Please note: first, my facts come from recent reports posted on CNN.com. Second, I admit my meager understanding of the Islamic faith up front. Should I get a detail or two wrong, I ask you to look to my main point as the intent of this piece.
In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a story on a book about the life of the Islamic prophet Mohammed, accompanying it with a collection of caricatures. Under Sharia law, which is partially composed of divine rules drawn from the Islamic holy book, no depictions of the prophet Mohammed are allowed. This law, combined with the fact that one of the caricatures featured Mohammed wearing a bomb as a turban, has set a large segment of extremist Muslims into a frenzy. Protestors have already lost their lives during attacks on the Danish consulates in England, Syria and Lebanon, of which the latter two were set ablaze. In Rome, a discussion has begun over how much extra security to assign the Danish athletes to protect them from a potential Munich-like statement of violence. Worse, this isn’t likely to be all the negative fallout that results from this event. How the hell did it come to this?
An ironic wrinkle is that the original compilation of Mohammed caricatures was to force discussion of the soft-pedaling of Muslim issues in Denmark newspapers. Yet even if the original intent had been to inflame Muslim sentiment, one struggles to find meaning behind the subsequent violence, and in the responses to it. People have died over a cartoon, yet the issue has been broken down into two easily digested sides: is this an issue of freedom of expression, or of the right of a religion to be accorded respect for its laws? Perhaps the answer is not so simple. Perhaps the news coverage I reference portrays the very thing the Danish paper set out to explore: an inability to talk straight about “Muslim issues.”
An integral question is precisely what a “Muslim issue” might consist of, but the answer depends on whom one consults. Responses can vary from “sources misconstruing the Islamic religion and good faith attempts to correct such errors,” all the way to “anything that Muslims who hate the West can use to go off the deep end.” Jihad Momeni, the editor of a Jordanian newspaper who decided to print the caricatures, presciently asked, “Who offends Islam more? A foreigner who endeavors to draw the prophet as described by his followers in the world, or a Muslim with an explosive belt who commits suicide in a wedding party in Amman or elsewhere?” Not everyone has been so even-handed. In a misguided attempt to debate freedom of speech, a French paper reprinted the cartoons under the headline “Yes, one has the right to caricature God.” There seems to be no sane responses from the larger world, only countries making apologies for hurting the feelings of the worldwide Muslim community.
In a move that highlights the world media’s inability to take sides on this issue, an Iranian paper has called for caricatures of the Holocaust. The editor asked, “Does the West extend freedom of expression to the crimes committed by the United States and Israel, or an event such as the Holocaust? Or is its freedom only for insulting religious sanctities?” If everyone takes sides except the sane among us, there will never be an end to this unbelievable idiocy.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “We shall have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.” This is not about smearing the name of Islam – this is about retaining human dignity in the face of zealotry of any kind. My beliefs are not worth your life, nor are yours worth mine. Why is that so difficult to understand?
In an attempt to stem the flow of “Student Life hates Islam” letters I expect to read over the next few days, let me say this: I do not care what religion anyone is, nor what individuals do with their lives. But I will not refrain from passing judgment on thousands of people who are taking a battle of ideas and using it as the impetus to cause widespread death and destruction. At least in the past men had the decency to line up in rows and look at those they were about to murder. Now all we get is a pit in our stomachs that reminds us we could wind up dead riding the bus.
Joshua is a senior in Arts & Sciences and a Forum editor.