Arab News Blog

-”Blessed is Allah” and “This is what GOD has given me (Ma Sha Allah)” Artist: Baker Masad

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One of the major problems with the blogosphere in which I dip is the ease with which the most ludicrous and obnoxious statements can spread. Witness Mark Williams, the blogging head of the so-called Tea Party, who ranted against a proposed new mosque in lower Manhattan by calling Allah as worshipped by Muslims a “monkey god.” There are many who have denigrated Islam, most often claiming that Allah started out as a moon god in Mecca. But Mr. Williams probably confused Islam with Hinduism, only to compound his ignorance by issuing an apology to Hindus for accidentally offending Hanuman, who is indeed a monkey god. Here is the “apology”:

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Husni Mubarak has been on a whirlwind European tour this week and was in Italy today, and during a press conference he was asked about the succession:

“Who knows? Who knows? Only God knows who will be my successor,” Mubarak said in English when he was asked who would prefer as a successor.

When the reporter repeated his question, Mubarak pointed to the sky and replied: “Whoever God prefers, I prefer.”

It doesn’t add much to our understanding of his intentions, but it does remind him that this question will not be going away soon.

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Pakistani authorities doing the hard police work in Karachi of attempting to trace the network of friends and contacts of attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad have come up empty-handed. There is nothing in Shahzad’s background that links him to the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP or Taliban Movement of Pakistan), based in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Pakistani police found one person in Shahzad’s circle, a relative of his wife’s, who in turn had ties to a fundamentalist group. Muhammad Rehan is a “not very active” member of the radical organization, Jaish-i Muhammadi. He and Shahzad traveled last year to the Pashtun northwest, though this trip is unremarkable because their family is Pashtuns and they are from that region. Rumors that Rehan had been arrested or that he had long lived near the radical mosque turn out not to be true, according to the Pakistani periodical, “The Nation”.

Pakistani police are unable to find any link between Rehan and the Pakistani Taliban, and can’t even find evidence of active membership in the Jaish-i Muhammad. Nor is there evidence that he introduced Shahzad to the Pakistani Taliban. Shahzad is apparently a braggart (ego inflation and delusions of grandeur are typical of terrorists) and his claim that he received training in a Taliban camp is not believable given that he had not the slightest idea how to construct a simple truck bomb. If there is one thing the Pakistani Taliban are good at, as guest op-ed contributor Stephan Salisbury noted here on Monday, it is blowing up things. In fact, the results of the intensive Pakistani investigation vindicate Salisbury’s skepticism about claims made by civilian US officials concerning this case. Informed Pakistani writer Rahim Yusufzai exhibits the same skepticism.

Gen. David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander, said last week that Shahzad was a lone wolf vaguely inspired by the Pakistani Taliban.

Other reports say that Shahzad was upset about US drone strikes on Pakistani territory, which often kill civilians.

Since Shahzad appears to live in a fantasy world, Attorney General Eric Holder was unwise to believe the tales he spun about professional training in terrorist camps of the North-West Frontier.

Why have civilian officials of the Obama administration been so eager to accept that Shahzad, a single unbalanced individual, was part of the TTP? Pakistan’s Urdu press thinks it is because the Times Square near-incident potentially gives the US leverage over Pakistani military policy in the northwest. Pakistani authorities have been willing to go after the Pakistani Taliban groups and tribes that have broken with Islamabad, such as those in Bajaur, South Waziristan, and Orakzai. But the Haqqani Network in North Waziristan still operates with impunity, though it is a) more dangerous to US troops in Afghanistan than the TTP and b) closer to Arab al-Qaeda operatives in the FATA.

On May 11, Jang‘s Mushtaq Ahmed, ‘Deploring that the United States has been persistently overlooking the effective operation being carried out by Pakistan in insurgency-hit areas of the country, the article says: “The real thing that the United States wants Pakistan to do is to launch military operation in North Waziristan. However, the Armed Forces of Pakistan have already refused to do so because they have completed their operation in the area and it is fully under their control. However, the timid and terrified Americans see the Taliban in their dreams as well. Their scare does not allow them to heave a sigh of relief. They want Pakistan to destroy its northern areas. Even if the Pakistani forces, God forbid, do so, even then the Americans will not be pacified and they will not be contented.” ‘(trans. courtesy USG Open Source Center).

