Muhammad survived Dante’s Inferno. He’ll survive a YouTube clip

Like freedom, tolerance is not a western invention or innovation; it is an Islamic virtue.

By Mehdi Hasan Published 27 September 2012

A Pakistani student holds a placard during a protest against the controversial film 'Innocence of Muslims'. Photograph: Getty Images

Dear Muslim protester,

Where do I begin? Having watched you shout and scream in front of the world’s television cameras, throw petrol bombs and smash windows, I reluctantly decided to write this open letter to you.

Let me be blunt: you and I have little in common other than our shared Islamic faith, our common belief that there is no God but God and Muhammad is His Messenger. You live in a Muslim-majority country, where religion (or should that be religious extremism?) defines the boundaries of political debate and the limits of free speech; I was born and brought up in the liberal, secular west as a member of a minority Muslim community.

If I’m honest, I have to say that, listening to your belligerent rhetoric and watching your violent behaviour, I struggle to recognise the Islam in which you profess to believe. My Islamic faith is based on the principles of peace, moderation and mercy; it revolves around the Quranic verses “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256) and “Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion” (109:6). Yours is a faith disfigured by anger, hate and paranoia.

Self-control

Please do not misunderstand me: yes, you have every right to be angry. I have no time for those neoconservatives here in the west who airily dismiss “false grievances” in the Middle East and beyond. Muslims have much to be aggrieved over – from Bagram to Guantanamo Bay, from Abu Ghraib to Haditha, from US soldiers urinating on the Quran to the spate of racist films and cartoons depicting our beloved prophet as a terrorist/murderer/paedophile/rapist/ delete-as-applicable.

Anger, however, is not an excuse for extremism. Have you not read this saying by the Prophet? “The strong is not the one who overcomes the people by his strength, but the strong is the one who controls himself while in anger.”

Today, 14 centuries later, too many of us seem to have lost all self-control. Your fanatical counterparts on the Christian evangelical right have a phrase they often deploy: “WWJD”, or “What would Jesus do?”. Perhaps you and your fellow protesters should ask “WWMD”: what would Muhammad do? Would the Prophet endorse your violent attacks on foreign embassies and schools, on police stations and shops?

We both know the answer. As a child, you will have been taught, like me, about how Muhammad was verbally and physically abused by the pagan worshippers of Mecca – but never responded in kind. The Quran calls him a “mercy for all of creation”.

But your anger has blinded you. You tell foreign reporters you are protesting against injustice – but the fight for justice begins at home. Where were you and your fellow flag-burners when a poor, 14-year-old Christian girl in Pakistan was arrested on trumped-up charges of “blasphemy” in August and threatened with the death penalty? Where are you today when the Syrian regime continues to wage war against its own (Muslim) people? Why do you not protest outside the embassies of the Bahraini regime, which tortures and tear-gasses its (Muslim) citizens?

You say you love the Prophet and cannot bear to see him abused, yet in Saudi Arabia the house of the Prophet’s first wife, Khadija, was flattened to make way for a public toilet, while the house where Muhammad was born is now overshadowed by a royal palace. Where is your rage against the Saudi regime? Or is your selfprofessed love for the Prophet just a cynical expression of crude anti-Americanism?

You and I have long complained of the west’s double standards in the Middle East; it is time for us to recognise that Muslims are guilty of equally egregious double standards. Egyptian state television has broadcast a series based on the infamous anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Pakistani television channels regularly air programmes demonizing the country’s Ahmadiyya community. Islamic scholars appear in online videos ridiculing the core beliefs of Judaism and Christianity. Yet you and your allies demand special protection for your religion and your prophet. Why? Is your faith so weak, so brittle? Muhammad, lest we forget, survived Dante’s Inferno. Trust me, he’ll survive a 14-minute clip on YouTube.

Own goal

Perhaps the greatest irony, and tragedy, is that by publicising the online insults directed at the Prophet, you have given the wretched “Sam Bacile”, the maker of the offensive movie, and his Islamophobic, evangelical Christian ally, Steve Klein, a victory they could never have achieved on their own. Need I remind you that when the full-length film, Innocence of Muslims, was released earlier this year, it was shown only once, to an audience of fewer than ten people, at a run-down cinema in California?

Meanwhile, the reputational damage done to our faith – exacerbated, I hasten to add, by lazy journalists in the west who cannot seem to distinguish between Islam and its adherents – has been immense. Have you not seen the cover of Newsweek magazine? “Muslim rage”, screams the headline.

