Insulting The Prophet
It is most interesting that it has taken a relatively minor event to galvanise Muslims in the west to protest their fundamentally backward cousins elsewhere for embarrassing Islam in the eyes of the world through an absurd and cruel theatre of denunciation demanding the death penalty to avenge yet another insult to Muhammad. Not the stunning events of violence visited on a vast population through the predations of rabidly jihadist extremists.In a way, not surprising. Humans are more able to connect with events on a small, more readily mind-assimilable scale to produce a reaction of sympathy or outrage, than to react to sweeping events of huge impact, soiling the message of Islamic brotherly love. A rampaging crowd bent on shariah justice chants "No one lives who insults the Prophet", and, in the circumstances of the untutored naivete of an infidel, reasonable Muslims cringe.
Great affront so readily taken on the basis of perceived slights seen to tarnish the great worship in which Muhammad is held. Who now is untutored in forgiveness and patience toward those whose exposure to Islamic-specific forbidden clumsiness in action is evidenced by ravening crowds willing and anxious to exact vengeance? For are we not continually facing censure in the west for our insensitivity to Muslim sensibilities?
The British teacher Gillian Gibson's stumbling fall into danger has activated two British Muslim peers to travel to Sudan to defuse an international absurdity, a miscarriage of justice whose result is to bring additional scorn upon the country of Sudan and its ignorantly strident, violence-prone fundamentalists. But yet whose national laws uphold and defend the situation, her arrest, incarceration, trial and sentencing.
From worshipping at their mosques, listening to incendiary denouncements by their clerics thundering outrage at Western violence against Islam, a protesting mob marches to the school where the damning deed was done, to the British Embassy in Khartoum, chanting rage and defiance at the slighter-than-anticipated sentence handed down to the offender.
Enlightened Muslims everywhere are aghast at the turn of this tide, themselves adding their voices of protest aimed at the government of Sudan. Where the slaughter and rape of hundreds of thousands in Darfur elicited slight protests, this international contretemps has brought fervent denunciations at the backwardness of the same Islamic nation.
Manifestly, intensely illogical.
Labels: Religion, Traditions
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, December 02, 2007
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