"The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miraclewreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason."
Also sprach Zarathustra, aka Richard Dawkins, our very own modern-day Nietzche. I wonder what he might possibly mean? High treason is an act of gross disloyalty, presumably in this context, to one's own intellect, which seems to me to have some quite nastily schizophrenic undertones to it. His wrath overtakes his reason, sometimes, exampled with the delightful 'miraclewreaking'.
I'd quite like to wreak a miracle, personally. All of the above has only tangential bearing on the title today. The great all-seeing, most gracious, most merciful God of Islam, might be perceived in either of the above ways, although I have some conceptual difficulty with God as a metaphor. Metaphor for what, one asks? A metaphor for his self, perhaps. Muslims use (up to twenty times a day) the invocation of the presence of Allah in human affairs. Insha'Allah, to be precise, is the beautiful cover-all phrase even Westerners use when they are asked when a particular something might happen. Or not. Or they'd rather it didn't and are too polite to say so. Water is leaking all over the bathroom floor and the plumber when asked when he is coming, replies, 'Tomorrow, inshallah', meaning, of course that tomorrow is very probably quite out of the question and were he to bestir himself to think any further into the future, a week Tuesday might just be on the cards. Or not.
