I know Muslims are sick and tired of the Islamophobic refrain of “Why don’t they speak out against ISIS?”  Some refuse to accept the terms of the challenge, seeing it as a demand that they apologize for being Muslim.  Others denounce terrorism, to deaf ears.  But it wasn’t until I read this piece by New Zealanders Khareyah Wahaab and Jason Kennedy, who made news a couple of years back by inviting a racist MP to dinner, that I realized how Muslims in the West are doubly threatened by extremism.

[Tim from Timaru, by the way, is the New Zealand equivalent of Joe Bloggs — or perhaps Joe the Plumber.  And it should be noted that before ISIS took to beheading Western hostages, they beheaded dozens of Syrians in Raqqa. They stuck the heads on the points of railings in the city’s main park. Western media paid no attention.]

This may come as a shock to some, but ISIS hates us, a young Muslim couple in the West, with the same vehemence as Tim from Timaru.  Except, unlike Tim, we have many ties to the Muslim community in New Zealand.  It’s a small community and our family is known to most Muslims here, who in turn still have ties to their countries of origin.  This means that if by some freak chance a terrorist group were to put a bounty on our heads for speaking out against them, they have a much greater chance of finding us than finding Tim from Tumaru.

More than anyone else, terror groups seek to punish those they view as apostates of their own religion.  Radical fundamentalists thus hold all Muslims hostage.  Even in New Zealand, where our freedoms of speech and religion are a given, we still live with the risk of terrorist reprisal for speaking out, precisely because we are Muslim.

Terrorism is not aimed only at Westerners;  it’s a daily experience for those who must live among extremists.  Muslims have immigrated to the West in a conscious decision to escape violence and instability, seeking to build a better life, but many fear that if they speak out loud, they and their families “back home” will suffer.  You may call this cowardly, but first ask yourself if you would be willing to jeopardize your family’s freedom and safety if you legitimately feared reprisal.

Many do so nonetheless.  In public gatherings, demonstrations, formal statements by imams, even teenagers posting their frustrations on YouTube, the message is the same:  “ISIS does not represent us.  ISIS does not represent Islam.  We condemn their actions entirely.”  You don’t hear them because they’re not considered newsworthy, but engage a Muslim in conversation, and you are very apt to find someone who feels exactly the same way about extremists as you do.

How can we, two Kiwis who have never had anything to do with the Middle East, possibly answer for the actions of extremists with whom we have nothing in common other than proclaiming to be Muslim?  Like every other Muslim we know, we choose to follow the progressive, peaceful tenets of Islam, and leave the rest to the annals of a long and tumultuous history.

With biblical literalism still prevalent in many churches, it should be no surprise that Islam also struggles with literalism.  Most Muslims in the West gloss over the violent passages in the Quran in much the same way as Christians disregard the violent passages in the Bible.  Whether consciously or unconsciously, they recognize the need for reform.  But Martin Luther’s reform of Christianity didn’t come until the sixteenth century.  Islam, a faith 600 years younger, is now, in the twenty-first century, grappling with the same need.  Progressive western Muslims will certainly lead the way.

And if you haven’t managed to hear it by now, then hear it this time:  Yes, we are Muslim, and yes, we categorically denounce ISIS and all forms of terror.

The advice-to-young-people racket is utterly shameless. Even William Burroughs gave in to the temptation, proving that the best advice-to-young-people may be to ignore all advice-to-young-people. Unless, of course, it comes from The Stranger, Seattle’s ornery, Pulitzer-prize-winning alternative weekly, whose annual back-to-school issue confronts incoming freshpeople with all manner of weird, ironic, and occasionally even useful advice on life, love, and… oh yes, sex.

This year, they decided to go for broke and include religion, and who else would they turn to but the Accidental Theologist? — who obligingly came up with ten questions for “young people” to ask if they’re trying to choose a religion:

I don’t remember ordering J.M.Ledgard’s novel Submergence from the library.  I do remember getting the email that it had arrived, and wondering what it was. Then picking it up a couple of days later, looking at the cover — “huh?” — and asking myself if I even wanted to read it.

I still know nothing about Ledgard aside from the capsule bio on  the back cover:  Born in Scotland, lives in Africa, political and war correspondent for The Economist.  Nothing, that is, but the fact that he’s written an astonishingly ambitious, beautiful, and haunting novel.  So much so that the moment I finished it — and I mean the precise moment, with no hesitation — I turned back to the first page and began reading it again, with even greater admiration.

