It has been just over a year since the Danish cartoon explosion. It has been just over a year since embassies burned and people died in violent demonstrations, as Danish businesses suffered from boycotts and European lives were threatened across the middle east. At the time, Ghazi Khankan, a former spokesman for the Islamic Center of Long Island, seemed to sum up the “moderate” Muslim point of view when he said, “Islam champions freedom of speech, but you cannot offend the religious beliefs of another person.”

 

There are two problems with this statement. First, Islam does not champion free speech, Islam has no history of free speech, and no nation run under the principles of Islam today offers its citizens anything like free speech—or freedom of religion, for that matter. The Holy Prophet Mohammad himself set the tone for how the Islamic faithful should deal with dissent when he was consolidating his power in Mecca. In the 7th century in the Arabian peninsula, poets, in addition to their literary contribution to the culture, were the social and political commentators of their day. They were also among Mohammad’s first enemies.

 

There was a female poet named Asma bint Marwan who was suspicious of Mohammad and called on her fellow Meccans to boot him out of town. The Prophet’s reaction was swift: he ordered her killed and her assassin used a dagger to nail her to her own couch. In another instance, the Prophet not only had a poet killed but also arranged the same punishment for the unfortunate girl who had recited the poet’s offending work.

 

In fact, Mohammad was so upset by his experience with poets, that he (or Allah Himself, if you prefer) added the following verse to the Quran, “As for poets, [only] the erring follow them.” (26: 224) This verse set the tone for Islam’s rocky relationship with artists, which we witnessed firsthand when the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran called for the murder of author Salman Rushdie who criticized Islam in his book The Satanic Verses, and when filmmaker Theodore Van Gogh was killed on the streets of Amsterdam for making a film that was critical of Islam’s treatment of women.

 

Western culture has seen centuries of criticism of Christian beliefs. Holy Mary has been covered in dung to create “art,” Terence McNally wrote a heralded play in which Jesus and Judas had a homosexual relationship, and Kanye West appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone made up as Jesus. Many Christians weren’t happy with these expressions of free speech and some may have had their religious beliefs offended, but no embassies burned, no death warrants were issued, and no one died in riots half a world away.

 

What gives?

 

The answer lies in the Muslim belief that the Quran is the exact word of Allah; it is perfect and timeless, and above question or comment. If that sounds like fundamentalism, that is only because it is. An accurate term for non-fundamentalist Muslims is Not-Muslims. Please don’t take my word for it. Here’s a quote from the website of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR (a self-styled “moderate” organization): “The Quran is the record of the exact words revealed by God through the Angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad. It was memorized by Muhammad and then dictated to his companions. The text of the Quran was cross-checked during the life of the

Prophet. The 114 chapters of the Quran have remained unchanged through the centuries.”

 

Certainly there are many moderate Muslims in the world, but there are few that would admit that they don’t think the Quran is the exact word of Allah. And if they do have doubts about some of the more extreme passages of Islam’s holy book or the example of the Holy Prophet, they keep those thoughts to themselves because in many parts of the world, questioning the word of Allah or criticizing Mohammad carries the death penalty—or a life in hiding like the one Salman Rushdie has enjoyed for many years.

 

There are many verses in the Quran that come into direct conflict with Western values, particularly the Muslim holy book’s cheerful acceptance of slavery and its recommendations for the treatment of women and non-Muslims.

 

And this takes us to the second part of Ghazi Khankan’s quote: “you cannot offend the religious beliefs of another person.” Of course you can. In the West it’s not only a tradition, it’s practically an obligation. Religious thought, like political thought, has to duke it out in the bare-knuckled

brawl that is the Western marketplace of ideas. It’s an often-brutal process where feelings are hurt daily, but extremists are marginalized and ridiculed and tyranny is kept at bay.

 

Martin Luther started the ball rolling on criticism of the Catholic Church when he nailed his grievances onto a Church door in the 16th century. Today, Christians and their beliefs are regular targets for satire in film and television, where we have seen Saturday Night Live’s Church Lady, the film The Life of Brian, too many Simpsons episodes to list, and countless other

examples.

 

Given the fact that Islam is both a religious and a political system, it’s imperative that it be subject to the same scrutiny as other institutions, both secular and non-secular. The problem is that Islamic tradition forbids criticism. And yet, there are a lot of things in the Quran and Mohammad’s life that are uncomfortable for Muslims to talk about. After all, the Holy Prophet was a product of his time, a slave-owner, a polygamist, and a brutal conqueror who fought many battles of aggression against his neighbors.

 

Freedom of speech and thought are concepts that the West has wrestled with for centuries. During the same time, Muslim societies saw no serious intellectual challenge to Islamic orthodoxy. Now, with globalization and the instant transmission of information—like, say, political cartoons—Islam is seeing what freedom of speech means in practice. Clearly, the process is painful.

 

And this is only the beginning. The West needs to have some frank discussions with the Muslim world about its beliefs and history. And the Islamic faithful need to think carefully about how they will respond to real and perceived criticism if they want a seat at the grown-up table of world

affairs.

 

March 1, 2007