Geert Wilders was a supporter of the Dutch cartoonists who depicted the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) as a terrorist with a bomb in his turban, yet when someone posts an offensive cartoon about him and his party (based on their proposal for what they call “hooligan villages” although their general bigotry is well-documented), he demands that it be removed. Worse, one of his supporters threatens the staff of the broadcaster which posted it on his website. So much for law and order and freedom of speech. (The cartoon shows a man understood to be Wilders, holding a baton, showing a group of Muslims into a building marked “shower”; Nazi gas chambers were disguised as showers.)

To summarise it for the sake of our visually impaired friends, Smoker tells us that, at a recent debate at the Oxford University Union (a debating society), she, along with Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who published the notorious cartoons, opposed a motion that “Free Speech should be moderated by respect for Religion”. The motion was defeated by 129 to 59. She doesn’t see why free speech should be moderated for religion, “nor for any other abstract noun”. This was a stupid gibe when Michael Moore used it regarding terrorism, and it sounds just as stupid when the noun is religion. She thinks that religious people should be respected “as long as they are not antisocial and don’t aim to impose their religious views on others”, but faith, “which means firm belief in the absence of evidence”, should not, because it “betrays human intelligence, undermines science-based knowledge, and compromises ordinary morality”.

Smoker continues:

Scepticism is of paramount importance, because it is the gateway to knowledge; but unless the sceptical ideas are freely argued over, they cannot be assessed, nor can the ensuing knowledge spread through society. And free speech must include the right to laugh at absurd ideas. Indeed, ridicule - including satirical cartoons, which have recently provoked terrorism - has always been an important element of the free exchange of ideas on everything, not least religion. Without that free exchange there can be no advance in knowledge and no social progress.

She conveniently ignores the fact that debate about science and the usual things the religious and the secularists disagree on go on all the time in the west and do not routinely provoke terrorism or violence of any sort. If it did, you would expect that any institution where such debates go on, from Radio 4 to pretty much every university, would be under pretty heavy guard, but apart from the usual security measures (which merely identify who goes in and out of the building by means of pass cards; I find it hard to believe that they would stop a determined terrorist), they are not. Until a few years ago, most London universities were open. The two I’ve attended (Aberystwyth and Kingston) still are.

The Danish cartoons were not an attempt at civilised debate, but contained deliberate insults and slurs. Three of them show a sort of stereotypical nasty Arab, fierce and grizzly with an unkempt beard with a bomb in his turban in one case and two goggle-eyed veiled women behind him in another, as if this was what the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) really looked like. With some cultures, although not others, if you insult people’s forebears, particularly someone’s mother, you will provoke a fight - and this includes European cultures besides those of the Middle East. A contributor to a Rough Guide book on travelling in Europe wrote that he chased a man he suspected of stealing from him through the streets of a Spanish city, and when the man continued running even after being called, among other things, a son of a whore, he became convinced that this was his man - because if he wasn’t, he would have turned around and put up a fight.

The Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) is the model every Muslim tries to emulate; on every moral or existential issue, people will recount things they have heard that the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) said or did in a particular situation. These cartoons depicted him as the worst stereotype of an Arab Muslim, and thus insinuate that such is the model Muslim. We did not all (or even mostly) erupt in a frenzy, but we were all insulted. I should add that, in a Danish context, Muslims are not a powerful population; as elsewhere in Europe, they are ghettoised, politically under-represented and suffer discrimination. It is not debate and it is not satire; in our country, at least, satire tends to be aimed at politicians and other powerful people, not at minorities, even privileged ones like the Jews. If a “satirical cartoon” linking Blacks with apes or cavemen were published, and then spuriously justified with references to black drug dealers or gangsters, there would be outrage, and justifiably so.

Moving on, she explicitly associates Islam itself with terrorism:

When the ideologies we pretend to respect indoctrinate children, some of whom may even grow up to be suicide bombers because of it, hypocrisy becomes complicity in the mental abuse of children, in the oppression of women, in the obstruction of social reforms, and even in incitement to terrorism. We are told that Islam itself cannot be blames for the terrorist attacks on New York, Madrid and London, followed by widespread carnage in retaliation for the publication of a few innocuous drawings. That is like say that that the horrors of the Inquisition had nothing to do with Christianity.

