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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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THE BREATH OF ALLAH Sources from the international filmmaking world report that a new blockbuster film about the origins of Islam will soon be released by the German film company Träumenbild. Based upon the research of an author whose name remains secret, the new film, “The Breath of Allah”, tells the previously suppressed “true” story of Islam. It relates how an illiterate seventh-century Arabian warrior-chieftain, Muhammad of Mecca, founded one of the world’s great religions and made it a major force in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Asia. Muhammad had a religious “epiphany” while worshipping Allah, his tribe’s local deity, around A.D. 610. In the vision, Allah commanded conversion of the whole world to the “one true religion” with fire and sword. This suited Muhammad, as his tribe were essentially Arabian highwaymen who made a nice living attacking other tribes, killing their men, and plundering their belongings and women. Allah’s commands now made these activities religious duties. As Muhammed’s success grew and his followers increased, Allah grew in importance. Many western peoples began to think of Allah as equivalent to the Bible’s Jehovah God. Claiming this is false, the film shows how Allah started as a minor tribal god but grew important because the tribe’s chieftain gained significant military and political success. Islam seemed “new” to other Arabs because Allah was local. Other tribes had never heard of him. The film claims the true motivation for Islam’s military conquests was a wager between Muhammed and other Arab chieftains over who could amass the most wives from other tribes and nations. The film suggests that Muhammad might have been gay. Being illiterate, he couldn’t have recorded the Koran. Instead, tenth-century Arabian scholars wrote it to answer the booming religion’s demand for a scriptural text. Notes of the Prophet’s vision – recorded by his daughter and preserved with other artifacts, such as Muhammed’s sword – formed the basis for the Koran’s text. Polygamy, sharia, and the slaying of infidels – already widely practiced by Muslims during three centuries of jihad – were included in the Koran after they had become established custom. The Koran’s scholarly authors included a passage on peaceful coexistence with the Jews. (Arabs and Jews both call Abraham their ancestor.) Islamic scholars and politicians hoped for a Jewish-Islamic alliance in which Jews – already dispersed across much of Europe – would join militant Islam in creating a monotheistic world empire. That Koran passage was quietly excised around 1100 after united Jewish and Christian forces of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem and slaughtered the Muslim occupants. Thereafter, Jews joined Christians on Islam’s list of Infidels. German politicians are concerned that Träumenbild’s film might produce riots among Muslims and violence toward the producer and writer. But German cinematic Wunderkind Inge Karl, director of “The Breath of Allah”, scoffs at such concerns. “Vee do not fear hooligans vearing handkerchiefs on zehr heads,” she said. (But her confidants say she has retained several former East German Stasi agents as bodyguards.) Before my readers get too fascinated with all this new knowledge about Islam, I should point out that most of the above (but not all of it) is rubbish. “The Breath of Allah”, Träumenbild films, and director Inge Karl are inventions. (Inge Karl’s fictional persona is based (very loosely) on the famous German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (1)). No cinematic exposé of Islam is planned. My readers should not expect a smashing new German film directed by the brilliant Inge Karl. Those sensational disclosures about Islam are a few facts mixed with fiction. Muhammad did claim Allah was speaking to him around the year 610. He began preaching against the idolatry and economic oppression that afflicted the Arab people. (There was no outrageous wager over a “foreign wives contest”, and Muhammad was certainly not gay.) It is also true that Allah was a local god who grew big along with Islam. The Rev. Tat Stewart, former missionary to Persia and noted authority on Iranian missions, says Allah is not the Bible’s Jehovah God. That claim arose centuries after Mohammed’s death. Nothing suggests that Mohammed’s tribesmen were brigands, but Islam certainly became a powerful military movement within the Prophet’s lifetime (a “religion of peace”?). By 630 the Prophet controlled Mecca – the Arabian Peninsula’s commercial and economic center. He died in 632, but his movement surged onward. By 750 the Muslim empire stretched from Spain to India. The Koran’s origins remain mysterious. Islamic fundamentalists insist the angel Gabriel dictated the text to Muhammad, but scholars find no historical evidence of the Koran’s existence until 691 – 59 years after Mohammed’s death. The tenth-century