POLITICS OF HUMOR: THE ISLAMIC REACTION

As of today, Feb. 15, 2006, street protests continued in the Islamic world over the Danish cartoons apparently lampooning Muhammad. The protests seemed to be continuous for the last 10 days or so, the protestors indignant, enraged and often vengeful. The fire of this protest was fueled and fanned when various European presses reprinted the cartoons. To this writer the moral and political status of the cartoons are questionable and should be questioned. The reprinting of the cartoons seems unnecessary if not irresponsible. Western presses continue to reprint the cartoons asserting their right to publish in the face of pressure to censor the cartoons. Muslims around the world were obviously offended by these cartoons. Such taking of offense is understandable to me. What is not understandable to me is the degree of offense, the fury if not hysteria of their outrage. Possibly I should be able to understand. Possibly I am insensitive, unempathetic or just ignorant. I am not sure. What I do know is that I had no such feelings as I saw last night on CNN. Possibly it is not accurate to call the cartoons a lampooning of Muhammad since they were not intended ultimately to ridicule. Maybe better to characterize them as caricatures or satires. As a political cartoon, however, it seems its main intent was not to demean but to criticize. Now if the furor was over the fact of depiction alone of Muhammad no matter what the meaning or context, then there is no explaining let alone justifying the intent of the cartoon. If however the furor was over the content or meaning intended in the cartoon, then we have, I believe, a different matter at hand. Again it seems the essential intent was not merely to ridicule nor insult Muslim sensibilities. The cartoonists, strictly speaking, are not blasphemers because they are not carrying out these offenses from within the Muslim world. They are not Muslims. They may be accused of being sacreligious or being infidels but not blasphemers since they are not believers in the first place. These cartoonists are artists or caricaturists making a political point. What is that political point? It is that the insult to Islam is really coming from within the Muslim world by Muslims who would turn their religion into an instrumentality for ultimately political purposes. To kowtow to Muslim pressures and protests would be to surrender the political and religious criticism being made. It is extremists within Islam who belittle, insult and compromise the integrity of the religion of Islam. No show of disrespect to Islamic sensibilities could touch the degree of damage done to Islam by extremists, zealots and exploiters who would use Islam to support their political purposes. The theological laxity demonstrated in the predominant silence of the Islamic world in the face of egregious interpretations of Islam to justify any and every imaginable political action is deafening. Any damage that Western attitudes and even cultural exports have done to Islam does not hold a candle to the damage done by Islam itself through theological and political laxity, laziness, opportunism and zealousness. Possibly this unacknowledged self-abuse explains the degree of outrage at the cartoons, an outrage that covers the truth being spoken by some of the cartoons: once again, this truth is that Islam is being politicized from within to the detriment of its religious content and to the denigration of its prophet. The justice which the very concept of "Islam" represents is turned into revenge and the peace which it avows is disavowed in unbridledled violent reaction against putative infidels at every crossroad. ..... It is also unfortunate that the leaders of Islam should make the same mistake that Catholics have made in the face of the sex scandals in America in which a large number of children have been molested by priests. The Catholic bureaucracy delayed, stonewalled, denied and covered up the scandal, exhibiting the callousness and indifference that finally exposes the cruelty, that is the lack of love, that characterizes its state of decay, distortion and inexorable hypocrisy. Islam should have learned from Catholicism's self-destructiveness. Apparently it has not. Instead it itself remains reactive, defensive and self-righteousness. If the rational and reflective leadership of Islam had taken as proactive a role critiquing Islam's divergence from its inner truth as its extremist fringe has taken in promoting violence, then possibly the world's respect for Islam would be greater than it is. ..... Lastly let me say that our probable failure in the West to fully comprehend and appreciate the beauty, wisdom and treasure that is Islam does not go unrivaled by Islam's ability to underestimate the value placed upon freedom of speech in the West. How infinitely often has the truth gone unsaid for fear of reaction, retaliation, offense, shunning or excommunication. When is the defense and exercise of freedom of speech too great especially in striving to express and comprehend the infinite wisdom of God. When the emperor has no clothes, for his own good, should we wait for the innocent child to speak up? Or should we recover our own authentic innocence and speak the truth about the hegemony of religious hypocrisy in our world today, hypocrisy of which countless cartoons could never speak enough truth sufficient to rectify its depth of corruption, perversion and perdition.