Collective Self-destructiveness

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown laments the self-destructive behavior of "saviors" of Ummah! With "friends" like these, who needs enemies!

Today, creative, imaginative, dissenting and innovative Muslims have to wear virtual body armor, hunker down, just in case someone decides to get offended (and someone always does), inciting an uproar on the web, on the media, on the streets bringing out the mobs in Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, South Africa, Somalia and on and on. Inevitably some die for a cause they never really understood and the restless army of discontents shuffles off until the next noisy and bloody march.

I know of talented painters and poets in Pakistan who have just given up or fled. Arab artists, activists and thinkers unafraid of the truth are in actual prisons or enclosed behind limitations built by their fearful societies.

Explosive episodes are always gathering round the corner. We witnessed the organized outrage over the Channel 4 programs exposing some of the vile imams still controlling some mosques. The film of Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner, about a young boy in Afghanistan, is causing much anger. One of the pivotal scenes involves a homosexual rape of a Shiite boy. They won't have that, it is a slur, an insult. Muslims don't do such things. The same protests met Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane, in which a young Bangladeshi wife in Tower Hamlets has an affair. Muslims don't do such things etc, etc. Of course there is no rape and adultery in our countries, those are bad "Western" behaviors. The controversy will be reheated when the film of Brick Lane is released in a few weeks.