Few days back, I tumbled upon an article on a western website, which alighted upon growing concerns regarding the alleged trend of inducting anti-Christianity content in children’s readers and flicks. My mind instantly flashed back to not so remote past, when amid mass protests and violence Muslims throughout the globe were lashing out against one such film based on an anti-Islamic theme. Yes, you must have guessed that I’m pointing to the September 2012 catastrophe, when outrageous anti-Islamic movie and caricatures in flared and enraged the Muslims so much that they resorted to violence against others, and themselves to make their point. Whether or not the message was understood at the other end is another thing, it made me ponder if the rise in anti-religious sentiments is a common issue. I surfed through the archival sources in search of any evidence and came up with certain conclusions, which I would like to share in this article.
During my humble research, I got to know that history is replete with assaults on faiths by believers of some other faith or the faithless ones. What distinguishes faithful from faithless is the “belief “in some “super being”, which the former clings to and the later scoffs at. An interesting fact is that in most of the cases of anti-religious assaults, Faithfull are at loggerheads with each other.
History testifies that every rising faith has had to face antagonism from the dominant belief system, check the Roman history, wherein the last of Romans tried in vain to curb the rising influence of Christianity and had to yield themselves at the feet of Christian altar (though not without causing some serious damage to the original Christian teachings).
Islam seems to may be facing same kinds of challenges, where the status quo force is unyielding and vindictive. The essence of “faith” is unwavering loyalty, and any challenge is not less than an alarm of war. When the last spate of emotions and anger among Muslims took a violent turn, the local and foreign media started streaming with a multitude of views and responses. The film in question “The innocence of Prophet” was dubbed to be the most cheap outrageous movie, which heated the internet with its 14 minutes trailer and with it burned to ashes the faithful souls of the millions of Muslims world over.
Media went abuzz with speculations and theories about the motives of the movie director and producer Sam Bacile aka Nakoula Basseley-the alleged U.S snitch. It was asked again and again as to what a snitch would aim to achieve from provoking Muslim sentiments, was he doing so to seek some hidden agenda? was he having C.I.A’s backing or Israel’s? was Al Qaeda using him to firm the ground for its upcoming attack on the American Embassy in Bin Ghazi? which was to leave dead 4 U.S nationals in its wake? or was it orchestrated to divert the Pakistani’s from more pressing issues at hand (like American intervention, exasperating War on Terrorism, Afghan War, NATO excesses, NATO containers etc.) to mere issues of faith. Whatever the ulterior motives of that enraging anti-Islamic movie may be, it for sure proved one thing that Muslims can easily be distracted by inducing matters of religion and that the so-called open-minded and pragmatic Western media can continue to be not- so-open minded in matters concerning Islam. Films questioning Christianity or Zionism or holocaust may be unwelcoming and alarming, but the blasphemous caricatures of a Muslim prophet or unbelievingly outrageous film against Islam can get a shut eyed response in the name of “freedom of speech”.
The Muslim world has the right to question whether freedom does not entail some amount of responsibility. The same question may be asked of the ever so emotional Muslim ummah, does not faith require us to be more patient and sage in the matters concerning faith. In a frenzy of a moment, we start burning and killing each other lest the enemy. Islamophobia may be a reality or our delusional attempt at concealing our weaknesses, because where faith in Allah ends there starts the infinite chaos. Trust me; the entire Muslim ummah appears to be in chaos right now!
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