The ‘plot’ is simple enough:  a man and a woman meet in a French hotel, have a brief affair, and continue thinking of each other as they go on with their separate lives.  He is an intelligence agent gathering information on militant extremists in Somalia.  She is a deep-ocean scientist obsessed with the strange life forms in the deep-water fissures of the earth’s mantle.  He is captured by jihadist fighters, badly beaten, held hostage.  She dives in a submersible 3,000 meters under the north Atlantic.  Separate lives indeed, yet somehow, and with extraordinary grace, Ledgard pulls them together into a magnificent evocation of the complexity of life on earth, human and otherwise.  And of its intense fragility.

Life in the deep turns out to be extraordinarily stable.  Life on the surface, terrifyingly unstable.  The hardship of Somalia comes as alive here as the shimmering life forms (I had to look up ‘salp’ on Wikipedia) in the hadopelagic — ‘hado’ from Hades, the deepest depths.  The jihadist captors are drawn with rare understanding even as there’s no stinting on their cruelty (including an all-too-vivid scene in which a young teenage girl who has been raped is stoned to death for adultery).

Here’s an extract from toward the end:

We cannot talk with definition about our souls, but it is certain that we will decompose… What is likely is that sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents, or pools of molten sulphur on which the tonguefish skate.

You will be in Hades, the staying place of the spirits of the dead.  You will be drowned in obliviion, the River Lethe, swallowing water to erase all memory.  It will not be the nourishing womb you began your life in.  It will be a submergence.  You will take your place in the boiling-hot fissures, among the teeming hordes of nameless microorganisms that mimic no forms because they are the foundation of all forms.  In your reanimation you will be aware only that you are a fragment of what once was, and are no longer dead.  Sometimes this will be an electric feeling, sometimes a sensation of the acid you eat, or the furnace under you.  You will burgle and rape other cells in the dark for a seeming eternity, but nothing will come of it.  Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity.  It is stable.  Whereas you are a tottering tower, so young in evolutionary terms, and addicted to consciousness.

And as an eerie footnote to this, here’s Ledgard in an interview last year on the blog of The New Yorker.  The novel “juxtaposes land with ocean and enlightenment with fanaticism,” he acknowledged. “I felt impelled to write it in this way, but it is odd, I can see that. But sometimes life is even odder. It was the strangest moment for me when Osama bin Laden was killed and buried at sea. Everything came together in the abyss. I have often thought about it since, not just bin Laden’s weighted corpse sinking down to the sea floor, but also the processes done on his body, the creatures, the crushing dark, and that’s what I am talking about — there is another world in our world.”

Penguin Books India has been forced to recall and possibly destroy all copies of this book — The Hindus: an alternative history, by Wendy Doniger — in order to settle a lawsuit brought about by a fundamentalist Hindu group that says the book over-eroticizes the religion.

In case you are wondering, Wendy Doniger is not exactly a sensationalist.  She’s the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School (and despite that formidable title, writes well).

What she does do is trace the many strands of Hinduism, and argue that “the greatness of Hinduism — its vitality, earthiness, and vividness — lies precisely in many of those idiosyncratic qualities that some Hindus today are ashamed of and would deny.”

The basis of the lawsuit was not that Doniger’s book was wrong.  It was that it hurt the group’s feelings (see the quote above, from page 2).  It didn’t present Hinduism the way they wanted it presented. I’ve heard this same argument from fundamentalist Muslims about both my books on Islam, to which the only sensible response, since I’m neither Muslim nor fundamentalist, is “But of course not!”.  Such arguments leave no room for anything but what’s politely called “devotional literature” — the apparently endless stream of pious pamphlets read only by “true believers” of whatever faith. Though I often wonder if even they have the patience.

The logical conclusion of the hurt-feelings argument is that publication of anything at all — books, newspapers, websites, whatever — should be banned, because someone somewhere may have so little faith that their feelings can be hurt by even the most empathetic outsider eye.