Koran-writing is nonsense, but serious scholars do trace much knowledge about the life and sayings of Muhammad to accounts written 130 to 300 years after the Prophet’s death. No one knows if the Prophet was literate. That he was a preacher of monotheistic righteousness is well documented. Islamic military successes produced the Crusades – not the other way round. Eyewitness reports say Jews welcomed Muslims as liberators when they took Jerusalem in 638. The First Crusade included the only successful conquest of Jerusalem (1099) of the six crusades. It included horrific slaughter of both Jews and Muslims. The Koran was not subsequently modified. Muslims initially saw Jews as monotheistic brothers, but later political disagreements divided them. I fabricated this tale about the “The Breath of Allah” and the sensational “origins” of Islam to show how easy it is to fool people who know very little about a topic. Most readers don’t know much about Islam, so my fractured history probably sounded almost plausible. (Even the claim that Muhammad might have been gay had an oh-so-modern authenticity.) I say this because a sensational new film – based on an equally sensational book – that also fools people with semi-fictional “history” was recently released. “The Da Vinci Code” book and film have protestant and Catholic clergy in an uproar because they seem to have convinced many people that a non-divine Jesus actually married Mary Magdalene and fathered a daughter who was supposed to head a new, female-dominated religion. By the Da Vinci account, Jesus also planned to make a goddess the faith’s central deity, but Peter conspired to suppress the entire plan – thus creating the male-dominated, sexually-restrictive religious mess we have today. (If only it had worked out differently.) Gnostic literature, on which some of the Da Vinci tale is based, is ancient heresy, not long-suppressed truth. Scholars trace its roots to pre-Christian Greek thought. Gnostics believed they had secret “knowledge” about the divine that could not be comprehended by ordinary intellect. The Gospel of Truth, Letter to Rheginus, Treatise on the Three Natures, Apocalypse of Adam, Gospel of Matthias, Gospel of Philip, Acts of Peter, and Acts of Thomas were rejected by church councils long ago because they were demonstrably false. This seems “conspiratorial” to modern Americans only because we don’t know much about (church) history. (As for Mary Magdalene – I can see why revisionists are obsessed with her. The 1927 Cecil B. DeMille silent film “King of Kings” – which had original newsreel footage from the actual events – shows Mary Magdalene looking like the Vamp of Savannah on a bad hair day. After roaring up in a chariot pulled by four zebras, MM wiggled seductively into her house to meet Jesus. She was the Marilyn Monroe of her time. I had no idea there were blondes in first-century Judea.) My other purpose is to remind my readers that today’s grim realities ensure that no film or book remotely like “The Breath of Allah” will emerge very soon. Exhibit A is Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who directed “Submission” – a film critical of the brutal oppression of Muslim women. For his cutting-edge work (so to speak), Mr. van Gogh was stabbed to death on an Amsterdam street by an offended Muslim. A note pinned to his body with the knife that killed him also threatened Ayaan Hirsi Ali, writer of the film’s script. Miss Ali has been in hiding and plans to immigrate to the USA. No writer, producer, director or studio executive will risk becoming the next Theo van Gogh by doing a film critical of Islam. It is much safer to produce nutcake thrillers about first-century Christian conspiracies that supposedly turned a promising, female-dominated, earth-goddess-centered, free-love religion of peace, joy and sexual fulfillment into the dour, straight-laced, oppressive Christianity of today. I doubt if director Ron (Opie) Howard has hired any ex-KGB bodyguards to protect his back from enraged Christians. In a recent article (2), Dr. Robert Norris, Pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland, marvels that the most sophisticated society in history “can be so gullible”. He writes: “The deliberate gullibility of a society that wants to believe and promulgate acknowledged and exposed fabrication raises profound questions about the nature of faith today.” Gullibility is the crazed child of ignorance and unbelief. G. K. Chesterton must have been predicting our era when he said, “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in anything.” ******* (1) Miss Riefenstahl, Hitler’s brilliant young filmmaker who made the legendary “Triumph of the Will” in 1934, died in 2003 at the age of 101. Despite her obvious abilities, the Hollywood film establishment ostracized her because of her collaboration with the Nazi Führer. (2) “Discrediting Faith”, by Robert Norris; The Washington Times, May 17, 2006. (http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20060516-085750-7959r.htm)
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