[lit-ideas] Re: Defending Offense.
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:30:34 -0500
Here are four reactions from the European press,
summarized by the pseudo-Heideggerian German site,
SignandSight
http://www.signandsight.com/features/590.html
Irshad Manji, a Canadian and Visiting Fellow at
Yale University, asks why people shouldn't be
allowed to make jokes about Muslims. "We Muslims
can't pretend to have the integrity to demand
respect for our religion if we don't respect the
religions of others. When have we ever demanded
that Christians and Jews be allowed to set foot in
Mecca? Only when they come for business reasons
are they allowed to enter. As long as Rome
continues to welcome non-Christians and Jerusalem
welcomes non-Jews, we Muslims should be protesting
against more than these cartoons."
________________________
"Christians in the West are forced to put up with
incredible insults every day: Christ depicted as a
homosexual, Mary as a prostitute, etc. And if they
show the slightest indignation, they are subjected
to a hailstorm of criticism from those who invoke
the sacrosanct principle of free speech," writes
Luciano Amaral, a professor at the New University
of Lisbon, in Diario de Noticias. "And all it
takes is for a Danish newspaper to publish a few
mediocre cartoons of Muhammad and you have half
the intellectuals in the Western world discovering
the religious sensitivity of Islam, doing penance,
excusing the acts of violence by Muslims and
reminding us how important it is to try to
understand them, they who are taking a direct hit
from the West's arrogance. ... The hatred that
certain Western intellectuals harbour towards
their own culture is one of the most fascinating
phenomena of the contemporary world. If a
civilisation is no longer even capable of arousing
the instincts necessary for its own survival,
perhaps it no longer deserves to live."
___________________
The Arabs and Muslims themselves are mainly
responsible for the defamation of this religion
and of the Prophet Mohammed's image, because they
convey a distorted picture of this divine and
immortal message and its revered prophet. We
should all ask Mohammed for forgiveness for
defacing his image," writes Arab author Baha
al-Musawi in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard,
and asks: "Why don't we portray Mohammed as a
devout, honourable and tolerant human being,
instead of letting him be reduced to an image of
Osama bin Laden, of a sword, of killing, of the
Taliban, of beheadings and suicide? How can we
permit the murder of the unbelievers when Mohammad
honoured them? How can we oppress women when
Mohammed revered them? How can we spill blood when
Mohammed has forbidden it?"
________________
In the French Figaro the philosopher Andre
Grjebine is worried at how governments –
especially the UK and the USA – and institutions
like the UN kowtow in face of calls for religious
censorship. He demands that the torch of the
Enlightenment should be relit to prevent
governments from taking "the first step towards
recognising the Sharia as the common law of
humanity": "As Umberto Eco shows in 'The Name of
the Rose', religious institutions fear nothing
more than laughter, that caustic questioning of
the revelation. And nothing is as fearsome as
people who are incapable of seeing their belief as
one among many, who want to force others to share
their belief, or at least forbid them from casting
doubt on it. This is why it is fundamental to
protect the right to laugh, and to lend our
support to those who seek to defend freedom and
tolerance within Islam itself, like Salman
Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands and
Shabana Rehman in Norway."
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