BY TARIQ ALI
The latest round of culture wars does neither side any
good. The western civilisational fundamentalists insist on seeing Muslims
as the other – different, alien and morally evil. Jyllands-Posten
published the cartoons in bad faith. Their aim was not to engage in debate
but to provoke and they succeeded. The same newspaper declined to print
caricatures of Jesus. I am an atheist and do not know the meaning of the
"religious pain" that is felt by believers of every cast when what they
believe in is insulted. I am not insulted by billions of Christians,
Muslims and Jews believing there is a god and praying to this non-existent
deity on a regular basis.
But the cartoon depicting Muhammad as a terrorist is a
crude racist stereotype. The implication is that every Muslim is a
potential terrorist. This is the sort of nonsense that leads to
Islamophobia.
Muslims have every right to protest but the overreaction
was unnecessary. In reality, the number of original demonstrators was
tiny: 300 in Pakistan, 400 in Indonesia, 200 in Tripoli, a few hundred in
Britain (before Saturday’s (February 11) bigger reconciliation march) and
government-organised hoodlums in Damascus burning an embassy. Beirut was a
bit larger. Why blow this up and pretend that the protests had entered the
subsoil of spontaneous mass anger? They certainly haven’t anywhere in the
Muslim world, though the European media has been busy fertilising the
widespread ignorance that exists on this continent.
How many citizens have any real idea of what the
Enlightenment really was? French philosophers did take humanity forward by
recognising no external authority of any kind but there was a darker side.
Voltaire: "Blacks are inferior to Europeans but superior to apes". Hume:
"The black might develop certain attributes of human beings, the way the
parrot manages to speak a few words". There is much more in a similar vein
from their colleagues. It is this aspect of the Enlightenment that appears
to be more in tune with some of the generalised anti-Muslim ravings in the
media.
What I find interesting is that these demonstrations and
embassy-burnings are a response to a tasteless cartoon. Did the Danish
imam who travelled round the Muslim world pleading for this show the same
anger at Danish troops being sent to Iraq? The occupation of Iraq has
costs tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. Where is the response to that or
the tortures in Abu Ghraib? Or the rapes of Iraqi women by occupying
soldiers? Where is the response to the daily deaths of Palestinians? These
are the issues that anger me. Last year Afghans protested after a US
marine in Guantánamo had urinated on the Koran. It was a vile act and
there was an official inquiry. The marine in question explained that he
had been urinating on a prisoner and a few drops had fallen accidentally
on the Koran – as if pissing on a prisoner (an old imperial habit) was
somehow more acceptable.
Yesterday (February 12), footage of British soldiers
brutalising and abusing civilians in Iraq – beating teenagers with batons
until they pass out, posing for the camera as they kick corpses – was made
public. No one can seriously imagine these are the isolated incidents the
ministry of defence claims; they are of course the norm under colonial
occupations. Who will protest now – the media pundits defending the
Enlightenment or Muslim clerics frothing over the cartoons?
It’s strange that the Danish imams and their friends
abroad ignore the real tragedy and instead ensure that the cartoons are
now being reprinted everywhere. How will it end? Like all these things do,
with no gains on either side and a last tango in Copenhagen around a
mountain of unused butter. Meanwhile, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine
the occupations continue.
(Tariq Ali is the author of Clash of Fundamentalisms:
Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. Email: [email protected])
(Courtesy: The Guardian; February 13, 2006.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoonprotests/story/0,,1708319,00.html