Doniger’s response to all this on Facebook was gracious yet to the point:

I was, of course, angry and disappointed to see this happen, and I am deeply troubled by what it foretells for free speech in India in the present, and steadily worsening, political climate. And as a publisher’s daughter, I particularly wince at the knowledge that the existing books (unless they are bought out quickly by people intrigued by all the brouhaha) will be pulped. But I do not blame Penguin Books, India. Other publishers have just quietly withdrawn other books without making the effort that Penguin made to save this book. Penguin India, took this book on knowing that it would stir anger in the Hindutva ranks, and they defended it in the courts for four years, both as a civil and as a criminal suit.

Penguin India, I should add as a declaration of interest, also distributes The First Muslim, which elsewhere has been subject to a quieter and less newsworthy form of censorship, as happened when the Turkish-language publisher backed out a month before publication for fear of a fundamentalist backlash.  But at least he committed to publish in the first place.  In other countries, publishers and literary-festival organizers have quietly refrained from expressing any interest, cowed not by specific threats, but by their fear of possible threats, and the book, like so many others that do not meet the requirements of conservative piety, appears to be semi-officially banned from public sale in most Arabic-speaking countries. (I say “appears to be,” because there’s no website called BannedInTheMiddleEast.com where one can get a complete picture.)

This is how censorship works: it creates an atmosphere in which good people are afraid to publish, speak, listen, read, even think. When it succeeds, it brings everyone into line.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t succeed. Not any more. Not when you can order books online, or listen to talks on YouTube, or access blogs, newspaper articles, opinion pieces from all over the world.  

So guess what:  Doniger’s book is now Amazon’s #1 bestselling book about Hinduism. The fundamentalists seem to have forgotten one basic element of publishing:  sex sells.  By insisting that the book be pulped because they think it too erotic, they’ve managed to give it a huge sales boost.

And that is the kind of unintended consequence I adore.

I am distressed by this news report in today’s Detroit Free Press.  The first four paragraphs:

A group of metro Detroiters visiting Saudi Arabia for the annual Muslim pilgrimage said they were attacked and threatened with death last week by a group of Sunni men from Australia because they are Shias, a minority sect within Islam.

One of the members of the group was strangled until his face turned blue and women in the group were threatened with rape, according to people who witnessed the attack last week. They allege that authorities in Saudi Arabia did not take their complaints seriously and deleted a video one of them had made of the incident.

A U.S. State Department official told the Free Press on Monday: “We are concerned by reports that a group of U.S. citizens was attacked … at a campsite for Hajj pilgrims located outside of Mecca. We take these reports seriously and are committed to the protection of U.S. citizens traveling and residing abroad.”

The Embassy of Saudi Arabia did not return a reporter’s calls or an e-mail seeking comment. The State Department official said the hajj and interior ministries in Saudi Arabia “have confirmed that they are investigating” the incident.

In this instance, my distress is more than a matter of principle.  I have been a guest of Imam Qazwini and the Islamic Center of America (the largest mosque in North America), and admire their openness, their warmth, their calm devotion, and their civic involvement.  I have made dear friends there, people with whom I can talk deeply across all so-called divides of religion/affiliation/belief.

And this distress is only further deepened by the language used in the Detroit Free Press article:  the “say they were” in the headline, and the repeated use of the word “allege” in the body of the piece, as though there were some doubt on the veracity of Imam Qazwini and his group of pilgrims.  Such language only adds insult to the injury of what actually happened.

In principle, the hajj is when all Muslims come together, when all distinctions of class, ethnicity, denomination, and even gender fall away.  But the ultra-conservative and intellectually primitive Salafis — a movement very close to Saudi wahhabism — will have none of this.  It’s their way or no way.  Their Islam or no Islam.  Like all fundamentalist extremists, of all faiths, they see open minds and open hearts as a threat.  And respond with violence.

Expect a far more moderate response from the Islamic Center of North America than I am capable of.  And expect nothing from the Saudi “investigation.”  Year by year, as glitzy multi-million-dollar high-rises go up around the Kaaba itself, the Saudis bear ever greater resemblance to the seventh-century elite who profited from pilgrimage in the pre-Islamic years, charging exorbitant fees for everything from water to access to holy sites.  In fact an essential part of Muhammad’s Quranic message protested exactly this.

But even that pre-Islamic elite insisted on preserving the pilgrimage as a time of absolute non-violence.

What, then, does the Saudi tolerance of Salafi intolerance make them?

