The killer of four U.S. Marines in Chattanooga maintained a short-lived blog that hinted at his religious inner life. Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez’s blog had only two posts, both published July 13 and written in a popular style of Islamic religious reasoning.A man used a blog format to put up a few sentences 3 days before he committed a mass murder. There's no "blog" to read. Adulazeez didn't "maintain" a blog, even "a short-lived blog." And I have no idea what counts as "a popular style of Islamic religious reasoning." The Daily Beast doesn't bother to define its term.
Abdulazeez did give us some evidence worth thinking about, but I wouldn't take the statements at face value. They were not written over a period of time, revealing a path of thoughts. And they were put up so close in time to the murders, which presumably were already in the offing, that the writing must be understood as representing what he wanted the public to think about him.
If he used a style that can, in fact, be identified as "a popular style of Islamic religious reasoning," that's reason to think about his statements not as pure reflections of his thought patterns, but as something cribbed and copied, perhaps to throw us off track or to play upon our tendency to jump to merge him with the grand, mythic mass of Islamic terrorists who have traipsed all over the American brain since 9/11.
Abdulazeez used the old story of the blind men and the elephant, which originated in India and appears in Jain, Buddhist, Sufi, and Hindu versions. He calls it "The Story of the Three Blind Men." Three? Is he mixing it up with the nursery rhyme of the 3 blind mice? I think — in all the versions — there were more than 3. According to Wikipedia, the Sufi version of the story doesn't have blind men at all. Which makes more sense. Why would blind men stay together rather than disperse themselves among the sighted population? In the Sufi version, the inability to see is achieved by putting the elephant in the dark:
Rumi, the 13th Century Persian poet and teacher of Sufism, included it in his Masnavi. In his retelling, "The Elephant in the Dark," some Hindus bring an elephant to be exhibited in a dark room. A number of men touch and feel the elephant in the dark and, depending upon where they touch it, they believe the elephant to be like a water spout (trunk), a fan (ear), a pillar (leg) and a throne (back). Rumi uses this story as an example of the limits of individual perception:
The sensual eye is just like the palm of the hand. The palm has not the means of covering the whole of the beast.Rumi does not present a resolution to the conflict in his version, but states:
The eye of the Sea is one thing and the foam another. Let the foam go, and gaze with the eye of the Sea. Day and night foam-flecks are flung from the sea: oh amazing! You behold the foam but not the Sea. We are like boats dashing together; our eyes are darkened, yet we are in clear water.Rumi ends his poem by stating "If each had a candle and they went in together the differences would disappear."
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