The Thin of the Wedge

By lex, on September 29th, 2008

Vampires make uncongenial guests: Having invited one into the house, you have forfeited any power over him. It becomes his decision when, and under what circumstances to leave. Or even if he will. He might even come to feel at home in your place. Admire the views.

Rearrange the furniture.

Notice, in time, that you’re still pottering about in the attic. Make a note to do something about that.

The living and the undead make uncomfortable housemates – sooner or later, one or the other will have to go. Dreadful nuisance, much drama in the way of broken crockery, but there it is.

So it may be too when western civilizations – bodies of people bound together in a framework of laws that seeks to emphasize individual liberty to the maximum practical extent compatible with a beneficial social order – invite others whose culture emphasizes the sublimation of the individual to the family, clan and tribe, and the whole of it under submission to the unalterable will of God as perfectly set down by a man 1500 years dead. And then invites those people to not only preserve and enshrine those same cultural aspects which impoverished their abandoned homelands, but extend them * into the common sphere. Let them – voluntarily of course – submit to alternative frameworks of law.

Where does it all end?

Well, if you’re a UK book publisher hoping to tell a “moving love story” about the history of the Prophet and his child bride Aisha, it ends with se buyour hourning down around your ears, and clerics telling people that you had it coming to you.

(Radical) cleric Anjem Choudhary said the book was an insult to the Prophet Mohammed’s honour, something he said would warrant a “death penalty” under Sharia law…

“It is clearly stipulated in Muslim law that any kind of attack on his honour carries the death penalty,” he said.

“People should be aware of the consequences they might face when producing material like this. They should know the depth of feeling it might provoke.”

He denied any involvement in the attack but said he “understood” the feelings of the perpetrators.

“If the publication goes ahead then I think, inevitably, there will be more attacks like this – this is the thin of the wedge,” he said.

Speaking from Lebanon, the radical cleric Omar Bakri, added: “If anybody attacks that man I cannot myself condemn it.”

But what if the book’s publisher hadn’t voluntarily placed himself in submission to God’s will? A mere technicality, apparently. After all, who is a publisher to constrain God?

By the way: Nice place you’ve got here. Shame if anything should happen to you.

* 08-25-2018 Link Gone; no replacements found – Ed.

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