If the children being taught Islam are taught explicitly that suicide bombing is against Islam and is not a path to martyrdom at all, as a lot of Muslims actually believe, then this possibility is averted unless the children choose to ignore what they have been taught, or unless the children are living in a context of dispossession, occupation and widespread oppression and disruption of daily life by an outside invader. In the case of the tiny number of British Muslims who have ended up becoming suicide bombers, many, if not all, of them went through a British state education rather than an Islamic school.

The Taliban, al-Qa’eda and the Badr Corps, are certainly extremist, but they are orthodox deriving logically from the Koran, which denigrates women and tells believers to wage jihad against heretics and infidels. Moderate Muslims often try to explain away this tyranny and violence as misinterpretation of the Koran. If that is so, why did Allah, or his Prophet, lapse in to such ambiguity?

The answer lies in the fact that neither the Taliban, with their bizarre hostility towards women, nor al-Qa’eda, nor the Badr Corps are typical of Muslims anywhere. In no other country are women forced (by law) to wear the burqa as seen in Afghanistan or denied medical treatment or education by law. This did not even happen when the Islamic Courts gained control of Somalia: by contrast, British TV showed girls, without faces covered, having been sent back from the UK for schooling there. It is not the case even in other countries were veiling of women’s faces is common. Our model remains the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) and he and his Companions never told us not to teach girls or to deny them treatment for illness, nor to deliberately massacre innocent people in preference to combatants. It is not a matter of ambiguity but of people taking words which apply to one situation and applying them to another, a mark of small extremist fringe groups at many points in Islamic history, including those known as Kharijites who murdered distinguished Muslims of the first generation for disagreeing with them.

Smoker puts no distance between herself and anti-Muslim bigots like Robert Spencer in claiming that Al-Qa’eda “derive logically” from the Qur’an. Islamic scholars, who actually know the Qur’an and the contexts of each verse, condemned all the atrocities of al-Qa’ida. Granted, in the 1990s there were those Muslims who believed that Osama bin Laden was a soldier for Islam and not a mass murderer, and doubted that he really had anything to do with the east African embassy bombings, but the generality of Muslim scholars has always condemned the terrorist actions themselves. That is what counts.

Smoker concludes that giving religion “false respect” “could allow superstitions of the Dark Ages to triumph, destroying the whole range of social and individual freedoms courageously won over the past few centuries”, and that we should “moderate respect for religion in favour of free speech”. To her, secularism represents progress and freedom and religion superstition and oppression. However, it’s a fact that the modern age has led to a respect for the scientist that has led us to throw people in jail for years and rob people of their right to have children on the basis of what they say, which sometimes proves to be wrong. At one time, eugenics was associated with progress, while religion opposed it - and it has since been discredited. Such behaviour continued with the imprisonment of innocent Irish people for terrorism on the strength of false “science” in the 1970s and with the false baby-murder convictions attributed to Roy Meadow’s faulty mathematics more recently. Some westerners will believe the words of a man in a white coat when he calls someone a murderer just as readily as some Africans will believe a self-made priest when he calls someone a witch.

I should add that there is a difference between “moderating free speech” in terms of passing laws restricting it and society having certain limits in order to keep the peace. This country already has, for example, codes of conduct for the press and laws banning, among other things, incitement to racial hatred. Laws banning satire on religion are not on the table, and any Muslim who seeks to have such laws introduced should consider that many of us are not above lampooning aspects of our fellow citizens’ religions. We are one minority among many, and cannot expect special treatment in that regard. Rather, we object to calumny, and a calumny against the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) is a calumny against all of us, and when it concerns violence, it causes understandable distress. If you cannot see that, you are an idiot.