But I have some (bad) news for you (and, for that matter, Newsweek). You represent no one but yourself. You do not speak for Islam or for the Prophet. Nor are you representative of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. In a recent Gallup survey conducted in ten Muslim-majority countries, representing more than 80 per cent of the global Muslim population, believers, when asked what they admired most about the west, cited political freedoms, fair trials and . . . wait for it . . . freedom of speech.

Your actions undermine not just the great religion of Islam but a worldwide Muslim community, or umma, whose members want to live in peace and freedom despite the provocations from the bigots, phobes and haters.

Like freedom, tolerance is not a western invention or innovation; it is an Islamic virtue. As the great Muslim caliph Ali ibn Abu Talib once wrote: “Remember that people are of two kinds: they are either your brothers in religion or your brothers in mankind.”

Yours faithfully, Mehdi.

Mehdi Hasan is an NS contributing writer and the political director of Huffington Post UK.

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View the discussion thread.

45 comments

Thu, 2012-10-04 13:32 — Caroline Crampton

Comments on this article are now closed.

Thu, 2012-10-04 08:23 — kodimirpal (not verified)

Extreme liberals, of course, are not so naive as to agree in advance that they will submit to any laws artists may propose, or even agree with any opinions they may express.

Liberals frequently do undertake to fight to the death to defend artists’ rights to express any opinions they may choose to.

The problem with this position, if maintained consistently, is that it leads directly, by unstoppable logic, into a completely amoral universe.

It is a universe in which the novelist’s right to advocate torture, rape, murder and genocide must be defended just as resolutely and as zealously as the right to advocate liberty and laughter, and to celebrate affection and sexual love.

Extreme liberals have long been aware of this objection to their position and tend to react by shifting uneasily, like a policeman, from one foot of their argument, which advocates absolute freedom of expression, to the other, which advocates merely freedom within the law.

They have also shown a tendency, having noisily driven traditional religious faith out of their house through the front-door, to re-admit it silently through the back-door in some secular disguise.

They thus frequently attempt to resolve the dubiety of their position by taking refuge in the belief that art is in itself morally good – or at least that it is more good than bad.

But a blind faith in the absolute or approximate goodness of art is ultimately no less dangerous than a blind faith in the moral goodness of God.

Thu, 2012-10-04 08:18 — kodimirpal (not verified)

For the furore which this filthy movie has caused is not a simple battle between fundamentalism and freedom.

It is a battle between two factions of the same religious tradition – the Judaeo-Christian tradition to which, ultimately, Islam itself belongs.

It is a clash not between religious authoritarianism and freedom but between two kinds of rigidity, two forms of fundamentalism.

In this battle what the most extreme liberals are really advocating, whether by intention or by default, is not, after all, any principle of freedom or tolerance.

What they are defending ultimately is the right – or the duty – which has always been most sacred to our intolerantly monotheistic religious culture.

It is the right to proclaim the superiority of their own revelation, and to abuse the gods who are worshipped by other, supposedly inferior cultures.

Christian and post-Christian rationalism is itself a profoundly blasphemous religion, impervious because of its own narrow rigour to the blasphemous insults of others, hard-line liberals who campaign for completely unfettered rights to blaspheme are in effect campaigning for the right to offend the members of other cultures by abusing their religion.

Thu, 2012-10-04 08:12 — kodimirpal (not verified)

In a number of European countries there are laws against the incitement of racial hatred.
These laws impose a form of censorship. But they are not for that reason wrong.
In most Western countries it has for a long time been illegal to incite people to murder. This is a restraint on our freedom of speech which we would be unwise to dispense with.

The law of libel is another far more sweeping restraint on freedom of speech. Sometimes the effect of this law is to suppress truths which should be told. But no civilised, democratic country would ever consider simply sweeping the laws of libel away, any more than it would abolish laws against incitement.

For words are not, as is sometimes claimed, neutral and harmless instruments. As the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa itself demonstrated, they can, in certain contexts, be as lethal, almost, as bullets. They can also be used to destroy reputations and can cause great offence and personal distress. That is why absolute freedom of speech is ultimately no more desirable than absolute freedom to murder.

For centuries most democratic countries have recognised this and they have framed laws whose specific purpose is to constrain freedom of speech.

One of the difficulties we have had throughout the duration of the Satanic Verses controversy is that a significant minority of artists and intellectuals appear to have succumbed to the liberal-democratic myth that none of these laws exist, that the purpose of democracies is to remove constraints on freedom and that our own democracy accords to all its members some absolute freedom of expression which is now under threat.

Wed, 2012-10-03 10:01 — Pavlova

Mehdi once said in a debate with Douglas Murray that he loved Mohammed more than his own 2 year old son. That he didn't expect Murray to understand, but that was how it is.

