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Deadline for Whiskers
by Abdulhadi Hairan
2007-10-05 09:01:39

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A local pro-Taliban militant group has warned a businessman to cut his long whiskers within one week. The group has set a deadline and its head said that if Mr Khan tried to flee the area, they will set his home ablaze.

The man, Ameer Mohammad Khan, has at least ten inches long whiskers and he loves it. The militant group has declared that keeping long whiskers is un-Islamic and unnecessary.

According to daily Mashriq, a local Urdu newspaper from Peshawar, Ameer Mohammad Khan is a businessman of the Bara area where a group of militants called Lashkar-e-Islam is active for past few years.

The group has set a deadline and its head said that if Mr Khan tried to flee the area, they will set his home ablaze.

'Those long whiskers are un-Islamic and unnecessary. So he must cut them within one week' the daily quoted Mangal Bagh, head of the militant group.

This group has a rivalry with another militant group and more than four hundred people have been killed so far in their fighting.

There are many pro-Taliban local militants active in Pakistan's tribal areas who call themselves Jihadist, Islamists and local Taliban. They have already banned music and other entertainment activities. They have their own strict Islamic rules which they impose by force.

First published on www.quazen.com

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Emanuel Paparella	2007-10-05 17:13:57
A modest proposal: since Talibans like beards Mr. Khan should explain to them that what he sports is merely an horizontal beard. Maybe he'll get away with it, but most likely he will not: hair is serious business. The latest rumor is that the Talibans will try to recruit to terrorism all men with giant beards. Prime candidates is Santa Claus, who was originally a Christian bishop and now is just a jolly old man. That way they will kill two pigeons with one stone.


Simon	2007-10-05 19:38:33
How can anybody justify murder by the size of a man's facial hair? It defies belief and logic that a religion believes Allah cares more about that than the death of 30,000 children every day.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-10-05 21:14:13
Ah, there is the rub: belief and logic, or revelation and reason. Are they antithetical? Of course says the modern rationalist out to grind an ax against religion per se. Einstein used to say that God may be subtle but he is not a trickster. Aquinas said something similar in his Summa when he pointed out that revelation cannot contradict reason since it was the same God who gave us reason and expects us to use it. Galileo said that the universe too was a Bible written by God and it behoove us to read it assiduously. So how does one cut that Gordian knot? Can one be discriminating and not mix apples and oranges? A good rule of thumb is this: when a religion defies reason and makes God a trickster of sort, one should immediately suspect that one is not dealing with a religion but with a degradation of a religion to the level of a fanatical cult.