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Finaly, a voice of reason in the insane asylum:
| quote: | Reason and religion can learn to co-exist
TARIQ RAMADAN
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
I was in Copenhagen in October when the cartoons affair started to provoke demonstrations in Denmark. Interviewed by a journalist of the newspaper that first published the caricatures of the Prophet, the man told me how intense the debates among his fellow journalists were. He told me about the discomfort many of them were feeling about this issue and how they had been surprised by the strong reaction of Muslims and of Arab embassies in the country.
At that time, it seemed the tension was not likely to cross the Danish borders. And, to the Danish Muslims who were denouncing the publication as racist -- a provocation that would be used by the country's growing right wing -- my advice was to avoid reacting emotionally, to try to explain quietly why these cartoons were hurting them, and neither to demonstrate nor to take the risk of activating mass movements that would be impossible to master.
Everything seemed to be solved; so, three months later, why has the controversy burst into flames? A few Danish Muslims, it seems, visited some Middle Eastern countries and stirred up resentment. In turn, some Arab governments, happy to find a kind of Islamic legitimacy in the sight of their own people, presented themselves as the champions of the great cause. This was enough for some politicians, intellectuals, and journalists in the West, to present themselves as the champions of freedom of expression and the resistance fighters to religious obscurantism.
In short, it became a simplistic polarization: an alleged clash of two civilizations -- the religious and the liberal. Muslims want apologies, some are attacking European interests and others threaten to attack people. Western governments, intellectuals and journalists refuse to bend under the threats, and certain media added to the controversy by publishing the cartoons again. Most of the world simply wants the zaniness to end.
What matters, now, is to find a way to get out of the infernal circle and to ask everyone to stop putting fuel on the fire, in order eventually to open a serious, and serene debate.
This affair does not symbolize the confrontation between the principles of Enlightenment and those of religion, nor a fracture between the West and Islam. Rather, it is between those who, in both universes, are able to assert what they stand for, whether in the name of a faith or of reason, and balance it with appreciation of the other, and, on the other hand, those who are driven by exclusive certainties, blind passions, reductive perceptions of the other and hasty conclusions. These character traits are shared by some intellectuals, religious scholars, journalists and ordinary people on both sides.
It is strictly forbidden in Islam to represent the Prophet in any way. If, moreover, one adds clumsy confusions and insults, as it was perceived by Muslims in the Prophet's caricature (drawn with a turban in a form of a bomb), one can understand the nature of the shock and the rejection that was expressed by large segments of the Muslim communities around the world. However, it necessary for Muslims not to forget that Western societies, for the past three centuries, have become used to derision, irony and criticism toward religious symbols -- the Pope, Jesus Christ, and even God. Even though Muslims do not share this attitude, it is imperative that they learn to keep an intellectual critical distance while facing such provocations, and that they do not let themselves be driven by passionate zeal and fervour, which are never advisable.
Facing such cartoons, it would have been, and it remains, preferable for Muslims to expose their grievances and their values to the large public without uproar and then to wait until a better conjuncture makes it possible to open a serene debate. What is welling up today from within the Muslim communities is as excessive as it is insane: To be obsessed with apologies; to call for a boycott of European products, even the threats of physical or armed reprisals are totally excessive, and these excesses must be rejected and condemned.
On the other hand, to invoke the right for free expression, to give oneself the right to say anything in any way against anybody is irresponsible as well: first, because it is not true that everything is permitted in the name of freedom of expression. Each country has its laws that set a framework that allows, for instance, condemnation of statements of hate. Racial or religious insults are not treated the same way in every Western society. Within a similar legal framework, each country has its own memory and its own sensitivity, and wisdom requires people to acknowledge and respect that reality.
Western societies have changed and the Muslim presence has naturally changed this collective sensitivity. Instead of being obsessed with laws and rights, would it be not better to call the citizens to a more responsible use of the freedom of expression that takes into account the different sensitivities that compose our contemporary societies? It is not a matter to add laws and to restrain the scope of free speech. It is simply to call every conscience to use one's rights in a more respectful way. It is more a matter of nurturing a sense of civic responsibility than to impose legislation. Muslim citizens are not asking for more censorship but for more respect.
We are at the crossroad. It is time that the women and men who reject the wrong-headed divisions between two worlds start building bridges between the two universes, sharing common values. They must assert the right to freedom of expression and, at the same time, recommend the sense of measure as to its use. We need them to promote an open and self-critical approach, refusing the exclusive truths and the narrow-minded binary visions of the world.
We are in dire need of mutual trust. The crises provoked by these cartoons show us how the worst can be possible, out of apparently nothing, between the two universes when they become deaf to each other and are tempted to define themselves against the other.
Tariq Ramadan is a visiting professor at St. Antony's College, Oxford. He is chairman of the European Muslim Network think-tank and author of Western Muslims and the Future of Islam.
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| quote: | | No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. |
--Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011)
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I'm such a stupid dick...
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