Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Muslim tolerance put to the test

By Bashir Goth - posted Friday, 24 February 2006


To Muslims, Islam is the religion of peace and reason. Muslims believe that Mohammed’s greatest miracle was the word, the Koran. From the outset one can see that Islam gave precedence to the brain over brawn. However, it seems Muslims today have lost their intellectual fortitude.

If we Muslims are really so adamant to defend the reputation of Islam it is our house that we have to put in order. It is unfortunate that while we are so hell bent on burning diplomatic premises and Danish and Western flags, Islam is everyday insulted, ridiculed and slandered by Muslims themselves.

Islam dazzled the world with its free and powerful theological and philosophical discourse from the Middle Ages onwards. Maybe if we had read the Danish cartoons in this historical and geographical perspective, we would have understood that Denmark is a non-Muslim country with its own values, its own culture and that the Danish people have the right to behave the way they want to behave on their own turf. But by resorting to violence Muslims have inflicted more damage to the image of their great religion than any Western masterpiece, let alone the amateurish, stupid and crass cartoons of Jyllands-Posten, would have ever done.

Advertisement

A painful reality check for Muslims

It is unfortunate that many of the Muslims who denounce the cartoons do not know that Islam is insulted everyday by its own followers through the:

  • daily hostage taking and slitting the throats of innocent humanitarian workers and journalists before world television cameras;
  • brainwashed young men flying civilian airplanes into towers and on their promised journey to heaven taking with them thousands of innocent lives;
  • suicide bombers murdering tens of innocent commuters in the subways of London and Madrid and embassies in Nairobi, Darus Salam and other foreign capitals;
  • warlords that hijacked the Muslim people of Somalia and turned the once proud pastoral people into beggars;
  • Taliban regime that kept the Afghan people hostage for years, ridiculed its female population and destroyed the historical heritage of the Afghan civilisation and religious sculptures of Buddha without any regard to the religious feelings of millions of Buddhists around the world;
  • ugly bearded, turbaned and shabby looking firebrand clerics like Abu Hamza al-Masri who seek fame in this world, and heaven in the world after, by preaching hatred and inciting young Muslims to kill and maim the people on whose tax they live and learn; and
  • ubiquitous images of bin Laden and his lieutenants and their messages of hate beamed by Al Jazeera satellite television and other Arab televisions in the name of freedom of the press.

As Muslims we may claim to possess all the good virtues in the world but we definitely lack one very important virtue - that of self-criticism - while the West is at least blessed with this good virtue. We witnessed some of the biggest demonstrations against the war in Iraq in Western capitals. Each day we see the Western media chastising their governments for their involvement in foreign adventures: we see women, students, professors, actors and the ordinary masses expressing their anger against their leaders and sometimes voting them out of office as punishment, as we have seen in Spain.

One may ask, how many demonstrations Muslims organised to express their anger against the innocent Russian children slaughtered in the name of Islam in Beslan; how much anger the Islamic world has shown to protest the crimes committed in the name of their religion in Algeria, Iraq, Chechnya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere? Why doesn’t the world see the large mobs thronging to the streets and chanting God’s name when Muslims commit some of the heinous crimes in the name of Islam? In fact many of our Muslims enjoy moments of shadenfraude and dance in the streets when such misfortunes befall our brothers in the Abrahamic faith.

A little dose of self-criticism will show us that Muslims every day insult and make mockery of other people. Our imams curse the Christians and pray that God destroys their houses, shatters their unity, or wipes them off the face of the earth. And all the faithful respond with a hearty “Amen”. I will not even mention the Jews, the ridicule of whom is daily bread for our clerics, although I find it beyond my understanding why Muslims always drag Jews and the holocaust into the agenda whenever they have a debate with the Christian world. These are the beliefs with which every Muslim child grows up: my brothers and sisters, and no one in our self-righteous world has ever questioned how much disservice we are doing to our future by preaching such hate to the young minds.

Even today, at the dawn of the 21st century, some of us dream of the day when Islam will again conquer Europe and a turbaned Muslim will occupy the American White House. I am not saying this, these are the words of Ayman Al Zawaheri, al-Qaida's number two, and of Abu Hamza al-Masri. The former uttered these words in one of his broadcasts in Al Jazeera and the latter preached them in his Finsbury Park mosque in London.

Advertisement

It would have been understandable if this kind of fantasy thinking was confined to these unbalanced and misguided men, but it is very worrying and indeed scary when one discovers some of the learned men of Islam taking pride in such utterances and defending them on Arab TV. It is not also uncommon to read reports in newspapers from the Arab and Islamic world on Islam spreading in the West like a fire on a windy day. In fact most of such reports come from Muslims living in the West. With such vitriolic rhetoric and with the stereotype of the few Europeans converted to Islam turning their back on the norms and values of their home countries, changing their attire and adopting an alien look and attitude, it is just natural for the Western people to feel their values and their freedom of speech are under threat.

Muslims historical grievances and their flipside

Despite our bravado about Muslim brotherhood, we all know that there is neither brotherhood, nor fraternity among Muslim people. Not a day passes without satellite TV stations beaming to our homes the ugly reality of Muslims killing fellow Muslims in Mosques and in shrines, at religious festivals and at homes with mothers and children sleeping peacefully slaughtered like animals. My brothers and sisters, truth hurts and I am hell bound today, more than any time before, to tell the truth.