The BBC did report it, but their attached picture does not convey how much space there was around the people. There were two Muslim speakers, one of them Sayyida Rend Shakir (whose speech is reproduced at the Muslim Action Committee blog here) and the other an Iraqi called Ali, whose argument was based mostly on things he told us happened in Iraq involving people being jailed or tortured for opposition to Saddam Hussain’s regime. Among the first things that happened when I got there was the announcement that someone had been arrested for holding a particular poster because someone had complained that they found it offensive. The whole crowd was therefore asked to pass it round, because they could not arrest everyone. The poster was the work of some Iranian communist organisation, and I saw one of the protesters see what it was and refuse it. I saw one guy with a placard saying “All religion is anti-human”, and I remarked to those who refused the banner that there was no religion more anti-human than communism.

I was able to stand on the steps, which would not have been possible at a really well-attended rally, and snap away until my battery ran out, which was sadly after taking only about 25 or so pictures, some of which I’ve uploaded to Flickr (note: some of these show people holding up banners containing the offensive cartoons). I heard Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society, the implacable opponents of religious state schooling, tell everyone that the blasphemy law was still on the statute book and was not the dead letter it was made out to be; he told us about the sentences people had received under it in the distant past and how someone from the Gay News died prematurely from the stress of a blasphemy case in the 1970s. (I can’t remember whose name he mentioned; the editor Denis Lemon fell ill with AIDS five years later, and died in 1994.)

My memory’s like a sieve; I can’t really remember much of what I heard yesterday afternoon even though much of it really was quite ridiculous. I should start taking a tape recorder with me when I go to these things. I heard, for example, the famous “first they came for the Jews …” speech, which was followed by a quite ridiculous assessment that it “started with political correctness” and so on. Well, the last time round, cartoons vilifying ethnic groups had an awful lot to do with it, I recall, and political correctness really didn’t. Free expression was inhibited to prevent criticism of the ruling party, not the races and religions they disliked. How stupid and tastless for people to claim persecution in this way when they demand the right to vilify minorities!

Another specious claim was that the famous proverb attributed to Voltaire (I may not agree with what you say etc.) was being put into practice by some of the groups present. What, like Maryam Namazie’s Worker-Communists? She was there to show her enmity for Islam. Nothing more or less than that. The hypocritical demand for “unconditional freedom of expression” is not something she would honour were she to become part of any communist Iranian government. They would refuse to even allow children to be taught Islam, or indeed any other religion:

One of the immediate tasks to guarantee children’s right to a happy, secure and creative life is to protect children from religion’s interference and abuse. To protect children from religion and religious institutions, the Worker-communist Party of Iran would call for the following to be implemented: 1- Prohibition of religious or religious institutions and material or moral interference with children under the age of 16. Prohibition of recruitment of children under 16 to religious sects, ceremonies and religious assemblies. Prohibition of veil for anyone under the age of 16. Prohibition of genital mutilation or circumcision of children.

Another specious claim was attributed to some guy who had been in prison in Soviet Russia, who had said about western Europeans that he had lived our future and it wasn’t very good, or something to that effect. It was commented at Harry’s Place that NO2ID should have been there, but were not in evidence; in the hour I was there, very little was said about the authoritarian laws which have been introduced by Tony Blair, much less by George W Bush; the talk was nearly all about religion, and not merely about the religious hatred laws, but about the general tendency towards avoiding giving offence regarding people’s religions: for example, the fact that no British newspaper reprinted the Danish cartoons was noted as a point of shame.

Towards the end, we were introduced to someone who had made a donation towards the event: none other than Labi Siffre, the author of one of the most irritating songs of the 1980s, Something Inside So Strong. Siffre opined that not all opinions deserve any respect, among them sexist, racist and homophobic beliefs and the belief that one knows there is a God. And he went off on a general anti-religious diatribe. There was also Sean Gabb from the Libertarian Alliance, who named Nick Griffin, Abu Hamza, David Irving and Frank Ellis, the university lecturer who has been suspended after a controversy about his racialist opinions, as people who have been victimised for exercising free speech - “among other things” in the case of Abu Hamza. Obviously he mentioned these four people because they are the sort of people whose right to free speech people in general would not go very far to defend, to which I would reply: for very good reasons, particularly in the cases of Griffin and Abu Hamza, although I happen to think Frank Ellis’s racialist views need not prejudice his teaching of Russian unless he should let it. The truth is that I worry too much for people’s life and limb, particularly those of the Muslims of West Yorkshire, to care about Nick Griffin’s freedom of speech.

