Pious Saudi Parrots Chanting Pater Noster, Barukh atah Adonai ………..
“Parrots are now taught to recite the Quran and perform prayers; a trend taking place in Saudi Arabia with big money to be made. “Teaching parrots Quran is not new, it goes back to eight years ago when people started teaching parrots to sing, and then the trend to teach them Quran caught up,” said Abd Al Rahman al-Arwan, one of the amateurs raising parrots. “Now when people know that someone has a parrot, the first question the parrot owner will be asked is whether the parrot has memorized some verses from the Quran, if the answer is no, they will reply promptly that the parrot does not deserve a high price,” al-Arwan added. Aya is the shortest division of a Quranic text into a phrase or a sentence, while a Sura is the division of the Quranic text into a chapter or part, set apart from the preceding and following text. If the parrot memorizes Ayas from the Quran with pellucid clarity, the price range will be around 12-13 thousand Riyals, and if the bird has Suras stored in its intelligent memory, its price will go up to 20 thousands, however the price can go much higher if the bird can recite Suras and ham it up with performing prayers….. al-Arwan said. “It comes gradually each day I teach the parrot one Aya, and so on for the following days, until it memorizes the whole Sura. I can ask the parrot “who is your god?” to teach him to say Allah, and I repeat the question, or the parrot asks me the same question and I answer “Allah”, he added….”……”
A pious little parrot: when I was in elementary school, there were kids with me who could not do that. This is about the new craze in Saudi Arabia: teaching parrots to recite the Quran. But that is not new: many parrots, millions of them all featherless and not so pretty, have been reciting the Quran for many years without knowing what it means, without applying its commandments. The same goes for the Bible, the New and Old Testaments.
I wonder why we never hear of a Western parrot chanting the “Pater noster, qui es in caelis….”, or a Jewish parrot chanting “Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu, melekh ha-olam….”.
Why is it always Muslims who perform these miracles of chanting pious parrots? In one of the UAE emirates, there was a period when the media reported almost weekly of two-headed or five-legged (no, not necessarily male) goats being born. One of them even had the name of God, our true God Allah, somehow etched on its forehead, or so thought everybody else, except me. But that was at the very beginning of the property boom.
Actually not just Muslims: I recall in parts of India they can train monkeys to perform “strange” acts in order to get money out of passersby. If the passerby or tourist does not cough up any Rupees, the audacious monkey then looks at him or her and performs an act that is even more strange (and very offensive).
Cheers
mhg
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