The publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in European newspapers has sparked protests and boycotts across the Muslim world.
In a Q&A, Saudi Arabia-based Lubna Hussain of NBC News explains the tenets of Islam that many Muslims say the cartoons violate, why the images are so offensive to so many, and why the world’s 1 billion Muslims would like an apology.
Can you explain the background on the tenets of Islam these cartoons violate?
Islam is a monotheistic religion. That means that we pray to God without any intercessor in between. So, we don’t have any priests in Islam. Another very important element of our religion is that we don’t recognize icons. We do not allow any icons or pictorial representation of God or his prophets.
The reason for this can be explained by the historical context of the Arabian Peninsula at the time that the Prophet Muhammad was born. At that time, the whole Arabian Peninsula was steeped in paganism. We believe that after seeing a vision of the Angel Gabriel, Muhammad called to the people of Mecca to cast aside the 300 idols of Kaaba and worship only one God.
So, the whole purpose of the rise of Islam was to totally cleanse the Arabian Peninsula of any kind of pagan effigies or icons.
As a result of that, we are not allowed in Islam to have any pictorial representations of the Prophet Muhammad, or God, or anything like that.
From an Islamic viewpoint, pictorial representations of God were distractions from the oneness of God. The sole purpose was to worship God without having a pictorial or physical concept of what God embodied.
So, the prophet is not allowed to be depicted in any way.
There is a movie called “The Message” about the life of the prophet, and his face is never shown and his voice never heard in it. There is always just some sort of a lingering of his presence, but you don’t actually ever see him because it is considered to be against Islam to show that.
That is the element of our blind faith. We don’t know what form God takes, and it is beyond our conception to even imagine what form he could take. The point is the spirituality, not the materialism, of the religion.
Since the Prophet Muhammad is such an incredibly revered figure in Islam — he is considered to be the person who carried the message of God and is therefore the embodiment of Islam — any assault on him is an assault on the whole Islamic world.
For example, the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie and the reason why a fatwa to kill Rushdie was called in 1989 was because he directly insulted the character and the goodness of the prophet in his book “The Satanic Verses.”
Another very important point to make is that all of the prophets — Jesus, Moses, Abraham —they are all equally revered. For instance, there was an uproar in the Islamic world over the film “The Last Temptation of Christ.”
That said, Muhammad has special significance for us because he embodies the essence of the whole practice of Islam.
Besides the fact that any depiction of the Prophet Muhammad is offensive, why is there such outrage about these images, depicted first in newspapers in Denmark, and now in France and other European countries?
I have to say, because I am over here in Saudi Arabia, all of the Web sites are blocked. So, I haven’t seen the actual cartoons.
But, from what I understand, they include an image of Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse, and another portraying him holding a sword, his eyes covered by a black rectangle.
These images would be extremely offensive to the Islamic faith.
According to our history, the Prophet Muhammad is said to have won followers over because even though he conquered lands and used military force, the people who he captured were said to be able to practice their own faith. So, people would be offended by that reference to the prophet as a violent figure because he does not embody violence, but rather tolerance.
It would be like depicting the pope in such a way because many of the Irish Republican Army were Catholics — in other words, it just makes no sense. Just because you have some fringe elements that use religion to hijack the tenets of any faith, and then you make that sort of link, I find that to be very offensive to the Muslim community at large.
Doesn't this debate really boil down to a clash of cultures between the Western values of free speech versus taboos in Islam?
I never have agreed with this sort of "clash of cultures" slogan that has been touted around recently — particularly since Islam has been around for over 1,400 years.
Islam is not some force that is likely to go away. On the contrary, it is the fastest-growing faith in the world. So it is very important to find common ground and not just tout around these slogans that are meaningless.
With every freedom, there comes responsibility. In Islam we have freedom, but hand in hand with that, we have responsibility. So we have freedom to do what we want in an individualistic manner, but we also have a responsibility to respect other people’s feelings and to not denigrate or deride other people’s faiths.
For me, publishing these cartoons was very provocative. I don’t understand what purpose their publication was meant to serve. Especially when you are treading on the toes of over a billion people. It doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Rather, it is incitement. Would it be considered funny or an example of freedom of the press to publish depictions of Holocaust victims? We would never do such a thing because it is inciteful, hurtful and highly offensive.
There is a fine balance between exercising your freedom of speech and the press while at the same time maintaining a level of human decency and continuing to live in a global community.
Are the protests about this particular cartoon? Or are the cartoons really a trigger for feelings that Islam is not respected by the West the way other religions like Christianity or Judaism are?
In a way, I think that these sort of media-generated myths — that Islam is not respected or tolerated — are a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more the media talks about it, the more evident it becomes on the street.
I lived as a Muslim for many years in the West, prior to 9/11, and I never had any problems practicing my faith. Since then, unfortunately, a connection between terrorism and Islam has be made very strongly by the media, and is something we can’t shake.
When you have over a billion people and you compare the statistics of the terrorists among our community, they probably wouldn’t even register as one percent.
I really don’t believe that Muslims feel that their religion is not respected. I think it is just a form of general disrespect and that Muslims these days have become a soft target.
Islam is a multinational faith — from Russia, to Asia, to Europe and all across the Americas — so it is not something that can be marginalized.
But, we are not protesting about a generic thing about Muslims being mistreated. We are protesting about these cartoons that have denigrated our prophet.
It has nothing to do with anything else going on in the global situation at all. I think the anger is specifically targeted at this particular cartoon and its offensive imagery.
You mentioned that these cartoons have prompted boycotts of Danish goods and some nations — such as Saudi Arabia — have even withdrawn their ambassadors from Copenhagen. What sort of resolution are these protests seeking?
There needs to be an apology. The line that has been taken is that this is freedom of our press, and we can not control our press. However, there could be certainly, on the governmental level, be an apology to people who have been offended by this.