But you didn’t know that, because you don’t actually care about Farkhunda and what happened to her, except as a way to bash Muslims.
Gilles Kepel’s Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam is an interesting book not just because of its thesis (that the increase Islamic terrorism represents not the success of the fundamentalists but their failure, the violent death throes of a dying movement) but because it’s an exhaustively-researched book written mostly before 9/11 (though he briefly touches on those attacks in an afterword). Reading it now, in the light of the US destabilization of Iraq and the Arab Spring and its aftermath (the rise of ISIS in Syria, the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt) is quite thought-provoking.
Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic, by Ray Takeyh is somewhat outdated in that it was published before the Green Movement protests during the 2009 election and the election of Hassan Rouhani in 2013. However, it provides a revealing look at the power structures and factions within Iran, internal divisions that led to both of those post-publication developments. Iran is generally thought of as some kind of monolithic theocracy, when the truth is far, far more complex, and this book is an excellent guide to understanding just what makes Iran tick.
For a change, here I’m not going to recommend a book, but a scholarly article: The Etymological Fallacy and Quranic Studies: Muhammad, Paradise, and Late Antiquity, by Walid Saleh. The core of it is a very thorough and utterly brutal dismantling of Christoph Luxenberg’s load of nonsense (which garnered a lot of attention in the mainstream press a few years back) about how the Qur’an is really a collection of Christian texts written in Syriac and that Arab-speaking Muslims for the last 1400 years haven’t been aware of this. But in order to get there, Saleh’s article takes the reader on a fascinating tour of how the fallacious use of etymology and philology has been an unfortunately common feature in Western quranic scholarship.
You again answered your own question: cultural traditions. A lot of what’s considered “Islamic”, by both Muslims and non-Muslims, is not actually rooted in scripture, but arises from cultural tradition.
Which undoubtedly had a lot to do with the fact that it supposedly took place at the US’ torture and prison camp.
It kind of does, because otherwise it’s not satire, it’s just dumb insulting jokes that don’t actually have anything to do with Muhammad or his message, but would work just as well (or just as poorly) if you cut-and-pasted his name with the name of someone else.
I wouldn’t count anything “dumb and unsophisticated” as satire. If you’re just telling stupid jokes that work the same way no matter who is the target and don’t actually say anything about that target because you’re not actually making any kind of reference to what the target has said and done, it’s not satire.
At any rate, Miller more than adequately addressed your other points. There’s a whole ton of contextual baggage that’s at play when it comes to depictions of Muhammad, and the problem isn’t the depictions themselves so much as it’s seen (and used, by both haters like Geller and fundamentalist inciters like Ahmed Akkari) as a direct attack on Islam and Muslims. That’s why some images of Muhammad cause riots and death threats when they’re published, and others don’t…even when they’re the same images sometimes.
Speaking of Pamela Geller, it turns out that she and Robert Spencer are responsible for four different anti-Islam groups tracked by the SPLC, and in fact many similar groups are funded and run by a relatively small group of people in America hiding behind multiple organizations.
If only this mook were as dedicated to bringing attention to the scourge of drunk driving in this country, which kills far more people than any acts of terrorism, Islamist or otherwise.
Myanmar court sentences three people to 2 years of prison for representing the Buddha with headphones on. This has nothing to do with the stated goal of this thread whatsoever and one is entitled to wonder why I’m bringing this up in the first place. For about three seconds.