Bearing in mind that this is somebody who may not have even existed, but certainly somebody that Medhi definitely doesn't know, I find that not incomprehensible, but indefensible.

This is a manufactured, egotistical love, developed in a self-referential closed system that doesn't depend on its object to be real or to be known or to reciprocate, akin to the stalker's. It certainly creates a spring board for irrational behaviour and skewed priorities.

Wed, 2012-10-03 13:22 — jankaas (not verified)

the claim to love one's god more than one's own flesh and blood is hardly unique to Mehdi, or to Islam. surely you know this Pavlova? i seem to remember an Old Testament bloke willing to kill his own son....ever heard of Abraham?

am not trying to justify these religious followers, i also find it a most bizarre POV, but you do appear to have an indefensible view of the religious. by which i mean - accepting that human beings are an irrational animal, you demand that when it comes to religous matters humans should be entirely rational.

so i think you demand the impossible. not that you are alone, it is entirely in keeping with the likes of Dawkins et al who are also merrily battling the same windmills.

Thu, 2012-10-04 00:01 — Pavlova

I'm not demanding anything. I'm merely pointing out that if you start with a skewed sense of priorities, you shouldn't be surprised when you end up with a skewed sense of priorities.

If you think an imaginary person is more important than real ones, then what happened last month is pretty inevitable.

I find Mehdi's attempts to distance himself from these inevitable consequences either willfully blind or dishonest.

Thu, 2012-10-04 12:43 — jankaas (not verified)

"I'm merely pointing out that if you start with a skewed sense of priorities, you shouldn't be surprised when you end up with a skewed sense of priorities."

and i tried to make it clear that it is entirely in keeping with the dumb/irrational animal that humans are.

"If you think an imaginary person is more important than real ones, then what happened last month is pretty inevitable."
and as i keep trying to impress on you, it is inevitable that humans will resort to supernatural agency.

"I find Mehdi's attempts to distance himself from these inevitable consequences either willfully blind or dishonest."
and i think you'll find his argument is that the correct consequence of his religion should be peaceful behaviour. and he evidences this with the fact that only a miniscule minority do otherwise, and that they are wrong.

Wed, 2012-10-03 02:21 — Guest111 (not verified)

Its not the same, some of the issues you raised are ongoing, and the film issue is a current issue...as for the Syria issue...where have you been ?? arab govt have been taking action.

as for flattening of the prophets house that is a sectarian and political issue, not something all muslims agree on. the House of Saud maintains a dictatorship not easy to protest.

In muslim countries TV shows quesiton others faiths, that is fair game but they do not spread insulting and false pornographic images

the 14 year old girl issue was about due process and fear of extremist backlash, she was freed...

your ridicilious

Tue, 2012-10-02 22:00 — Pavlova

"Today, 14 centuries later, too many of us seem to have lost all self-control. Your fanatical counterparts on the Christian evangelical right have a phrase they often deploy: “WWJD”, or “What would Jesus do?”. Perhaps you and your fellow protesters should ask “WWMD”: what would Muhammad do? Would the Prophet endorse your violent attacks on foreign embassies and schools, on police stations and shops?"

Well according to many reliable Hadith, yes that's exactly what he would endorse. You don't beseige and take over cities without destroying their infrastructures.

"We both know the answer. As a child, you will have been taught, like me, about how Muhammad was verbally and physically abused by the pagan worshippers of Mecca"

Well do you think that might have had anything to do with him trying to unseat them from power and to wipe out their religion?

"but never responded in kind. The Quran calls him a “mercy for all of creation”."
Well, you know, apart from declaring war on them and vandalising and coopting their most sacred sanctuary I suppose.

"Meanwhile, the reputational damage done to our faith – exacerbated, I hasten to add, by lazy journalists in the west who cannot seem to distinguish between Islam and its adherents – has been immense. "

There is very little to distinguish the behaviour of Muslims in these last few weeks from the behaviour of Muslims these last few years, decades, centuries and reaching right back to the Hadith and to Mohammed himself. It's as if Mehdi has forgotten that according to Muslim lore, Mohammed and his contemporaries embarked on a military campaign to enforce monotheism on religious pluralists across the entire Arabian peninsula. And that this was used as a launch pad after his death for a Muslim empire. That 1000s of people lost their lives, or were enslaved, critics executed, shrines destroyed. That's not an "each to their own" attitude. The religion was born in conflict, warfare, censorship, religious zealotry and total intolerance towards unbelievers or religious pluralism and it remains that way. The Koran is a brief respite from that, but as you know, Muslims do not base their faith entirely on the Koran.