Under the heading Disappointing But Not Exactly Surprising:

There will no Turkish edition of The First Muslim.  My Turkish publisher received a reader’s report on the book from an un-named “academic member of Islamic history” at the Faculty of Theology at Marmara University, and today emailed to say that “The report showed more than a few aspects about your book which, considering the current political situation, might not be desirable and welcomed in Turkey.  I am apologetic to tell you that our company has decided not to proceed with your book.”

Since the book had already been translated and was ready for publication next month, this is a decision that comes at some cost to the publisher.

Here’s the upshot of the report:

The work seems successful in general.  However it has some lack of knowledge and misinformation.  Besides, it has an attitude imputing the prophet Mohamed and Muslims especially when it comes to Jews… The book is the product of a serious labor.  Nonetheless it is concluded that the translation of the book to Turkish is not appropriate when it is considered lack of information mentioned above and negative comments which are sometimes beyond the purpose and sometimes understood to be made consciously.”

The full report is here.  It seems I should have simply skipped over the tension between the early Muslims and the Jewish tribes of Medina, which culminated in the massacre of the men of the small Qureyz (Qurayza) tribe, and was, the academic reader argues, the fault of the Jews themselves.  (This argument is very familiar to me, since I’ve debated it many times with fundamentalist-leaning Muslims, both in public and in private.  I am equally familiar with most of the other points raised by “the academic member” — though the one about Jesus having or not having a father struck me as particularly picayune.)  The real complaint, of course, is that the book is not a hagiography, and does not conform to the requirements of piety.

As the publisher wrote, this is a political decision.  These are edgy times in Turkey, where Prime Minister Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party seem intent on deepening the instititutionalization of Islam despite strong secular resistance.  Three months ago, Taksim Square was the epicenter of the secular/religious clash.    Inevitably, my book falls into that same volatile intersection of religion and politics.  That’s the realm I’ve been exploring for years now, and will continue to explore.

Just not, it seems, in Turkish.

“You’re a Muslim, so why would you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”

That’s how Fox News’ Lauren Green began her challenge to Reza Aslan’s right to write about Jesus.  The video of her interview with him instantly went viral (in fact, several accidental theologists sent it on to me — thank you!).  It inspired several spoofs, including this one here.  Aslan’s book, Zealot (my San Francisco Chronicle review of it here) was already #2 on the Amazon bestseller list;  by the next morning, it was #1.

“Gotcha, J. K. Rowling!” Aslan responded.

But aside from the small detail that Christianity was founded by Paul, not Jesus, Green’s question may not be such a terrible one after all.

I’ve been there, and often still am — from the other side, as it were.  The first time conservative Muslims asked why I’d decided to write a biography of Muhammad, I spluttered in amazement: “But you don’t think he’s worth writing about?  This man who carved such a huge profile in history?  He’s your prophet, how can you even ask?”

It quickly became clear that this was not a sufficient answer, and that the question was not about my decision as a writer.  It was about my decision as a Jew.  Just as Green focused on Aslan’s Muslimness and assumed that his real agenda was to attack Christianity, so certain conservative Muslims focused on my Jewishness and assumed that my real agenda must have been to attack Islam.

Let’s get one thing straight right away:  just as many mainstream Christians have welcomed Aslan’s book, so many mainstream Muslims have welcomed mine.  It’s the conservatives we’re talking about here, those who cannot tolerate any deviance from received orthodoxy.

In the context of Fox’s Islamophobic politics on the one hand, and of the Israel-Palestine conflict on the other, perhaps such suspicion is inevitable.  But since Aslan’s book and mine both draw on scholarly resources but were written for general audiences, there’s another less obvious factor.  Most devout believers are unaware of the vast body of academic research on the early history of Christianity and Islam.  Used to hagiographic or devotional literature, they see any more dispassionate view of their revered figures as an assault on their belief.  Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection.

But what if Green had interviewed Aslan not with the desire to criticize, but with the desire to know?  What if my conservative Muslim questioners had been more curious than judgmental?  Without such knee-jerk defensiveness, the question of what a non-Christian brings to the study of Jesus or a non-Muslim to that of Muhammad becomes an interesting one – a question, that is, about the value of the ‘outsider’ point of view.

