It gets scarier, and I have had this exact same conversation with other Muslims.
If I lived in Saudi Arabia, and hung out with Osama bin Ladan, and we saw someone standing on a soap box, shouting that Allah requires that the first born son of all Muslim families be put to death to quell his anger, and that Mohammed had done so with his son. The punishment of such blasphemy would be imprisonment, flogging, amputation, hanging, or beheading, depending on the law. He would have been treated like some disgusting thing to be discarded.
Now, when Bin Laden gets up on the same soap box and makes his own declaration of death, he is in no danger of the same punishments, because it is not blasphemy, because all that he has said can be interpreted as valid. The very fact that no Fatwa for his crime of blasphemy was ever made against him is a proof by omission that his words are not so outside of the mainstream, and can find support in a faith of slaves.
Because when you are a slave, and the leadership gives you a command, you do it as a true believer. And so that is why you had several true believers obey Bin Laden, while they paused to pray to Allah, and look forward to their eternal reward for doing God's work. And until a decree for the death of such a person comes from a Mufti from within the faith, then is it not that Islam defines what Osama really is, but the other way around.
Slaves are dangerous.
If I lived in Saudi Arabia, and hung out with Osama bin Ladan, and we saw someone standing on a soap box, shouting that Allah requires that the first born son of all Muslim families be put to death to quell his anger, and that Mohammed had done so with his son. The punishment of such blasphemy would be imprisonment, flogging, amputation, hanging, or beheading, depending on the law. He would have been treated like some disgusting thing to be discarded.
Now, when Bin Laden gets up on the same soap box and makes his own declaration of death, he is in no danger of the same punishments, because it is not blasphemy, because all that he has said can be interpreted as valid. The very fact that no Fatwa for his crime of blasphemy was ever made against him is a proof by omission that his words are not so outside of the mainstream, and can find support in a faith of slaves.
Because when you are a slave, and the leadership gives you a command, you do it as a true believer. And so that is why you had several true believers obey Bin Laden, while they paused to pray to Allah, and look forward to their eternal reward for doing God's work. And until a decree for the death of such a person comes from a Mufti from within the faith, then is it not that Islam defines what Osama really is, but the other way around.
Slaves are dangerous.
“I've done everything the Bible says — even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!"— Ned Flanders