As far as I could see the whole affair was very orderly; the organisers tried to make the event “inclusive”, inviting Sayyida Rend Shakir and disassociating themselves from a rally organised by a pro-deportation group in Copenhagen. However, the turnout seemed mostly to be a mixture of those generally hostile to religion and those specifically hostile to Islam, and the comparison of laws aimed at curbing inter-communal hostility with persecution of people because of their political opinions simply does not ring true. Poking fun at politicians and other powerful people is not the same as vilifying a minority group by such means as insulting their religion; the former is among the ways of bringing the powerful to account, while the latter is the beginning of persecution, or worse. It never seems to occur to people that Muslims object to this vilification not because they want to silence debate about religion, but because they fear that it may lead to violence, particularly when it is accompanied by rhetoric about Muslims grooming and pimping white girls in Yorkshire.

One commenter at Harry’s Place reported that he “got followed by a group of hostile muslims, unbeknownst to us, who ran in the pub and tried to tear up another bloggers Toonophobia placard, nearly came to blows” (he also blogged the rally, and the guy in the bottom picture between the two police photographers, and in the second to bottom picture with his face above the black speaker’s microphone, is me), but despite the five Asian men trying to cause a fight in a pub after the event, nobody attempted to disrupt the event while I was there. In fact, Muslims stayed away from this en masse, demonstrating either that they did not know about it, or that they had no desire to cause a fight. If anyone thinks that Muslims in this country are out to destroy free speech, they might ask themselves why they made no attempt to disrupt or obstruct this demonstration.

“This is surely what the march is about. By restricting the free speech of the protestors you will play into the hands of Islamophobia Watch…” . “I’m hugely disappointed by this. You’ve done exactly what the censors want. I’m really not sure I’ll bother coming along now, to be honest, and I’m guessing plenty of other people who have supported this campaign feel the same. I donated money to this campaign in good faith, and right now this feels like a betrayal of that faith. Will you be reimbursing people?” … “I am incredibly disappointed by this – it is nothing but dhimmitude.” … “What a bunch of wimps. You have obviously caved in to the Islamic pressure groups and the Mayor of Londinistan. Another victory for Sharia law and another defeat for Liberty.”

Sullivan predicts an appearance for the organiser, Peter Ridson, on Dhimmi Watch. Personally, I’m wondering what made him change his mind. (Update 25th March: the appearance on Dhimmi Watch has happened.)

Sarah Joseph’s is surprisingly not the only traditionalist position in this month’s Prospect; Abdul-Hakim Murad, under his old name Tim Winter, also has an article on page 20 in which he writes that Muslims have sometimes tolerated images of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) and that according to one major Sunni authority, “it is not a criminal offence for a Christian or Jew to blaspheme against the Prophet in a way that is mandated by his or her own beliefs”; what he does not say is that this amounts to stating their beliefs, such as that the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) was not a prophet, or not a prophet to them. He also points out that in several European countries there are laws against blasphemy, often upheld by the European Court of Human Rights.

So, Abdul-Hakim’s article articles some of Nazeer’s points in ways Ms Joseph does not. Yes, insults and disrespectful behaviour towards every religion is common, but it’s not always legal. And there are other sensibilities which cannot be offended: for example, while Holocaust denial is not illegal in the UK (as it is in several countries in Europe), one can cause huge controversy for otherwise offending Jewish sensibilities. Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, is presently facing a tribunal which could deprive him of his position for suggesting that a Jewish reporter might have been a Nazi war criminal. One also remembers the teacup storms kicked up when Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin were depicted as flying pigs in the 2005 General Election campaign, and another Jewish Tory front-bencher (which might have been Letwin) was compared to Fagin from Oliver Twist. (Not everyone who has heard of Fagin has actually read Dickens’ book.)