Chronic complaints of fellow Muslims against the West are that it:

  • colonised our lands;
  • divided our peoples and territories;
  • helped the Jews to usurp the Arab territories in Palestine;
  • invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and killed thousands of innocent Muslims; and
  • humiliated Muslims in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and many other clandestine prison camps around the world.

All these are true and painful facts of history.

It is, however, a misery that we share with millions of people around the globe, both in the distant and near history, who suffered the same fate or sometimes worse in the hands of foreign oppressors. To cite but a few: the annihilation of the Red Indians in the Americas; the inhuman act of the slave trade of which Arabs had a big hand; the Jewish holocaust; and the apartheid system in South Africa. These were some of the worst crimes ever committed by a human being against his fellow human being.

Looking at the other side of the coin, however, we have to admit that Western countries:

  • gave money and ammunition to the people of Afghanistan to help them liberate their country from Soviet occupation;
  • saved the Muslim people of Bosnia and Albania from annihilation;
  • went to the rescue of the Muslim people of Somalia to break the grip of warlords on the people's life, to feed the poor and treat the sick;
  • despite their follies still extend the largest financial aid to the Palestinian people;
  • generously and compassionately opened their pockets to help the millions of Muslim people whose lives and homes were devastated by Tsunami in Indonesia and other places;
  • are still dispatching thousands of tons of food and medications to the drought affected people of East Africa, the majority of whom are Somali speaking people in the Horn of Africa; and
  • Western humanitarian organisations are feeding, sheltering and treating the thousands of Muslim refugees of Darfur.

Finally, I would like to hear if anyone could tell me what the life of the Arab people in the oil rich Gulf countries would have been today without the West exploring and extracting oil and gas for them.

I may also mention that despite our acerbic rhetoric and collective bashing of the Western world, thousands of Muslim youths who are running away from harsh political realities and grinding economic conditions make their way to the West every year. Although they do not all find milk and honey in the promised land, and many of them live in squalid ghettos, the hard working ones who are ready to integrate and embrace the values of their host countries make a decent and dignified living.

It is worth mentioning that hundreds of militant clerics, who are known to be sworn enemies of Western life, sought refuge in the West to escape imminent beheadings in their own Muslim homelands. They were not only given free food, shelter, free education and nationality but they had also been allowed to build their own mosques and carry on their own religious missions, which they have unfortunately misused to produce armies of suicide bombers, instead of disseminating God's word of peace, love and brotherhood.

There is no doubt that the extremist groups that have hijacked Islam long ago have also hijacked the cartoon crisis; diverting it from being an issue of cultural ignorance to incite hatred and vengeful feelings among the illiterate Muslim masses. If only someone had told these mobs that the Prophet Mohammed and the great religion of Islam is more noble and deep in the hearts of millions than to be worried by cartoons.

If only someone had reminded them that the crusader armies of King Richard the Lion Heart could not tarnish the Muslims' love for their Prophet. A little cool contemplation on the history of Islam would have shown them that it was Prophet Mohammed who fought for freedom of speech when he was pleading to the non-Muslims to just listen to him when they were threatening him with sticks and stones. Mohammed was telling them there was no compulsion in Islam, proclaiming in God's words "Unto You Your Religion and Unto Me My Religion."

This is how Islam taught us that civilised debate and freedom of choice were more powerful than brute force. Hence, it is pathetic to see in the cartoon saga that Muslims have taken the position of the Quraishites, and instead of resorting to dialogue and judicial law suits, have instead turned to sticks and stones and economic boycotts of Danish goods. Muslims will definitely be the losers given the amount of aid extended by the West to the Muslim world.

One can compare the Prophet Mohammed's struggle for freedom of worship, in the early days of his call to Islam, with the West’s torturous and bloody journey to earn the freedom of speech it enjoys today. Freedom of speech is as sacred to Westerners as Islam is to us. Indeed it is freedom of speech and liberalism that allowed Islam and other cultures to flourish in Europe. The Norwegian editor of the online afrol News, Rainer Chr. Hennig, has eloquently put this in his recent editorial "Without criticism of religion and religious leaders, Europe would still be burning witches and killing Jews and Muslims. Demanding respect for Islam has been considered a blasphemy in Europe! European liberalists were called unfaithful by Church leaders when campaigning to stop slavery."

To sum up, I would say that living in a global village where millions of unfortunate human beings survive under the scourge of poverty, diseases and natural disasters; where millions of mothers watch their children become skeletons due to famine before they gasp their last breath, it is an insult to humanity and almost a blasphemous act by the erstwhile defenders of both camps to waste their energy and resources on such imbecilic endeavors.

I may take consolation here in remembering the prayers of the Prophet Mohammed when he was wounded in the Battle of Uhud. Some of his followers asked him to invoke God’s anger and revenge on the enemy, however, Mohammed took the moral path and prayed for them instead saying: "O God, forgive my people and guide them to truth, because they do not know."

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. All

Article edited by Peter Coates.
If you'd like to be a volunteer editor too, click here.

This is a shorter version of a piece first published in Adwal News on February 11, 2006.



Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

114 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

Bashir Goth is a Somali poet, journalist, professional translator, freelance writer and the first Somali blogger. Bashir is the author of numerous cultural, religious and political articles and advocate of community-development projects, particularly in the fields of education and culture. He is also a social activist and staunch supporter of women’s rights. He is currently working as an editor in a reputable corporation in the UAE. You can find his blog here.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Bashir Goth

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Photo of Bashir Goth
Article Tools
Comment 114 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy