Across the Middle East, mobs have once again been invading western embassies, burning flags and calling for death to the infidel – indeed visiting death upon four American diplomats in Tripoli. The pretext on this occasion was a tin-pot movie entitled Innocence of Muslims that was posted both in trailer form and in a 14-minute digest on YouTube. It seems the feature-length version has only ever been screened twice, the first time in the Hollywood to which it perhaps aspires. A dubbed version of the trailer was spread by Coptic Christians in Egypt, where a clip was broadcast on the country’s equivalent of Fox News. The protests began three days later on the eleventh anniversary of the al-Qaida attacks on the US.
I want to ask a question that I have not heard or seen posed concerning this matter: has anybody seen the film? I mean really: has anybody sat down and actually watched the thing? Well, by now I guess a few must have done so. There are various versions and purported versions on YouTube, at least one of which appeared to have been “taken down” only moments after I first clicked onto it. Numbers of visitors vary – the version I started to look at reckoned to have had some 300,000 hits – but I suspect that the majority give it up pretty quickly. About 45 seconds was enough for me. You know at once what you’re in for. To western, rationalist eyes, what’s most offensive about it is that it’s the worst kind of lame-brained, amateurish rubbish. It makes the 1950s works of Ed Wood, the most notorious of Z-grade movie-makers, look like Martin Scorsese.
As it happens, Wood used to raise the finance for his stupid films from various kinds of evangelical churches, assuring them that he was about their god’s work. Some of them may even have approved the finished articles. As more background has tumbled out about the present monstrosity, a few of the usual suspects have surfaced. Tub-thumping evangelical and Islamophobe Steve Klein has stepped up as a self-described consultant for the movie. Terry Jones, the Florida cleric who two years ago attempted the public burning of a copy of the Qur’an, also supports the movie, which he screened to his flock (its second outing) on September 11th. That probably won’t hurt his present presidential run, but Jones’s followers should remember that he’s not the messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy.
Only a few dozen would have heard of this enterprise at all if mischief-makers hadn’t made it their business to use its existence for their own devices. What is certainly the case is that vanishingly few of those screaming and chanting on the streets of Arab cities have seen it. If an enlightened imam were to tell the protesters that all those who have not seen the film should go home, there would be no protests, no embassies invaded, no flags burned and no lives lost. But there are no enlightened imams. Indeed, it is the imams who are telling their dim-witted followers to go out and hate the infidel west. This is where blind faith leads.
Of course we have been here before and we shall be here again. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the publishers of his novel The Satanic Verses, accusing him of blasphemy and calling for him and them to be killed. There is no evidence that Khomeini, then in the last four months of his own life, actually read the offending novel. He was merely reacting to protests whipped up by imams. No doubt he died content that a number of translators of the novel were killed and injured and dozens of the unconnected died in riots, assassinations and a related fire at a Turkish hotel. Rushdie was obliged to live in hiding for nine years before the fatwa was lifted by Khomeini’s successors.
Cartoons published in a Danish newspaper seven years ago sparked protests across the world and accounted for more than a hundred mostly random deaths. Again, it is unimaginable that above a handful of the thousands of protesters can have seen these cartoons published in a newspaper in a distant country. Where the hell can you get hold of a four-month old back number of a Danish newspaper in downtown Damascus? And who could translate the punch-lines for you? The desire to “punish” those deemed to have insulted the prophet needs no rational or informed basis. It is enough that a holy man has thrown his hands in the air.
That imams are capable of astounding malice towards those they consider infidels is illustrated by the tragic and disturbing case of Rimsha Masih, a disadvantaged Pakistani child accused of burning pages of the Qur’an. After the child had been held in jail for several days under threat of the death penalty, it emerged that a local imam had planted the burnt pages on her, in order to blackguard the minority Christian community of which she is part. She has been released and her family given safe passage to a new location. But there will be implacable Muslims who will still wish to harm her and her family. In Islam, unsupported allegations are sufficient to mark anyone for martyrdom. What surprises me is that no one appears to be threatening the life of the imam, the individual who actually carried out the desecration of the Qur’an for his own vile ends. Even a disgraced cleric is better protected than an innocent infidel.
Try as I might to remain tolerant of the absurdities of religions, Islam does present a particular obstacle, largely because it itself is so comprehensively intolerant of other faiths and of none. At the height of the Danish cartoon outrage, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner permitted highly inflammatory protest marches across London. It is just as unimaginable that one could march down a street in Islamabad or Tehran or Kabul with a poster that yells “Islam Is The Cancer: Free Speech Is The Answer” or “Slay Those Who Insult The West” and escape being stoned to death, as it would have been for Jewish protesters to march in defiance of the Nazis in Berlin or Nuremberg in the 1930s. To feel that Muslims who publicly advocate violence to the host nation might exceed the bounds of the tolerance that they have a right to expect is not a fascist or even a nationalist response. It is a decent human response.
