Another silly story of Qur’an abuse. Prison Service says female security prisoner goes on rampage during body search, tosses Quran pages toward toilet. From YNet News:
ASHKELON – A female Palestinian security prisoner in Ashkelon’s Shikma Prison tore up pages from a copy of the Quran and threw them toward the toilet during a routine search Sunday, the Israel Prison Service said.
The 22-year-old detainee from a village near Hebron is an Islamic Jihad member who was arrested three months ago in suspicion of hostile terror activity.
She resisted a routine search by a female guard, and then took out torn Quran pages from her skirt and hurled them toward the toilet.
The guard handed the torn Quran pages to the prison’s director, and Prison Service officials said she showed heightened sensitivity to the holy Islamic book.
“Security prisoners are permitted to keep Qurans, and the Prison Service provides them with the books, but tearing pages out of the book and throwing them in the bathroom is blasphemy and hinders the prisoners” right to conduct religious rites,” a Prison Service official said.
Sorry, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how tearing up a book could be construed as blasphemous in this day and age. I thought the world had given up these exaggerated notions of the sacred a long, long time ago. Just like a lot of other things Muslims are forcing back into our collective consciousness, these ideas have never left Islam. We must grapple with them, not simply accept them, as the prison official cited above has done.