Horse play - or, slings and arrows

Now I've been a bit mean to Sardar at times. I admit it. He really came through the other day, though.

He had an exchange of letters with a man called Abdullah al-Hasan, who is even more religious than he is. I don't think he'd agree with my definition there, but Hasan definitely would.

Hasan told him he wasn't properly qualified to explain the Qur'an to an audience, because he wasn't one of the clergy. Strangely, he then went on to claim that Islam doesn't have a clergy. I know this isn't true, because I've seen them on the telly. Frocks, hellfire, pointless arguments about bugger all - if they aren't clergy, I don't know what all those bishops think they're up to.

Sardar dismantled him with a rhetorical hammer. You could tell he was seriously pissed off. The likes of me just get a patronising brush off, like we're not worth noticing, but people like Hasan really get his goat. It was enough for him to make blog 7 entirely about them.

And you can see why. There's Sardar stuck between two opposing worlds. It's like he's tied to two horses by the same rope, trying to hold them together, and the more they pull against each other the tighter things get.

And what does Hasan do? He gets on the Islamic horse, and gallops off as far away from the other horse as possible, leaving Sardar tied in knots in the middle. He's already believing six thousand incompatible things before breakfast, now the friction burns are killing him.

And we're not helping. We're on the other horse, whispering sweet nothings in its ear about how much greener the grass is over the hill. We have to, because we care about our horse, we've raised it since it was a gleam in Francis Bacon's eye and we have to defend it against concepts like perfect books. But we feel his pain.

And he ends brilliantly. For his Parthian shot, he quotes an Islamic scholar. A woman. To a certain kind of Muslim, and I think that's the type Hasan is, that's like rubbing his face in menstrual blood. Good.