Much of the scandalous consequences are attributable to an active history of hostility between the West and the Islam.

by Hamid Dabashi
Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Now that the public protest, violent or otherwise, in response to the recent cases of blasphemy against Islam have by and large subsided, and the world is distracted by other atrocities, Muslims need to sit down for a moment and ask themselves some serious questions before yet another lunatic or career opportunist in Europe or a charlatan loser in the US comes out and says “jump” and Muslims around the world fume “how high?”

The scenes are exceedingly unseemly and unbecoming of a world on the cusp of reimagining itself for its posterity.

The cases of the movie clip The Innocence of Muslims (2012) and before that the late Theo van Gogh’s Submission (2004), based on a script by the notorious Islamophobe Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s plagiarised script, and before that the Danish cartoons ridiculing Prophet Muhammad, and before that the Salman Rushdie affair over the publication of his Satanic Verses (1988) and many other similar incidents all come together to raise the question of “blasphemy” among Muslims today.

Why so much fury over so little substance? Whence such a thin skin in a world so thick with atrocities? The question is of paramount concern to all Muslims, and no cleric, no imam, no ayatollah, no self-appointed “religious authority”, and certainly no chimerical construction called “religious intellectuals” – some of them now actively confusing the halls of the university with the pulpits of the mosques (giving testimony to Max Weber’s premonition of calling them “academic prophets”) – is in an exclusive position to define what “blasphemy” is or to presume to speak as if Prophet Muhammad would on current subjects!

The singer not the song

Much of the heated and at times violent reactions to these depictions of Prophet Muhammad and/or insults to the Holy Quran have had to do with the European and North American origins of these productions. Although Ayaan Hirsi Ali and before her Salman Rushdie were Muslims (though of the kind that think themselves to be “secular” and “ex-Muslim”, and such, as they say), but the country in which they had initiated their deliberately and consciously insulting acts were in the domain of what Muslims are wont of calling “the West”.

Much of the scandalous consequences of their act were thus attributable to an active history of hostility between this “West” and the “Islam” that has emerged in historic conversation and contestation with it. “The West”, so the story went, was actively hostile to “Islam” and here was an example of it. Such acts of blasphemy were initiated in “the West”, in the languages of the West (Dutch, Danish, or English, French, etc.) – though their perpetrators were at least nominally (ex)-Muslims.

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