Rudyard Kipling"
āWhen you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldierā
General Douglas MacArthur"
āWe are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.ā
āIt is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.ā āOld soldiers never die; they just fade away.
āThe soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.ā
āMay God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .ā āThe object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
āNobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
āIt is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Let
us put this claim to test. There is a hadith that reports that one
night, Muhammad rode on a winged horse that drove him from Masjiduāl
Haram to Masjiduāl Aqsa (in Jerusalem) and from there to the seventh
heaven where he was shown the Hell and the Paradise
and then taken to the presence of Allah. This story that is commonly
accepted by all Muslims and is known as Miāraj is also confirmed in the
Quran:
Glory to (Allah) Who did take His Servant for a journey by night, From the Sacred Mosque to the Farthest Mosque. ā Quran 17:1
Here we are not going to question the absurdity of such trip.
Considering that it would take light (the fastest thing in the universe)
8 years to make a round trip to the closest solar system, and 30
billion years [now at least 46 billion years] to the outskirts of the
known universe, and considering that wings donāt serve beyond the
atmosphere of the Earth, such a trip performed on the back of a horse
with wings in one night is just stuff of the fables. If Muhammad could
travel from Medina to the presence of Allah, riding on a winged pony,
and come back in one night, then Allahās palace must be not much far
from Medina. I wonder how come no one has found it yet?
Is God
inside the universe or outside of it? If inside it, then he is contained
by it and therefore cannot be infinite. If outside it, then he must be
billions of light years away from us and no winged horsy can reach his
throne in one night and come back. And if He is omnipresent, like air in
the atmosphere, then one does not need to go anywhere to meet Him. God
must be where you are right now. This story is simply fairytale.
We
are not also going to ask whether the gate of the heaven is in
Jerusalem? Why did Muhammad have to go to Masjidulā Aqsa in order to go
to heaven?
The biggest problem with this story is that the
Masjidāul Aqsa āFarthest Mosqueā was built after the death of Muhammad.
The problem we want to discuss is that Masjidāul Aqsa āthe Farthest
Mosqueā did not exist at the time of Muhammad.
First Temple on
that site was built in 960 BC, allegedly by Solomon to house the Ark of
the Covenant which his father, David, had brought to Jerusalem. The first temple was burned to the ground by the Babylonians in 586 BC. The Second Temple was consecrated in 515 BC, rebuilt by Herod in 20 BC and destroyed by Titus in 70 AD.
The
Romans in 70 AD destroyed that temple. Since then no temple, church or
mosque stood on that spot. When Caliph Omar Ibn al-Khattab conquered
Jerusalem in 638 AD, he performed a prayer in the site where Temple of
Solomon used to stand. It was Calif āAbd al-Malik ibn Marwan who built
the Dome of the Rock around 691 A.D. i.e 72 years after Hijrah. And
Masjiduāl Aqsa was built on the Temple Mount by the end of the 7th
century. Muhammadās alleged Miāraj took place around the year 621. There
is 70 years gap between Miāraj and the construction of Masjid ul Aqsa.
This is reported in The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam, Harper & Row,
1989, p. 46 and 102.
Muhammadās alleged Miāraj took place around the year 622. At that
time Jerusalem was in the hands of the Christians. There were no Muslims
living there and certainly there was no Mosque in Jerusalem. 53 years
after the death of Muhammad, Muslims built the Dome of the Rock and the
Al Aqsa on the site where Solomon had his temple.
Whoever has
been the author of the verse 17:1 of the Quran, he was not aware that
Masjid ul Aqsa did not exist during the time of Muhammad and he could
not have made his trip to heaven from a place that did not exist.
One comparison makes this point most clearly: Jerusalem appears in the Jewish Bible 669 times and Zion (which usually means Jerusalem, sometimes the Land of Israel) 154 times, or 823 times in all. The Christian Bible mentions Jerusalem 154 times and Zion 7 times.
In contrast, the columnist Moshe Kohn notes, Jerusalem and Zion appear as frequently in the Qur'an "as they do in the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita, the Taoist Tao-Te Ching, the Buddhist Dhamapada and the Zoroastrian Zend Avesta"āwhich is to say, not once.
