Learning from a girl named Nazira
By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - Leaders and masses of the Muslim and Christian world should take a
deep breath. It is unacceptable that so much controversy, bad feelings, insult
and violence should erupt after the speech of Pope Benedict XVI given at the
University of Regensburg on September 12 in Germany.
The pope infuriated the Muslim world by quoting the Byzantine
Emperor Manuel II telling a
Persian intellectual in 1391: "Show me just what
Mohammed [the Prophet of Islam] brought that was
new and there you will find things only evil and
inhuman, such as his command to spread by the
sword the faith he has preached." The
pope did not say that he agreed with these words.
Nevertheless the damage was done and, regardless of intentions, violence and
anti-Christian feeling immediately soared throughout the Muslim world. One
phrase from Benedict's lecture that was completely ignored by the mass media
was: "The emperor must have known that Sura 2:256 [of the Koran] reads: 'There
is no compulsion in religion.'" True, that is what Muslims believe, and
Benedict XVI did not fail to point to it.
To give him the benefit of the doubt, one can say that he wanted to show how
just Islam was during its birth, as opposed to the Islamic fanatics who have
distorted Islam and waged senseless war in its name. By quoting the emperor, he
might have wanted to show how ignorant the leaders of Byzantium were of the
flourishing Muslim faith in Arabia. But that's certainly not how Muslims
explained his remarks.
The pope has since apologized twice. On Sunday, he said: "At this time, I wish
also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few
passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered
offensive to the sensibility of Muslims. There in fact were a quotation from a
medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought."
But regardless of intentions and in light of his apology, let us stop for a
moment to think objectively of all that is happening and being said in the
Muslim and Christian worlds. The pope was quoting a Byzantine emperor speaking
to an unnamed Persian intellectual, taken from an obscure document, 615 years
ago, in 1391. It is unbelievable that we still have the energy to dig up these
ancient arguments, use them to arouse emotions, riot like madmen, and foster
hatred in both communities. It is equally repugnant that the pope would make
such a miscalculated remark, knowing perfectly well how much disgust it would
cause in Muslim communities around the world.
Equally guilty, however, are the Muslim leaders who responded to his remarks
with church attacks and violent rallies around the world. God created the human
mind to debate, study, analyze and explain. Isn't it the duty of Muslims, after
all, to educate non-Muslims on the true nature of the religion of Mohammed? If
the pope was misinformed, then Muslims are responsible for not explaining the
true nature of their faith to the world, or marketing its true values. They are
to blame for letting terrorists like Osama bin Laden hijack Islam and ruin its
name.
This same pope, struggling to fit into the oversized shoes of his predecessor
John Paul II, had condemned the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed earlier
in the year, saying: "In the international context we are living at present,
the Catholic Church continues convinced that, to foster peace and understanding
between people and men, it is necessary and urgent that religions and their
symbols be respected." He added, "Believers should be the object of
provocations that wound their lives and religious sentiments." He also said,
"For believers, as for all people of goodwill, the only path that can lead to
peace and fraternity is respect for the convictions and religious practices of
others."
He has also called on Christians "to open their arms and hearts" to Muslim
immigrants and to dialogue on religious issues. He added that the Church's
"inter-religious dialogue is a part of its commitment to the service of
humanity in the modern world". He described this dialogue as "important and
delicate". The pope has called for the establishment of a Palestinian state,
and on July 14, the Vatican condemned Israel's attack on Lebanon.
Oriana Fallaci: No apology
For all of the reasons mentioned above, I would like to believe that the pope's
insult was an unintentional mistake that will not be repeated. And for this
reason, I want to forgive him. More dangerous than what the pope is saying,
however, is the eulogy being made in the Western press to Italian journalist
Oriana Fallaci, who died last week in Florence.
A rude woman by all accounts, Fallaci once interviewed ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini shortly after the Islamic Revolution in Iran in February 1979. She was
annoyed by him forcing her to cover her head with a chador, as is common
in Islamic tradition when meeting with a Muslim cleric. Provoking him with
sensitive questions about politics and religion, she then famously asked: "How
do you swim in a chador?" An infuriated Khomeini snapped back: "Our
customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not
obliged to wear it." She said: "That's very kind of you, Imam. And since you
said so, I am going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now."
The pope apologized for his mistake. He said he had not intended to offend the
Muslims. Fallaci did not apologize. She died happy that she had been offending
Muslims and insulting them for 30 years. And in bidding her farewell, the
Western world is hailing her as a symbol of freedom of speech.
