Death of the Khalifah of the Laughingstock: An Obituary

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"God forgive me, but perchance You are drunk, Lord." (Omar Khayyam)

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Evolutionary brain scientists claim to have established that religiousness is a genetically-formatted wiring of the brain. They have also alledgedly mapped its location in the brain: the 'upper rear parietal lobes, both right and left'. Moreover, these 'neurotheologians' conclude that the 'human brain was genetically conceived to encourage religious beliefs' (Andrew Newberg and Eugene d'Aquila, cited in Régis Debray, God: An Itinerary).

Before even venturing into the issue of the murky content spawned by these sites of the all-pervasive religiousness in human beings, I wonder how "neurotheology" (Régis Debray) would account for the wild and wide variations in intensity of religiousness in individual human beings. That is, from the neutral mode to the murderously bigotry of, say, one Caliph Usama bin Laden. Maybe it's a simple thing of the brain area being stunted in some individuals and overdeveloped in some others.

In any event, as for me, if I were ever asked by the Intelligent Designer to pick an appendage of the brain to ablate, I'd readily choose the "upper parietal lobes, both right and left." For on my view, at bottom, there's something rotten about religiousness...

I once read in Gibbon that among the early Christian sects in the waning years of the Roman Empire there were wandering bands of martyrdom-seekers roaming the backroads of North Africa. These wackos had a laughable misconstruction of martyrdom. They'd corner an unsuspecting traveler, hand him a weapon, and then beg: "In the name of Jesus-Christ, please, brother, martyr me!" These crazy martyrdom-seekers killed anyone who wouldn't martyr them!

By the way, I just learned that the newly-beatified Pope John-Paul II was a closet flagellant, a paradox as it were, as by definition a flagellant--like any good Shia--"scourges himself as a public penance" (Webster). 

I wish the late Khalifah Usama bin Laden had chosen one of these two relatively benign self-martyrizing kinds. Unfortunately, he chose the murderous martyrdom-inflicting kind. The kind invented by his precursor, Hassan Sabbah, the antithetical buddy of the cool-head poet and wine aficionado Omar Khayyam, as described in the historical novel by the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf entitled Samarkand:

"It was the end of the eleventh century, or to be exact 6 September, 1090. Hassan Sabbah, the brilliant founder of the Order of the Assassins, was about to take over the fortress which was to be, for 166 years, the seat of the most fearsome sect in history."

Well, I shouldn't have compared Usama bin Laden to Hassan Sabbah. For one, the fortress Sabbah seized was Alamut, perched "on a rock six thousand feet high in a countryside of high mountains" in Persia, whereas Abbottabad is a posh tourist resort in northern Pakistan--a town, I'm told, created by one British colonialist called Abbott!

Secondly, there's no way the franchise called The Base, the new copycat of the Order of the Assassins, could endure 166 years, nothwithstanding the warning of leaders and pundits to the effect that "Al Qaeda isn't dead with bin Laden's untimely demise" at the hands of Obama or that we now live in "The Age of Sacred Terror."

"Age"? Give me a break! This is the kind of nonsense that people who believe in the "end of history" would axiomatically put forth. The Arab streets are giving it a lie as we speak... Al Qaeda, however dangerous it is now, wouldn't pass muster when Shahrazad's proverbial formula of "time" and "age" is applied to it: "It is related, O auspicious King, that there was once, in the antiquity of time and the passage of the age..." (The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night).

Thirdly, whereas Hassan Sabbah was brilliant and a polymath, the Caliph of the Laughingstock was an absolute moron.

Just reread Chapter 2 or The 9/11 Commission Report entitled "The Foundation of the New Terrorism." There's a subsection in that chapter titled "Bin Ladin's Worldview" where you are made to expect rising to the clouds of Bin Ladenian Koranic higher criticism and exegesis. Instead of which you're treated to obscurantist platitudes of the following kind:

"Bin Laden also relies heavily on the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb. (...)
Three basic themes emerge from Qutb's writings. First, he claimed that the world was beset with barbarism, licentiousness, and unbelief (a condition he called jahiliyya, the religious  term for the period of ignorance prior to the revelation given to the Prophet Mohammed). Qutb argued that humans can choose only between Islam and jahiliyya. Second, he warned that more people, including Muslims, were attracted to jahiliyya and its material comforts than to his view of Islam; jahiliyya could therefore triumph over Islam. Third, no middle grounds exist in what Qutb conceived as a struggle between God and Satan. All Muslims--as he defined them--therefore must take up arms in this fight. Any Muslim who rejects his ideas is just another nonbeliever worthy of destruction."

Now, seriously, is this mumbo-jumbo theology? You have to be high on metamphetamine mixed with ecstasy to digest this gibberish, let alone to go on a kamikaze mission based on this rant of a drunk waking up with a massive morning katzenjammer! Or maybe it's God Himself, as Omar Khayyam would have it, who "perchance" is drunk as a skunk!

And  lastly, Hassan Sabbah died of natural causes in his own bed at his fortress of Alamut,whereas bin Laden died a well-deserved ridiculous death of a Mexican drug kingpin, and has turned into the laughing stock of licentious rowdy crowds chanting at Ground Zero and in front of the White House: "Obama got Osama!"