Christopher Hitchens has called for a more universal resistance to what he deems the stranglehold militant Muslims have imposed upon journalists around the world. If we insist upon the right to use the word Allah or to make a likeness, they insist it is their responsibility to kill us.
Without so much as a wimper, he contends, writers everywhere have hidden behind, rather than taken up their pens in resistance to prohibitions announced as terminally offensive and the subsequent deaths of several journalists.
I'm not crazy about being told what words to use, either, whether it's in a Union office or a U.N. assembly, but I was confused about the Muslim use of the word Allah and the use of a non-believer-- is it similar to the word "nigger" being appropriate in a rap song sung by a singer sufficiently dark-skinned, but not by a white Judge on a gold course?
I learned, to my surprise, that the word itself is sacred: since the Koran was not passed down by disciples, but came, word by word, from the mouth of Allah (him?)self, his name is not merely a sound: it is the aural equivalent of a Catholic wafer.
And while Catholics must ingest both wine and wafer to have become one with their Christian god, even then a Priest must consecrate the process or it doesn't count. The sheer ease and "independence" of the Mulsim form of transubstantiation is part and parcel of its "global" troubles...Muslims need neither consecration nor a Priest to become one with their god. Stand-alone sacred is far too portable to be easily protected in a digitally-connected, religiously diverse world.
Think of the trouble Gertrude Stein would've been in...
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