In the recent controversies surrounding the now-cancelled (?) burn a Quran day by pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, state-leaders from the US, the UN to the Vatican has condemned the planned act. At the same time, media has shown us images of demonstrations in the Middle East where american flags and effigies of Terry Jones are burned. So what’s up with all the burning?
The obvious answer is that the aggressive act of destroying a symbol of what you hate functions as a form of stress relief. Burning the image is channeling communal anxieties and antipathies. But burning effigies has its roots in ancient magical practice; a public desecration of an absent body. When burning a straw-witch, a flag, a book or a pastor-effigy, the burning is explained as a communal attempt to harm a hated subject (person, state, people or religion) who is otherwise unapproachable. The act of burning an effigy or a key symbol as a substitute of the actual enemy is related to imitative (homoeopathic) image-magic, so-called envoûtement, although I doubt the culprits of today actually envision their acts to have any real effects on their victims. It is magic in the sense that there is no actual link between the harm done to the effigy and the actual victim, only an imagined effect.
If the effect is imagined, then why are people so upset by a torched Quran, (or rather the muṣḥaf – the physical book containing the Quran)? Would the outcry would be less vocal had some radicals planned a burn the New Testament day? To Muslims the Quran is more than a book and more than a scripture. It is an object containing the words of God and is treated with the utmost respect. It should not be touched in an impure state. In parts of the Muslim world, in particular where Arabic is not spoken, the Quran is treated more as a venerated object in the home – rarely to be opened. And the correct manner to dispose of an old Quran is to wrap it in pure cloth and bury it, much like the how a person is buried, or its pages can be tied to a stone and cast in a flowing river. The book then, is more like a relic or an icon then it is a book. Thus, both victims and culprits seem to agree that by burning the Quran harm is actually inflicted upon someone – probably God. The Quran contains the word of God and is thereby linked to His person; attacking the book is the same as attacking God’s only material manifestation on earth. Still, the effect of the attack is only a presumed effect, or is it?
The envoûtement of the modern day seem to work in new ways through the power of media rather than through magic. What would happen had not the media aired the planned Quran-burning? Probably very little I suppose. A group or radical Christians would have made a bonfire, and probably felt good about it – just like magic has an interior communal effect rather than the presumed exterior effect on the victim. God, Islam or Muslims would be harmed as little as pastor Terry Jones felt the effect of his effigy being consumed by flames in Kabul. In fact, an illuminating parallel happened two years ago when the extremely radical Community of Christ actually did burn the Quran, but was ignored. The irony of it all, may be that when the international burn a Quran day is cancelled, the Community of Christ will step forward again and have their Quran-burning moment in the spotlight.
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