Fitzgerald: On dogs and statues in Islam

One thing is the extreme reaction that often characterizes Muslims in the Western, Infidel lands when they are being asked merely to accept what is a matter of course in those lands -- such as the use of seeing-eye dogs. But for Muslims this does not provoke quiet distaste, but rather a kind of hysteria.

The second is the aggression in Muslim behavior, and demands. For it is clear that in no case was there any attempt to simply get out of the way of the seeing-eye dog; rather, it was the 71-year-old Mr. Herridge who was being asked to leave. And the woman who began shouting at Mr. Herridge, when he was at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, that "I don't like dirty dogs," was clearly committing an act of aggression against an elderly blind man. For she might not have liked "dirty dogs," but she had no need to shout at the blind man who required his dog, and who had a perfect right to his dog, and in whose country this woman had been allowed to settle, though she appears intent on not accommodating herself, but in behaving outrageously toward the indigenes, even the most helpless and vulnerable among them. And when she shouts "I don't like dirty dogs," she is attacking Mr. Herridge himself, for she is denouncing his sole source of succor and solace.

Ibn Warraq once told me that while both Jews and Muslims do not eat pork, Jews are completely relaxed about it. No Jew would run rushing out of a restaurant screaming if he happened to discover that pork was on the menu. But Muslims would, and do. And it is the same with dogs. The hatred of dogs is not rational. It is simply based on the slavish acceptance of Muhammad's strictures, in a well-known Hadith, in which he is reported to have said: "I will not enter a house in which there are statues and dogs."

This is a strange, and even mysterious coupling of two items deemed haram: "statues and dogs." Why, one may ask? I think I know the reason. Statues, of course, were to be found in homes of Christians, and if those statues are clearly declared to be haram, and if Muslims are told that Muhammad, the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil) will not enter a house with statues, then no Muslim would do so either. That would be one bright line to distinguish Muslims from the Christians whose lands they conquered, and it would be one way to impose on those Muslims the duty not to become too friendly with Christians, not to enter their houses where there might still be statuary. And if Christians, in order to allow the members of the ruling Muslim class, to enter their houses, which might for those Christians be a desirable thing (they would need to curry favor with the Muslims who now ruled over them) they might find themselves more willing to themselves do away with statues and icons of every kind.

But why the warning against dogs? It is likely, I have suggested before at Jihad Watch and am suggesting again right now, that because dogs were prized by Zoroastrians, and treated with great affection and reverence, Muslims would want especially to distance themselves from the same practice, even to hold up dogs as objects of hysterical hatred. In so doing, they would again, as with Christians and statuary, clearly distinguish the superior Muslims and their practices from those of the inferior non-Muslims, in this case represented by Zoroastrians.

In Europe, Muslims have already been reported as vandalizing statues. For Islam makes an exception for statuary that has been so vandalized as to have become an object not of veneration but of comical contempt. Then they can be endured. More than thirty years ago, in Beverly Hills, one of the many Al-Saud princelings bought an estate, and on that estate there were many statues. He didn't destroy the statues, but he painted them grotesque colors, bright blues and greens. And stories were written about this, and pictures taken, and visitors came to gawk. But the great mystery that was never really asked, so certainly not answered was -- "Why?" Why did he do it? No one among the reporters covering the story had any idea that statuary was banned in Islam, but that vandalized statuary could remain, as long as it could not possibly be an object of respect or veneration. The ignorance displayed in that small case had no important consequences, unlike the ignorance of Islam that so many among our rulers, among those who claim to understand the world (and that includes Islam), display. They claim to be able to protect and even instruct us, and yet do not know the first thing about Islam. It is extraordinary, and maddening, and frustrating, and they never seem to think they should be embarrassed by this colossal mental lapsus, nor do anything to remedy it.

It was recently reported that in the heavily Islamic municipalities in Turkey, stray dogs are being hunted, tortured, and killed by the hundreds, and that "at least two of the dogs had been sexually abused." Western newspapers reported that "there is a myth among pious Muslims that dogs are unclean." But this is nonsense. There is no "myth." There is simply the Hadith of Muhammad saying he would not enter a house with dogs, and another that says that one's prayer is invalidated if a dog or a woman passes in front of the man doing the praying. And that means that dogs are haram, forbidden, and that must mean, to most Muslims, that they are "najis" or "unclean." Why call it a "myth" and not a teaching derived from the Sunna (that is, from the Hadith that form much of the written record of the Sunna)?

Muslim attitudes toward dogs, and the fiendish cruelty with which, in Muslim Iran, Zoroastrians and their dogs are treated, have been described by the leading historian of Zoroastrianism, Mary Boyce:

In Sharifabad the dogs distinguished clearly between Moslem and Zoroastrian, and were prepared to go...full of hope, into a crowded Zoroastrian assembly, or to fall asleep trustfully in a Zoroastrian lane, but would flee as before Satan from a group of Moslem boys...The evidence points...to Moslem hostility to these animals having been deliberately fostered in the first place in Iran, as a point of opposition to the old (pre-Islamic jihad conquest) faith (i.e., Zoroastrianism) there. Certainly in the Yazdi area...Moslems found a double satisfaction in tormenting dogs, since they were thereby both afflicting an unclean creature and causing distress to the infidel who cherished him. There are grim...stories from the time (i.e., into the latter half of the 19th century) when the annual poll-tax (jizya) was exacted, of the tax gatherer tying a Zoroastrian and a dog together, and flogging both alternately until the money was somehow forthcoming, or death released them. I myself was spared any worse sight than that of a young Moslem girl...standing over a litter of two-week old puppies, and suddenly kicking one as hard as she could with her shod foot. The puppy screamed with pain, but at my angry intervention she merely said blankly, 'But it's unclean.' In Sharifabad I was told by distressed Zoroastrian children of worse things: a litter of puppies cut to pieces with a spade-edge, and a dog's head laid open with the same implement; and occasionally the air was made hideous with the cries of some tormented animal. Such wanton cruelties on the Moslems' part added not a little to the tension between the communities."

Would that those in power began to study Islam, began to ponder what the ideology of Islam, its politics and geopolitics, its Muslim and Arab supremacism, really means for the world's Infidels, their art, their science, their freedoms, their statues -- and even their dogs.