Vladimir Dixon (whose papers are preserved in western Massachusetts). Despite his Christian name, Dixon was not quite as Russian as Barclay de Tolly or even Baudouin de Courtenay, but he was chosen as the main subject of this year's Underappreciatd Society meeting because Beckett had come into the discussion above and, as many by now have hastily or even hostily guessed at this informative website, the name "Vladimir" for a certain personage's name in "Waiting for Godot" was first suggested by the first name of Beckett's fellow contributor to "Our Factification Round His Exagmination for Incamination of Work in Progress." Even the crisrixians have missed this.
A high old time should be had by all, especially during the planned climb of the Hill of Howth. The High Kings of Connaught have written that they plan to attend.
Do think of joining us, Interested, and all others who are, or may be, Interested.
"Pasteur and Lavoisier will be gone, too..."
-- from a posting above
If you are trying to sing the relative praises of the West as compared to Islam, it might be better not to invoke the name of Lavoisier.
At least the French police will still act on occasion:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4921848.stm
Surprisingly, the BBC has used the T-word there, which it rarely does.
I've just finished reading a charming little story by Théophile Gautier (1811-1872), La Mille et Deuxième Nuit ("The Thousand-and-Second Night"). It's a romantic fantasy about a wealthy Muslim in Cairo who falls in love with the Sultan's wife whom he doesn't know is really a "peri" (defined in Webster's as (Persian Myth.) An imaginary being, male or female, like an elf or fairy, represented as a descendant of fallen angels, excluded from paradise till penance is accomplished), probably a female jinn. Of interest are the subliminal messages Gautier is, consciously or unconsciously, transmitting with his story: overtly, we become familiarized with an Islamic society where a young Muslim man (the protagonist, Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed) can live a life of upper-middle-class ease through inheriting a little money, and in doing so, likes to spend many of his hours smoking tobacco ("ses plaisirs consistaient à fumer du tombeki dans son narguilhé"). Mahmoud, Gautier tells us, has had a "good education": he has learned to read fluently in the most ancient books, has acquired a beautiful penmanship, has learned the verses of the Koran and its commentators by heart, has become able to recite flawlessly the "Moallakats" -- seven famous pre-Islamic poets according to Gautier posted on the doors of the mosques (and according to Wikipedia a copy hangs from the arches at the Kaaba in Mecca), and has himself become something of a poet. Later in the story, when he recites his poetry to the female jinn, she tells him he's so good he should be posted in the mosques along with the celebrated "Ferdoussi, de Saadi and Ibnn-Ben-Omaz" (Muslim poets -- Gibbon curiously called Ferdoussi, circa late 10th century, a "national poet").
In sum, Gautier subliminally yet predominately presents an Islam where men smoke tobacco, read high literature, indulge in poetry, and fall in love at first sight and feel the passions of romantic love so much they do rash things to try to fulfill it, and became despondent and melancholy when it slips through their fingers.
Peripherally and in passing in his story, the reader encounters the harsher side of Islam -- when the peri pretends to be a slave of the Sultan escaping from his wrath for the grave sin of having passed a love-letter from an admirer to the Sultan's wife, whom the Sultan punishes by putting her in a leather sack with two cats which he had tossed into the sea; or when a black slave who conducts Mahmoud to a secret hiding place of a woman he had fallen in love with at first sight (a woman who turns out to be the daughter of the Caliph) reveals that he cannot answer Mahmoud because he, the black slave, has had his tongue cut out by its roots as part of his role in the royal court being prevented from revealing secrets.
Correction: the Mahmoud of the story mentioned above falls in love with what he supposes is the Caliph's daughter, not the Sultan's wife.
Hugh,
Can you elucidate further on Tom Paulin? What do you mean exactly?
Hugh,
Not to worry.
Just checked out the archive. I see what you mean.
Er... ...Yojimbo:
I think Camus converted to Islam, didn't he?
Good grief, did he? That's a bit disturbing, if true.
No. He didn't.
To expand on that - I'd seen Camus as something of a "brand from the burning" in terms of his falling out with Sartre and rejecting communism. It would be a shame if he had fallen for another type of totalitarianism instead.
Wikipedia has this:
I don't know how accurate that is - always a problem with Wikipedia (but not necessarily not with more traditional sources either, of course).
As a pied-noir - even a somewhat sympathetic one - he'd be damned in the New France anyway, I suppose.
