Iran, dogs and Islam
Reader comment on item: Rooting for Ahmadinejad
in response to reader comment: Islam's (Mohammed's?) hostility to dogs

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jun 14, 2009 at 18:15

Ron wrote

I've long been curious about Islam's curious hostility to 'man's favorite companion'. Like Islam's hostility to the human image, did this additional strange aversion come from Mohammed himself? Do you know if it was his personal hostility to Persian Zoroastrians (and their apparent fondness for dogs) that led to Islam as a whole having this unfortunate attitude?with regard, Ron Thompson

Very good question. Well Persians were really dragged yelling and screaming into islam. But this is a great civilization and early on Perians realized that their culture was far superior than that of the Arabs who were no match to them and that the pen can be mightier than the sword and the way out of Arabian imperialism by the people of Iran was the following

1. Firdawsi's great epic the shahnemah and this great poem saved the Persian language from the hegemony of the arabic language.

2. Ali Dashti believed that Persians wrote 70% of what is known as al-ulum al-islamiyya (Islamic sciences and read this as Islamic knowledge) and kutub al-turath al-islami or the books of the foundation of islam be it the sira (biography of Muhammad was written by the grandson of a Syrian or Ibn Ishaq and it was redacted by an Egyptian and that is Ibn Hisham and just iamgine here someone in let us say England writing the biography of let us say George Washington 125 years after his death and with out have ever visited the US and with no written sources! Which means that sira was aslo made up) or the hadith and the sunna (sayings of Muahmmad) or tarikh (history) ansab (family geneology) were written by Persians even the father of the grammar of the Arabic language Sibawayhe was either a Persian or an Afghan and what did those invading Arabs do? they did what they always did best and that to invade enslave and destory. Learning and books? they were the last on their minds

And all of this means that the people of iran shaped Islam in the way they did see things and the Arabs had to follow. Just amazing

3. Iranians opted for Shi3a islam as they never wanted to have anything to do with the Arabs or their brand of islam and that is sunni islam

Now this brings us to the problem of the sources of such traditions (eg: the dislike of dogs) and the major source of such traditions comes from the hadith and we know that as per Ignaz Goldziher that the hadith is really anachronistic and Jospeh Schacht proved that you can draw a line at the year 100AH where the so called isnads or the names that link such sayings to Muhammad become unreliable which means that ALL the hadith cannot be linked to the historical Muhammad. But the final nail in the coffin of the hadith you will find it in Patrica Crone's "Slaves on horses" where she regards that the entire hadith literature is unreliable and cannot be linked to the historical Muhammad period

Now what does all of this have to do with Iran, islam and dogs? I suspect that converts tend to be more Catholic than the Pope himself and the hadith was composed to let us say hate dogs because of self hate and the hate of some Persians of the religion of their ancestors and this is real anachronism. Notice also that Muhammad in the hadith is really a nasty man and you can even read that he was homosexual and a killer who is preoccupied with sex and perfumes and food which makes you wonder that other Persians might have been composing ahadith (p. of hadith) to discredit Muhammad . Can I prove this? No I cannot but again the islamic historical tradition is the most destructive tradition of its past

I hope that I helped

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