Below you find a crucial part from the Preface of a soon to be published book.
Title: 49:49
Subtitle: The Emperor’s Old Rags
The penny dropped when I started translating the book into English.
The previous section is titled: ‘Not hurting your Mom ‘.
” The moment I looked again at the first paragraph of Part I of this book in progress, the first penny dropped.
In that paragraph I emphasised, that I –though atheist– judged Christianity quite differently despite similarities with the teachings of Mohammad. My own farewell to Christianity, however, did not follow an analysis of the Bible; and certainly not an analysis as thorough and critical as the one I had already carried out on the Quran.
My upbringing was not fundamentalist, but it was thoroughly Catholic. On both my father’s side and mother’s side, many generations of my ancestors were Catholic without exception. I went to Catholic schools and was in a Catholic hobby club for boys. My older sisters joined Catholic scouting.
One week before Easter 3), I walked with a large number of other children in procession to a Catholic hospital. Each of us carried a cheerfully decorated cross that was papered with candy and fruit. The cross was ‘crowned’ with a rooster made of bread 4).
My father assisted during services in the most imposing church building in my hometown. When I was about ten years old I was even allowed to help count the money collected during the collection in an idyllic little seven or eight-sided annex of that church, behind the room where the priests dressed up in their robes for the church services.
The Catholic Church was important to my father until his death in 1970. I had not been in a church for several years by then, but of course went to the worship service dedicated to the end of his life. The closing of the service was provided by the male church choir: his friends. They sang the song Kyrie Eleison. That’s Greek for, “Lord have mercy“.
I had heard this text many hundreds of times in my life and sometimes mumbled it with them, but now, performed as a Gregorian chant, it took on a different, truly moving meaning: his friends wished him all the best after his death.
For my mother, the church was somewhat less important, and especially during my father’s prolonged deathbed, she ended contact with the church. She became as atheistic as I was.
So one could label me as a ‘cultural Catholic‘. And now, through this book, I am actually asking ‘cultural Muslims‘ who read it, to critically examine the foundation of their religion.
Such a request cannot possibly be well received if I do not also critically discuss the foundation of my parents’ religion. Critically and above all: just as explicitly.
After this penny dropped, I delved into the contents of the Bible and oriented myself towards Judaism.
Notes:
3) The holiday Easter celebrates that Jesus Christ would have risen from the dead on the Sunday after his death on Friday. Easter is celebrated each year on Sunday, so not always on the same day of the year. The Sunday preceding it is called Palm Sunday.
4) Recently, ‘Palm Passion‘ has been celebrated more often in the Netherlands: in a new, semi-secular form.
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