Disgust Is Not Enough

by Mark P. Shea - November 8, 2007

Reprinted with permission.

Here's something you don't read every day. The Middle East Media Research Institute reports the following:

Media Uproar Following Egyptian Mufti's Fatwa on Companions of the Prophet Muhammad Being Blessed by Drinking His Urine

An uproar in the Egyptian media followed the recent publication of a book by Egyptian Mufti Dr. Ali Gum'a in which he claimed that the companions of the Prophet Muhammad would drink his urine to be blessed.

Most people don't know that a "fatwa" is not a death sentence but rather an opinion by a Muslim leader. Because of this, many Western readers – merely glancing at the story – will assume that somebody has yet again been sentenced to death for saying something untoward about Mohammed. But the story is stranger than that. It turns out the fatwa by Dr. Ali Gum'a is not condemning, but endorsing, the idea that some people believed drinking Mohammed's urine brought a blessing.

Other Muslims are upset with this – much bustle and shouting, etc. We see this sort of thing all the time on TV. The Islamic world appears to be full of angry bearded men who are always screaming about something. And when that "something" they are screaming about is "drinking the urine of Mohammed," it becomes a matter fatally easy for Westerners to make fun of. In addition to our being mortally sick of ululating Bronze Age thugs yelling on TV, there's also a strong disgust factor that drives our reaction to the story.

Still and all, Catholics interested in an intelligent defense of the Faith should be cautious about jumping on the bandwagon of criticism here. Why? Because disgust over urine is an aesthetic reaction, not an argument. And if we do not think things through, our kneejerk ridicule of a story like this can leave the Church wide open to exactly the same ridicule from her enemies here in the West.

Here's how it works: Modern secularists of the "Religion Poisons Everything" school (such as Christopher Hitchens) naturally dismiss all this sort of fooferah about the Piss of the Prophet as yet one more illustration of the barbarism of Islam. Such polemicists have a knack for delivering witty putdowns of the Bronze Age fanatics and their crude superstitions. But then, conservative Christians get on board with their own guffaws because – particularly in the case of Hitchens – his views of Islam coincide with the Western rejection of the assorted barbarisms of Radical Islam. Hitchens seems like a convenient ally.

And so conservative Catholics are suckered into a trap by the peculiar prejudices of this particular hour in history. Those who base their Faith purely on aesthetics will soon find themselves hoisted on their own petard by the atheist polemicist.

"What, are you Catholics guffawing about?" asks the Hitchenseque atheist. "You are, after all, the ones with the mummified head of St. Catherine of Siena looking down at you from a reliquary in a European shrine. You are the ones who divvy up the bones of St. Teresa of Avila and scatter her all over Spain. And supremely, you are the ones who take with utmost seriousness the words 'Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in you.' Blood drinkers laughing at urine drinkers! That's rich!"

In short, if we thoughtlessly make disgust – about urine drinking or any other aesthetic matter – our sole argument in dealing with the challenge of Islam, we leave ourselves open to the atheist who will insist that the only real difference between Muslims and Christians is which magical body fluid they happen to superstitiously revere. If we have only aesthetics to back us up, we will be in a very poor position to answer a world that continues to ask, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat? This is a hard saying! Who can hear it?"

Catholics must recognize that, in certain ways, we are far closer to Muslims than we are to secular postmodernists. That's not because – as the atheists say – the Catholic faith is a barbaric oriental superstition indistinguishable from Islam. Rather, Christians share with Islam – and most of the human race – that thing a tiny minority of Western atheists have cut from their souls: a sense of the sacramental in created things.

Next week, we'll talk about how to flesh that out (pardon the pun).

Mark P. Shea is a senior editor at www.CatholicExchange.com and a columnist for InsideCatholic. Visit his blog at www.markshea.blogspot.com.