At last! Could this be the beginning of some sort of level playing field? The injustice of the cartoon affair is that – like the US B52 bombers flattening mud houses and seeding the surrounding market places and fields with bomblets carrying the logo ‘peace and freedom’ – these I.T. mercenaries are installed in fortified comfort zones, armed with corporate salaries, pension plans, annual leave and the latest information technology: paid to mount an ideological carpet bombing campaign against an unarmed and often unemployed work force – in many cases exiled from a homeland under Coalition military occupation.
The name of the game is mental Sack and Pillage. These media hacks and so-called cartoonists are graffiti thugs in a worldwide ongoing propaganda war. Their desperate, school boyish attempts to ridicule the ‘top man’ points only to their own vulgarity and impotence.
Humiliation and hostility from the society surrounded the Prophet, his family and his companions. I would say to the Muslims that the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, would have passed on by, would have denied his tormentors the satisfaction of a reaction. Would have asked that they be forgiven for their ignorance. Remember the humiliation at Taif when excrement and stones were thrown at him and the Companions asked him to curse the city? His reply was “I was not sent to curse mankind but as a Mercy to the Worlds”. And that is one of his greatest names. We now live in times that are similar to those times and that alone is a cause for celebration for any Muslim.
The preposterous thesis that existence unfolded from a mindless non-existence to the launching of spaceships to Mars defies all logic, as is the proposition that scientific rationalism is the basis of all knowledge. If it is the case – prove it! We concede to the devotees of this plainly nonsensical and nihilistic creed the freedom to express it within time honored parameters of intellectual courtesy and good manners. Of course to respond with insulting caricatures of its main adherents is beneath our dignity.
It is the global environment in which this kind of crudity and arrogance unfolds that should concern us all – muslims and non muslims alike. The unbridled forces of debt driven investment banking and speculation ride an apocalypse of corporatism across the planet creating a havoc of war, famine, environmental havoc and social disintegration. Militant secularism’s shrill cry is that all conflicts are provoked by ‘Religion‘. Does that include Socialist Soviet Marxism or Chinese Maoism? How about the Terror of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite in eighteenth century France, the cradle of democracy? Who were the extremists in Nagasaki and Hiroshima? How about 20th Century expansionist Zionism – though of course that could fall into the category of a religious war. And last but not least Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia et al. In the Animal Farm Democracy George Orwell has the pig regime declare that some animals are more equal than others. IS THERE SOMETHING ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF DENMARK?
Prophethood is a form of government both personal government and social government. It is as natural and germane to the human being as the migrations and breeding habits of birds, animals and sea creatures. The only difference is in the matter of will. The creatures are programmed but the human creature chooses. Chooses either to accept or reject. In that is a supreme privilege. Acceptance is hard and rejection is easy. As the Prophet Muhammad once said “the path to hell is paved with ease and the path to heaven with hardship.” The duration in this world is short the duration in the next is for ever whether it is total extinction or life everlasting.
The prohibitions within these teachings have always provided an immune system against personal and social disintegration; intoxication, gambling, theft, murder, adultery and promiscuity, and most of all usury (in our time debt-driven capitalism and monopolistic trade systems). Of usury – riba – the Prophet said “it is 70 times worse than fornication with one’s mother in the precincts of the Ka’aba”. The world bears witness through its mass media to some of the effects of mass disregard for these prohibitions. After all there is so much more money to be made in the spectacle of the depraved and disgusting. Those who attack Islam in the form of the Prophet Muhammad do not need to be destroyed because they have already chosen the path of self-destruction – for themselves and for the society in which they live.
We assert that all the miseries and conflicts of our time arise precisely from a disregard and rejection of the parameters of human and social behavior laid down by the One Who originated all existence. This was reflected in the life of His last chosen exemplar Muhammad the Messenger of Allah, the most recent in a long line of such messengers present in every part of the world since the beginning of the human story on this planet. A Messenger reflects the one in the many and the many in the one. He personifies the highest form of human possibility at any given time. But he is always a mortal, he is subject to disease and death – “he eats food and walks in the market place”. This is not an intellectual matter but an existential one. It is an affirmation of existence itself as ascendant over the intellect. The Prophet Muhammad could neither read nor write – instead he read existence itself – about which the mass educated citizen of the world has become increasingly dyslexic. The definitive Book about the human condition complete with instructions as to how to live within it safely, traveled through him into the world. He – may God bless him and grant him peace -was the Qur’an walking.
The Muslims need to recognise the fact that they, like the Messenger himself, peace and blessings of God be upon him, live among misguided peoples ignorant of the Message – I myself was one of them. They should conduct themselves as he did with forbearance, compassion and a deep commitment to emulating his behavior in the face of provocation and rejection. It is only a trial.
The Messenger once said “if a Bedouin in the desert gets a thorn in his foot every Muslim feels it”.The true power of Islam lies in the fact that in spite of the centuries and splits that exist within the Islamic world there is this astonishing collective transmission generated by the memory of one man, who was known as The Trustworthy. If an injury to any ordinary Muslim can impact on the entire Islamic world how much more intensely will even a symbolic injury to the human source of Islam reverberate throughout what is known as the ‘Ummah’ of Islam. People used to feel this way in Great Britain about Winston Churchill – an insult to him was an insult to the whole British nation. Princess Diana of Wales briefly occupied this position. There is nothing sacred in our time, abuse alone has become sacrosanct under the moniker ’freedom of opinion’. We live in a time of ‘double speak’. People ridicule and distrust their political leaders and in the place of this reverence for the great individual we are now offered a junk cult of disposable celebrities – first division footballers and drug abusing rock stars. In the Qur’an it is stated that ‘the human being was created to worship”. This is to say that there is an inescapable compulsion to worship embedded within the human being which can be twisted into many shapes. There is only one form which is congruent with reality and capable of reaching its ultimate objective, which is to lose itself in the object of worship. The Qur’an also tells us that
“which ever way you turn there is the Face of God”. The Muslim learns that the only way to see that Face is by taking on the form of the Messenger in his behavior and practice. Everything Muhammad did was an act of worship – from washing his hands to fighting a war.
Hatred is the reverse side of love. The Muslims need to understand that all this hate could be the birth pangs of a great love. We need to be patient – God is with the patient, God is the Patient. Wisdom is in restraint. The Muslim is the messenger of The Messenger. There are increasing numbers of us previously fanatical in hostility to Islam who are now dedicated and passionate Muslims. Remember the ferocity of the great Sayyiduna Umar ibn al Khattab, may God be pleased with him, storming out to kill the Prophet in his house. He arrived there only to become his most devoted Companion. The analogy that comes to mind in my personal opening to Islam can be described in terms of the film The Truman Story. One walks towards the horizon of one’s unquestioned social experience, stretches out one’s hand and the ‘horizon’ opens to reveal a totally different landscape which has been there all along. And it is not a set, it is the real world and you are no longer the star performer in a soap opera you have joined the truly human race.
by Saba Khalid,
activist and thinker,
embraced Islam nearly four decades ago.
She has traveled widely in the Muslim world and lived in Morocco and Spain and has now settled in the UK.