And, as Sarah Joseph points out, when the editor of the same paper briefly decided to print the Iranian Holocaust cartoons, he ended up having to apologise for that. He will not, however, apologise for wilfully offending the Muslims. The double standard is obvious, but in his concluding letter, Kamran Nazeer insists that there is “only one double standard in play here”, namely that “Muslims are asking for a level of protection against offence which no other religion any longer receives or expects”. He offers the example of South Park depicting Christian charity workers as selling religion in exchange for food and depicting their director (he doesn’t mention which charity) as Jabba the Hutt. The difference is (obviously) that the cartoons in question associate the person through whom Islam came to us (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam), and thus the entire community, with the worst elements in the community. It’s a much more serious slur than the one in South Park.

Also, Nazeer brings in the old saw about Islam needing to have a “Protestant moment”. In fact, the origins of Protestantism, much like the Rome-Constantinople split, led to major wars. Some of the Crusades were launched against the eastern Christians; some were against the Hussites in Bohemia (the forefathers of today’s Moravians), but the bitterness caused by the Protestant splits lingers in some places even today, notably Northern Ireland and Scotland. It was not a movement of what some on the intellectual left today call Englightenment rationalism; it included some rationalistic departures, such as the abandonment of practices like visiting relics, but it was initially a fundamentalist movement (the original fundamentalists were, in fact, Protestants). It led to terrible oppression. Why on earth would any Muslim want this to be replicated (if it has not been already) among the Muslims?

Sarah Joseph concludes that it’s possible for the two worlds she belongs to “find a way to live together” and not clash, but that it is necessary to “first recognise our shared and common humanity and treat each other with respect and dignity”. And (perhaps surprisingly) this is the last word in the debate. The debate is currently available for free, while Dr Abdul-Hakim Murad’s piece is on a pay-to-view basis, although perhaps it might become available on Mas’ud Khan’s site in time. The magazine itself costs £4.50.

Inside Scoop on Protest of Danish Embassy in Lebanon @ The Imam’s Daughter

(Hat tip: Izzy Mo.)

When I saw a report on the BBC’s website that there was to be another demo in London, I thought it must be a mistake. Another one? I thought we’d had the big demo last Saturday, the one rubbished by Darcus Howe in the New Statesman this week thus:

The opportunists also emerged - the goody two-shoes from within the Muslim community. Their rally was advertised locally and nationally, on the radio and in the papers. They paraded their denunciation of “extremists” just about everywhere. The press speculated that 10,000 would attended; those behind the march predicted 30,000. In the end, a puny 4,000 turned up.

Well, I’m not sure how the numbers of attendees are calculated; do they take some sort of calculation of how many people are in the square at the peak of the demo? In which case, it does not take into account the fact that some people arrive early and leave early, or arrive late. I attended part of last Saturday’s demo and arrived late for this one, breaking off after the crush on the way from Trafalgar Square to Pall Mall and rejoining in Picadilly, following a trip to the loo in Waterstone’s there. The real figure may well be somewhere in between the official estimate and the organisers’ estimate; however, Trafalgar Square’s capacity is reduced by the two huge fountains.

The BBC reported on the event and the reader will notice the picture of the guy in the “Soldier of Allah” jacket above the caption “The aim was to highlight mainstream Muslim opinion”. Thanks, guys.

The demo actually highlighted mainstream opinion rather better than last week’s demo, and certainly better than that one guy. I saw him too, and I don’t remember seeing anyone else with such a slogan on his clothing. Last week’s demo was organised by the London-based groups (Muslim Council, Muslim Association etc) and had GLA involvement; this week’s was by an unknown group, the “Muslim Action Committee”, described as “an umbrella body for mosques and community groups”, and was an overwhelmingly Pakistani affair. Nobody who was there could fail to notice the preponderance of light brown faces, beards, topies and turbans. The BBC also mentioned that not a single arrest was made.

