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Dorian of PostmodernBarney.com on the Danish Cartoons Controversy
posted February 12, 2006
 

Have you seen this article from the BBC News page?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4688624.stm

The telling quote, I think, is:

"Muslim leadership the world over has historically been the most cynical manipulator of Islam - and this is especially true of Pakistan," says one analyst.

"Injured religious sentiment has seldom translated into public unrest unless there was political mileage to be gained from it by some vested interest," he argues.

What continually strikes me about this situation is that the world owes a tremendous debt to the Islamic world because of their contributions to the sciences, particularly mathematics and medicine. And in less than a century, the convergence of political and religous totalitarianism in the region has almost completely suppresed the once vigorous intellectualism of the culture. (Not that that excuses the West for baiting those forces.)

It all reminds me of a quote from Hanif Kureishi in My Beautiful Laundrette, about the reason why there are so many Muslim expatriates in the West: "That country has been sodomized by religion." Seeing what has happened to the Arabic world makes me even more afraid of attempts to mix religion and politics in this country.