What I want to know is when this guy is going to
1) publish the letters from the non-muslim that he is responding to.
2)Stop pretending as if noone here has said anything, as if noone could possibly fail to be swept away by your efforts.
3) Stop having some kind of spiritual orgasm over some over-blown poetry that noone apparently can appreciate outside of the Arabic.
Hint 1 to Mr Mansour, its all the rocking and special chanting and years of brainwashing from the cradle that makes you think you see God flashing his ankle at you ,so to speak, in that book.
Hint 2 to Mr Mansour. It would really be impressive if the Koran as a whole, as opposed to little carefully selected bits, was impressive in any language. But its not is it?
What I would be impressed by is if you would reply to me and to others.
I hate to get crass here, but it really seems like you are getting off on these words. I see you getting way too excited and going way overboard and overblown. (Must be all that training in extremely cheesy and excessively florid Arabic poetry.) But if you arent already primed by either your whole upbringing or else a non-native desparation to find a way to go all exotic or native, then, listen carefully, the words do not impress anyone else.
I ask again, how can you love an abstarction like, infinitude? Or a flame? How can you love something that you don’t really know and can’t know? How can you love a list of names or attributes? I got news for you. Whatever it is that you feel its not love because you can’t love those things any more than you can love some distant Hollywood star. Lots of people think that their passion for the stars is real, but it just isn’t. You are perhaps in love with the feeling of love or of desire for something that you can’t really get close to, but that is not love.
You are obsessed like some old knight mooning (pun intended) over some cast off token from an unattainable lady. You are swooning over what amounts to a get well card from a lover who could visit you but never has. Your room is wallpapered with his love notes but its just you and some scractches on paper in there. Its pitiful, especially in contrast to what is happening in the next room. In that room, the Lover and Healer of All sits by the bedside curing the patient with infinite care and wisdom greater than any human physician. Around these two figures the whole family is gathered close sharing a meal in thankgiving for a gift already given and the room is full of real warmth, the kind that you can’t manufacture no matter how much you get yourself worked up.
Christians and Jews are two different versions of that warm room. We may disagree on some important particulars, but as has already been said here, we are alike in that intimate and warm experience of God. We experience a God who has reached down and touched us with his own hand or his own body. When the Israelites wandered the wilderness, they didnt have to fight in order to eat. God provided manna and water from the rock. He fed them with his own hand in a way that could not be mistaken for human effort. Jesus healed and provided food and rescue and gathered in the unclean under his wings. The Holy Spirit dwelt with the Church and preserved it from destruction without there being raised a single Christian army.
In this time of Lent, we Catholics sing an antiphon in which there is an image found in both the First and the New Testaments. God’s word says that He, himself, will wash us and we will be cleansed. Think about this arrestingly intimate image for just a moment then compare this to the god depicted in the Koran who remains off stage, who waves a hand in the darkness like some oriental potentate behind a screen or something like that and sin is just forgotten. Its a sanitary transaction. No intimacy involved.
I know that my words sound harsh, Mr Mansour, but they are harsh out of frustration that you still act as if there was no chasm between what you believe and experience of God and what Christians and Jews believe and experience of God.
There is one God. He is a fact no matter what impression or idea that we have of him. But some notions about who He is are farther from the truth than others to the extent that the understanding of some people is so far from the the understanding of others that they might as well be worshipping two different Gods. In this sense, Christians and Jews on the one hand and Muslims on the other worship two completely different Gods. They have almost nothing in common apart from some abstractions. I dont think there is any question which understanding is better. It is better because it is a true and confirmed by presence and actual contact as opposed to some high-flown idea found in some over-wrought verse.