I got speaking to one attendee who came from Coventry; he told me that some nine coaches had come down from Coventry alone. I was told a far higher number had come from Birmingham. The square was packed. It wasn’t like last week, when I was easily able to reach the front (although I got there before the demo had really started, and they were playing nasheed over the PA system; later on, this wasn’t possible). This time, I couldn’t get close to the stage. The “belly” of the square was a sea of people - or rather of men. The ladies, and there were many of them, were on the raised bit outside the National Gallery.

Contrary to the impression given by the “Soldier of Allah” guy, this definitely wasn’t an extremist event. I know this because I know the slogans which were chanted. It was the Pakistani “Nara’i Takbeer, Nara’i Risala” sequence, answered by “Allahu akbar” and “Ya Rasoolallah”. The last means “oh messenger of Allah” (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) and the sort of people who turned up two weeks ago with the obscene banners and the “al-Qa’ida-loving toddlers” woudl likely not consider anyone who would address the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) from a distance to be anywhere near the right path, or in some cases, inside the fold of Islam at all. Among the speakers, if I remember rightly, were Ghulam Rabbani (of Minhaj al-Qur’an) and at least two of the sons of Abdul-Wahhab Siddiqi, a well-known Bareilawi shaikh who founded the Hijaz College in Warwickshire.

Anyway, I took a few pictures of the event, and may post a few more, insha Allah, in the near future. I’ve been going through them all and shrinking down those worth posting so that people won’t eat up my whole month’s bandwidth on these photos insha Allah.

(1) The TV Screen: showing one of the imams speaking. I could not see the stage anything like as clearly as I could see the screen.

(2) Nara’i Takbeer!: all hands (and banners) raised.

(3) Be Careful With Mohammad (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam): a picture of the podium, the message and the people on it. Not a politician in sight.

(4) From the steps: the square is pretty densely packed! Even the police said attendance was about 10,000, which is credible.

(5) Held up in Cockspur Street: we were held up ages on the way from Trafalgar Square to Pall Mall. The barriers seem to have bottle-necked the demo as you could see from this picture; I have no idea why this was so. As often happens, the crush ended once the demo reached Pall Mall.

(6) Diversity: I said it was a mostly Pakistani affair, but there were quite a few black brothers and Arabs too. Fewer than I’ve seen at other demos, though, probably because they had less chance to hear about this than about previous demos.

(7)Aashiq-e-Rasool: these brothers are from Oldham, and for the record are not the nasheed group of the same name.

(8)Dark clouds: these clouds look threatening, and may or may not have persuaded the organisers to call off anything they intended to do in Hyde Park. In the event, they marched us down Park Lane, not through the park as has been the case before. In the event, though, the rain didn’t pour down as these clouds seem to threaten.

(More photos here.

Clash of the Uncivilized: Insights on the Cartoon Controversy

The current crisis shows the extent we Muslims are vulnerable to media manipulation, superficial shows of piety, and counterproductive one-upmanship militancy. If we start with the issue of media manipulation, it is clear that Western and Eastern media outlets played a large role in stirring up Muslim, and now Western sentiments. When the crisis initially broke in September, it was barely a blip on the media radar. Few outside of Denmark even knew of the cartoons. The Danish Muslim community, appropriately, by and large ignored the story. [1] It was only after a campaign undertaken by a delegation of Danish Muslim community activists to stimulate greater interest in the issue that the crisis reached the proportions we are currently witnessing. These activists traveled throughout the Muslim East trying to draw attention to the issue. When the issue was popularized by Iqra and other Arab satellite channels, and the cartoons were reprinted by several European papers, the crisis deepened. In light of that reality, it would be hard to deny the role the media has played in sparking and now perpetuating the crisis.

Rally against incitement & Islamophobia, Saturday 11th February 2006

Date: 11th February 2006, 1pm-5pm, Trafalgar Square, London.

Full details here.

BBC NEWS | UK | Protester is returned to prison