And let us not forget Ionesco whose play Rhinoceros might be viewed as an allegory of the spread of Islam through conversion and intimidation.
The mullahs may even rip out the very beginnings of French culture. Histories of Martell might be rewritten. Passages of the Song of Roland might be censored, etc.
chsw
Paulin:
Oxford poet wants Jews shot
Paulin is described as being from a "liberal" family - although this is not a liberalism that, say, Locke or Kant would have recognized.
"the 'Moallakats' -- seven famous pre-Islamic poets...."
-- from a posting above
One of the most famous tales of the Russian writer Leonid Andreyev (d. 1919) bears the title "Seven Who Were Hanged." The "Mu'allaqat" refers to the (Seven Poems) That Were Hung, supposedly at or on the Ka'aba in Mecca, and also supposedly written by pre-Islamic poets, in Arabia, in Arabic. That is the story. And Theopihle Gautier, of course, had no reason to doubt that story.
But many others do doubt it.
For them, the "Mu'allaqat" are later fabrications, that appeared out of nowhere in the eighth century (for this and other information I am indebted to Ibn Warraq, who will cover this subject in his forthcoming "Which Koran?").
Various scholars have had various ideas. David Margoliouth thought that all so-called pre-Islamic poetry was a later fabrication; his doubts were based on the unreliability of the translators (that isnad stuff can work both ways). The Egyptian Taha Hossein came to the conclusion that the Mu'allaqat were forgeries, and after expressing these doubts -- which appeared to have no connection to an undercutting of Islam -- was forced in the 1920s to recant his views.
In his "Qur'anic Studies" John Wansbrough suggests that the Mu'allaqat were forgeries, fabricated by Arabs to give a greater antiquity to their "holy" language, i.e., the language of the Qur'an. Furthermore, since Arabic as a written language most likely developed outside Arabia, the assigning of the Mu'allaqat's composition to Arabs within Arabia would further support the need to promote the placement of the first written Arabic within Arabia, for obvious religio-political reasons.
Christoph Luxenberg, one assumes, will be looking into the Mu'allaqat. Don't expect any members of MESA Nostra to come close to touching the subject.
Wait until this summer, when Ibn Warraq's "Which Koran?" comes out, and read whatever he has to say, in his lucid fashion, on the "Mu'allaqat."
"Ferdoussi, de Saadi and Ibnn-Ben-Omaz" (Muslim poets -- Gibbon curiously called Ferdoussi, circa late 10th century, a "national poet"..
-- from a posting above
Gibbon called Firdowsi, author of the Shahnameh, a "national poet" because he accepted the belief that in writing so beautifully in Persian, Firdowsi helped to preserve that language from the arabization, linguistic and cultural, that everywhere accompanied islamization. If Maronites today have Arabic names, and use Arabic, that does not make them Arabs -- as the Muslim Arabs claim. Nor are Copts, with partly-Arab names, who use Arabic, Arabs -- as Muslim Arabs try to claim. Firdowsi, as well as many other Persian poets, helped save the Persian language, and what was, at least until recently (when the "gift of the Arabs" to the Persians was renewed by Arafat and the PLO and other Arabs helping Khomeini's possibly resistible rise -- Islam, the gift that keeps insisting on being given, just in case recipients the first time don't quite get it) from arabization, if they could not undo the islamization that dragged down Persia, or has at the moment, to the civilizational level of the most primitive desert Arabs.
I guess that means Madame Bovary (the little harlot) is beyond the pale. Even though her adultury led to her slow, painful and ugly death, she wasn't punished sharia-style. i.e. by being stoned to death.
Au revoir, Emma.
Flaubert and Maxine du Camp also misbehaved, in islamic terms, when they visited Cairo. And then there was that adulterous liaison with Louise Colet, hardly mitigated by the subsequent years of chaste merely epistolary passion. I don't think Flaubert deserves, or would make, the cut -- islamically defined. Or, depending on how you look at it, perhaps he most unfortunately would.
And Anais Nin.
And Laclos and his "Liaisons dangereuses", a masterpiece of French beauty and cleverness. Laclos, I suppose, is not only guilty of having libertine ideas, but also he has too much esteem for women. Madame de Mertueil is as powerful, as smart as Valmont.
What about Sade and his "Juliette" ? The most feminist book in the world. And the most anti religious...
Foutre des Saints et de la Vierge,
Foutre des Anges et de Dieu !
Sur eux tous je branle ma verge,
Lorsque je veux la mettre en feu...
