St George
Yesterday, Sunday 23 April, was St George's Day.
I went to the St George's Day Festival in Luton, which was a rather small do, with shows mainly for children. We should have had a bigger celebration to commemorate the life of this great man.
Excerpt from April 2006 Emel Magazine:
"St George was born in Cappadocia, in modern day Turkey to an army soldier and a mother from Lydda, now known as Lod in Palestine. After his father's death, George's mother took her infant son back to her home town of Lydda where he grew up to serve as an officer in the Roman army, like his father before him. When ordered by a pagan ruler, the Emperor Diocletian, to pay tribute to Roman gods, he refused and faced prolonged periods of torture - in some stories as long as seven years, ending with a gruesome death: sliced in half and beheaded...
... George's death occurred around the fourth century AD, some 300 years before the last prophet of Islam completed the Message of God to His creation with the Qur'an. Thus as a true follower of monotheism Muslims regard him as dying in a state of submission to the One Creator. Or in Arabic - of dying in a state of Islam"
posted by PROVOLUTION at 4/24/2006 03:37:00 pm
2 Comments:
His story is dubious to some extent. Did Emel clarify that? And, if you have heard of him being said to be regarded as al-Khidr by Muslims, I strongly believe that to be baseless and mere imagination of the Orientalists.
Also St George's tomb is not the only example. Some other tombs which we consider sacred are like the tomb of Barnabas in Cyprus. Too bad, immigration bureaucracy made me have to hurry and missed his.
Claims that he was al-Khidr are rather off the mark, I think. But that is not relevant anyway. If he rejected polytheism pre-Muhammad, then he was a monotheist (or an atheist?).
But even that was not really my main concern.
I just think there should have been a bigger celebration. That's all. The excerpt from Emel was something I found quite interesting.
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