Allah, the Evil Demiurge?

Not long ago, a Muslim apologist intruded upon a few comments threads on Jihad Watch, disseminating the usual pneumopathology characteristic of his ilk.  One comment of his, however, caught my eye, as perhaps revealing (unintentionally) aspects of both Islamic doctrine and the Mohammedan mindset.

At one point this Muslim saw fit to embark upon a discursus on dolls and the various Islamic reasonings for why and under what circumstances they are haram.

For people below puberty, they can play with dolls which have a face. For post pubertal people, the[y] can play only with those dolls which do not have faces.

And not just the face matters, apparently: This Muslim went on to quote (apparently) a hadith from Bukhari:

"With regard to those in which the shape is incomplete, in which there is only a part of the limbs or head, but the shape is not clear, there is no doubt that these are permissible... (Narrated in al-Bukhaari, 6130; Muslim, 2440).

Why is this important to the Muslim? Because, without faces and/or without recognizably zoological formation ...they were not considered to be idols.

The Muslim goes on to flesh (pun intended) this out with his Islamic opinion:

But if the shape is complete, and it is as if you are looking at a person - especially if it can move or speak - then I am not entirely at ease with the idea of them being permissible, because this is a complete imitation of the creation of Allaah.

I've already been familiar with this idea of Islam forbidding idol-worship and images of living creatures (indeed, Saudi Arabia and Iran have made it illegal to sell Barbie dolls!).  What interests me more here are a couple of things revealed in between the lines. For now, I'll just allude to these things for which I do not currently have links to sources that may verify whatever claims may be implied in my presentation.

1. A fairly common idea in ancient Gnosticism, also preserved (critically, not supportively) in medieval Rabbinic mythological speculation: the Satan figure (whether named or not) is also a "Demiurge" who competes with the true God by attempting to create living things which, because he's not God and does not have creative power, turn out to be half-formed, stunted, zombie-like creatures (e.g., the golem of medieval Jewish myth). Perhaps what's going on between the lines of the Islamic proscription of forms looking like truly living beings is the Satan-God Allah forbidding his minions from honoring the true God's creation in art and liturgy -- yet permitting such a possibility as long as the forms are defaced and deformed into their appropriately golem-like appearance, as would please the Demiurge (Allah).

2. The Muslim I discussed above described one suitable way to transform a haram doll into a halal doll -- beheading:

But if a person wants to be on the safe side in such matters, he should cut off the head...

He also added this luridly weird advice:

... or hold it near the fire until it softens, then he should press it until the features disappear." 

-- this, of course, having a source in an official (and officially insane) Islamic fatwa: "(Majmoo' Fataawa al-Shaykh Muhammad ibn 'Uthaymeen (may Allaah have mercy on him), 2/277-278, cited here)..."

Thus, my second thought, expanding on the first: The Islamic penchant for beheading, and more generally for rampant mutilation and disfiguring of the enemy with knives (as well as with fire and acid, not to mention the stones that reduce women to a bloody pulp in stonings; or the savage clitorectomies that are, and have been for centuries, pandemic throughout the Muslim world) may well be an extension of the doll-defacing impulse: go after not merely artistic renderings of God's creation, but also attack God's artwork itself -- the creatures He has created, and try to destroy, decapitate, deface, disfigure them in your Satanic frenzy of obeying the evil Demiurge who throughout all history tries to compete with God but, knowing deep down he really can't, opts for lashing out destructively instead:  

"If you can't Create, Destroy".

Postscript:

And it's not just human creatures Muslims like to disfigure, but as this report indicates, animal torture is common among Muslims too.

Cruelty to animals in Mohammedan culture is a whole other can of worms about which, to my knowledge, an adequate treatment has yet to be researched and published.  A few more examples may be cited, however, to give a glimpse of the maggots under the rock.

A Pakistani Muslim blogger writes on his blog, LUBP:

Cruelty to animals is so common in Pakistan that no one notices it.  

And more on this:  The Persecuted Animals of Pakistan (where the author takes pains not to be multiculurally "insensitive").

Andrew Bostom in this article includes the account of scholar Mary Boyce and her report of cruelty to dogs by Iranian Muslims, including children.

Undercover journalist John Roy Carlson in his book Cairo to Damascus (on page 75), aside from noting that children are cruelly abused as a matter of course in Egyptian Muslim culture, witnessed Muslim children having tied a stray dog to railroad tracks, and "gleefully" waiting for the train to destroy that dog.

Three links here about the horrid treatment of cats by Muslims -- here, here and here.

Or this recent, ghoulishly monstrous spectacle -- Muslims in Nigeria crucified a cat! in order to protest the Mohammed film. (Note: I see just now that apparently Spencer has eliminated this story from Jihad Watch -- typically without a shred of explanation.) (Update: Apparently, the cat crucifixion is a story from 2010, unrelated to the Mohammed film -- which of course is irrelevant to its news- and outrage-worthiness.)

Also, some useful links on the grotesque brutality of Eid animal slaughters.

Post-Postscript:

Aside from these general thoughts I had on reading the Mohammedan's post on dolls, another one occurred to me. If those hadiths are accurate, it seems that Aisha possibly demonstrated a pathology of arrested development, playing with dolls long past her appropriate age -- perhaps her confused way of trying to hold on to a lost childhood, violently and insidiously stolen from her by the rape and psychologically perverse seduction imposed upon her by Mohammed.