Precisely because he or she does not come from a place of belief, what seems obvious to the insider is not at all so to the outsider.  It demands to be explored, to be understood on the multiple psychological, cultural, and political levels on which history takes place.  Done well, this process can create important new insights into otherwise received versions of history, opening up fresh ways of seeing and understanding, and finding new relevance in old stories.

As with Jesus, so with Muhammad:  by placing him in the world he experienced, in the full context of place and time, politics and culture – the ‘outsider’ biographer honors the man by honoring his lived experience.

Historical reality doesn’t detract from faith;  it humanizes it.  And when gross inhumanities are committed every day in the name of one faith or another, that alone should surely be more than enough reason to write.

Don’t dare think in Saudi Arabia.

And don’t even dream of having an opinion.

This AP report is a pretty good indication of what would happen there to The Accidental Theologist:

The founder of a liberal Web site has been sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes after angering Islamic authorities in Saudi Arabia, the newspaper Al Wattan reported Tuesday. The site created by Raif Badawi urged Saudis to share opinions about the role of religion in the country, which follows a strict form of Islam. According to Al Wattan, a judge in the Red Sea port of Jidda imposed the sentences but dropped charges of apostasy, which could have brought a death sentence.

Here’s an earlier report from Amnesty International on  his case:

Raif Badawi, founder of a website for political and social debate, “Saudi Arabian Liberals”, has been detained since 17 June 2012 in a prison in Briman, in Jeddah. He was charged with “setting up a website that undermines public security” and ridiculing Islamic religious figures. His trial began in June 2012 in the District Court in Jeddah, and was marred by irregularities. According to his lawyer, the original trial judge was replaced by a judge who had advocated that Raif Badawi be punished for “apostasy”. His lawyer contested the judge’s impartiality in the case.

The charges against Raif Badawi relate to a number of articles he has written, including one about Valentine’s Day – the celebration of which is prohibited in Saudi Arabia. He was accused of ridiculing Saudi Arabia’s Commission on the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (also known as the religious police) in the conclusion of his article. The charges against him also mention his failure to remove articles by other people on his website, including one insinuating that the al-Imam Mohamed ibn Saud University had become “a den for terrorists”. On 17 December, the District Court in Jeddah referred the case to the General Court in Jeddah, recommending that he should be tried for “apostasy”. On 22 December the General Court in Jeddah had Raif Badawi sign documents to enable his trial for “apostasy” to proceed.

On 21 January the General Court sent the case back to the District Court stating that they did not have jurisdiction to review his case and that they had found that he had not insulted Islam and therefore it did not amount to an “apostasy” charge. The general prosecutor however is still insisting that Raif Badawi be tried for apostasy. The case is currently before an appeal court to determine whether the case should be heard by the District Court in Jeddah or another tribunal, in particular the General Court in Jeddah, to which it was previously referred.

Amnesty International considers Raif Badawi to be a prisoner of conscience. Act now to call on the authorities for his immediate and unconditional release.

The talk I gave at TEDGlobal twelve days ago just went live!

Here it is — on Muhammad, the relationship between faith and doubt, and the travesty of fundamentalism:

Anything you can do to forward/repost/facebook/tweet/email/tumble/reddit/generally-spread-the-word will be wonderful.  Let’s stop being the far-too-silent majority!

Shortcut url is http://on.ted.com/Hazleton

————————————————–

[In case you missed it, my earlier TEDx talk on reading the Quran is here.]

I just now saw the cellphone video of one of the killers in Woolwich. It is pure barbarism. And all the more weirdly so for taking place on a busy London street, in front of passers-by, just a few yards from a school.

Blood all over his hands, and all over the cleaver and the knife he’s so casually brandishing. None of the distance of guns here, let alone drones. No attempt to hide, or to flee. Instead, a rant into the camera “justifying” what he and his friend have just done: run down a man and then hacked him to death. In the name, good god, of God.

I’ll get to that in a moment, but first, what strikes me is the way this man exults over what he’s done. He’s pacing back and forth like an animal after a kill, like a predator — a lion, say, or even a “domestic” cat when it catches a bat — proud of what he’s done, showing off, all but beating his chest.

And guarding his kill, keeping everyone away from “it.”  “No man comes near this body,” witnesses report his friend saying, but you can see a woman calling them on that, then bending down to try to help the victim, then standing up to challenge them over what they’ve done.  That’s courage.

