The Language of God

Submitted by Salah Ali (Norway), Jun 16, 2009 at 06:23

You are either kidding, ignoring or ignorant of Iraq's history. There are 10.000 archaeological sites in my country and all witness to 7 successive world civilizations which gave humanity: writing, the wheel and the legal system. Shifts in the political situation do not entail or subsume shifts in cultural heritage or in the ethnicity of the people if they continue their uninterrupted existence in the land. The Arabs of Iraq are Semitic and the cultural characteristics: world-view, anthropological attributes and the type of imagination that exists for instance in al-Mutanabbi's poetry and the pre-Islamic Odes is the same as the type of imagination of Asurnaserpal II describing his conquest of the Near East, Shulgi's poem or Tamooz Ode. The imagery in Gilgamesh's epic is the same as the images I use in my poetry and in most Arab poetry. You reminded me of King Jeho (which in Arabic means "donkey") kneeling before Shalmenser III son of Ashurnaserpal II. Then, came the great faith of Islam which was and still is the most resilient of all faiths and cultures as it founded new-world view, new cities, new architectural style and new world capitals in Damascus, Cordova, Istanbul and Baghdad. In the time, you insolently and stupidly mentioned my country as an isolated and peripheral outpost of the Ottoman Empire, Iraq had witnessed a cultural, literary and commercial revival. You can read Percy Kemp's thesis on Mosul during the Jalilis' period to quote only one reference. Moreover, in the time the Ottomans controlled the Fertile Crescent, most Eastern Europe and the Balkans were under an outskirt to the Islam capital of Istanbul. Do not forget that it was Mohammed II who liberated Istanbul from the yoke of Christendom and restored it to Islam. The Ottomans are our coreligionists and we in Iraq do prefer to strengthen ties with modern and increasingly divorced from Secularism Turkey. The more the Turks distance themselves from West, the better for us. We are crossing fingers that Islam will prevail soon in Turkey and the few perverts like Ataturk would wake up from the delusion of joining an infidel and a morally fast-dying Europe. You said "Without the leadership of T.E. Lawrence during World War I, much of Arabia would have remained part of an Ottoman Empire in decline." U here again another signpost of your ignorance, if you mean the Hollywood Lawrence, you are justifies since you are talking of movies but if you mean the historical Lawrence you are absolutely wrong. Have you read the Seven pillars of Wisdom, or have you searched into the reasons behind stealing the hand-written version of the book while Lawrence was exchanging trains between Reading and Oxford. Lawrence only succeeded in winning the Arabians of Hijaz (the later kings of the Fertile Crescent) only after a promise of independence. It was the British who had done down both Lawrence and the Arabs. But cultures never die. If you confound politics with the cultural memory and cultural identity, you are far and wide off the point.

The West and Israel are conglomerations of pirates and thieves. You conquer and derive legitimacy from aggression "History proves that there is a price for everything, the price of your liberation from the Ottomans was the de facto colonization of both France and Britain". Who liberated whom? What you call the revolutions of Algeria, Egypt and Iraq? And where had the sacrifices of 1000.000 martyrs in Algeria only gone if we were liberated by the West? Your ignorance persists every letter in your comment you say "However there were also benefits. It fact it was the European Christian missionaries that introduced both lithography, and printing to Lebanon in 19th century". It is a historical fact that Europe adopted woodblock printing from the Moslem World, initially for fabric since the technique of metal block printing was also unknown in Europe. Moreover movable type printing was introduced from China, not from Europe. However, it was not the X-missionaries that introduced lithograph printing to the Arab world. It was Napoleon who brought a press to Egypt and supplied it with Arabic letters, not of course for civic objectives but for political one for Napoleon believed strongly in propaganda. But ironically the new tools only helped dissemination of printed material to the general public and helped the nationalist revival in the Arab World. Ironically too, it was Eastern Christians who began hard-line Nationalist parties such as the Baath Party in Syria and Iraq and the hard-line Palestinian movement headed by George Habash. We are credited by civilizing the world: The very invention of writing is an Iraqi gift to mankind and my ancestors were writing cuneiforms on mud and stone when all European capitals were jungles.

As for your last statement. I am free to choose where I live. I am not forcing myself. The wealth Europe enjoys is a result of a history of exploitation and colonization of the East. The foreigners here in Europe are only given a little portion of their own money! Jews are thieves and you are an intruder. In fact, everybody is an intruder since Islam is the centre of the Universe and a Moslem wherever he exists is his country proper be it Europe be it the Middle East. The whole world is a gift given by God to us. If you are a Moslem, then you are the same like us and can enjoy the whole Earth as your temporal and spatial transitional domain The difference is between fine-minds like mine and a mind full of rubbish that ignores the religion of God that is Islam, and the language of God that is Arabic.

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