/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.9828906]

Okay, I don't want to sound like a /pol/tard. But I was thinking about The Chronicles of Narnia, and are the Calormenes meant to be an allegory for Islam?

Think about it. And considering they were largely responsible for the fall of Narnia... what was Lewis getting at here?

[Anonymous No.9828914]

Whoa.. screencapped...

[Anonymous No.9828926]

>>9828914
While I appreciate that you found my post good enough to screencap, generally a screencap is meant to answer questions, not ask them.

[Anonymous No.9829408]

Is no one #woke enough to understand this?

[Anonymous No.9829434]

I have literally no clue what you're talking about but I've read some Lewis outside of those books. With your knowledge of the books, could it also represent atheism?

[Anonymous No.9829448]

Actually the donkey dressing up as Aslan under the direction of the gorilla is what's responsible for the fall of Narnia. So it's not Islam, it's the Antichrist.

[Anonymous No.9829704]

>>9829448
But the reason Shift made Puzzle dress up as Aslan is because Shift had already been colluding with the Calormenes in a similar way that Donald Trump is colluding with the Russians and saw an opportunity that would allow them to take over Narnia.

[Anonymous No.9829718]

>>9829704
holy shit, that escalated quickly...

also, yeah, it's probably about muslims. Go deeper in your research and maybe something will come out of it.

[Anonymous No.9829747]

>>9828906
yes the calormenes are based on arabs and islam. there's plenty of writing about this.

[Anonymous No.9829933]

I think I felt the first stirrings of sexual desire whilst reading The Silver Chair. I imagined it was me, not Eustace, who was the hero going on that long trek with the lovely Jill (she looked delightful in the illustrations), carrying a sword, sleeping by a campfire and having those amazing adventures — it was delicious in a forbidden way. (The emotional textures of sex and danger were entwined for me at that age.)

But there was an aspect of Lewis’s world which caused me great discomfort. The enemies of Narnia were from a country called Calormen, and we learned more about them as we progressed through the books — especially The Horse And His Boy. These people looked unmistakably like Saracens — medieval Muslims; the Narnians themselves looked like Crusaders. In wanting to identify with the characters, I was torn between a natural desire to be on the side of “good” with the white English children and a feeling that I was condemned to be in the other camp, the Calormenes, the darkies from Calormen (colored men?) with their curved swords and spicy food and unmistakable Islamic cultural symbolism. I knew I wasn’t a Calormene, but would my white English friends think of me as one?

One specific example troubled me deeply. Whenever Muslims mention the Prophet Muhammad, they are supposed to proclaim “Peace be upon him!” as a sign of respect. Whenever the Calormenes mentioned their leader, they always exclaimed “May he live forever!” in exactly the same tone. It seemed to be a deliberate imitation of the Muslim custom.

[Anonymous No.9829955]

>>9829933
As I grew older and had a series of intense discussions with some particularly abrasive evangelical Christians, my discomfort with the Narnia stories increased. While Muslims like to stress the commonality of Islam with Christianity — the same Abrahamic roots, the belief in one (and only one) God, the belief in all the Prophets — my Christian evangelizers always stressed the opposite, claiming in the worst cases that Islam was a false religion deliberately created by Satan to mislead people from the only true salvation of Jesus Christ. Whilst Muslims like to explain that Allah and God are actually the same, in different languages (and Arabic translations of the Bible use the term “Allah”), the Christians were adamant that this was also Satanic deceit. They also quoted extensively from Revelation, which they said foretold a chilling and catastrophic global war between True Believers (i.e. Christians) and Unbelievers (mostly Muslims) led by the Antichrist (who reports to Satan).

All of these elements became apparent to me in the Narnia books many years after I had first read them.

Lewis does seem to demonize Islam, making his Calormenes appear so obviously like Muslims, yet their theology of worshipping and practicing human sacrifice to a hideous idol-god called Tash could not have been more un-Islamic. (Islam is endemically opposed to anything even vaguely resembling idolatry.) He must surely have known this, but most of his readers would not have had enough knowledge about Islam to see this inconsistency.

If the Calormenes had instead worshipped an invisible, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God whom they insisted was the One and only One, that would have created a more authentic situation — but one much harder to deal with in black-and-white, good-versus-evil terms.

[Anonymous No.9829956]

>>9829955
The Last Battle is the darkest book of the series — entirely reminiscent of Revelation and its apocalyptic vision of the end times — and a particular scenario is played out. Shift, the sly ape (representing the Antichrist of Revelation), persuades the simple donkey, Puzzle, to wear a lion-skin and pretend to be Aslan, deceiving many people in the process (clearly a ‘false Christ’). Shift is always in the background, orchestrating the messages from Aslan, one of which has a particular resonance with my discussions with the Christian evangelists; Shift puts out the (obviously untrue) assertion that “Aslan and Tash are the same.” In this I hear echoes of the old argument: Muslims propose that God and Allah are the same; evangelical Christians vehemently oppose this.

Decades later, I still find it hard to reconcile the fact that the Narnia books are immensely enjoyable and gripping children’s stories, with the theological undercurrents which Lewis has woven into them. Which is why I think they are a great read when you are nine years old, but more troubling later on.

As the years passed, the landscape for my own identity issues moved on, to the James Bond novels — but that is another discussion.

[Anonymous No.9831057]

>>9829956
Allah is pagan Bedouin moon demon that got monotheized just like Aten or Ahura Mazda. Mohammadeanism isn't the first time Satan pulled that trick, or the last. Saracens are demonolaters. Those who do not have the Son do not have the Father. There is no way to the Father except through Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God. If your god does not have Jesus and the Holy Spirit, it is not God. James Bond is for faggots.

[Anonymous No.9831072]

I should read that Narnia huh

[Anonymous No.9831095]

>>9829956
>>9829955
>>9829933
I hate this place sometimes.

[Anonymous No.9831139]

>>9829933
>>9829955
>>9829956
>>9831057

I am intrigued by this.
Unsure as to why you started by telling us about your sexual desire, I still find your personal insight into the books fascinating. I take you you either identify as a Muslim, or have grown up that way. Nevertheless, identity crisis is normal. Everyone who grows up gets to a point where they are caught in the limbo of who you are, and who you want to be. But, this should fade quickly with focus and determination. So, don't let your identity be questioned or molded by others' perception of you or what you believe. Just do you, boo.
As far as the allegory, I am only slightly versed in Narnaic lore, so this is all really cool to learn. Christianity and Islam are close, but researching both more closely reveals the divide. For starters, learn why Jesus and Mohammed are different, and that will open up a world of new insight.

[Anonymous No.9831186]

>>9828906
Tash (the calormene god) is supposedly based on Termagant, the old 'frankish' misinterpretation of what the fuck Islam actually worshiped. Until the crusades christendom basically saw the ummah like Calormen.
So yeah, Calormen is straight up the Islamic world for Lewis. Good (and bad) people caught up in a fucked up religion.

[Anonymous No.9831223]

>>9831139
I got that from a HuffPo article so I don't know any more about this person's thoughts than you do.

[Anonymous No.9832155]

>>9828906
WTF I suddenly love C.S Lewis!