Eight Dead in Mazar-i-Sharif

The fifth bolgia of the eighth circle of Hell was generally reserved by the great Dante Alighieri for politicians. So it is not apparently aesthetically consistent that I consign the Reverend Terry Jones of the Christian Dove World Outreach Center in Jacksonville, Florida to that blasted place. I admit that it is purely an emotional response. The image of the Malebranche using their tines to keep the Reverend submerged in boiling black pitch has me positively awash in seratonin - I blush lest this betrays me on the threshold of psychopathology - and I even imagine that in heaven I will commission Gustave Dore to make an engraving of the scene.

The cause of the grief in Mazir-i-Sharif was the belated news (Good Morning Afghanistan is not on the twenty-four hour news cycle) that Reverend Jones, after much dallying, publicity mongering, faux handwringing - and probably a concluding circle jerk with his congregation - did, finally, burn a Koran. Yes, it is America, and he does have the right to burn all the Korans he wants to. But in doing so Jones betrayed two words in the name of his church - Christian and Outreach - and revealed himself to be another Prince of the Air - no less so than the Afghan 'insurgent' who masterminded the Mazar-i-Sharif riotous attack. Just another asshole hijacking religion for quasi-political purposes.

Kierkegard's essay The Crowd is Untruth presents an apparent paradox when considered alongside Christ's injunction that where two or three are gathered in his name, "There I am." But it is only apparent. Terry Jones did not gather his flock in Christ's name. The megalomaniac can never be alone before Christ, which one must be, even in a crowd. Jones first allegiance is the crowd. It is the same crowd that Apollonius of Tyana riled up. It is the crowd that shouted 'Crucify him!" It is the crowd that seeks out a mirror of its own violent heart and finds it on talk radio, Fox News, apostate Presbyters and Priests, Reverends, Imams, terrorists - Princes of the Air one and all. Hot air with the stink of death on it.

But here we are only concerned with the crowd that Reverend Jones plays before and not that of the Afghan insurgent. For how is it possible to remove the speck from your brother's eye when you have a knot of wood shaped like a monocle in your own? To listen to an Islamophobe with their rantings about Wars of Civilisation and Sharia Law coming to America and 9/11 Mosques you'd think that Mohammed had just left Mecca for Medina sometime during the Carter Administration. A hysterical lot, the lot of them, and hence a dangerous crowd. But as I sit dreaming of Reverend Jones boiling in black pitch in the fifth bolgia of the eighth circle of hell, I recall that back in Canto Four or Five(?) in the first circle of hell, Dante seeing the shade of Saladin. That the great Muslim Caliph should share limbo with other 'righteous pagans' foundational to Western Civilisation like Socrates and Aristotle is testimony to how degraded Christian generousity of Spirit has become. Dante lived in far greater temporal and spatial proximity to the great expansionary era of Islam and he marched in the Third Crusade, yet he could place Saladin on the rim of Hell while consigning several Popes and many of his fellow Florentines and their descendants farther into the abyss. The view he took was sub specie aeternitatis, which, pretty much by definition, is untenable when two or three gather to ape the discourse of the twenty-four news cycle. For the immediate man, the world will always be a scary place.