Hashem Aghajari, a college professor in Iran, was sentenced to death last November by Iranian hardliners after giving a speech on the need to rejuvenate the Muslim world with an “Islamic Protestantism.” According to a translation of his speech by the MEMRI news service, Aghajari said that as “the Protestant movement wanted to rescue Christianity from the clergy and the Church hierarchy” so modern Muslims must do something similar.
“Just as people at the dawn of Islam conversed with the Prophet, we have the right to do this today,” he said. “Just as they interpreted what was conveyed [to them] at historical junctures, we must do the same. We cannot say, ‘Because this is the past we must accept it without question.’ . . . This is not logical.
“For years young people were afraid to open a Koran. They said, ‘We must go ask the mullahs what the Koran says.’ Then came [Ali] Shariati [a progressive Muslim thinker who died 25 years ago], and he told the young people that those ideas were bankrupt. [He said] you could understand the Koran using your own methods. . . . The religious leaders taught that if you understand the Koran on your own you have committed a crime. They feared that their racket would cease to exist if young people learned [the Koran] on their own. . . .
“Today more than ever we need the ‘Islamic humanism’ and ‘Islamic Protestantism’ that Shariati advocated.”
While one may agree with Aghajari that a less anti-modern, less anti-Western Islam is desirable, his is a truly stunning analogy—radically violent Islam as Catholic Church, moderating Islamic elements as Protestantism—that obfuscates what it purports to illuminate. What is clear is that Aghajari utterly misunderstands Christianity.
Dissemblers Unmasked
Boy, we could use more books like this: A thousand-page Vatican study titled Lexicon of the Family, to go on sale in Italy early this year, clarifies numerous terms that seem innocuous but which otherwise hide ideological objectives.
“When the family is discussed in the U.N. or in national parliaments, ambiguous terms and concepts impede a real understanding of the speaker’s intentions,” Alfonso Cardinal López Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, told the Italian newspaper Avvenire.
When there is talk of discrimination of woman in reality “there is no concern for the feminine condition, but a desire to put across that the family is the place where woman’s.aspirations are abused,” the cardinal said. In other words, “to speak about discrimination of woman too often becomes an accusation against the family.”
Voluntary interruption of pregnancy, when referring to abortion, and reproductive health, when talking about contraception, are only two examples of the terms endorsed by many countries that introduce grave moral confusion, the lexicon warns. It points out that even expressions that seem unequivocal, such as matrimonial indissolubility and conjugal love, can open the doors to a new manipulation of language.
The lexicon addresses another term that masks debatable concepts: gender. “At present there are many experts who no longer refer to the biological fact [of gender] but to the cultural option,” said Cardinal López Trujillo. “According to this logic, sexual identity should not be rooted in human nature but in the tendency that the individual is free to embrace. In this way an attempt is made to put heterosexual and homosexual couples on the same plane.”
Intolerance Is Relative
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger thinks relativism has become the new expression of intolerance. The prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said recently in an interview with the Zenit news agency, “I would say that today relativism predominates. It seems that whoever is not a relativist is someone who is intolerant. To think that one can understand the essential truth is already seen as something intolerant.
“However, in reality this exclusion of truth is a type of very grave intolerance and reduces essential things of human life to subjectivism. In this way, in essential things we no longer have a common view. Each one can and should decide as he can. So we lose the ethical foundations of our common life.
“The gift of knowing Jesus does not mean that there are no important fragments of truth in other religions. In the light of Christ, we can establish a fruitful dialogue with a point of reference in which we can see how all these fragments of truth contribute to greater depth in our faith and to an authentic spiritual community of humanity.”
The Just Hierarchy of Values
“Society is essential to the fulfillment of the human vocation,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 1886). “To attain this aim, respect must be accorded to the just hierarchy of values.”
* * *
Last November 20 a report published by the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the World Bank made a dramatic appeal for additional funds to ensure vaccinations for poor children. “In many regions of the world,” explained Gro Harlem Brundtland, director-general of the World Health Organization, “it is more the rule than the exception for children to die of common childhood conditions such as measles, which alone causes about 700,000 deaths a year.”
That same day the Associated Press reported that pets in Palm Beach, Florida, were about to have their own society magazine. The new publication, Palm Beach Pet Society, is designed “to chart the season’s biggest canine social events, the latest designs in dog beds and the general comings and goings that make pedigreed purebreds the talk of weekly grooming sessions.” The report said Pet Society editor Joanne Cutner wants to make sure the animals are treated as well as their owners. Palm Beach pets already attend lavish $1,000-plus birthday parties and are adorned with $75 designer collars, $100 sweaters, and even pricier diamond and pearl jewelry.
* * *
Also on November 20 The Narragansett Times reported that biomedical ethicist Dan W. Brock, speaking at the University of Rhode Island’s Tenth Honors Colloquium lecture, contended that society might be better off if it prevents the birth of blind and severely disabled children. Brock said he upholds the “full and equal moral status” of disabled people. Yet “we should distinguish between preventing people from becoming disabled from preventing the existence of disabled people.” He justified aborting children by saying it would result in “less suffering and loss of opportunity in the world.”
Meanwhile, The Independent, a London newspaper, reported October 22 that animal rights activists protested plans to kill a group of sick seals. The Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, hoping to reduce the spread of the phocine distemper virus, had organized six marksmen to shoot the ailing seals before they could infect other animals. (Scotland is home to almost 80 percent of the United Kingdom’s seal population, so a spreading infection could wreak havoc.) But the group Advocates for Animals demanded special holding pens for the infected seals while they recovered from the disease.
* * *
The day after the sick seals story, British daily The Guardian reported that the British Board of Film Classification approved, uncut, the rape scene portrayed in Kaspar Noe’s film Irréversible. The censors said the rape scene “contains no explicit sexual images and is not designed to titillate.” Last May 26 when the film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, it was so shocking that some 250 people walked out, including film critics who described Irréversible as “sick” and “gratuitous,” reported the BBC.
Three weeks later, on November 14, The Telegraph newspaper reported that the same film board balked at allowing a scene in John Malkovich’s film The Dancer Upstairs that depicted animals with fake sticks of dynamite attached to them. The film is based on a novel that describes how the Shining Path destabilized Peru during the 1980s and ’90s. Maoist guerrillas would often attach explosives to animals and blow them up in crowded areas. The board was particularly worried about two scenes in the film showing a chicken and a dog strapped with explosives walking into crowds (the film changes scene before the explosions commence). The board said the animals were “clearly distressed,” and that it would not grant a certificate for the film to be shown at the London Film Festival unless the scenes were cut. The Telegraph noted it was curious that the board made no complaint about other scenes in the film depicting children similarly armed.
After a long debate, the board approved the film without cuts.