Sorry if I can't translate that !
Roger Shattuck said all that needed to be said about the literary cult of the Marquis de Sade. If we must have mention of this kind of thing, then let's stick to the onze mille verges of Apollinaire, where at least there's a pun to see us through. Or Gavarni, or Daragnes. Or the cheerful accommodations of Mme. Aury for Jean Paulhan. But please, let's leave Sade out of it.
Some things are much better practiced than preached.
Not many people know that Beckett once fell on hard times. Homeless, he had to sleep in a dustbin (later to feature in "Endgame"), and was forced to find work on a building site just outside Dublin. The foreman was naturally unimpressed by this weedy intellectual, and asked him whether he knew the difference between a joist and a girder.
"Easy", said Beckett, "Girder wrote Faust and Joist wrote Ulysses."
Joyce, of course, embraced Arab culture, warts and all. He converted to Islam on his deathbed, and was heard to mutter something about ninny-goats nanny-goats noncing by...
Hugh, Sade is a wonderful author, his language is so beautiful, and he is the most humouristic author I know, the most insolent...
Montesquieu would be out - separation of powers sounds highly suspect.
Emile Durkheim, "father of sociology", would have to go, too - for obvious reasons.
Céline, too, I suppose. His support for the occupation would go down well, but existential despair must be questionable.
Really, when it comes down to it virtually everything will have to go on the bonfire.
And don't even think about teaching the music - Hector Berlioz, Camille Saint-Saëns (certainly not L’Enfance du Christ), Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy ...
But, so far as I can see, no one does anything to protect France and French culture. If I woke up and they said on the news that the French Army had seized control, I don't know but that it wouldn't come as a relief.
No. He didn't.
Posted by: Hugh at April 19, 2006 01:50 PM
I presume this is Hugh responding to my reference to Camus converting to Islam. I believe I came across this assertion in connection with the very brief listing of Muslims who have received Nobel awards. It noted that Camus was a "pieds noir: -- Frenchman born in Algeria and sympathized with the Algerians.
If, as Hugh states, Camus never converted, that puts the number of Muslim Nobel Lauriates at 8 or 9, including the one given to Arafat for signing the accord that he swiftly torpedoed by staging the first Intifada and should have been revoked.
The Muslims, and Arabs especially, have a very great deal --beaucoup-- to hold against Chateaubriand, despite his nostalgia for old Granada.
In his Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem, he writes [approx]:
Everything about the Arabs denotes the civilized man fallen back into the savage state.
He also describes the Arab-Muslim oppression of the Jews in Jerusalem at that time.
He visited Jerusalem in 1806.
Then other French writers wrote about Jews living in Israel in the 19th century: such were Cesar Famin, Pierre Loti, Felix Bovet, etc. All such writing should be considered a no, no, since --according to the new "palestinian people" orthodoxy, there were no Jews in Israel before the Holocaust, or before 1917 for the more liberal propaganda propounders.
Let's not forget the scholarly historical works on the Land of Israel by Felix Abel, a Dominican priest attached to the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem.
Histoire de la Palestine [up to the Arab conquest]
Geographie de la Palestine, and many articles in the Revue Biblique
"Pasteur and Lavoisier will be gone, too..."
-- from a posting above
If you are trying to sing the relative praises of the West as compared to Islam, it might be better not to invoke the name of Lavoisier.
Hugh, could you please elaborate? I know about the allegation that Antoine Lavoisier took credit for research performed by Joseph Priestly; if there are other bad aspects to his character I do not know about them. I really only know about his work in chemistry.
Paul Bowles anyone? While not French, he did live in Paris for a time while studying under Aaron Copeland and Gertrude Stein before finally and famously finding his own Road To Morocco.
I've long thought that his three "Maghrebi" novels along with his numerous short stories written from within and about the land of Islam and the people who inhabit those lands would serve as an excellent primer for our "middle east planners" in the State Department- an excellent course-study on the mind of muslims and their attitudes and intentions towards infidels. For instance, I wonder what Karen Hughes would think upon reading this excerpt from THE SPIDER'S HOUSE in which Amar, one of the main protaganists of the novel, muses upon the motivations of the Arab "militants" in their uprising against the French in mid-1950's Morocco-
"The circle was closed; now he understood the Wattanine whom the French called les terroristes and les assassins. He understood why they were willing to risk dying in order to derail a train or burn a cinema or blow up a post office. It was not independence they wanted, it was a satisfaction much more immediate than that: the pleasure of seeing others undergo the humiliation of suffering and dying, and the knowledge that they had at least the small amount of power necessary to bring about that humiliation. If you could not have freedom you could still have vengeance, and that was all anyone wanted right now. Perhaps, he thought, vengeance was what Allah wished his people to have, and by inflicting punishment on unbelievers the Moslems would merely be imposing divine justice."
