George Bernard Shaw Quotes
You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by someone who did accept him, and who went to Paradise for having sent you to Hell.
Shaw, George Bernard. Preface on the Prospects of Christianity. Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion, Constable and Company, 1916, p. cviii.
A Fatwa is an Islamic theological legal ruling. Islam has no hierarchy. So this Fatwa is not necessarily binding on any Muslims who do not wish to be bound by it. This is one of the relatively few Islamic theological organizations who have taken a public stand against terrorism.
A publicity seeking fundamentalist Christian minister in Florida had publicly burned a Koran to the moral condemnation of the President and most other government leaders, as well as clergy of all faiths. However, after the President of Afghanistan condemned the act, there were attacks on a United Nations compound in that country and a number of innocent people were killed and two beheaded. Yet most Muslim clerics were reluctant to morally condemn the murders while they were vociferous in castigating the Koran burning. Some were intimidated and feared that they would be attacked if they criticized the Islamic fundamentalism that advocated the murders and terrorism.
Most Americans and Europeans and their governments feel that Muslim leaders and organizations have not done very much in terms of “drawing the line” and publicly condemning terrorism. However many of the critics did not understand the intimidation that exists in most Islamic communities where the fascist fundamentalists target any Muslim public critics as heretics and apostates themselves. Many have been killed or injured in assassination attempts.
There is of course no way to tell the sect of a Muslim by physique alone, although there are major behavioral differences. The reason the quotation was newsworthy was that it was amazing that a senior Senate leader was so ignorant of such a critical and problematical subset of the world.
This is the “logic” by which Islamic terrorists have justified murder of civilians. Just as all Muslim men are fighters for Allah, all infidels are fighters against Allah and thus should die.
Both Islamic terrorists and anti-terrorist Muslims believe that they are following the world of God. Which group is the “hijacker” can be argued either way which is why the “hijack” notion turns out not to be very useful, However, despite intense pockets and even countries where the terrorist view of Islam is in the majority, the majority of Muslims in the world reject the terrorist interpretation of Islam. The difficulty lies on supporting the anti-terrorist Muslims and fighting the Islamic Terrorists without offending the former by conflating all Muslims together.
He was one of the few Muslim political leaders who at that time called for reform of any aspect of Islam where reform and change are considered blasphemy and heresy by most Islamic theologians and clerics.
George Bernard Shaw, known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
