You’re welcome! 
And thank you. I hope you enjoy the books I’ve recommended!
From the linked article:
Wow, those Muslims, huh?
Our book this time is Vali Nasr’s Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World. Instead of focusing on Shia-Sunni issues, as in his previous book, Nasr this time casts a wide glance at the Muslim world in general, and uses economics to forecast the political. After first describing how the growth of the middle class led to dramatic political changes in the West, he goes country-by-country to examine how the middle class in Muslim countries has already affected the political situations there, and how they will continue to change them in the future, with special emphasis on Turkey and Iran.
Well, shit, I guess I’m moving to Nepal, then. Especially if they all look like Dichen Lachman.
Anyway, Kecia Ali’s The Lives of Muhammad is, as the title indicates, not about Muhammad’s actual biography, but about the many different ways Muhammad’s life has been viewed, both by Muslims themselves and by non-Muslims, and how those say more about the people writing those biographies as they do about Muhammad himself. In the words of Shyam K. Sriram, it’s a biography of Muhammad’s biographies. Engagingly written, and covering a lot of detail about how Western views of the Prophet have become increasingly polemical in the modern period, this is one of my favorite books.
Easy there, A’isha! It almost sounds like this could bring the discussion back to secularism in the Muslim world. Don’t you realize this thread is about how badly you want to murder me?
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Anything can be said about Islam. Absolutely anything at all. I, as a citizen of Great Britain, and you, as a (presumed, please correct me if I’m wrong) citizen of the United States, have every legal right to say whatever we want about Islam. Whether we will subsequently live to tell the tale, however, is another matter. And that’s the problem. I’m not talking about what we’re legally entitled to do. I’m talking about the fact that there is a ruthless, well-funded, and horrifyingly popular strain of Islam whose proponents have succeeded in creating an atmosphere in which otherwise free people are not free to make certain statements about Islam. This strain, more to the point, has solid scriptural foundations. The hadith contains strict prohibitions against depicting Muhammed in any form. That some people choose to ignore those prohibitions doesn’t change that. If the hadith said “Draw Muhammed whenever you like”, the 12 dead Charlie Hebdo cartoonists would still be alive.
I suppose that, technically, of course, this is more or less true of anything. For all I know, some lunatic out there is plotting to kill me for writing this post, or for saying that the Game of Thrones TV show is better than the books (DrDeth, I’m looking at you ;)).
Islam is different. Fundamentalist reactions against depictions of Muhammed are both savage and tragically predictable. A man who drew and widely publicised a picture of Muhammed would basically be committing himself to spending the rest of his life in hiding. We know this because it’s happened before. The 12 Jyllands-Posten cartoonists whose depictions of Muhammed so inflamed millions of muslims across the middle east in 2005 are all still in hiding. One of them, Kurt Westergaard, has survived two attempts on his life.
We are all at perfect liberty to, for instance, burn a Koran, but no-one in their right mind would ever do it. To that extent we have in effect lost our free speech rights when it comes to Islam.
The point of that example was merely to illustrate the different ways that different religions handle criticism. The reaction of the Mormon church to that musical was to place an ad the official program saying “The show is good, but the book is better. Read the book of Mormon today”. If the Mormon Bible said to kill anyone who mocks the faith and in return you’ll be fast-tracked to paradise, their reaction would have been different. Mormons simply don’t believe the kinds of things you need to believe in order to react the way that some muslims do when their sacred cows are gored.
Yes. They are brave, aren’t they?
Okay, so where are all the boring and unfunny comedies about Islam? I get your point. There’s not much financial inducement to stage a comedy about a subject that most people don’t know anything about. But I think that now, at this point, after the Rushdie affair, and the Jyllands-Posten fiasco, the death of Theo Van Gogh, the hounding of Geert Wilders and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and now this latest attack in Texas (to name just the incidents that I can recall off the top of my head), we have to conclude that even if we were just as well versed in Islam as we are in Christianity it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. People would still be scared to satirise Muhammed, and with good reason.
Yes. And it often is, repeatedly and at great length.
Hardly. There are some Muslims (mainly part of an existing terror network that has been mainly engaged in murdering other Muslims) who target certain individuals in well-publicized incidents, but the majority of Muslims don’t want to have anything to do with those violent assholes.
That’s why the 500,000 Muslims in Texas completely ignored the event in Garland, and the two violent assholes who got themselves shot trying to attack it were amateurs who had to come from two states over.
The Iranians don’t seem to think so.
Which hadith are those?
Terry Jones, a deranged Christian pastor from Florida, gained quite a bit of notoriety for doing exactly that. Multiple times, in fact.
When he went right into the heart of Dearborn, Michigan (a city here with such a high percentage of Muslims that Islamophobes routinely freak out about how it’s a no-go zone ruled by shari’ah law), no one cared.
There at 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. Some of them are terrorists and others are violent and motivated enough to threaten (and these two groups mostly intersect). And that’s a definitely a problem, and requires vigilance and security measures to protect not just the Muhammad-drawers from them, but everyone they threaten (including their main targets: other Muslims).
But that’s not at all the same thing as “the religion can’t handle criticism” or “Muslims believe that their holy book tells them to kill anyone who mocks their faith”. Because if that were even remotely true, those 500,000 Muslims in Texas wouldn’t have ignored Pamela Geller like they did, and the followers of that dickbag imam in Pakistan who held a “funeral” for the Charlie Hebdo killers wouldn’t have complained that so few people turned out for it.
You just answered your own question. Take the Muslim humor site I linked you to before. I found the satire article about “Muslim Doctors Create Frankenhafiz” to be funny…but would you? Would you even understand what was being mocked?
There are plenty of satires of the kinds of Muslim extremists who do things like carry out attacks on the people you list, though. Gyrate even linked you to some in the post you replied to!
I know! I’m like “Dude, I just told you some.”
Seriously, go watch Four Lions.“The report makes crystal clear that the police shot the right man, but as far as I’m aware, the wrong man exploded.” Chris Morris is a freaking genius.
You’re not even making this difficult. Meet Pastor Mark Driscoll.
Or this guy:
But since I promised that for every “MUSLIMS! Oooga booga!” link that Haberdash posted I’d recommend a book from my own personal collection, this time I’ve selected Amina Wadud’s Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. Professor Wadud is one of the pioneers of the modern Islamic Feminist movement, and in this book (her first) she goes through the Qur’an in depth, analyzing the text from her perspective as a woman and as a scholar, providing the foundation on which she builds the conceptual framework that underpins that movement.
Well, so far as I know, camels are pretty scarce in Malaysia, so looks like women can breathe a little easier on that one, at least.
Petition closed, with a whole 348 supporters. Whew, that was close…
Deborah Amos’ Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East is a depressing read. Not because it details the tragedy of the many refugees who fled Iraq after the US shattered that country in their invasion and proved singularly incapable of putting it back together again (even though it does that). No, what makes this book so depressing is that the horrific stories it tells of the horrific situation these refugees found themselves in represent the high point; this book was written before the civil war in Syria and the rise of ISIS not only re-victimized those Iraqi refugees, but created massive waves of new refugees. A sobering, worthwhile book.
Not to mention the fact that the petition is three years old. Always on the cutting edge with his Muslim-hate, is our Haberdash.
A’isha, I was going to send you a PM about this but what the hell, it might as well be said public : not only is your counter-trolling form just about perfect, I’m genuinely grateful for the book suggestions and reviews. I’ll be sure to work some of them into the pipe (Lives of Muhammad in particular seems fascinating)