Offending Islam

Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders, whose 2008 film “Fitna” linked Islam, and the Koran, with terrorism and oppression, was this week refused entry to the UK while on his way to attend a screening of the documentary at the House of Lords. The Home Office claimed that Wilders’ presence would constitute “a threat to community security and therefore public security”. The film was alleged to be an affront on Muslims and an exercise in stirring up hatred, and Wilders is already facing charges based on these claims in the Netherlands.

It would be disingenuous to promote the man as some laudable champion of free expression: both he and the UK Independence Party who were organising said screening are right-wing extremists, interested solely in sowing as much fear as possible so that they may mobilise panic-voting among the public. He also makes the preposterous claim that the Koran should be banned outright. But, this all being said, I don’t believe for one second that the issue here revolves around the man’s political ideology and personal aspirations.

Rather, the fundamental question we must ask is whether or not the film told gross untruths about the contents of the Koran or the actions of those abiding by it. Were Wilders’ extrapolations on the consequences of verses he included in the film fair and just? Scenes such as those in which young Muslim girls are taught that Jewish people are pigs because Allah said as much in the Koran were certainly not faked. The counter-claim to this is that such an interpretation represents only the most “extreme” of Islamic elements: but how on Earth do we know which is the “correct” interpretation of this book? Frankly it’s difficult to think of alternative implications to be derived from a passage such as that which instructs Muslims to “strike terror into the hearts of your enemies”. Or perhaps it’s just a metaphor?

The rising militancy of patriotic Islamists in the Middle East, the famous offshoot of which was the 9/11 attacks, seems to undermine the claim that the so-called “moderate” interpretation is in any way more obviously reasonable to someone reared in the faith than its “extremist” counterpart. And let’s not pretend that this “extremism” is confined to any particular region. After all, it lead to the cold-blooded murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam for making a short documentary about the maltreatment of Muslim women in his country, and it’s also the reason why Wilders – and of course the heroic Ayaan Hirsi Ali – now require round-the-clock security protection from the state. It’s why publisher Martin Rynja had a petrolbomb thrown through a window in his North London home, for the “crime” of publishing a romantic fiction based on the life of the prophet Muhammed’s (nine-year-old!) lover.

Who are those we’re so worried about offending here? And is their supposed “offence” worthy of our censorship? The UK Government’s stance that (by his mere presence in their country) Wilders may have “disrupted community harmony” seems to imply an inflated, grotesque willingness to subdue challenges to Islamism; the like of which saw much of the media silenced in fear by the large-scale murder, mayhem and bloodshed that followed the publication of what we were assured were “deeply offensive” cartoons of Muhammed in a Danish newspaper. This culture of media self-censorship in response to Islamic violence and brutality was exemplified when Sony pulled a recent videogame from the shelves because of the fact that it contained a song in its soundtrack with lyrics from the Koran. How obscene!

This issue is bigger than Wilders and his petty agenda. It begs a much more important philosophical question about the structure of our society. It is one which first reared its head publically in 1988 when Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” resulted in the Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a general ‘fatwa’ against his name: all decent Muslims were called upon to ruthlessly kill Rushie on sight. It hasn’t gone away, not by a long shot; the beast is growing in stature all the time, and worryingly the trend seems to be towards an insatiable and irrational appetite to appease Islamic interests at any cost, to eagerly take “offense” on its behalf and to rush to persecute when such “offense” is expressed. In a worrying number of quarters at the time of the Jyllands-Posten cartoon saga, it was the delicate sensibilities of Muslims, and not the very real physical harm which ensued, about which we most heard.

by Adam Dinan