The Pakistani civilians and officers in control of the government have been reluctant to go after the Haqqani network, because it is otherwise a Pakistani asset in projecting continued influence for Islamabad in the Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke remarkably harshly of Pakistan in this regard, saying that there would be ‘very severe consequences’ of an attack in the US were traced back to that country. Nawa-e Waqt fulminated on May 11, “The statement of Hillary Clinton is not only a flagrant interference in our internal affairs, but also a threat to us in clear terms. Only a formal reaction to it will not suffice, but our government and military leadership will have to tell the United States in emphatic terms that it should not consider us an easy prey. If it tries to attack our sovereignty, it will have to crack the hard nut. It is time to pull ourselves out of the war of the US interests, and our rulers should neither express any compulsion in this regard, nor should make any delay in reciprocating because for us, both the United States and India are same so far as their enmity for Pakistan is concerned.” (USG/OSC trans.) Clinton also again trotted out her allegation that someone somewhere inside the Pakistani government knows where Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are, but is refusing to tell the US. (She seems to admit that this grave charge is speculation on her part). It is possible that she is just piling on the Zardari government in hopes of inducing it to finally take on the Haqqani Network.

But Clinton has overdone it, provoking denunciations of herself in the Pakistani senate and throughout the Urdu press. President Obama’s special envoy to that country, Richard Holbrooke, keeps having to maintain that she did not say what she said.

Since Clinton is an experienced public official, it is not possible that she is misspeaking. Rather, she seems willing to risk a downturn in US relations with Pakistan in order to say harsh things publicly that a secretary of state would usually utter behind closed doors. Why is she behaving in this erratic way?

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I received some snarky message after the Shahzad attempted bombing in Times Square, asking if I were still standing behind the idea of Islam as a religion of peace. It was a stupid comment. Classical Islamic law forbids murder and forbids terrorism, and it forbids aggression. Whether that makes it a religion of peace is a matter for debate; it isn’t my diction. Medieval Islam, like medieval and even modern Christianity (cf. the Portuguese and Spanish Empires’ ‘God, glory and gold’), was used as an imperial ideology, sometimes for conquest states– but that use of it was contrary to the verses of the Qur’an instructing believers not to commit aggression and to agree to peace treaties with others who seek them.

But in any case, no contemporary Muslim-majority country I can think of would launch a war of naked aggression purely on an Islamic basis. In fact, few wars of naked aggression have been initiated by Muslim-majority countries in the past few decades. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980 was an act of aggression on a self-proclaimed Islamic state by a secular Arab nationalist one, and premised on Arab nationalism, not Islam. Violence in the Levant is usually at least framed as a response to Israeli aggression. The issue of Morocco in the Western Sahara is national and territorial, and both parties are Muslim.

That is, few self-consciously “Islamic” polities have behaved as illegally and wrongly as did George W. Bush when he invaded Iraq on false pretenses and in the absence of an attack by Iraq on the US.

The people who say that “Islam” authorizes aggressive violence are a fringe of cultists and typically non-state actors. Those kind of people, you have in any society. The Hutaree in Michigan are a Christian sect that allegedly makes similar assertions. And you have the Christian fundamentalist Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda.

So the snarky question was a stupid and uninformed question. But it looks even stupider in the light of the revelation that it was a Senegalese Muslim, Alioune Niass, who discovered the smoking SUV in Times Square and urged a friend to call 911. That is, New Yorkers were saved from that bombing by a Muslim. See this MPAC article. (MPAC is a really great group and non-Muslims worried about bigotry against Muslims really should join it (membership link here).

Niass was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, which noted that he got no recognition for his heroism.

And, the snarky question would look even more stupid in light of the announcement by Gen. David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander in charge of the Greater Middle East and of the struggle against the Pakistani Taliban that Shahzad acted as a lone wolf, not as part of an organized plot. Shahzad is a Pashtun from an elite family (his father had been the equivalent of a two-star general in the Pakistani air force). He had not been a student activist of the Jamaat-i Islami, the fundamentalist party in Pakistan. If he did plot the bombing, he is as likely to have been motivated by Pashtun nationalism as Islam. Pashtuns are an ethnic group in northwest Pakistan, and often feel disadvantaged by the policies of the Punjabi-dominated central government in Islamabad. Even nationalist Pashtuns like the Awami National Party, which now rules the North-West Frontier Province (Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) initially objected to Pakistani military attacks on Pashtun Pakistani Taliban because of ethnic solidarity, not religious.

