The Quran – Channel 4
This feature length (102 mins) documentary shown a couple of weeks ago on the UK’s Channel 4, was watched by a million people – highly unusual for a documentary slot on C4. It was directed by Antony Thomas who also directed the highly controversial “Death of a Princess” that caused a diplomatic storm between Britain and Saudi Arabia, nearly 30 years ago.
Although the program comes with the warning: “contains footage of executions, the aftermath of bombing and female genital mutilations which may upset some viewers”, it is not a sensationalist piece, and, in large part, celebrates Islam. If anything, it shows too little of the dark side that has pervaded all strands: Islamic; Christian and Jewish, of the Abrahamic cult.
That this review in the Financial Times: “For those of us who ground our lives on what we believe to be rationality, the testimony of those who ground theirs on books that reason says must be fantasy attests to the massive power of the imagination of countless millions”, should assume that any reasonable person would reject Abrahamic, or any other, belief fantasy, is testament to the grip on American culture that it has. No mainstream US paper would make such an assumption about secularism, just as no American publication of any significant audience has yet dared to mock the recent, increasingly vapid and self-aggrandizing, evangelical speeches from Barack Obama, that we usually associate with the Republican right, in the manner of this satire in the London Times, yesterday.
What has this got to do with the Quran? Quite a lot, potentially.
