Murder in the Name of Allah — Page 9
Religion drips with Blood. Madame Tussaud's waxworks museum in London has a strange, moving and terrifying exhibition of this persecution. The museum was originally founded in Paris in 1770 and moved to England in 1802. . Its halls are lined with waxworks of famous and infamous people. Its. Chamber of Horrors is a kind of underground dungeon. The figures there have been modelled into such uncanny likenesses that you can almost see them breathing. Many visitors there have stopped to ask directions from a friendly looking curator, only to find they have been talking to a dummy! On display are the death-masks from the guillotined heads of. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, which were personally cast by Madame. Tussaud. There is an authentic gallows with other instruments of torture: pillory, stocks, whipping-post, ducking-stool, iron maiden rack, galleys, bed of Procrustes, cross, gibbet, halter and many others. Some exhibits are so gruesome that they are covered with screens to keep them away from children and squeamish adults. . It is a strange world where a man can rise to the heights of prophethood and talk with his Creator, then sink to the depths of becoming a priest and questioning Joan of Arc about her visions of angels. He can sink even lower and become an inquisitor. The instruments of torture shown at Madame Tussaud's tell the tragic story of the Spanish and. French Inquisitions. Innocent people were tortured for their so-called apostasy; they were forced to confess that they had recanted from the true religion. When they refused, they were whipped and flogged, put on the rack, lynched, impaled, pilloried, branded and burned. The victims either confessed or died a miserable death. These dignitaries of the Church in all their finery, who tortured innocent Christians, remind one of Christ sa with his crown of thorns, bleeding on the Cross and crying with a loud voice: 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?' (Matthew 27:46). These were the people who symbolically consumed the flesh and blood of Christas at. Communion services, yet could not recall that the Pharisees had asked. Pontius Pilate to crucify Christ as because he had 'apostasised' and abandoned the religion of his forefathers. But the crucifixion of Christ as pales into insignificance when compared with the Inquisition of medieval Christians. It is with a sense of relief and, indeed, pride that Islam, with its declaration of 'no compulsion in the matter of belief, has finally closed the door on such atrocities in religion's name. But this sense of relief and pride is only short-lived. Any Muslim will lower his head with shame when he sees today's ulema vying with what the Christian priests of medieval Europe did to devise new ways of suppressing freedom of 9