A Lot is Rotten in the State of Denmark

Denmark, with a Muslim presence of less than 3 per cent of its population, has been ahead in the pack of European countries where fascism is on the rise. It has shown the way to other European countries how to lift the draw-bridge and shut out Muslim immigrants at its gates. It has also been a pioneer in legislating Islamophobic laws to tighten the screws on the voiceless Muslim immigrants already inside its fortress.

The current government of Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen is in coalition with the neo-fascist Danish People’s Party that has long advocated expelling all Muslim immigrants from Denmark. Little wonder that Rasmussen arrogantly refused to meet Muslim ambassadors based in Copenhagen and, to date, has stoutly refused to apologise for the grievous hurt that his country’s licentious press has caused to the world Muslims.

But those who think that Danish and other European Muslims are making a mountain out of a molehill—as even some ‘liberated’ Muslims have leveled this ridiculous charge—seem to have little understanding of how callously and contemptuously Muslims have been treated in Europe for years, and more brazenly so since the license given to the European states in the name of fight against terrorism.

One doesn’t have to live in Europe to partake of the shabby treatment meted out to its Muslim minority, from UK to Greece and from Spain to Denmark. Even a casual visitor to a European capital gets a taste of it in spade from the moment he steps off his plane. Airports have been turned into fortresses bristling with armed guards and soldiers. Functionaries at these fortresses freeze into unsmiling and smug robots the moment they see a Muslim or Muslim-looking person venturing into them.

With this backdrop, the western tutelage over free speech and free expression looks increasingly vacuous when measured against the palpable reluctance of several European governments to share these hallowed freedoms with their visible Muslim minority. Wearing clothes of any kind is, in European eyes, an essential expression of freedom of choice. However, France, ever so proud of husbanding Europe’s break from its feudal past, is not prepared to let Muslim girls wear an innocuous piece of clothing, such as a meter long head scarf, or hijab, to their schools. That Muslim expression of free choice is deemed a threat and an affront to French secularism, which until now was believed to be far more resilient.

But France, and for that matter others in its league in Europe, is not prepared to admit that secularism essentially means that you give quarter to others’ beliefs and creeds and assign them the same value and prestige as you do to your own. Had there been room for ‘the other’ in European secularism France wouldn’t have banned the wearing of head- scarf by Muslim girls as an affront to its liberte.

European thinkers proudly boast of Europe’s ‘migration’ from religion and religiosity. They argue with obvious élan that religion has been consigned in Europe to the dustbin of history like so many other archaic notions and ideas. As the veteran British journalist, Robert Fisk wrote in the ‘Independent’ recently, Europe may be Christian in name but Europeans practice their faith more in its avoidance. That is not an exaggerated statement. What else would otherwise explain deserted churches in a country like Holland, for instance, being converted into a place of recreation and, in some instances, night clubs opening in them?

Therein lie the seeds of a clash of religions, if not exactly of civilizations, between the European pride of forsaking religion and the Muslim tradition of taking their religion seriously, dead seriously in some cases.

Western thinkers proudly proclaim that the west has struggled, ever since the Reformation five centuries ago, to acquire the ‘sacred’ right to trash religion and make fun of religious deities and heroes. There is no way, they argue, that the west would barter its freedom to make fun of any cult or religious figure as a matter of choice.

But in an increasingly inter-connected and shrinking world—shrinking down to the level of a global village—no freedom is unlimited any longer, not even the absolute freedom of sovereignty. So just as a heightening global sense of reverence for fundamental rights and civil liberties of human beings across national boundaries and frontiers is trumping the classical sanctity of sovereign right of a state, unrestrained freedom of speech or expression is becoming licentious too if devoid of regard for others’ sensitivities and icons.

Prince Karim Aga Khan, who is highly regarded in the west as an epitome of a moderate Muslim, put the perception gap in the western mind about Islam most succinctly in an interview with a Canadian journalist. The Aga Khan called it a ‘clash of ignorance’ and not of civilizations. He couldn’t be more right. There is so much ignorance in the educated western men and women about Islam. What is worse is that there is hardly an effort, individual or organized, to learn about a religion practiced by one fourth of humanity, and practiced with such devotion and reverence.

Muslims, however, have been fair game for the west and its licentious press for years. 9/11 seems to have given a carte blanche to the authorities and news media to stereotype Muslims as terrorists and anti-liberal with impunity.

For example, the recent ‘crusade’ against the Muslims in Denmark has enjoyed royal patronage of, no less than, Queen Margrethe. Last April, as reported by London’s Daily Telegraph, she went on record, calling on her subjects to stem the tide of Islam in Europe because, in her sense, there is “something scary” about the “totalitarianism that’s part of Islam.” She went on to say: “ We are being challenged by Islam these years, globally as well as locally…we have to show our opposition to Islam and we have to, at times, run the risk of having unflattering labels placed on us because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance.”

Understandably, with the head of state lampooning Muslims in her kingdom, and beyond, with such relish and exuberance, the Danish press and other news media may have felt fully entitled, if not duty-bound, to join the fray in Muslim-baiting. ‘Jyllands-Posten’ could well be obeying the Queen’s command by providing its readers with a crude weapon to go for the Muslim jugular—all in the line of service to the Queen.

The Muslim stereotype of a ‘terrorist-friendly’ people is being beefed up with special legislations, the latest being from ‘the mother of all parliaments’ in UK that makes any ‘glorification’ of terror a crime, without even defining ‘terror’ or its ‘glorification’.

This is in addition to insults, injuries and outright invasions of Muslim lands by neo-imperialists on flimsy and patently false premises. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq are the festering wounds inflicted on the body politic of world Muslims under the west’s undeclared new ‘crusade.’ Iran, Syria and Sudan are in the hair-triggers of imperialists itching for newer adventures in the Muslim world in order to stamp the superiority of their ‘civilisation’ and way of life over anything Islamic. Strategies are already on the anvil to starve the Palestinians because they have committed the ‘crime’ of electing Hamas to power.

Muslims in the west and the rest of the world get furious over incidents that demean heir religion because they rightly see it as the tip of a huge iceberg submerged not too deep below the surface. They see the iceberg drifting at an alarming pace to wreak more damage on the world of Islam out of sheer depravity and vengeance. They have good reason to freak out.

However, no level-headed Muslim would be proud of the snowballing violence informing the mainstream Islamic response to any mischief. Violence is a poor and un-Islamic response to a provocation that didn’t rely on physical aggression. It doesn’t behoove Muslims to use violence to defend the honour of their prophet whose entire life on this earth was an edifying embodiment of peace-with-all. Our proclivity to burn and destroy, even though blatantly provoked, only reinforces the western myopia that Islam stands for violence and Muslims are synonymous with terrorism.

The response, of economic boycott of Danish goods and dairy products, by Arabs of the Gulf and by the Iranian government is the right retribution which should knock the fear of God in the hearts of the Danes and their like-minded peers in the western world. In this interdependent world of ours nothing hurts more than a bite into one’s bread and butter. The Danes would soon learn it to their peril; 2 million dollars a day in lost exports to their dairy industry should make them realize what a gross error it was to provoke a Muslims who had done no harm to the Kingdom of Denmark.