As for the so-called quote from the Quran, he’s in fact in direct opposition to it.  Sura 5, verse 45, specifically states that an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth no longer applies. It says that “previously” — in the Torah — “we ordained an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (see Exodus 21:24) but now, it continues, “if anyone freely forgoes this right, it shall count as an act of expiation for him.”

No expiation for these two men. They are vicious murderers, pure and simple. Nothing more, and nothing less.

And that terrifying ignorance, that self-justifying righteousness, that pure bloody-minded and bloody-handed inhumanity, is the enemy of us all.

That headline isn’t mine — it’s courtesy of Stephen Colbert, the Comedy Central host of The Colbert Report, and a practicing Catholic.  His word for Ratzinger/Benedict’s resignation: “popectomy.”

I find myself in the same bind as Colbert.  It seems like I should have all sorts of incredibly pertinent things to say about Ratzi’s helicoptering off into the twilight, but the papacy has become so impertinent that the only real question that concerns me is this:

What happens to the nifty red shoes?

Prada shoes, they say.  Ratzi’s favorites.  To be left behind as he he now declares himself just “a humble pilgrim.”  (Gagging sounds heard offstage.)

How humble?  Well, since he’s said he’ll live out his remaining days “hidden from the world,” I’m assuming he means “hidden” in the same sense as the Mahdi, the messiah figure of Shiism, who disappeared into a cave twelve centuries ago and who will return at the end of days.

Of course Ratzi has to give up the red shoes.  Who could hide in red shoes?

Especially since he has such a lot to hide from.

What’s really puzzling is that anyone still takes the papacy seriously.  The media are hyping up the election of a new pope for obvious reasons.  Men in fancy dress, an electoral race, cloaked ambition, secret balloting, colored smoke — it all makes for good theater.  The fact that so many of those involved in all this are deeply corrupt gives an extra thrill to it all.  Whether it’s actual pedophilia or “merely” covering it up;  closet homosexuality by public homophobes;  unveiled misogyny displayed in the inquisition of nuns;  plummeting numbers of priests unable to marry a woman, let alone a man;  and now, a secret report on a sex and blackmail scandal within the Vatican walls — how could the media resist such a totally sick soap opera?

What we’re seeing is a huge fundamentalist institution deep into the process of self-destruction.  It’s imploding right in front of us.  The weasel has definitely popped, and the infallible is about as fallible as it can get.

If the Roman Catholic church doesn’t undergo thorough reform, right now, predicts the famed Swiss theologian Hans Kung, it will “fall into a new ice age and run the danger of shrinking into an increasingly irrelevant sect.”  He cites a recent poll in Germany showing that 85% of Catholics support marriage for priests, and 75% support ordination of women.

Religious historian Garry Wills’ new book Why Priests? – A Failed Tradition goes further and advocates abolishing the priesthood altogether.  Not only did Christianity begin without a priesthood, he points out, but it actively opposed it.  And rank-and-file priests are speaking up too, like Tony Flannery in Dublin, suspended by the Vatican for refusing to adhere to church orthodoxy on contraception and homosexuality, or Roy Bourgeois in the US, who was excommunicated for supporting the ordination of women.

But all this is far too pertinent.  So let’s take refuge in the impertinent and get back to the issue at hand:  what’ll happen to those hand-made red shoes?  Will they be bronzed like baby booties?  Will they be displayed in an air-conditioned glass relics case?   Will they be auctioned off on eBay?

Fundamentalists of all religious stripes, take note:  this is how imposed orthodoxy ends — not with a bang, but with a red-bootied whimper.

Great conversation on Al Jazeera’s The Stream yesterday:  I was with Lisa Fletcher and Anushay Hossain in the studio — I love her blog Anushay’s Point  — and Omid Safi, Nouman Ali Khan, and Michael Muhammad Knight joined in on Skype.  Plus an excellent video comment from Hind Makki in Chicago, which led to a lively post-show discussion, starting at the 25.15 mark, on reclaiming the narrative from both ‘Islamist’ extremists and Islamophobic bigots.

It’s a good thing Nouman Ali Khan wasn’t in the studio, because I’d only have totally embarrassed him by leaping up to give him a huge hug.  I really do have to figure out how to be cool on TV…

Like I say, hang around for the post-show segment — the silent majority is silent no longer!

