Bonfire of the Pieties
Islam prohibits neither images of Muhammad nor jokes about religion.

BY AMIR TAHERI

“The Muslim Fury,” one newspaper headline screamed. “The Rage of Islam Sweeps Europe,” said another. “The clash of civilizations is coming,” warned one commentator. All this refers to the row provoked by the publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper four months ago. Since then a number of demonstrations have been held, mostly–though not exclusively–in the West, and Scandinavian embassies and consulates have been besieged.

But how representative of Islam are all those demonstrators? The “rage machine” was set in motion when the Muslim Brotherhood–a political, not a religious, organization–called on sympathizers in the Middle East and Europe to take the field. A fatwa was issued by Yussuf al-Qaradawi, a Brotherhood sheikh with his own program on al-Jazeera. Not to be left behind, the Brotherhood’s rivals, Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Liberation Party) and the Movement of the Exiles (Ghuraba), joined the fray. Believing that there might be something in it for themselves, the Syrian Baathist leaders abandoned their party’s 60-year-old secular pretensions and organized attacks on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and Beirut.

I’ve always considered Amir Taheri one of the most reasonable–and accurate–commentators on Middle Eastern Affairs. Here’s his take on the matter of the Danish cartoons, as published in The Wall Street Journal‘s “OpinionJournal” on-line presence.

I’m not entirely confident in his exegesis of the theology behind Islam’s reticence toward images, but it’s entirely plausible. It’s a question that doesn’t really have any definitive answers as the hadith that ban imagery are a hundred or more years later than the Quran and the life of Mohammed.

Do read his piece, though, particularly for his conclusion:

Islamic ethics is based on “limits and proportions,” which means that the answer to an offensive cartoon is a cartoon, not the burning of embassies or the kidnapping of people designated as the enemy. Islam rejects guilt by association. Just as Muslims should not blame all Westerners for the poor taste of a cartoonist who wanted to be offensive, those horrified by the spectacle of rent-a-mob sackings of embassies in the name of Islam should not blame all Muslims for what is an outburst of fascist energy.