And, everybody in Pakistan is upset by the continued US Predator drone strikes on Pakistani soil by covert operatives and sometimes by Blackwater-Xe contractors. (President Obama unwisely joked about the Predators last Saturday; it is not a joking matter in Pakistan). I have long worried about the unforeseen consequences of the Predator strikes, which are illegal in international law and done as a covert operation and so outside the US democratic framework. None of this in any way excuses the bloody-minded terrorism plot against civilians in Times Square. But to simple-mindedly equate such violence with “Islam,” the religion of 1.5 billion people or nearly a sixth of humankind, and to blame it on the Qur’an, is, well, I’ll say it again: uninformed and stupid.

PS For Pakistani-American anxieties over being tarred with this brush, see this report from Aljazeera English:

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This is a rant about trying to censor classical literature. If you have no time for a rant you may skip it, but I intend to have my say.

There’s an anecdote about Dr. Samuel Johnson and his dictionary (perhaps from Boswell?) that I can’t Google precisely but that goes something like this: a well-bred lady complained to Dr. Johnson that she was shocked (shocked!) to discover the number of vulgar words that appeared in his dictionary. Dr. Johnson, to whom critics, women, and critical women ranked only a notch above the Scots and two notches above Americans in his hierarchy of contempt, said something to the effect of, “You must have spent a great deal of time looking for them.” This story suggests the anecdote, even if I don’t have it exactly right.

Hisba, roughly “supervision” or “oversight”, is a traditional Muslim principle that relates to enforcement of shari‘a and other elements of Islamic practice. In the classical period, there was public official called the muhtasib, the enforcer of hisba, whose role, while it may have had some elements of the Saudi religious police of today, also included things like making sure that weights and measures in the marketplaces were legitimate.

Today, the concept of hisba is being employed by some Islamists to bring legal cases against things and practices which they consider violate Islamic requirements. They’ve generally had mixed success.

But, as Bikya Masr notes, the latest incident of such an approach in Egypt is particularly attention-getting: a group of lawyers wants to ban the publication in Egypt of the 1001 Nights.

Now, Alf Layla wa Layla is probably the Arabic work best known, for the longest time, in the West, and still revered in some circles in the East (coffeehouse storytellers, folklorists), though it was never considered high literature. Although it sets many of its stories in the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid (and some, like Aladdin, in China or other far places), it has long been recognized that this is Mamluk Egypt in its overall environment: this is the Cairo of Baybars, not the Baghdad of Abu Nuwas. Though the stories originate in India, Iran, and some of the Sindbad stories are direct steals from the Odyssey, in many ways it is a particularly Egyptian work, and the old Bulaq edition remains a standard.

Now, could 1001 Nights be published in Egypt today? Probably not. It contains vulgar language, some (rather sophomoric) sex scenes, a fair amount of immoral activity of one kind or another, because it is a portrait (perhaps an irreplaceable portrait) of life as it was lived by those the storytellers in the coffeehouses actually knew. Of course there’s plenty of mythology, but if you take out all the jinn and the Sinbad stories, you can get a pretty good sense of daily life in some era, probably Mamluk Cairo. (Though al-Mas‘udi, d. 956 AD, well before the Mamluk era mentions the collection by name. Of course the stories evolved over time.)

It’s an enormous collection, and Sir Richard Francis Burton’s 17 volume collection, while almost unreadable compared to the Lane translation, not only includes all the dirty parts but brings in some that weren’t in the original. His notes may help those who come to the work for the first time and are only looking for the “good parts.” (Hint: start with The Porter and the Three Women of Baghdad. It might have shocked my grandmother, but since she grew up on a farm perhaps not.)

I would also note that, in a particular Orwellian note, the lawyers’ group are called the “Association of Lawyers without Restrictions.” I’d hate to meet the Association of Lawyers with Restrictions, but I don’t have an Arabic version so I’m not sure what’s being translated as “restrictions.”

