Sacrilege Or Blasphemy - Can A Dead Book Be More Important Than A Living Human?
By
Sumit Paul, New Age Islam
7 May 2024
A
19-year-old youth was beaten to death by a mob for allegedly committing a
sacrilege at a Gurdwara in Punjab’s Ferozepur district, the police said, PTI reported
on Sunday. The police have registered a murder case against the mob.
The teen,
identified as Bakshish Singh, allegedly tore up the pages of the Guru Granth
Sahib, the holy book of Sikhs, at the Gurdwara Baba Bir Singh in Bandala
village, the police said.
I wonder,
how can a few pages of a so-called 'holy' book be more important than the life
of a human? Is a dead book more important than a living human? Sacrilege or
blasphemy, which has been integral to Islam right from its inception, was alien
to other faiths until a few years ago. But now, all religions have become
morbidly touchy and pathologically sensitive.
Followers
of Sikhism and Hinduism are ready to lynch anyone daring to 'insult' their
'holy' books. Killing a person in 'modern' times just to protect the sanctity
of one's faith, god and book/s is not just fanaticism, it's sheer primitivism
and a throwback to our prehistoric existence.
Who're we
to kill someone for alleged blasphemy? Who has given the right to these zealots
to lynch a poor soul?
Salman
Rushdie recently wrote on the reasons for decline of reading, "When the
'holy' books start dictating lives and minds of people, the classics written by
Tolstoy, Proust, Sartre, Nietzsche, Camus among others become secondary. People
begin to follow the skewed, violent and jealous teachings of these religious
books and ignore the humanitarianism of the great minds who wrote ennobling
books and classics." You cannot disagree with Rushdie. This is happening
all over the world.
We all seem
to have become disturbingly religious. This is a sign of devolution. Yuval Noah
Harari wrote a couple of years ago, "Humans will take crores of years to
evolve but human civilization will have ended by that time. So, we all, without
an exception, will die unevolved reading our dead scriptures, following our
anti-life religions and praying to a non-existent god." There cannot be
two views about the profundity of Harari's statement. We're already Nikolai
Gogol's dead souls. Humans are doomed.
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A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul
is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He
has contributed articles to the world's premier publications in several
languages including Persian.
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic
Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism