Best answer to blasphemous fools

Knowingly or unknowingly, the Arab love poem Karl Lagerfeld painstakingly embroidered onto Claudia’s skinny shoulders was a verse from the Qur’an which millions of Muslims around the world recite every day. ‘Ulaa’ika humul muhtaduun’ meaning ‘they are the ones who have found guidance’ is the verse desecrated by the French designer. But the effective protest […]

Knowingly or unknowingly, the Arab love poem Karl Lagerfeld painstakingly embroidered onto Claudia’s skinny shoulders was a verse from the Qur’an which millions of Muslims around the world recite every day. ‘Ulaa’ika humul muhtaduun’ meaning ‘they are the ones who have found guidance’ is the verse desecrated by the French designer. But the effective protest by the Indonesians paid off when Mr Lagerfeld not only apologised to Muslims for the offensive dress, he also destroyed all the three he made, and explained that he was misled by a translator who said it was a line from an Arab poem.

The morale of this story is that violent protests after any act of blasphemy or sacrilege against Muslims only plays well into the hands of those who provoked the outrage in the first place. More often than not these blasphemies are premeditated and calculated to achieve the very reaction they lead to. And who wins in the end? Certainly not the protestors, who end up getting killed, wounded or arrested. The winners are those who engage in this deliberate provocation because the reactions serve to fuel Islamophobic tendencies in Europe and other parts of the developed world. They also serve to reinforce the Muslim terrorist image the West is trying hard to portray.

Writing soon after the Danish cartoons had elicited a similar reaction in the Muslim world to the one that the recent blasphemous video and the French cartoons are doing now, Robert Fisk, a renowned British journalist based in the Middle East had argued ‘This is not an issue of secularism versus Islam. For Muslims the Prophet is the man who received divine words directly from God. We see our prophets as faintly historical figures, at odds with our high-tech human rights, almost caricatures of themselves. The fact is that Muslims live their religion. We do not. They have kept their faith through innumerable historical vicissitudes. We have lost our faith ever since Matthew Arnold wrote about the sea’s ‘long, withdrawing roar.’”

In an article titled  “Cartoons: This isn’t about Islam versus secularism” Mr. Fisk argued further ‘That is why we talk about ‘the West versus Islam’ rather than ‘Christianity versus Islam’ because there aren’t an awful lot of Christians left in Europe. There is no way we can get round this by … asking why we are not allowed to make fun of Mohammed?’ On the oft-repeated excuse that such offensive cartoons are allowed to be published because the West valued freedom of expression, Robert Fisk debunked the claim when he asked why the same West, especially France, Germany and Austria have laws against denying the holocaust. Is denying the Holocaust not part of that freedom of speech or expression?

It was obvious in the case of the Danish cartoons that depicted Prophet Muhammad SAW, as a terrorist, with a bomb-shaped turban that the treatment was reserved for him alone. According to Glawdys Fouche, reporting for the British Guardian in 2006, the same Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten which published caricatures of Prophet Muhammad SAW, had turned down cartoons lampooning Jesus Christ in 2003. The author of the cartoons that caricatured Christ, a Danish illustrator named Christopher Ziegler told the Guardian reporter that he submitted a series of cartoons dealing with the resurrection of Christ to the same editor, a man called Jens Kaiser, but he told him that ‘I don’t think Jyllands Posten readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact I think they will provoke an outcry. Therefore I will not use them.’ But in 2006, the same editor didn’t think twice about publishing the anti-Muhammad SAW cartoons. Jens Kaiser defended his decision in the following words. ‘It is ridiculous to bring that now….in the case of the Muhammad cartoons, we asked the illustrators to do it. I did not ask for those (anti-Jesus) cartoons. That’s the difference. The illustrator thought his cartoons were funny, I did not think so, it would offend some readers, not much but some.’ He told the Guardian reporter.

There it is. If no one is, at least the editor of Jyllands Posten was honest enough to say the Danish cartoons were a premeditated act of provocation. He was also honest enough to say he didn’t agree to publish the Jesus caricatures because they will offend some readers. What he didn’t seem to mind is the fact that anti-Muhammad cartoons could offend over a billion adherents of the Islamic faith. We must see the anti-Islam video and the new anti-Muhammad cartoons published by French magazine Charlie Hebdo in this light. So how should we react to this, knowing that they are calculated actions designed to provoke in us the same anger that we display on the streets?

My honest opinion is we should use our brains not brawn, like former Malaysian president Mahathir Muhammad advised when he hosted the OIC meeting for the last time in 2003. He said because we are so easily provoked, we do not use our brains to undo our opponents, a fact which leaves us at a disadvantage. In the face of such sacrilege and blasphemy we may or may not take to the streets in peaceful protests, but we should do as the Indonesians did and call for economic boycott of all those blasphemers. We Muslims are the biggest perfume users in the world, if we keep off French perfumes in reaction to Charlie Hebdo’s blasphemy, surely we have done our bit to make them pay. We can boycott them and move to non-alchoholic oil perfumes, the better for all concerned. If your children can’t wait to get to Disneyland Paris, tell them of the numerous alternatives in Africa and the Muslim world, from Dubai, Egypt, South Africa to Malaysia and take them there.

The American and other first world products in our markets are too numerous to mention. We are better off boycotting their products than making aim at their embassies or harming their diplomats. Of course the incident in Benghazi, in which the American ambassador died, was more a case of Frankenstein monster than anything else. When the US armed and encouraged the Libyan rebels to rise against Ghadafi little did they know that like Victor Frankenstein’s monster, frustration and despair will send them chasing after their makers. The Americans got what they wanted with Ghadafi dead and Libyan oil under their complete control. They didn’t reckon with the youth militia they used and dumped. This militia had their revenge on Tuesday September 11th 2012, exactly 11 years after another Tuesday September 11th had the world hoodwinked.

For all intents and purposes we Muslims need to change the way we react to acts of provocation that make a mockery of our religion or sacred religious symbols. The mature thing is to embark on an indefinite economic boycott of these offending societies till they come to respect our feelings. The holy Qur’an advices ‘The true servants of the Merciful are those who walk humbly on earth, and when the ignorant accost them their response is ‘peace’. Surah Al-Furqan verse 63.