- Paul Bowles, THE SPIDER'S HOUSE
1955
Lavoisier came to an untimely end in 1794. To the appeal made on his behalf the answer, it is reported, was "The Republic has no need of geniuses."
"Sade is a wonderful author, his language is so beautiful, and he is the most humouristic author I know, the most insolent..."
-- from a posting above
"Insolence" in your French sense, or for that matter that highly overused adjective "insolite" meant as praise for a quality not necessarily praiseworthy, not to mention those two adjectives that are almost certain guarantees of deadly dullness, when applied to someone's "art" (as so much govno is optimistically described nowadays) -- that is, those much-invoked qualities of being "subversive" and "transgressive" -- leave me cold. Everything has been so goddam subversive and transgressive for the past decade or two, and who eats that stuff up more than those very rich men, the Saatchis and the Broads, who have no taste or sense, and who are ruining the art market for art. Shakespeare wanted to buy a house in Stratford. Keats would have loved to have lived long enough to marry Fanny Brawne. Dickens was as bourgeois as he could be (Miss Ternan was hidden from public view). Joyce was a Dublin burgher, or pretended to be.
All that Sade nonsense, which by way of Georges Bataille and other awful people, comes to us, descending possibly via Gabriel Matzneff and Catherine M. et sa vie sexuelle bien remplie, is intolerable.
And you know who agrees with me, Madamoiselle joiesauvage from Armentieres? Well, Angelina Jolie, and Jenny Shimizu, who are both here looking forward to spending a delirious night with me, just the three of us, as we read aloud from the Oxford Book of English Verse -- they agree with me.
So there.
There's one thing the French invented that the Muslims should really love - the guillotine. I'm surprised that they haven't already claimed it. They invented everything else, didn't they?
Thanks to Hugh for his information about those sources.
Another great French writer -- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), mathematician, theologian and philosopher, who would be an intolerable affront to Muslims. From his Pensées:
598. It is not by that which is obscure in Mahomet, and which may be interpreted in a mysterious sense, that I would have him judged, but by what is clear, as his paradise and the rest. In that he is ridiculous. And since what is clear is ridiculous, it is not right to take his obscurities for mysteries.
It is not the same with the Scripture. I agree that there are in it obscurities as strange as those of Mahomet; but there are admirably clear passages, and the prophecies are manifestly fulfilled. The cases are, therefore, not on a par. We must not confound and put on one level things which only resemble each other in their obscurity, and not in the clearness, which requires us to reverence the obscurities.
Here are the original words of Chateaubriand's remark that everything about the Arabs denotes the civilized man fallen back into the savage state.
tout indique chez l’Arabe l’homme civilisé retombé dans l’état sauvage
But the 19th French writers who saw the Arab/Muslim world clearly are being cancelled out by a certain Henry Laurens [Laurent?], author of a 2-volume La Question de Palestine. Laurens avoids most of what the 19th century Frenchmen said about oppression of dhimmis in 19th century Arab-Muslim-ruled society in the Levant, particularly about the oppression and exploitation of Jews, although I don't think he actually denies that situation [to the best of my memory].
Pelayo-
Abu Nekka Cheops, circa 850 A.D., is credited with inventing the first proto-guillotine in a suburb of Medina.
Originally, it was just a method of cutting papyrus sheafs en masse for making the original pre-paper strips more uniform.
A passing Muslim noticed it, a light went off, and he immediately commandeered the device, used it on Abu, and took it to the nearest mosque, claiming its invention as his own.
From there, it disappears from the historical records.
But some scholars think that the Muslim who 'liberated' it from its initial creator was rebuffed by Qur'anic scholars, and executed with it, since the machine was an offense to Allah, who prescribed that the followers of Mohammad should "strike at the necks" of infidels personally.
The device distanced themselm from the 'proper' satisfaction and fulfillment of their 'religious' duties. And was thus called "sculpture" -comparing it to "a mechanical Mohammad"- and burned.
Science, in Islam, usually meets this same fate.