No, that isn’t a typo in the title. Yes, it is another one of my trademark painful interlingual puns.
Fasting – known as “sawm” – during Ramadan is one of the so-called five pillars of Islam, or obligations described in Islamic texts, which many Muslims follow, alongside actions such as prayer, giving alms and making the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
Thus spake today’s article on the topic in the Daily Telegraph. They seem to have missed one of the five pillars, as I can only count four there, but such errors have never been known to bother the modern journalist. For the sake of completeness I will provide the whole list of these so-called “pillars”: shahadah (or “testifying” which means stating their belief that Allah is the name of the only God and his messenger is Mohammed as if it were fact) prayer, fasting, almsgiving and pilgrimage to Mecca.
Some of these are one off activities, some not. Everyone who doesn’t have a health exception is expected to do the hajj pilgrimage once in their lives. The sawm or fasting in Ramadhan is a yearly event, and zakat or almsgiving is supposed to be 2,5% of money assets a year. Salat, or prayer (from which we presumably get the term “lettuce pray”in English) is several times a day and is a ritual. You are supposed to find the qibla which to the disappointment of Poles is actually the direction to the Ka’aba, that big black box in Mecca with the demon-possessed stone built into the side of it, the meteor that Satan was clinging to when cast down to the earth, I assume it is. And they bow down to it. This is the same structure that they walk around seven times on their hajj, venerating this space rock while at the same time congratulating themselves on being free of any form of idolatry.
Why is all this suddenly topical and written about in the Telegraph? Well, it might be as a timely reminder to the new Germans who showed their true colours around Cologne Cathedral as 10,000 of them fired rockets at ordinary Germans and sexually assaulted the German ladies which the Germans are so pussified as to have allowed them to do and are now seeking legal solutions when if ever a Jew would have even thought of doing something like this 80 years ago a whole bunch of Germen would have kicked the Knoblauchsentsorgungsvorbereitungs-massnahmeneinheitigkeiten out of them. Now nothing. So the Telegraph might well have wanted to remind the new Germans that those five are supposed to be the pillars and not, as it appears in practice:
1. raping and paedophilia
2. looting, mugging and stealing while demanding that such people have their hands cut off as long as it isn’t a fellow muslim
3. practising taqiyyah and generally lying and spreading untrue propaganda about themselves to gullible liberals who take it at face value
4. bombing, beheading, stabbing, shooting and any kind of brutality
5. complaining and demanding special privileges and taking immense and puerile umbrage whenever anyone shows them the fruits of their vile credo.
But actually that wasn’t the reason the Telegraph wrote about it. The Telegraph instead was explaining how this year schools are going to have to change their exam schedules because Ramadhan falls in June. This is a special privilege of the type mentioned in point 5 above, of course, on the backdrop of Easter holidays having been eroded from 2 weeks when I were a lad down to a mere few days now.
This is to prevent any exam disadvantage coming to anyone who is fasting.
Well, there are so many things one could say about this one. First off, children are exempt from fasting and while you are taking your school exams you are basically still a child in our law. The exemption ought to apply. If someone chooses to fast because they wish to do so, they would be well advised to consider that sacrifices, including fasting, are not supposed to cost us nothing, that’s what sacrifice means. Of course to the Muslim, fasting only really means delaying a full set of calories until the sun is down. One of many things which prove that Islam is man-made as a real God would have known that there are parts of earth where the sun doesn’t actually go down. The big meal they have in the evening more than makes up for building up an appetite for it during the day. Calling it a month-long fast is a joke.
Secondly, fasting actually sharpens the mind. I used to avoid breakfast and a mid-day meal when taking professional exams and found that helped. Maybe the Islamic kids will be sluggish because they are still digesting the huge meal they get in Ramadhan just before they go to sleep.
Thirdly, I would like to know why it is that of these pillars of Islam, we get forced to take this particular one so seriously when Muslims themselves clearly are not taking the Hajj seriously.
The Hajj is now reportedly attended by 6 million people a year. More simply won’t fit anyway and each year there are nasty accidents from overcrowding. So 6 million is what we can call the viable run rate. There are currently 1,600 million Muslims in the world, and somehow this number is obligated to go, sometime in the next 80 years if that’s the life expectancy (by which the Muslim population might be far far higher) so if we divide 1600 million by 80 we get 20 million. That’s the number that has to be going every year. The people excused for sickness are offset by the number who go more than once – there are those who have been many, many times.
This means evidently that the religion is man-made, as a real God would realise that the observance required was not mathematically feasable and only putting lives at risk. I don’t see such requirements in Judaism or Christianity. It is similar to the requirement in Buddhism for chastity and monastic living, which if it were taken seriously by everyone who calls himself a Buddhist would mean that Buddhism would have died out centuries ago from the lack of offspring, instead of being observed most in countries with the most pressing population issues.
So if Muslims are not even taking their own five pillars seriously, I fail to see why examining boards in Christian countries need to bend over backwards with a scimitar at their throat in orange jumpsuits to accommodate them.
Comments are open, and any Muslim who feels like doing his own bit of jihad in blasting what I just said is welcome to comment. Commenting certainly beats chopping off heads which is what seems to be the main line of argument in use by our Muslim friends today. You can say what you like, I am only cutting spam in this site. Commentators are allowed a very broad leeway as they also are on the Facebook group I moderate which is “Polyglots No Holds Barred”.
I cannot comment on the Telegraph any more, as they rapidly closed their comments section – they are always uneasy on that site about giving people too much say, and only a small minority of articles on this topic have any response at all at what there is is heavily moderated. One could still vote in the poll and 88% were against the proposals of changing the exam schedule for Ramadhan.