Part of this, of course, is typical of censorship in any language or any culture. Our word “bowdlerize” comes from Thomas Bowdler, who wrote a cleaned-up version of Shakespeare lest the bard lead the young astray. (The “French lesson” in Henry V is, I confess, pretty bawdy, but only funny if you know French, and like most double entendres, only funny if you already know enough to get the joke, and Hamlet’s “country matters” pun is just juvenile, but still easily missed. Bowdler wasted his time since the young only read Shakespeare if they’re forced to.) Others went on to bowdlerize the Bible, lest the young be led astray by God’s suggestive language.

And, of course, there’s the fact that language changes, and yesterday’s taboos become today’s shibboleths, and vice versa. A generation or so ago in America, strong old Anglo-Saxonisms relating to sex and excrement were absolutely taboo except in works by Joyce or D.H. Lawrence, but ethnic slurs were common; today you’ll get in far more trouble for what we euphemize as the “n-word” than for the “f-word.” (I euphemize not from cowardice but to avoid computer filters.) (And do you realize how many people of my parents’ generation read all the way through Ulysses only to discover the bad word’s at the very end?: clever of Joyce I think: he made them read a great story.) But our ancestors were not so squeamish. People would read Chaucer more I suspect if the dirty words were easier to recognize in their Middle English incarnation. Thus, words you could not print in the 19th or early 20th century turn up in Robert Burns, when they were probably common in everyday Lallans Scots.

So also I suspect is the case in 1001 Nights. Most of the “dirty” words are in the classical lexicons and, sometimes, even in the shari‘a codifications. I don’t think there’s a single one I haven’t heard in spoken Arabic, even from elite figures.

I mentioned Burton’s translation of the Nights. Burton had to make up his own dirty words. It was the Victorian era, but he was determined to relate the tales in all their explicitness. It makes it seem even more artificial.

I cannot imagine Egyptian courts will ban a work of Arabic literature that dates from the late Middle Ages. If so, it’s time to get a full Arabic version online.

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Violence, scandal and sex: the media feed us a daily diet and we lap it up like faithful mutts willing to chase any sensationalized bone thrown our way. So when an Iranian cleric says something ludicrous to our sectarian ears, it is all the more newsworthy because it is so entertaining. But after the recent loss of life in Haiti, Chile and China, is it really a laughing matter when a far-off cleric blames natural disasters on God’s wrath over human behavior? Consider an AP story which broke on April 19 and was submitted, ironically, by a reporter with the first name of Scheherezade (her namesake could spin a tale almost to death). Here is the bait:

Iranian cleric: Promiscuous women cause quakes

By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI (AP) – Apr 19, 2010

BEIRUT — A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.

Iran is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, and the cleric’s unusual explanation for why the earth shakes follows a prediction by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that a quake is certain to hit Tehran and that many of its 12 million inhabitants should relocate.

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media.

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I almost missed a holy observation which I missed entirely last year; from the 25th to the 28th of April the Druze make their ziyara or pilgrimage to the tomb of Nabi Shu‘ayb (Nebi Shueib), at Hittin near Tiberias in northern Israel. (Oh, and Hittin is also the namesake of the Horns of Hattin of Crusader fame, but then, in Galilee, history keeps tripping over itself.) Nabi Shu‘ayb is also a Prophet of Islam but plays a smaller role there as the Prophet sent to the Midianites; he is often equated with the Biblical Jethro (Moses’ father-in-law, if you haven’t watched The Ten Commandments lately). (And there’s a rival tomb in Jordan more popular with Muslims than the Druze site in Galilee.)

Today the Druze are divided among Israel, Lebanon, and southern Syria and adjoining parts of Jordan, and generally only those in Israel and the West Bank (and officially some from Jordan) can get to the Prophet’s tomb at his feast. But I almost missed one of the few Druze holidays that is not also a major Muslim feast, so I should belatedly include it here. I’ll be honest: I don’t know precisely why Nabi Shu‘ayb is so big among the Druze, whose religion is largely secret. He’s seen as one of the emanations of God, since the Druze have a bit of Neoplatonism, a bit of Gnosticism, and a whole lot of Isma‘ili batini theology in their (apparent) beliefs. If those terms mean nothing to you, let’s leave that for another day, now that I’ve marked the holiday. Shu‘ayb, apparently, is one of the emanations of the Divine Mind, along with others culminating in the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim, whom most Muslims consider a lunatic but the Druze consider an emanation of the Godhead. As I say, we’ll address Druze beliefs another time. But Shu‘ayb is very big.

