The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Muslims

  • Muslims in Nigeria, Iran, Greece, Turkey protest controversial movie

    Muslims in Nigeria, Iran, Greece, Turkey protest controversial movie

    Muslims protested in Nigeria, Iran, Greece and Turkey on Sunday to show anti-Western anger against a film and cartoons insulting Islam had not dissipated.

    As delegates from around the world gathered in New York for a United Nations General Assembly where the clash between free speech and blasphemy is bound to be raised, United States flags were once again burning in parts of the Muslim world, Reuters reports on Monday.

    Iranian students chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” outside the French embassy in Tehran in protest at the decision by satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to publish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, days after widespread protests – some deadly – against a film made in the U.S.

    Shi’ite Muslims in the Nigerian town of Katsina burnt U.S., French and Israeli flags and a religious leader called for protests to continue until the makers of the film and cartoons are punished.

    In Pakistan, where 15 people were killed in protests on Friday, a government minister has offered $100,000 to anyone who kills the maker of the short, amateurish video “The Innocence of Muslims.”

    Calls have increased for a U.N. measure outlawing insults to Islam and blasphemy in general.

    In Athens, some protesters hurled bottles of water, stones and shoes at police who responded with teargas. Calm returned when demonstrators interrupted the protest to pray.

    Hours later, dozens of Muslim inmates in Athens’ main prison set mattresses and bed sheets on fire in protest. Firemen with four engines battled the flames in some cells but police and government officials said late at night the situation was under control.

    Protests around the world were relatively small and calm, but Western embassies remained on alert after the U.S ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed in one of the first protests, on September 11.

    The upsurge of Muslim anger – just weeks before U.S elections – have confronted President Barack Obama with a setback yet in his efforts to keep the “Arab Spring” revolutions from fuelling a new wave of anti-Americanism.

    In U.S ally Turkey, a secular Muslim state often seen as a bridge between the Islamic world and the West, protesters set fire to U.S. and Israeli flags on Sunday.

    “May the hands that touch Mohammad break,” chanted some 200 protesters before peacefully dispersing.

    “We will certainly not allow uncontrolled protests, but we will not just grin and bear it when Islam’s prophet is insulted,” Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan told party members at the weekend.

    “The protests in the Muslim world must be measured, and the West should show a determined stance against Islamophobia.”

     

  • Free speech and its expanding list of subtle enemies

    These are not the best of times for free speech. The killing of four American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11 by an al-Qaeda affiliate, the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has brought to the fore in all its ugly ramifications the difficult, if not impossible, relationship between humanity and freedom of expression.

    The killings, if AQAP’s claims are believable, were ostensibly to avenge the killing by US drones in June of Abu Yahya al-Libi, a top ranking al-Qaeda militant of Libyan descent. Libyan authorities seem to think that much more than any other reason, AQAP’s explanation is closer to the truth of what happened in Benghazi last week.

    The Americans are still piecing clues together, but they seem to believe that the killings were connected with the protests by Muslims in many parts of North Africa and the Middle East against the film, Innocence of Muslims, produced and posted on the Internet by an American citizen, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. YouTube hosts a 14-minute clip of the film that is considered by most people to have excessively denigrated Prophet Muhammad.

    Protests against the film have spread like wild fire in Arabia and some countries even in Europe. While many African countries south of the Sahara have been largely equanimous about the film, public officials in the US and Europe have struggled on one hand with genuine outrage and veiled contrition, and on the other hand with a steely determination to sustain the constitutional freedoms, especially that of speech, that have become integral to their civilisations.

    It is unlikely they will be able to easily resolve the quandary the hated film has put them. In 1988 when Europe was confronted with The Last Temptation of Christ, an award-winning film by Martin Scorsese, state officials were more successful in resisting any temptation to meddle either in restraining the film’s producers or in censoring its availability to cinema houses. Perhaps, too, because of Europe’s sophistication, protests against the film were not too successful. In fact, when a cinema house showing the film in Paris was fire-bombed, a French Minister of Culture at the time remarked that: “Freedom of speech is threatened, and we must not be intimidated by such acts.”

    However, the controversy over Scorsese’s audacious film pre-dated 9/11 and the al-Qaeda phenomenon. Since 2001, when al-Qaeda bombed targets in the US, the issue of free speech has assumed more alarming dimensions. In September 2005, a Danish medium, the Jyllands-Posten, published 12 editorial cartoons that depicted Muhammad contrary to Islamic injunctions. The newspaper said at the time that the publication was its own contribution to the debate regarding criticism of Islam and self-censorship. The ensuing riots that greeted the publication and its reprint in more than 50 other countries led to the death of about 100 people and the burning of many Western embassies.
    After the current gale of protests subside, the world, especially Western societies, will have to grapple with the volatile issues relating to freedom of speech. They will once again begin an examination of the difficult question of where free speech ends and intolerance begins, and how to disaggregate blasphemy in a world of shifting mores, values, interpretations and reassessment of religious principles and practices.

    The world will also have to examine whether the reactions to the Basseley film are just one more landmark in the so-called clash of civilisations between Western culture, or perhaps Christianity, on one hand, and Islamic values on the other hand; or whether the conflicts between the two civilisations merely mask geopolitical struggles in which Israel is at the core.

    What cannot be denied is that the West is finding it difficult to react with the same equanimity with which they often tackle problematic issues relating to the freedoms that underpin their societies. Like the deliberately provocative Danish cartoons, and now the Basseley film, there will be yet more provocations, some fairly harmless, and others quite lurid, to test the frontiers of free speech.

    Western societies do not think free speech must be circumscribed by borders when it comes to religion. Arabia and many Muslim societies think there is a red line that must not be crossed. The current furore will, therefore, not be the last in a world that seems to be growing increasingly and overtly less tolerant. Countries like Nigeria may be unable to contribute meaningfully to the debate, given its peculiar religious tapestry, but advocates of free speech must feel relieved to know that there are still parts of the world that allow or enable challenges to the orthodoxies of the day, whether those orthodoxies are religious, political or cultural.

    For in the end, it must be obvious to all that the world did not start out as either Christian or Muslim, or as any other religion for that matter. What religious texture the world will wear at the end of history, if indeed history will end, remains to be seen.