STUPID

This is going to be a stupid article. More accurately, it’s an article about stupidity. However, the acts that I will discuss are so brainless, puerile, and ignorant, that I may not have the power to convey them properly, which will make the article seem even more stupid.

Stupid number one: On July 2010, Pastor Terry Jones, the head of the “Dove World Outreach Center Church” in Gainesville, Florida, announced that he would burn a Koran, the Muslim holy book, to commemorate the 9/11 attacks by terrorists on the World Trade Center in New York.

After a number a setbacks, Jones finally announces that he would hold an “International Judge the Koran Day” on March 20, 2011. He stages a mock trial of the Koran, burns a copy of the holy book, and subsequently posts pictures of the burning on his church’s website.

Stupid number two: While the international press gives scant notice of Pastor Jone’s Koran burning, the act is nevertheless condemned by the Pakistani government. Later, on April 1, 2011, public protests break out in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan in response to Pastor Jones’ Koran burning. After these protests, a UN building in Mazar-e-Sharif is attacked leaving 12 persons — eight UN aid workers and four Afghans — murdered.

These killings were not only heinous and cruel but also utterly insipid. Simply, how can these people who claim that they were enraged and angered as Muslims by the burning of the Koran by Pastor Jones uphold the honor of Islam by breaking its most essential rules against the killing of innocents? Islam, by its vey root and etymology, is predicated on the Arabic word salaam or peace.

How could the killing of innocents be in consonance with the pacifist ethic of Islam?  There is one word to describe what happened in Afghanistan —senseless. Translation: stupid.      

And the causality between the Koran burning and the killings in Afghanistan is not the only thread common to the events. They are further linked in a web of stupidity. To explain: firstly, the essential harebrained-ness of burning the Koran by Pastor Jones lies in the fact that the physical written copies of Koran are not perceived by Muslims as the true essence of the Koran.

Yes, the act is truly despicable and offensive to Muslims; however, followers of Islam know that the Koran is not a mere physical book composed of wood pulp, ink and glue.

Devout Muslims believe that the Koran as a holy book is actually the words of the Creator revealed to humankind. Accordingly, the Koran exists beyond the mere physical pages of the printed words contained in a book entitled the Koran. So, no matter how many thousands of copies of the Koran are burnt, the word of Allah cannot — and will not — be diminished even by one iota.  

Furthermore, the burning of the Koran is a truly insipid idea because the Koran is meant to be expressed primarily through recitation. In fact, the Koran was originally transmitted via an oral tradition: the prophet Muhammad would receive his revelations through the intercession of the angel Gabriel and then the prophet would later recite these revealed statements or passages (surahs), which were to be memorized by his followers.

Only much later in 650 A.D., under the Third Caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, was the Koran placed or established into a standardized written form. In fact, throughout the Muslim world, great honor is placed upon the memorization of the Holy Koran. There are competitions for Koran recitation and thus even if all the written volumes of the Koran were destroyed, the Koranic tradition would doubtlessly live on.

Moreover, for an American such as Pastor Jones who claims to be a defender of America and the American way, he seems to have conveniently forgotten that religious tolerance and multi-culturalism are the bedrock of modern American democracy. While book burning, like flag burning, may be covered by the constitutional protection of free expression, nevertheless, expression has its limits. Pastor Jones’ acts only served to incite and inflame the passions of some sectors of the Muslim population who are more than happy to find new grounds, such as the burning and desecration of the Muslim holy book, on which to base their hatred of America and Americans. So instead of upholding the interests of America, all Jones did was to create more enemies, endangered the lives of Americans, and provided radical Islamists fodder for their attacks, whether physical or rhetorical, against the US. Stupid.

Perhaps the point is that evil in this world has morphed from the calculating, intelligent, even seductive evil of the old classic Satanic and biblical concepts of evil into a banal, ordinary and, essentially, stupid kind of evil. The writer Stephen King, who knows a thing or two about evil and the darkness of the human psyche, offered this take on the emerging stupidity of evil in the modern age:

“He wanted to see evil with its cerements of deception cast aside, with every feature of its visage clear. He wanted to slug it out toe to toe with EVIL, like Muhammad Ali against Joe Frazier, the Celtics against the Knicks, Jacob against the Angel...But there were no battles. There were only skirmishes of vague resolution. And EVIL did not wear one face but many, and all of them were vacuous and more often than not the chin was slicked with drool. In fact, he was being forced to the conclusion that there was no EVIL in the world at all but only evil — or perhaps (evil) at moments like this...he suspected that Hitler had been nothing but a harried bureaucrat and Satan himself a mental defective with a rudimentary sense of humor...”

Maybe I am underestimating evil. Perhaps evil has morphed into the most dangerous kind of all. Because the acts of Jones and the acts of the killers in Afghanistan all stem from the most basic foundation of evil, the source of all great crimes, and the wellspring of humankind’s biggest follies: ignorance.

As shown in Afghanistan and in Florida, ignorance and stupidity are the modern foundation of the world’s evil acts.