There was something eerily familiar about those banners borne in London. They demanded “Kill/Slay/Behead/Massacre/Annihilate [and even] Exterminate Those Who Insult Islam”, “Be Prepared For The Real Holocaust!”, “Europe Will Pay: Demolition Is On Its Way”, “Europe Is The Cancer: Islam Is The Answer” and other thoughtful messages. What they irresistibly put into my mind was a certain kind of teledrama of the 1970s, wherein a protest march was depicted. And all the posters and banners seen in the drama had been written out by the same design assistant. As a veteran of protest marches, I can safely vouchsafe that proper posters and banners come in many and various hands. But the London Muslim signs were clearly all inscribed by one person. Who was that, then, Sir Ian Blair? Wasn’t your forensics team up to identifying the malicious designer?
Similar charmers in other religions claim that “god’s judgment” brings death to those they hate or despise. In the 1980s, many caring evangelicals reported from the theological front line that AIDS was the lord’s punishment on “sodomites” who “deserved” the visitation of this merciless killer. Now that the casualties of the pandemic are predominantly heterosexual, these wise commentators have moved on to other issues and other devil figures. Meanwhile, I must just ask: if god did not intend people to be penetrated anally, why did he, in his infinite wisdom, make the anus an erogenous zone?
In another part of the burgeoning forest of devout hatred, the kindly telly-evangelist Pat Robertson declared that the massive stroke suffered in 2006 by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was punishment for his policy of withdrawing Israeli settlers from Gaza (Sharon lives on still in a vegetative state). Robertson withdrew the comment – he is obliged to withdraw his comments so regularly that you cannot help but wonder whether the old varmint just says these things for sheer devilment, knowing that all of his flock will understand that the statutory withdrawal is only for form’s sake. Oddly enough, no claim about divine judgment is made when blameless believers perish as, every time there is a hadj or mass religious gathering of the naïve, hundreds die in stampedes.
The arbitrary nature of catastrophe can shake the faith even of the most devout. At the beginning of 2006, there was a collapse in a mine in West Virginia. After a long wait, the desperate families were given to understand that the men were safe. This turned out to be a false hope. The loss was the crueller for the earlier optimism. One woman said bitterly: “We don’t even know if we have a lord any more. We had a miracle and it was taken from us”.
Tolerance was never a religious virtue, despite the assurances of supposed liberal clerics. Right across the world, all through history, religion has provided the spark of hatred between people who otherwise have everything in common. In some cities and towns in Scotland and northern England (to say nothing of Ireland), to be Catholic is to be unwelcome in many neighbourhoods, pubs, places of work, even shops, to be Protestant just as unwelcome in others. From Sri Lanka to Nigeria, Sudan to Iraq, former Yugoslavia to Indo-Pakistan, people who are fundamentally in the same boat find religious reasons to kill each other. Forget nationalism, despotism, revolutionary movements and tribal warfare – religion has provided the pretext for more self-loathing, guilt, abuse, fear, persecution, dispossession, torture, execution, extermination and genocide than any other cause in history. From the witch-hunt to the auto-da-fé, clerics have imposed dogma on the fearful and vulnerable and called for the waging of holy war, crusade and intifada.
But before we comfort ourselves with the notion that Islam is the home of ignorant bigotry, let’s not forget the outcry in British Christian circles against Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee’s unbridled entertainment, Jerry Springer: The Opera. Mounted at the National Theatre in 2003 as an earnest of new artistic director Nicholas Hytner’s intent to get the place noticed, the show survived unscathed until the BBC decided to screen it in 2005. There can be little doubt that most of those who attempted to pre-empt this screening were doing so on the say-so of others, just as Mary Whitehouse, who brought an unsuccessful action against the same National Theatre 23 years earlier concerning Howard Brenton’s play The Romans in Britain, did so sight unseen.
In 2004, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti was withdrawn by the Birmingham Rep after protests outside the theatre by members of the Sikh community disrupted the opening night. This was another occasion where the withdrawal of those only protesting on the basis of hearsay would have ended the confrontation.
What distinguishes Muslim protest from other kinds of accusations of blasphemy is the routine parlaying of such specific complaints into condemnation of broad cultural difference. It boggles the mind to see how taking umbrage at a poverty-row movie made by some bourgeois individualist in California can segue inexorably into the burning down of the German embassy in Khartoum.
Embassies and diplomatic missions do not as a rule enjoy complete territoriality anywhere in the world but, where local military and/or police forces are not adequate to protect them from being overrun, it ought to be acceptable for governments to defend their personnel with appropriate force and if that means shooting to kill when local people are bent on burning down the premises then so be it. What’s more, international law needs to consider drawing up legislation to punish incitement in all its forms, whether crude movie-making or hate-preaching in mosques. I am suspicious of analogies but that between incitement and arson has a certain merit. Whipping up resentment can seem as exciting as setting fire to dry tinder but once the flame, both literal and metaphorical, takes hold, the instigator is powerless to control its spread. This is why incitement is so dangerous and so in need of being discouraged. Whether it is a Danish cartoonist or a Californian Coptic film-maker or a bellicose mullah, these meddlers need to be made to take responsibility for the far-reaching results of their bile.
