Mecca - Raleigh Connection - Smoke gets in my eyes

By: Steven Luotto

I'm intrigued by the Abridged version of the Koran supplied to the University of North Carolina... a Koran with all the feel-good, do-right stuff one would expect of a major religion and shorn of all the "get-em-wherever-you-find-em-and jump-on-their-corns and chop-their-fingers-off" nonsense.

Of course what's funny about this whole scam is that whereas enacting the (now missing) bad stuff of the Koran would get you arrested in both Carolinas, North and South, enacting the good stuff (with the wrong people) would probably get you carted off to jail in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

But never mind. What the geniuses behind the operation judged as bad were those acts and thoughts that offend the golden rule of plain, simple, common sense. Commendable! Ecumenical! Diabolical! Oh the possibilities!

If we could only get the North Carolina Koran to become a bestseller in Cairo, or at least as popular as Mein Kampf!

Actually, seeing as cheating and messing around with the Holy word of (the one and only) Desert God is now perfectly fair, (they started!) I would have Spielberg and NASA get to work on some fake miracles to convince our Muslim brothers that the NCK (North Carolina Koran) is the really really true, no-messing-around word of God and not the Old Book.

They could stage miracles, like having the moon split (through a combination of laser and holographic technology) over Raleigh, the Capital of NC. This now obviously legitimate act of smoke-in-your-eyes religious tweaking could be financed at least in part by the local tobacco industry. How many people are driven to smoking through the worry of terrorist attacks?

A Koran with just good ole-time religious stuff that everyone can get along with, from Bible-thumping swamp deacons to the Pope right on down to the Dalai Lama! No more wife beating, slavery, pedophilia, looting, Jew-baiting, heathen-killing, special taxes... just Salaam!

Is not the Koran called a Miracle? Well miracles never cease, do they? I'm sure Mohammad Asadi, our brilliant retroactive scholar, with a little free assistance from IBM (also in on the scam) could find (or be artfully led to) a suitable combination of Verses divisible by nineteen (or at this point by 9.5) that would magically show that the Prophet knew all along that Raleigh would be the new capital of Islam.

Why didn't He say so right away in plain language? Inscrutable... (Best to leave some wide open logical questions wide open! That's the way religions are!) But as I'm sure Asadi and Big Blue would illustrate through amazing computer assisted mathematics (that no one in the 7th century, or in his right mind, could've possibly been able to pull off unless he were truly getting the equations from God), the Prophet mentioned "RALEIGH - MOON" and "TRUE WORD" hundreds of times (all you have to do is get the square root of the verse number, and multiply it by a factor of his uncle's hypotenuse and divide the result by his brother-in-law's wives... or whatever).

Of course there would still be the old diehards, those poor devils who memorized every single word of the original Holy Book, but other miracles could be staged to bring them around.

A new Hajj would direct the revised faithful to North Carolina. First they'd still have to go to Mecca, but only as a reminder of their once evil ways. There along with taking the traditional walk around the rock, sobbing and self-flagellating, they would beg forgiveness for not being smart enough to understand the old bad stuff of the polluted Koran and for failing Mohammad's test (of believing written words instead of their own honest hearts), then once purified they would hop on the plane and fly straight to Raleigh where they would enjoy the first time pleasure of just being normal (instead of having to waste so much time, energy and intellectual honesty in defending wife beating, slavery, pedophilia, looting, Jew-baiting, heathen-killing, special taxes, etc.)

Of course, before the geniuses revised the word of God, such a scam would've been unthinkable, utterly disrespectful, but seeing as they're pulling the wool over our eyes, I think we're entitled to spin a yarn or two of our own.

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