Garbanzo Toons: An Islamic Perspective on Holocaust Denial

Thursday, July 13, 2006

An Islamic Perspective on Holocaust Denial

Iranian President Mamoud Am-a-din-a-nut-job is the latest and the loudest to join the Holocaust denial camp, or maybe he's finally become loud enough so that the world can hear him. He claims he wants a "scientific inquiry" into whether or not the Holocaust happened.

There is a story by Idries Shah in his book, Wisdom of the Idiots. The story is called "Ajmal Hussein and the Scholars". Here is the part that applies to Holocaust deniers:

Sufi Ajmal Hussein was constantly being criticised by scholars, who feared that his repute might outshine their own. They spared no efforts to cast doubts upon his knowledge, to accuse him of taking refuge from their criticisms in mysticism, and even to imply that he had been guilty of discreditable practices.

At length he said: 'If I answer my critics, they make it the opportunity to bring fresh accusation against me, which people believe because it amuses them to believe such things. If I do not answer them they crow and preen themselves, and people believe that they are real scholars. They imagine that we Sufis oppose scholarship. We do not But our very existence is a threat to the pretended scholarship of tiny noisy ones. Scholarship long since disappeared. What we have to face now is sham scholarship.'

The scholars shrilled more loudly than ever.

This isn't the whole story, but it's the part that caught my attention. In my interpretation Ajmal Hussein is, of course, acting as Israel, or the Jews. The "scholars" are, obviously, the Iranian nutjob and his fellow deniers.

And they will continue to shrill "more loudly than ever".

Labels: Ahmadinejad, Holocaust denial, Idries Shah