The algebra has a devil for a sidekick

By Gary Mathews

When I finished primary school, I was sent to boarding school in the hope I might complete my education. It’s possible the primary reason I was shipped out was that my mother tired of my shenanigans and wanted to get rid of me. Either way, I ended up in the last year of high school as a member of a strange choir.

When it came to showering, older boys could spend more time luxuriating under the hot jets of water that thundered onto our backs. It was during these spare snippets of time during our daily dousing that we forged the curiously fabulous choir. To say that we formed the choir would imbue that formation with a forethought that never existed. Perhaps I should say the choir formed itself.

We stood in a row, eight showers in all, and belted out old Beatles numbers at the tops of our unselfconscious voices. Beyond the steam, the red brick walls of the ablution blocks rang with Yellow Submarine and Octopus’s Garden. After the Beatles, we usually turned to more exotic lyrics, I remember Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen being a particular favourite. The fact that we never quite knew all the words never seemed to be a problem.

“Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me…” easily became something more like “The algebra has a devil for a sidekick eeeeeeeeee…”, or any of a thousand and one such variations. I never knew anything about Beelzebub and very little about algebra, but at that time it made sense that things didn’t need to make sense.

Fast-forward a couple of decades and people are doing the same thing on the Internet.

They are singing songs without really knowing the words.

I’m referring to Ivo Vegter’s debate on the evils of Islam and what should be done about it. I don’t pretend that I know all the words or anything beyond the first two bars of the chorus, but I do know that algebra (derived from the Arabic al-jabr) was born of the Islamic Law of Inheritance and that the number zero (Fibonacci brought the number back with him from his travels in North Africa) are two of the myriad gifts of Islam to all humanity at a time when the barbarism of feudal Europe produced that little blot in our history we like to call the dark ages.

Vegter’s article on The Daily Maverick entitled “Bomb the barbaric lot already” caused me to purse my lips, then simultaneously gasp and whistle like a Tuvan throat singer.

I don’t know Vegter but from his writing he seems a smart fellow. I can only imagine how he might have smiled at the irony of his title, for surely he must understand the barbarism of bombing? The idea I find most perplexing is that the writer is not just calling for a selective strike with its normally attendant “collateral damage”, but for genocide. Vegter cites a series of undeniably atrocious brutalities, and proceeds to liberally spike his final solution with the word “civilized”.

To be fair, he is not calling for the bombing of all Islam, just the Shi’as in Iran, and it does seem for the first half of his article that he intends the targeted bombing of the villains in the piece. But in his chilling denouement he reaffirms his sensational title by saying “As for Iran, bomb the barbaric lot already“.

It could be he was being deliberately provocative to pull in a few more reads, but his irresponsible words would make him a poster child for the assault on media freedom, an assault I suspect would not find favour with him. It is also possible that he really means what he says. Either way, and despite his name, I don’t believe we’ll be seeing Vegter himself on any Iranian or Afghan battlefield in the near future.

And the song of Islam? Well, there are many refrains.

There are some philosophical and practical problems with Islam from a western perspective. Western culture venerates historical change, though the imperatives of change sometimes dictate change for its own sake and not necessarily for the better. Islam, however,is less concerned with change. Christianity is very important to western culture but it is essentially an adjunct, while Islam is generally perceived as a way of life by its followers.

The nexus of these two propositions result in two very different frameworks through which Islam and the West view contemporary realities. Christianity too has its fundamentalists, but they straddle a way of life that is characterised to a large degree by its need for change. By contrast the Islamic fundamentalist counterpoint is stuck with a more medieval philosophical cosmology.

We shouldn’t forget that Islam is also the song of the first scientific methods in the field of medicine, the discovery of infectious disease and the immune system. It is a song of modern surgery and of astronomy, algebra, chemistry, geology, spherical trigonometry, modern optics and experimental physics.

Let’s play out with the words of Rumi who, but for a few intervening centuries would have been bombed along with “the barbaric lot”…

There is no worse sickness for the soul,
O you who are proud,
than this pretence of perfection.

Gary Mathews has made a living writing software since the late 80’s, and tries not to waste too many hormones growing hair. Mathews has written for local technology titles and his fiction has been published by Laugh Out Loud. He has varied interests, and strong views on strong views.