The dictators behind those Muslim cartoon protests.

The Wall Street Journal, New York
11 February 2006


Clash of Civilization
The dictators behind those Muslim cartoon protests.

Saturday, February 11, 2006 12:01 a.m.

As a way of addressing the Islamist threat to civil liberties in
Europe, the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad were hardly
ideal. The right to mock a religion may be absolute, but so is the
right to publish most forms of pornography: Neither is appropriate in
a serious publication. That applies whether the religion is Islam,
Christianity or any other, and whether the cartoons are being
published for the first time or reprinted elsewhere as acts of
solidarity in the face of an implied threat.
But after the attacks on Western embassies in Beirut, Damascus and
Tehran, the murder of a Catholic priest in Turkey, the death of at
least a dozen people throughout the Middle East in anti-Danish
rioting and protests in Europe in which Muslim demonstrators urged a
"real Holocaust" on the West, questions about press freedom seem
almost quaint. What we are dealing with here is something else entirely.

That something else might be called the premodernism of much of
modern-day Islam, meaning the apparent unwillingness of too many
Muslims to place reason above "honor" and deal proportionately with
intellectual provocations. The Western philosophical tradition is
founded on the belief that the execution of Socrates for blaspheming
the gods of Athens was an injustice. When British Muslims carry
placards reading "Butcher those who mock Islam," they are making
their differences with that tradition depressingly plain.

Such premodernism is also on display among those Muslims who have
forgotten the reciprocal obligations that the principle of "respect
for religion" requires. We'll take the Islamic clerical establishment
at its word that Islam forbids pictorial depictions of Muhammad--and
look forward to their fatwas against the anti-Semitic caricatures
routinely featured in the Arab and Persian press.

Yet mass demonstrations almost never represent mainstream public
sentiment in the West. Why then should we take it as given that they
do among Muslims? Every society has its silent majorities, but it's
only in democracies that those majorities exercise a decisive
influence. If Islamic societies seem premodern and violent, this
surely has something to do with the fact that most Muslim countries
today are places where there is no democracy; where silent majorities
stay silent; where, to adapt W.H. Auden, "only the man behind the
rifle has free speech."


So it has been in the case of the cartoons, which were first
published in September, to the fairly muted protests of Danish
Muslims. Ambassadors of 10 Muslim countries demanded that the Danish
government "take all those responsible to task," apparently
forgetting that, unlike in their own countries, Danish authorities do
not serve as press censors. Around the same time, an Egyptian
newspaper reprinted the cartoons without drawing any noticeable wrath
from Muslim clerics.
It was only after a December meeting of the 56 member states of the
Organization of Islamic Conferences--all but a handful of which are
dictatorships or absolute monarchies--that the "outrage" really took
wing. No surprise here: as Sari Hanafi of the American University in
Beirut told the New York Times, these autocracies made use of the
cartoons (the most offensive of which were fabrications) as a way of
showing that the expansion of freedom and democracy in their
countries would lead inevitably to the denigration of Islam. From
there it was but a short hop to the airwaves of al-Jazeera (owned by
the Emir of Qatar), whose in-house cleric, Yussuf Qaradawi, a member
of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, issued a fatwa calling for
a "day of anger."

Put simply, what we have witnessed isn't the proverbial rage of the
Arab street. It's an orchestrated effort by illiberal regimes,
colluding with fundamentalist clerics, to conjure the illusion of
Muslim rage for their own political purposes. The Iranian mullahs
seek to discredit Denmark as it assumes the rotating presidency of
the U.N. Security Council, where Iran's nuclear program is being
discussed. The secular Allawite regime in Syria wants to shore up its
ties with the Sunni religious establishment, especially now that
Bashar Assad's former vice president has declared a government in
exile. The Saudis want to put behind them the latest stampede at the
annual Hajj, where some 350 pilgrims were killed.

And in Europe, clerics and self-styled "community leaders" with close
links to the Saudi government or the Brotherhood want to assert their
dominance over populations that have yet to find their social or
economic place in the mainstream of European life, as November's
riots in France showed. The fact that European governments seem
easily cowed by threats of violence has only made the problem worse.


In all the uproar, we find it telling that the two places where
Muslim communities have shown restraint and moderation is in the
United States and Iraq. American Muslims are overwhelmingly middle
class, upwardly mobile and not very susceptible to the atavistic
urgings of distant dictatorships. In Iraq, an unsilent majority has
repeatedly made its views plain about the religious fanatics who
demand to speak in their name. Just imagine the kind of anti-Western
protests that would be taking place there now if Saddam were still in
power.
There's a lesson in this for those who would have us believe that
what this cartoon conflagration represents is a conflict of
civilizations. There is a conflict all right, not between
civilizations, but within one, and it pits those who would make Islam
barbaric and those who would keep it civilized. In that struggle, the
heirs of Socrates and the heirs of al-Farabi must make common cause.

Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.