Cartoon Controversy!

Hope nobody visited my blog a day before yesterday because it was not coming at all except for a part of my last post. I normally would have attributed it to the sluggish internet connection but I had a day ago made a change in my template & so I sorta panicked ‘coz I know next to nothing about HTML codes and web templates. I wrote to Blogger Support but I think its back to normal now without them doing anything. Must have been the connection. Or something wrong with Blogger.

There is so much that happens every day that you wonder what to write about. My mind is such a muddle of totally unconnected and mismatched things, each of them jostling and pushing in a tiny space, trying their hardest to reach the main stage and be processed and thought abut that I sometimes think it’s going to completely collapse one day. It doesn’t help of course if you, at that moment, have just been through the insufferable traffic noise around here on the streets and have a severe head-ache as a result.
Sorry for my wandering, incoherent, sputtering.

Back to sense-making things? (Or perhaps sense spinning things)

So the cartoon ruckus is on these days …

The Danish embassy in Damascus was torched yesterday. 18 people were injured. Danish flags and the effigies of its Prime Minister were burnt in Multan. I cannot in the least bit justify violence as a means of protest for what Jyllands-Posten and others have done. Okay the cartoons were blasphemous to Muslims but why come down to violence. Such means do not in the least bit assist their cause. Just complicates it further. But Muslims in today’s world have a lot of rage, a lot of aggravation over everything that seems to be going against them, over Palestinians not getting their rights, over Iraq, over Iran, over Kashmir and all of this, in the midst of these continuous declarations of our religious leaders that the West is ever hatching plans for the sole purpose of eradicating Islam and the Muslim World. So when a thing like this erupts up, it naturally has unbounded potential to exacerbate that anger. Muslims are like that active volcano which spills lava every few days … ever rumbling, ever giving off that ominous smoke … they are always on edge. Originally it was their fault …as a result of their decadence, they fell from being the rulers of the world into this deep pit of slavedom. And now they just can’t get out. They can’t even see the light. The pit goes ever deeper for some. They are still falling. Dealing with corrupt governments. With martial laws. With the laws of the Imperial World.I guess all of this has half extinguished their sanity … of years and years of fighting with all of this (of course some are not even fighting) and getting nothing in return. They don’t know what to do so they just go out and burn some flags, some buildings and give out a lot of death threats to let off their steam. There is nothing at the moment to suggest that some of the lost sanity is going to make its way back into the hearts and minds of people. Sometimes I think there is no coming back. That somehow that a not-to-be-pushed button has been pushed. I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Because Muslims do not show any signs, not even dim ones of something hopeful. I wonder why doesn’t this kind of anger (not the violent one of course) burst out for the cause of education, for eliminating corruption. To Muslims it was an insult to the Prophet (pbuh) but it’s a hundred and thousand times more insulting to the Prophet (pbuh) if the people and nations who call themselves Muslims follow a path, the one we see in every other Muslim country, which is as far as it could be from the message our Prophet (pbuh) gave everything to. Why isn’t trying to become better Muslims our top priority? Why don’t we for once realize this? It doesn’t take a lot of intelligence to come to that conclusion does it? You feel sometimes that opposing the West is all we have to do these days (not saying that their unjust policies should not be opposed), that becoming a better Muslim is connoted with not agreeing with America. A common enemy does give a sense of unity but a unity which is being balanced on thin ropes. You have to have a common ideal to strive for, which we have but sort of forgotten. How do you make someone remember? In old movies you had to have this huge blow to your head which made you recall everything. Maybe that’s what we need. A huge blow. If the things continue like the way they are doing, a major blow (a very, very major one ‘coz the average sized ones don’t seem to get our attention) is not too far ahead.

Having said all of that, there is nothing that could have justified the publication of those cartoons. What irks me more than anything else are the re-runs. The European World is aware how these sorts of provocations are taken in the Muslim Community. They increase the chances of intolerant elements taking advantage of this fury. But they somehow had to do it in the name of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is an extremely worthy ideal but as an editorial pointed out in The News on Sunday, not something to be “boasted or brandished about”. Someone please tell me, isn’t there a fine, a very thin & delicate line between freedom of speech and striking right at the point where the religious sentiments of a community are particularly sensitive? Papers all over Europe are proclaiming their right to blaspheme, that it is not a crime in their part of the world. There is not much religiousness in Europe and perhaps their right to blaspheme is their because of this secular culture. Nobody particularly cares if some religious figure is satirized. But a society has its own taboos, other ones if not religious. Let me quote the editorial I mentioned earlier: "Deliberate provocation, especially where others’ religious sentiments and emotions are concerned, is by no means free speech. The holocaust was without doubt a monstrous crime of the 20th Century, but the Western Press was up in arms, with some governments joining up as well, when President Ahmedinejad of Iran cast doubt on some of the details of the even. In Germany there is a law - opposed even by some Jews - which makes it a crime punishable by imprisonment to state that the Holocaust did not take place. This example just goes to show that every society has its own taboos and sacred cows and that absolute freedom is just a chimera.”

I am quoting this now from BBC: In Berlin, Die Welt argued there was a right to blaspheme in the West, and asked whether Islam was capable of coping with satire.
"The protests from Muslims would be taken more seriously if they were less hypocritical," it wrote in an editorial.

Who is being hypocritical now? All Ahmedinejad did was questioning. Even if he was wrong, why wasn’t it taken as a chance to discuss the issue? Why an uproar? Why was it considered as a proof of Ahmedinejad intolerance? The protests in this case are more violent but that is, as I said, due to the explosive properties of the Muslim World in general. It didn’t have to be that violent. A more reasonable approach would have been more effective .Bridges between two civilizations are not built if people on both sides just stand at each end, proclaim the need of a bridge, but do not bring any raw materials to actually construct it. All there is then left is just a deep chasm that divides them.

P.S. Poor Arla Foods! Their sales have plummeted to zero in the Middle East.