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Allah, the compassionate, the merciful
Here is Allah, the one and only God, the God other than whom there is no God, speaking his eternal unchangeable word through his prophet Muhammad:
For the wrongdoers we have prepared a fire which will encompass them like the walls of a pavilion. When they cry out for help, they shall be showered with water as hot as molten brass, which will scald their faces. Evil shall be their drink, dismal their resting-place. [Sura 18, Dawood translation.]This is not a mere warning of punishment of hell, as we find in the Bible. Nor is it simple sadism, the sickness that derives pleasure from inflicting the maximum of pain on one’s enemies. It is hyper-sadism, sadism raised to the nth degree and eternalized. It is the kind of hyper-depravity that drove Saddam Hussein’s torturing sons and their henchmen, or the beheader Zarqawi and his followers, who, when we read a passage like this, are revealed not as Muslim extremists but as true followers of Muhammad.
Yet this “god,” this all-powerful projection of Muhammad’s hatred and vengefulness, is the god whom the Catholic Church in its 1965 Declaration Nostra Aetate (which Pope Benedict reiterated in St. Peter’s Square on September 20) calls “the one God,” and esteems Muslims for their adoration of him. Email entry |