We’ll talk about the Druze another time.

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Rather out of it today…

• Jordan confirms rocket strike in Red Sea port city – Haaretz: This is an extremely bizarre story whereby a rocket was fired from Sinai, flew over Eilat, and crashed on Aqaba. 

• ei: Beit Sahour: a microcosm of Israeli colonization

• Israel Bars Grand Mufti Of Jerusalem From Traveling

  Dahlan has VIP pass, but not Mufti.

• Israel expels West Bank Palestinian to Gaza upon release from prison – Haaretz – Israel News

  Perverse.

• Will Goldman Sachs prove greed is God? | Business | The Guardian

  Matt Taibbi.

• P.S.: Is Colloquial Arabic Destroying the (Literary) World? Or Is It the Internet? « Arabic Literature (in English)

  Neither, really.

• Israel First: More on Dr. Lani Kass by Philip Giraldi — Antiwar.com

• Companies Feeling More Pressure to Cut Ties to Iran – NYTimes.com

  More disinvestment from Iran – a good model to apply to Israel.

• Obama Official, Clinton Defend U.S.-Syria Ties – Bloomberg.com

  From non-existent scud allegations.

• No sign Scuds moved to Lebanon: U.S. officials | Reuters

  So can we stop the panic now?q

• Hamas is accused of being moderate – latimes.com

  This is a tough situation for Hamas, another sign of its losing hand.

• “friday-lunch-club”: ‘Al-Hayat’: Russia Supplied Syria With S-300 Missiles

  Air defense systems.

• Al-Ahram Weekly | Egypt | Diplomatic dynamite

  Amr Moussa speak out on domestic politics, and gets pushed back.

• Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Hijacking El-Baradei

  Is ElBaradei the only thing Said writes about these days?

• Former senior diplomat eyes Egypt presidency bid Asharq Alawsat Newspaper (English)

  A former amb. to Riyadh no less.

• Saudi Expert: Arabs Spend 5 Billion Dollars Annually on Magic and Sorcery Asharq Alawsat Newspaper (English)

  No comment – although I think he exagerates.

• Has Chuck Schumer EVER Criticized Israel or its Leadership in the Way He Just Unloaded on Obama?

  No, of course not.

• Comment: Is Palestinian Fatah Spying for Israel? « intelNews.org

  Does the pope protect pedophiles?

• Netanyahu Rebuffs U.S. Plea to Stop Building – WSJ.com

  Bibi gives Obama his no. What next? Also: “U.S. officials said Mr. Netanyahu’s government has been communicating much of its position through the White House’s senior Middle East adviser Dennis Ross, at times bypassing the Obama administration’s special Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell.”

• Bin Laden’s Equine Diplomacy | Stephen M. Walt

  Excellent piece on “strong horse” theory.

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This CNN report on the veiled threat made by an obscure, fringe American Muslim website against the creators of the South Park cartoon shows an extremist saying something completely untrue:

“Yunus Muhammad” says in the interview that the Qur’an instructs Muslims to ‘terrorize the disbelievers.’ It does no such thing. The Qur’an instructs Muslims to live at peace with non-Muslims who are at peace with them.

The verse to which this individual referred was in the chapter of the Spoils (al-Anfal), 8:60:

Wa a`iddu lahum ma istata`tum min quwwatin wamin ribati ‘lkhayli turhibuna bihi `aduwwa Allahi wa`aduwwakum

Which means, “Prepare against them all the power, and all the war horses that you can, whereby to strike fear into the enemies of God and your enemies.”

The context of this verse is the Battle of Badr on March 17, 624 of the Common Era. In the 610s, the pagan Meccans had persecuted the new religion of Islam and ultimately chased Muhammad and the Muslims out of Mecca for preaching the one God. They took refuge in the nearby city of Yathrib, which became known as Medina (i.e. the City [of the Prophet]). The wealthy Meccan polytheists hoped to wipe Islam and the Muslims out, and fought skirmishes with them. The early Muslims riposted by raiding Meccan trading caravans, in hopes of weakening their foe economically. That March in 624, the Meccans sent out their best fighters to protect a caravan. A Muslim force more or less stumbled onto this expedition. Badr, named after a well south of Medina, was the first major battle between the two sides, and the Muslims won it, thus saving themselves from genocide.

