Ignorance and suspicion claim lives, sacrifice truth

To outside eyes, it is as bizarre as it is repellent. A single event, book, cartoon, film or teddy bear, one which represents nothing but its originator, who may not even be American, sparks lethal outbursts of mass protest against America and the West.

What, to prejudiced westerners, could better exemplify Muslim backwardness and depravity?

The latest bloody furor was provoked by the release on the web of an amateurish film, probably made by a Coptic Egyptian living in America, attacking the Prophet Muhammad as a fraud, a brute and a pervert. Yet the film had been available for months, though dubbed in Arabic only recently. Undoubtedly offensive, it could count as an incitement to religious hatred, which is illegal in some countries, though not in America. It is no worse, however, than plenty of other material only a mouse-click away.

So why the ire? In a hallmark essay in 1990 called The Roots of Muslim Rage, Bernard Lewis blamed a mentality twisted by history. He cited the obligation of holy war, dating from the faith's turbulent birth and shaped by centuries of setbacks ranging from the retreat from Europe to western imperialism, and even the challenge to Muslim male authority from rebellious children and emancipated women. The result: an inferiority complex in which humiliation was compounded by western ignorance.

There is a less apocalyptic explanation. Muslims' resentment at slights to their religion is readily aroused by reports of desecration of the Qur'an or books, films and pictures that include a blasphemous depiction -- any depiction is considered blasphemous -- of the Prophet Muhammad or of God. Yet outbursts of rage can also be stirred by political grandstanding or by mischievous politicians preying on an ill-informed, aggrieved populace.

It is certainly odd, for example, that the latest film suddenly began attracting attention in the run-up to Sept. 11, an anniversary almost as politically charged in the Muslim world as it is in the West. It was energetically publicized, albeit in caustic terms, by two Salafist or hardline-Islamist television channels.

Most outbursts of Muslim rage bring political dividends to someone. The Ayatollah Khomeini reaped the benefits of his fatwa demanding the death of Salman Rushdie for Rushdie's 1988 book, The Satanic Verses. Pakistani politicians gain from whipping up sentiment against Christians and against politicians seen as soft on them.

The furor over the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published in 2005 in a Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, was also curious. Protests erupted four months later, sparked by a dossier that included pictures the paper never had published. The row, which cost at least 100 lives, was a boon for those with mischief-making agendas.

Ignorance in many Muslim countries of the way the West works makes rabble-rousing easy. Protesters at the American Embassy in Cairo on Sept. 11 erroneously believed the offensive film to have been shown on "American state television." In a place with a weak tradition of independent broadcasting, that claim is not as absurd as it might be elsewhere.

The casualties of such outbursts are not only innocent lives and lost livelihoods. The truth suffers too.

A reluctance among many Muslims to accept that America could be a blundering victim of atrocities rather than a wily perpetrator meant the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the twin towers were widely reported from the outset as an inside job, facilitated by Israel's intelligence service, intended to stoke up western hatred of Islam. Three-quarters of Egyptians now believe that conspiracy theory. It is a headache for their new president, Mohammed Morsi, because he plans to visit New York for the United Nations General Assembly.

For many Americans, only an explicit disavowal of his past support for such theories would signal that he is a decent man worth dealing with.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 15, 2012 A17