LEFT: The image of Muhammad and his horse in question. This is Mr. Taheri's description:
"A miniature by Sultan Muhammad-Nur Bokharai, showing Muhammad riding Buraq, a horse with the face of a beautiful woman, on his way to Jerusalem for his M'eraj or nocturnal journey to Heavens (16th century)..."
Please look here for the complete article.
Responding to my post of excerpts of Amir Taheri's article on the corruption of islamic teaching by those seeking earthly power
lecentre said...
I was fascinated to read this post. I didn't know these points, except that Islam no longer has an organic theology, which i was taught in my course on it last year "the door of Ijtihad closed."Fascinating post, and I imagine the image of Muhammad you posted is from the Koran, or some other arab source? It seems familiar, and it's clearly a religious depiction.
I read the koran years ago, and found it unexceptional for the most part. I have always doubted the radical sects were representative of islamic theology. Even I, a devout Catholic, can see the contributions moslems have made in the fields of art and science throughout history. The contrast with what we are told is true islam today is mind boggling.
It was an illuminating post. I personally was reading a bit more about the topic in this week's Time magazine. If it's always slightly behind the times, the magazine's still a good source of information. It was a bit fuzzy on this though; an editorialist said they're banned, a news article said it's a cultural convention, and there was at least another explanation I can't remember, but said something about it being implicit in certain verses (i.e. obvious interpretation).
ReplyDeleteThanks again for the good post, keep it up :).
On a related note, would you care to start a blogroll of Westerners with an interest in the details of Islam and the Middle East's politics? It could grow traffic to our sites and boost us in the search engines.