So what the Qur’an is saying in 8:60 is that the Muslims should keep a stable of fighting steeds at the ready and let the Meccans know about it, to strike fear into the hearts of an enemy trying to wipe out them and their religion.

The verse does not command any act of ‘terrorism.’ It commands that Muslims attempt to forestall irrational violence against a Muslim state through deterrence. It is defensive in intent.

The verse does not say anything about mere ‘disbelievers’ or non-Muslims. It is warning of the designs of ‘enemies of God,’ i.e. militant and violent anti-Muslims. Moreover, there is no implication that Muslims should act as individuals or vigilantes. Medina was a city-state that the Prophet Muhammad ruled, and he gave the orders. Muslims could not just run off and attack whomever they pleased whenever they pleased. A duly constituted Muslim state was in charge of defense of the community.

So unless Yunus Muhammad can find a group of armed individuals who aim at violently attacking Muslims en masse and trying to wipe out them and their religion, he should stuff a sock in it and go home.

In fact, trying to import terrorism into the Qur’an is an infinitely greater blasphemy than that of any Western cartoonist, and one would hope Muslim groups would get more upset about Yunus Muhammad and ‘Revolution Muslim’ than about an irreverent American tv program.

Unfortunately, along with people with genuinely hurt feelings, there will be some cynical political forces that manipulate Muslim fundamentalists and will try to advance their agendas by taking advantage of this South Park controversy (the show depicted the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit to avoid showing him– which is about as close as South Park gets to deference to religious feelings).

The USG Open Source Center translated the following item from Bahasa Indonesian about the reaction of the Forum Ummat Islam or the Community Forum of Islam, a coalition of fundamentalists formed in 2005 to repress the Ahmadiya movement. (The Ahmadiya is a form of modernist millenarianism that posits a minor prophet (nabi) after Muhammad; most Muslims believe that there is no prophet after Muhammad). The fundamentalist FUI, which includes cults like Hizb ut-Tahrir, the caliphate nuts, is relatively small in Indonesia, where secular parties have done far, far better in recent elections.

‘Indonesia: FUI Seeks Clarification From US Mission on Film ‘Desecrating’ Prophet
Report by Dadan Muhammad: “US Embassy Must Give Clarification on Film Desecrating Prophet”
okezone.com
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Document Type: OSC Translated Text …

Jakarta — Lodging protest against an animation movie showing Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit, the Islamic Followers Forum (FUI [Forum Ummat Islam]) sought a clarification from the US Embassy in Jakarta. “The US Embassy in Indonesia must give a clarification that its government will take strict action against the creator of this animation movie and apologize to all Muslims in the world,” FUI Secretary General Muhammad al-Khaththath told Okezone.com.

According to him, any attempt to portray Prophet Muhammad, including showing him in a bear suit in the animation, is prohibited in Islam. He terms this “desecration against the nobility of Prophet Muhammad.” Followers of Islam all over the world must be hurt by this. “The followers Islamic must protest and the creator has to be punished because it is a humiliation,” he stressed.

The FUI secretary general said that this humiliation might give rise to hostility. “The United States, which glorifies democracy and human rights, has actually been acting racist and violating the dignity of other groups. The followers of Muhammad will not allow this to continue,” he said.

When asked about a possible protest in front of the US Embassy, Al-Khaththath said that he was still watching the situation. “We will see the situation,” he said. He said that the desecration of Prophet Muhammad had taken places many times earlier also. According to him, it had been caused by hatred against the Islamic teaching. “It is the Islamic teaching that has become their enemy, not Muslims. Muslims who have poor Islamic knowledge are not their enemies,” he said.

According to Al-Khaththath, the other factor operating behind such happenings is a secular law, which did not give severe punishment to the citizen who commit desecration against a religion or a group.

In the 200th episode of South Park broadcast last week, a program created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, an animated prophet Muhammad was shown wearing a bear suit. It has riveted protests from many groups so far.

(Description of Source: Jakarta okezone.com in Indonesian — Website owned by Media Nusantara Citra (MNC), the owner of Indonesian Education Television (TPI), Rajawali Citra Televisi Indonesia (RCTI), and Global TV Indonesia (GlobalTV). Provides on-line news and information; URL: http://www.okezone.com) ‘

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