The Clash to End All Clashes? Making sense of the cartoon jihad
February 8, 2006, 8:15 am |
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by Daniel Pipes
National Review Online*
February 7, 2006
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3361
* Cross-posted with permission
Editors’ Introduction: In belated response to a cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed published in a Danish paper and subsequently reprinted across Europe, scenes of outrage filed out of London, Beruit, and Damascus, among other cities this weekend. Flags and embassies burned. Placards (in London!) read: “Behead those who insult Islam.”
In light of the anger unleashed, National Review Online asked some experts on Islam and/or the Mideast for their read on what’s going on and what can/should be done. We asked each: “Is this a clash of civilizations we’re watching? What can be done? By Muslims? By everyone else?”
Daniel Pipes’s Introduction: Click here for responses by Mustafa Akyol, Zeyno Baran, Rachel Ehrenfeld, Mohamed Eljahmi, Basma Fakri, Farid Ghadry, Mansoor Ijaz, Judith Apter Klinghoffer, Clifford May, Ramin Parham, Nina Shea, and Bat Ye’or.
It certainly feels like a clash of civilizations. But it is not.
By way of demonstration, allow me to recall the similar Muslim-Western confrontation that took place in 1989 over the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the resulting death edict from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. It first appeared, as now, that the West aligned solidly against the edict and the Muslim world stood equally with it. As the dust settled, however, a far more nuanced situation became apparent.
Significant voices in the West expressed sympathy for Khomeini. Former president Jimmy Carter responded with a call for Americans to be “sensitive to the concern and anger” of Muslims. The director of the Near East Studies Center at UCLA, Georges Sabbagh, declared Khomeini “completely within his rights” to sentence Rushdie to death. Immanuel Jakobovits, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, wrote that “the book should not have been published” and called for legislation to proscribe such “excesses in the freedom of expression.”
In contrast, important Muslims opposed the edict. Erdal Inönü, leader of Turkey’s opposition Social Democratic party, announced that “killing somebody for what he has written is simply murder.” Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt’s winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in literature, called Khomeini a “terrorist.” A Palestinian journalist in Israel, Abdullatif Younis, dubbed The Satanic Verses “a great service.”
This same division already exists in the current crisis. Middle East-studies professors are denouncing the cartoons even as two Jordanian editors went to jail for reprinting them.
It is a tragic mistake to lump all Muslims with the forces of darkness. Moderate, enlightened, free-thinking Muslims do exist. Hounded in their own circles, they look to the West for succor and support. And, however weak they may presently be, they eventually will have a crucial role in modernizing the Muslim world.
Full coverage of the cartoon controversy at netWMD:
- Islamists attack Danish and Norwegian embassies in Tehran
- Free Speech in France Prevails; Its Islamists Don’t Get It
- Muslim Intolerance: One Newspaper, One Nation, One Religion, One World
- Muslim Intolerance: Just the Facts
- Arab/Muslim world: do as I preach, not as I practice
- Anti-Danish cartoon rallies turn into fiasco for the [Iranian] regime
- Cartoons and the clash of “freedoms”
- Got A Tantrum? Blame the Jews!
- Do Not Censor Me! I Censor Thee!
- “Death to them and to their newspapers”
- A solution looking for a problem…
- Danish Cartoons, Free Speech, and Arab/Muslim Sensibilities
- Caricature of the Prophet Mohammed
- In the Interest of Political Correctness, I Now Give You…
- SUPPORT DANISH PRODUCTS
- Free Speech? Free Press? Who Needs It?
Related: Arab/Muslim World, Islam, Political Correctness