The Real Blasphemy

Blasphemy comes in many forms. This is a lesson that the world is beginning to learn, although not many people are willing to admit it, for they feel that blasphemy is a cut and dried, black and white issue, whereas in today’s world, where truth is relative and God is only on your side, blasphemy is able to assume any shape willing to accommodate its chilling vagaries.

Only a few weeks ago a Dutchman of Moroccan origin knifed and shot to death Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh as he cycled in a park in Amsterdam on a cold November morning. Van Gogh had received death threats for directing a film that accused Islam of condoning violence against women. Many films and programs have been made on the issue of domestic violence in Muslim societies and communities. Producers of these sorts of programs often find themselves on the receiving ends of death threats, as there is something in the subject that seems to arouse the basest of passions in the human heart; the need to annihilate the person who says something you do not wish to hear.

The documentary has offended people as much for its subject matter as for its visual treatment of the subject. In the most controversial scene, partially clothed women are portrayed as the victims of abuse with scars on their bodies, but verses from the Quran are also inked out in black on their bare skin. Van Gogh fully intended to shock with these images, and in so doing, create a response in his audience. It’s impossible to believe he didn’t hold a certain amount of animosity towards Islam, and he was surely aware of the type of animosity that his actions would provoke in certain extremists, but in the end, he paid for his bet - with his own life.

Muslims are taught that the Quran is to be respected, revered, treated with the utmost care and caution. We are not allowed to even touch its verses with our fingers if we are not in a state of ritual cleanliness; we must be dressed properly to even listen to its recitation, and we cannot so much as place the book lower than any other book or hold it lower than the level of our hearts. But could Dutch Muslims expect secular Europeans to truly understand this conditioning, or respect (or fear) its ramifications? And is violence the appropriate response to blasphemy?

The picture of Van Gogh’s body, prone on the ground of the park and covered with a white sheet, was soon flashed across the world on television and in the newspapers. The picture itself seemed obscene; a man killed for speaking his mind. This, in the eyes of the Dutch, was the real blasphemy, not the content of his film. Soon, more pictures followed; mosques being burned in Holland, police and firefighters attempting to put out the flames. People in Holland and around the world considered the murder of Van Gogh as the worst kind of sin against their secular, tolerant society, then were treated to yet more disturbing realizations that tolerance only goes so far; now the majority of Dutch people do not want Muslims in their country anymore. And this is a trend that could easily spread all across Europe in the coming years.

Cause and effect, victims and more victims, all sparked off by the original blasphemy that started it all, that of women’s naked bodies with verses of the Holy Quran inscribed upon them. In the spiral of violence, the lines drawn by the pointing finger of blame begin to get blurred. Each image seems more horrible than the last, the original sin compounded twice and then thrice by the events that it spawned.

The current trend of insurgents in Iraq to kidnap foreign hostages and then behead them on video is yet another attempt to control and manipulate the emotions of the world by presenting shocking visuals that one cannot fail to respond to. Over the past month we have seen the tear-stained, frightened faces of people like Margaret Hassan as they plead for their lives to their leaders on news stations around the world. Hassan has apparently been murdered, on screen, a month after her kidnapping. She is not the first nor will she be the last to die in this manner. The insurgents responsible for her death hope that it will scare people into leaving Iraq. But is not the parading of foreign hostages and then their public execution that they are subjected to not simply another form of blasphemy? Or was the invasion of Iraq itself the ultimate blasphemy, out of which all further events are parented for generations to come?

Yet wait. Today’s modern blasphemy has even more facets. Just yesterday a video surfaced of an American soldier shooting to death an unarmed, wounded Iraqi prisoner. Who can forget the images of prisoners being shamed in Abu Gharaib prison, being made to parade on leashes and stand on boxes with wires attached to their bodies? How about the countless civilians who have been murdered in the bombings in Baghdad, Falluja, and Mosul? Every human being killed and maimed in this war without reason is another testament to humanity’s ability to take lives in the name of something they believe to be true.

And this is the biggest blasphemy of all; the fact that people are willing to spill human blood for their beliefs. No matter whose side you are on or what you think of the people who have died, whether or not you believe they deserved their fate, recognize that all acts of blasphemy need only three components; a lie, a perpetrator willing to believe that lie, and a victim to take it out on. The names, the nationalities, the causes change throughout the centuries, but the act always remains the same. When a person’s life is taken, a sin against God or the universe or humanity - whichever you choose to acknowledge as your higher power - is committed. In the new world, where religion and secularism battle it out but only manage to kill humanism in the end, violence against innocents is the real blasphemy, a lesson we are all being taught with each day that passes in it.