Fallaci wrote several books about Islam after the September 11, 2001, attacks
on New York and the Pentagon. Among other things, she wrote that when occupying
the Abbey of Montecassino in Italy in AD 883, "the Muslims amused themselves by
sacrificing each night the virginity of a nun. Do you know where? On the altar
of a cathedral." Her quotes are not footnoted, casting doubt on her seriousness
in documentation. When the Muslims took Constantinople in 1453, she added, they
"decapitated even newborns and extinguished candles in their little heads". She
also wrote of "the dream that the sons of Allah have been nurturing for years,
the dream of blowing up Giotto's Tower or the Tower of Pisa or the cupola of St
Peter's or the Eiffel Tower or Westminster Abbey".
When terrorists using the name of Islam strike the heart of New York, or
detonate bombs in the London Underground, this makes it more difficult to
defend the Muslims against Fallaci, since she attributes these acts to all
Muslims, and not the few who are fanatics. All her remarks, which have
resurfaced in the past week on websites and editorials, show a grand hatred for
Muslims.
One of the famous ones was: "Islamic racism that is the hatred of the infidel
dogs reigns supreme and is never put on trial, never punished." She added that
Muslims think "that biology is a shameless science because it is occupied with
the human body and sex". Fallaci also said: "Muslims have killed 6,000 people
to the glory of the Koran, in obedience to its verses." She said Muslims placed
Jesus of Nazareth, whom she calls "our Jesus", in an Islamic paradise "where he
drinks like a drunkard, screws like a sexual maniac". She said Muslims have
"urinated on their monuments [in Italy] or soil the sacristies of their
churches or toss their crucifixes out the window of a hospital".
Fallaci famously concluded: "Despite the massacres through which the sons of
Allah have bloodied us and bloodied themselves for over 30 years, the war that
Islam has declared against the West is a cultural war. They kill us in order to
bend us, to intimidate us. Their goal is not to fill cemeteries, not to destroy
skyscrapers. It is to destroy our soul, our ideas, our feelings and our
dreams."
The remarks of Fallaci and the statements of the pope raise a million questions
on who started this war with the Muslims. Was it the Muslims who declared war
on the West, or the other way around? And it raises other questions on where
the lines of free speech fall in the Western world. If we tolerate Benedict
XVI, do we accept the rude and insulting remarks of Fallaci as balanced
journalism? As far as the Muslim and Arab worlds are concerned, the answer to
Fallaci is a certain "no". The status of the pope is debatable and up to each
Muslim to decide, taking into account that he has apologized. And if we were to
accept the Danish cartoons against the Prophet Mohammed, topped with Fallaci
and Benedict XVI - or should we say Manuel II - then why does freedom of speech
change from one subject to another?
The unthinkable thoughts of David Irving
I cite the example of David Irving, the famous British historian who is
currently in jail for his views on the Holocaust. His 1977 book Hitler's War
was the first of his two-part biography of Adolf Hitler. In it he described
World War II from Hitler's point of view - a taboo throughout most of the
Western world. Irving showed that Hitler was a rational, intelligent leader and
human being whose main motivation was to increase the prosperity of Germany. It
was British prime minister Winston Churchill who escalated the war after coming
to power, stated Irving, not Hitler.
Irving did not deny the Holocaust but said Hitler did not order it or know of
it, enraging the Jewish community around the world. Irving attributed the
Holocaust to Hitler's right-hand man Heinrich Himmler.
Irving controversially remarked: "There were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. It
makes no sense to transport people from Amsterdam, Vienna, and Brussels 500
kilometers to Auschwitz simply to liquidate them [when] it can be done 8
kilometers from the city where they live." The historian challenged any person
to come up with an authentic written order by Hitler for the Holocaust.
Irving then wrote The War Path in 1978, with similar views on World War
II. In 1987 he wrote a very ugly biography of Churchill, showing him as an
alcoholic who sold out the British Empire and blamed him for "turning Britain
against its natural ally, Germany".
By the 1980s, Irving was banned from entering Austria. In the 1990s he was
banned from entering Germany as well. The same applied to South Africa,
Australia, and Canada in 1992. In September 2004, New Zealand declared that he
would not be allowed to enter the country to give lectures at the National
Press Club. He defied the ban and tried to go but was arrested in Austria. In
court he tried to change discourse, but Austrian authorities did not believe
him and at the time of writing he still languishes in jail. He had tried to
revoke ideas he had promoted for years by saying: "The Nazis did murder
millions of Jews. I made a mistake by saying there were no gas chambers, I am
absolutely without doubt that the Holocaust took place. I apologize for those
few I might have offended."