[youtube=http://youtu.be/mtbsSXe6f2k]

Oh what a bandwagon that noxious little anti-Islamic video has set in motion.  There seems to be no end of people eager to hop on it for personal and political gain, no matter how many lives it costs.

There’s Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, reeling from backlash against his support of Bashar al-Assad’s ongoing massacre of Syrian civilians.  What a perfect opportunity to deflect criticism by calling for more and larger protests — not against the Syrian regime, but against America, in the name of “defending the Prophet.” Except that’s not what he’s doing. To cite the headline of Nick Kristof’s NYT column today, he’s exploiting the Prophet.

There’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she of the soft voice and the compelling back story, who just can’t stop talking about what she calls “the Muslim mentality.” (Pop quiz:  if someone who generalizes about a stereotyped “Jewish mentality” is an anti-Semite, what’s someone who generalizes about a stereotyped “Muslim mentality”?  Click here if you don’t know.)  Hirsi Ali told her story yet again in Newsweek‘s “Muslim Rage” issue (to which the best answer was the often hilarious #MuslimRage meme on Twitter).  Strange to think that the rapidly failing Newsweek was once a reputable publication.

There’s the sophomoric French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose idea of cutting-edge humor is cartoons of politicians with their pants down around the ankles.  This week they ran similar cartoons of Muhammad in order to inject some life into their plumetting circulation by creating controversy.  Oh, and as a beacon of free speech, of course.

There’s Pakistan’s Minister of Railways — the man responsible for the system’s chronic debt, constant strikes, and devastating crashes. What better way to distract people from his total failure than to make himself out to be a “defender of Islam” by offering a $100,000 bounty for the life of the director of that inane video?  There’s nothing quite like incitement to murder to cover up your own corruption.

There’s more — there’s always more of such people, including of course the miserable little bigots who made the video in the first place —  but that’ll do for now. Because none of this reflects the real Muslim rage:  the palpable outrage not only at the killing of Ambassador Stevens, but also at the blatant attempt of Islamic extremists (and their Islamophobic counterparts) to hijack Islam.

Listen, for instance, to Egyptian activist Mahmoud Salem, aka Sandmonkey, who was one of the voices of 2011’s “Arab spring” in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.  Violent protests over the video are “more damaging to Islam’s reputation than a thousand so-called ‘Islam-attacking’ films,” he writes, and calls on Egyptians to condemn Islamic fundamentalists as “a bunch of shrill, patriarchal, misogynistic, violent extremists who are using Islam as a cover” for political ambition.

Twitter is spilling over with similar protests and disgust from Muslims all over the world at the way the “defenders of Islam” are destroying it from within.  And this disgust was acted on in Benghazi on Friday when 50,000 Libyans marched to demand the disarming of the extremist militias suspected of attacking the US consular buildings, then stormed the headquarters of two of the biggest militias and forced them out of town.  Two other Islamist militias instantly disbanded.  Yes, if you unite, you can face down the thugs, even well-armed ones.  This, of course, is not something you’ll see on the cover of Newsweek.

As Libyans, Egyptians, Tunisians, Yemenis, and with especial pain, Syrians know, the “Arab spring” is not a matter of a single season.  The moniker itself is a product of Western media shorthand, of the desire to label a “story” and assign it a neat, self-contained timeline.  But this was no mere story for the people living it.  It was and still is the beginning of a long process.  But one that once begun, cannot be undone.

All over the Middle East, real voices are making themselves heard, unmediated by government control whether in the name of “security” or of an extremist travesty of Islam.

And this is surely the real manifestation of that much abused principle:  freedom of expression.

Could that pernicious video have ended up working against itself?  Could this be the tipping point for both Islamophobia and its mirror image, militant “Islamist” extremism?  Is this where both are revealed for the ugly con game they really are?

Perhaps the one good thing about the video is that it is so upfront in its ugliness.  It’s no longer just you and I saying it;  it’s also the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, whose anger was palpable:  “To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible. It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.”

