The Turban, Defiled by Suicide Bombers, Has Biblical and Emotional Roots

[rug]

By FARZANEH MILANI
Published: October 7, 2011

Charlottesville, Va.

LAST month in Kabul, a man posing as a Taliban peace emissary managed to pass checkpoints, iron gates, and security guards with explosives tucked away in the folds of his turban, on his way to meet former President Burhanuddin Rabbani in his home.

Mr. Rabbani, head of the High Peace Council in Afghanistan, offered his guest a welcoming hug and unsuspectingly triggered the deadly bomb. Similarly, in July, the mayor of Kandahar, Ghulam Haider Hamidi, and a few days earlier, a top religious leader in southern Afghanistan, were assassinated by bombs concealed in turbans. The latter detonated in a mosque.

It is as though life is imitating art and these terrorists are acting out the Danish cartoons that prompted violent, sometimes deadly riots in more than a dozen Islamic countries in 2006. At the heart of the violent fury was an offensive representation of the turban. Some of the 12 controversial cartoons conjoined the turban with the sword, or with its modern counterpart, the bomb. This was identified by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then the Danish prime minister, as his country’s worst international crisis since World War II.

The turban, like the veil, predates Islam. Never mentioned in the Koran, it appears more than 20 times in the Old Testament as a symbol of prophecy among the Israelites. “He set the turban on his head, and on the turban, in front, he set the golden plate, the holy crown, as Yahweh commanded Moses” (Leviticus 8 : 9).

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/opinion/the-turban-defiled-by-suicide-bombers-has-biblical-roots.html?_r=1&ref=religionandbelief

[Igel]

1. You pick your translation,

you get your historicity.

From all the accounts I can find, the "turban" for the high priest in the OT was wrapped, but not very much like any modern turban I've seen worn by Sikhs or Arabs (or even Afghans).

A fedora is a hat. A cowboy hat is a hat. Doesn't mean a cowboy hat is a fedora.