Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem compares the crisis over the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed with the Fatwa issued against the author Salman Rushdie by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhoolai Khomeini. Neither the West nor Islam has a monopoly on good or evil, he writes, concluding that “…freedom will be meaningless if it is completely unlimited, but living in a society also means that we have to share it with people whose ways and values may clash with ours”.

I was a student in England when the Salman Rushdie affair broke out. Let's refresh our memories. Mr. Rush to Die, a celebrated British writer of Indian Muslim origins, had written a novel called Satanic Versus. In it he repeated one of many insinuations about Prophet Muhammad, sexuality and women.

Apart from the literary types and their allied industry promoters, not many people would have heard of the book, even less would have bought it and fewer still would have read it. Somehow some Muslim clerics got to hear about this book and before you could say Salam Alaikum Muslim Clerics in Bradford (predominantly Asian) were up in arms, calling for a ban on the book and declaring it a blasphemy against Islam.

Then Iran's Ayatollah Ruhoolai Khomeini, (briefly in the 1980s the Spiritual Leader not just of Shiite Muslims but notionally for all Muslims and admired by many anti imperialists for cutting the US to size) waded in by declaring a FATWA (basically capital punishment for an apostate Muslim). From a local affair in Bradford the anti Satanic Verses popular protests spread across the United Kingdom and became a global bonfire in many Muslim countries. A spate of bannings followed, including by many African states that feared that the book was a threat to public peace and safety.

The protests about the book had less to do with the offence than the context. This was England in the 1980s, painfully adjusting to the conservative counter revolution of Margaret Thatcher in which poor people in general but ethnic and racial minorities in particular felt marginalized and vulnerable. British Muslims, especially second or more generation Asians locked in their ethno-religious laagers in places like Bradford and Leicester, felt more vulnerable than others. A community under attack from socio-economic and political changes finally found its religious faith also not considered sacred! The matter was made worse by the fact that the author who gave this public expression was, or was supposed to be, one of them even if he claimed to have become a lapsed Muslim! Do we see any parallels with the current protests because of a set of cartoons published in some Danish newspaper four months ago?

Like Rushdie's case the matter began locally but it became global because of technology but also because of the current tensions about the role of the West in global matters, particularly in the Middle East. Like British Muslims their brethren and sisters in Denmark, despite pretensions to the contrary of liberalism in countries like Denmark, feel left out and in recent years under right wing attack due to the rightward shift in politics in the Nordic and Scandinavian countries. Xenophobia is on the rise (formalising itself in parliament and government) as in many other European countries.

While Rushdie’s case was regarded as a stab in the back, the cartoons are considered a frontal blow. The international environment has meant that the tiny Muslim populations in a very tiny country called Denmark are not alone. Their frustrations can feed into all kinds of frustrations by Muslims and non-Muslims alike about the West.

The disagreement is presented as a simplistic one between freedom of expression and its enemies. Or even more directly as yet another clash of civilizations between the West and Islam, with the former standing for democracy and the latter lack of it. But it is not about religion essentially, but about politics and power locally and internationally. Freedom is not absolute anywhere in the world, least of all in the West. Would the same newspapers that have gleefully published the cartoons in over 25 Western countries (including the apartheid State of Israel) have published them if they had been about Jews? What would be the reaction of the same newspapers if the cartoons were about Jesus Christ, insinuating that he was a pedophile, since so many priests in Europe and the US have in recent years been exposed as systematically abusive of children in their flock? How many of these freedom lovers will take up the challenge thrown by an Iranian newspaper which had commissioned a similarly offensive set of cartoons about Christianity and Judaism and dare publish them in their papers?

On the other hand how many of those militant protesters burning down embassies and brandishing all kinds of violent posters and placards will be tolerated in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan or any other so called Muslim state if their protest was about the un-Islamic practices of their rulers whose rule is any thing but Islamic?

How many of those protesting have actually seen these cartoons? My guess is that like the Satanic verses, which many liberals bought to show solidarity but never read beyond the 'satanic' page, many of those protesting the cartoons have not and will not even see them.

Does that mean there are no issues at stake apart from cynical politics and transferable anger? No, there are serious issues and discussions that need to be heard but which can only be meaningful after the current pontification from the West and victimhood emotionalism from Muslims has settled down.

Neither has a monopoly on good and evil. Freedom will be meaningless if it is completely unlimited but living in a society also means that we have to share it with people whose ways and values may clash with ours. Finding a peaceful formulae for mutual coexistence within boundaries of tolerance in equal dignity is what democracy is about. The tragedy is that the West behaves as though it has a monopoly on democracy to the extent that many non Westerners or non westernised people now instinctively reject democracy as a western subterfuge.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa

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