Entries from Islam's Advance tagged with 'Taliban'
Mohammed Cartoons, Part II?
Every Friday for the past few weeks, embassies in Kabul have told foreign nationals to prepare for a rerun of the 2005 Mohammed cartoon riots. Back then, mobs attacked Western businesses and embassies across the Islamic world to protest images in a Danish newspaper that depicted the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. This time the potential affront is a film made by right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders, in which he denounces Islam’s Koran as a "fascist" book that "incites people to murder." Rumors put out by the Wilders camp suggest he burns a copy of the Koran in the film.
Both cartoon and film (due to be released next month) are clearly crass and self-serving exercises that pay lip service to the idea of freedom of speech while being little more than vehicles for xenophobia. But rather than dwell on these productions, I'd like to ask what it is about them that provoked such a visceral and, for many, a disproportionate reaction in the Muslim world. Recently in Afghanistan, there have been several similar incidents in which religious intolerance has prevailed: a 23-year-old journalist sentenced to death last month for distributing a text on Islamic feminism; a publisher who released a Dari translation of the Koran without a corresponding Arabic text, and had to flee for his life.
Can these reactions tell us something deeper Islam's relationship to the West?