Now we know who made the video:  a convicted con man, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, indicted on multiple charges of bank fraud and check-kiting.  And he may indeed end up back in jail, since by posting his work to the Internet he violated the terms of his probation.  That’s little consolation, of course, for the multiple deaths he’s caused — at least a dozen so far.  And none at all for those who don’t understand that the principle of freedom of speech, no matter how hard it is to accept, applies to all. Under a different administration, the same principle by which they demand that he be jailed could then be turned around and applied to them.

But we know more.  We know that the protests against the video have been used and manipulated by Al Qaeda and Salafi types, who manipulated the sincere outrage and insult of protestors to further their own political agenda and try to destabilize newly elected governments.  In the process, they also furthered the agenda of their Islamophobic blood brothers, providing graphic images of Muslims doing everything Islamophobes expect — rioting, burning, killing.  But for the first time, all countries involved seem to have clearly recognized this and given voice to it, perhaps none more perfectly than Hillary Clinton: “”The people of Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia did not trade the tyranny of a dictator for the tyranny of a mob.”

We know that Twitter is alive with condemnations of the violence from Libyans, Tunisians, Egyptians, and more.  Mainstream Muslims, both religious and secular, will no longer tolerate being intimidated into silence by those who claim to speak in their name for a violent, extremist travesty of Islam.  They are speaking out in unprecedented volume and numbers.

And we know this:  the new governments of Libya and Yemen instantly condemned the violence and apologized for the death of Ambassador Stevens.  In the words of the president of the Libyan National Congress, it was “an apology to the United States and the Arab people, if not the whole world, for what happened.  We together with the United States government are on the same side, standing in a united front in the face of these murderous outlaws.”  Residents of Tripoli and Benghazi staged demonstrations to condemn the attack on the Benghazi consulate and to express their sorrow at the death of Stevens, who was widely admired for his support of the revolution that ousted Qaddafi.

Even the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt finally realized that this was not a matter of defending Islam against outside enemies, but of defending it against its own worst enemies on the inside.

All this, it seems to me, is new.  As is the reaction of the US administration, led by Obama and Clinton — calm, measured, determined, and in the spirit of Ambassador Stevens himself,  the opposite of the heavy-handed American imperialism of the past.  Imagine if this had happened under Bush, or under Romney, and shudder at how they would have reacted.

Could it be, finally, that more and more people are getting it?  That both the Islamists and the Islamophobes are losing?  That sanity, however high the cost in lives, might actually prevail?

Once again, the extremists have fed each other.  Once again, with other people’s blood.

The blood is that of one of the best friends the new Libya could have had:  US Ambassador Christopher Stevens, killed yesterday, the evening of 9/11, along with three of his staff as they tried to evacuate employees of the American consulate in Benghazi.  The evacuation was necessary because protestors had been whipped into violence by a 14-minute farce of a video attacking the prophet Muhammad.  Or, as now seems possible, the protest was used as an excuse for a planned attack, since RPGs and automatic weapons were involved.

Al-Qaeda-type extremists are apparently the ones who pulled the trigger, using the insult to Islam as an excuse. But they could not have done so without the help of their partners — their Jewish and Christian brothers-in-arms right here in the United States. That’s who provided the ammunition, in the form of a shoddily crude and absurdly amateurish “movie trailer” portraying Muhammad as a fraud and his early supporters as a bunch of goons.

I’m deliberately not linking to the video here since I refuse to link to such tripe. This isn’t an insult to Islam;  it’s an insult to human intelligence. If you feel sufficiently masochistic, you can find it on YouTube by typing in the title, ‘Muslim Innocence’ (the director’s idea of irony).

You’ll see that it’s made by ignorant fanatics for ignorant fanatics. Nobody else would pay it the blindest bit of attention. In fact nobody else did (even the director, an Israeli-American who goes by the name of Sam Bacile, which may or may not be a pseudonym, admits that the whole movie has been shown only once, to a nearly empty movie theater in California). Nobody else, that is, until Florida’s tinpot Quran-burning pastor Terry Jones — the one who once hanged President Obama in effigy and will apparently do anything to get himself back in the news — decided to showcase the trailer as part of his annual 9/11 Islamophobic rant.

I’ll write more about this very soon (I’m just back from a trip, and jet-lagged). But for now, two things:

1. Rest in peace, Christopher Stevens.

2. As for Terry Jones and the man calling himself Sam Bacile: if such a thing as hell exists, may you both rot in it, alongside your blood brothers in Al Qaeda.