Learning from Syrian history
It is a funny world with funny double standards indeed. To make things easier
for everybody - especially the oversensitive millions in all faiths - it is
safe to say that critical issues such as the Holocaust become red lines that
should not be crossed. In saying that, we can assume that Fallaci, Benedict and
Irving all committed mistakes.
Offending others for the sake of free speech should not be tolerated. Yes, the
Holocaust did happen, and it would be a crime to say that it did not. But my
own word of advice to the Muslim community is to think big and avoid the
trappings of critical articles, comments here and there, or cartoons. Islam is
much greater than these small, really small, issues.
Seventy years ago, in April 1928, a 20-year-old girl named Nazira Zayn al-Din
wrote a book called Unveiling and Veiling, saying she had read,
understood and interpreted the Holy Koran. Therefore, she said, she had the
authority and analytical skills to challenge the teachings of Islam's clerics,
men who were far older and wiser than she. Her interpretation of Islam, she
boldly said, was that the veil was un-Islamic. If a woman was forced to wear
the veil by her father, husband or brother, Zayn al-Din argued, then she should
take him to court. Other ideas presented by her were that men and woman should
mix socially because this develops moral progress, and that both sexes should
be educated in the same classrooms. Men and women, she said, should equally be
able to hold public office and vote in government elections.
They must be free to study the Koran themselves, and it should not be dictated
on them by an oppressive older generation of clerics, she said. Finally, Zayn
al-Din compared the "veiled" Muslim world to the "unveiled" one, saying the
unveiled one was better because reason reigned, rather than religion.
Her book caused a thunderstorm in Syria and Lebanon. It was the most outrageous
assault on traditional Islam, coming from Zayn al-Din, who was a Druze. The
book went into a second edition within two months, and was translated into
several languages. Great men from Islam, including the muftis of Beirut and
Damascus, wrote against her, arguing that she did not have the authority to
speak on Islam and dismiss the veil as un-Islamic. Nobody, however, accused her
of treason or blasphemy. They accused her of bad vision resulting from bad
Islamic education.
Some clerics banned her book. Some, however, such as the Syrian scholar
Mohammad Kurd Ali, actually embraced it, buying 20 copies for the Arab Language
Assembly and writing a favorable review.
But despite the uproar, which lasted for two years, the Syrians and the Muslim
establishments did not let the issue get out of hand. They did not lead street
demonstrations for weeks, as if the Muslim world had no other concern than
Nazira Zayn al-Din. Zayn al-Din was still free to roam the streets of Syria and
Lebanon, without being harassed or killed by those who hated her views. The
leaders of Islam in 1927-30 were by far too busy to occupy themselves, and the
Muslim community at large, with the ideas of a 20-year-old girl. They had to
attend to their mosques, run their charity organizations, answer theological
questions, cater to Muslim education, lead political issues, and fight the
French.
Why, then, have the leaders of today's world abandoned every problem in the
Muslim world to concentrate on the silly cartoons published in a Danish
newspaper? Or to inject life into the statements of Manuel II? Yes, the
cartoons were very wrong and very insulting, and yes, the pope committed a
grand error by repeating what the Byzantine emperor had said. But as well,
Muslims should have shown solidarity on other more important issues, such as
Israel's digging beneath the al-Aqsa Mosque, invading Beirut in 1982, bombing
Ramallah, massacring innocents in Jenin and Rafah, and building the Separation
Barrier. More recently they should have united on the destruction of Lebanon.
The death of Palestinians is certainly more important to Muslims (or should be)
than what an obscure Danish newspaper publishes, or the views of an
until-now-unknown script by a forgotten Byzantine emperor. I am not saying that
one should ignore the cartoons and the pope, but rather that one should only
give them the attention they deserve, with no exaggerations, and concentrate on
more concrete issues relating to the Arab and Muslim worlds.
The Prophet is one of the greatest names in history. He is too great to be
affected by these ugly cartoons or the remarks of the pope. To quote Lawrence
of Arabia, it is time for us to stop acting like a small people, a silly
people, and start living up to our duties before history and mankind. After
all, we have not contributed anything to human progress in the past 500 years.
We should write and promote our history, then concentrate on science, arts,
literature, and freedom of the mind. We should learn to talk to, rather than
demonstrate against, those who think and act differently, and those who wrong
us.
