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GUAM—My
friend Catherine (not her real name) was married to a
guy surnamed Mohammad. As soon as she got divorced, she
rushed to have a name-change. But more than her desire
to regain her maiden name, her haste in dropping her
ex-husband’s last name was driven by her awareness that
having the surname Mohammad in her passport was an
invitation to interrogation at any Western airport.
Catherine is a five-foot cutie, weighing 90 lbs.
There’s nothing about her that fits the profile of a
Unabomber. But anyone surnamed Mohammad is always a
probable suspect.
The name
Mohammad is dangerous territory. Just ask Gillian
Gibbons, the British teacher who was charged by the
Sudanese authorities and almost had to suffer 40 lashes
for allowing her pupil to name a teddy bear after the
Muslim prophet.
In this
world so consumed by gnawing hatred born of intolerance,
such a fanatic reaction to an otherwise innocent deed
may no longer be surprising, but it still gives ground
for despair among those trying to hang on to what
remains of this planet’s sanity.
Just
read the entries on the BBC web site, in which some
British Muslims maintained that Gibbons should be
punished. Read the entries from people in Sudan who said
the children should be equally punished.
Which
makes my friend Erin wonder: “Do you think if a Muslim
teacher named a teddy bear ‘Jesus’ in southern United
States, there would have been the same reaction?”
Which
makes me wonder, too: Will the Muslim world be appeased
if teddy bears are named Vaishnava, Siddharta,
Krishna and Zoroaster? Would that make the world an
equal-opportunity blasphemer?
The
teddy-bear industry can always count on their marketing
strategists to turn what may be perceived as idolatrous
irreverence into some commercial trick. Say, the
theological teddy collection is meant “to promote
harmony among religions,” or “to bring religion closer
to children,” and similar marketing inanities.
But, of
course, you can’t do that without the risk of facing
excommunication, if not a death fatwa—unless you want to
be in the company of Salman Rushdie.
Gibbons
was eventually pardoned. But it was still lunatic that
she had to spend horror-filled nights and almost had to
go through some barbaric punishment for what was so
obviously a misunderstanding or a lapse of cultural
sensitivity. She did not mean to imply that she thought
Allah’s messenger was in any sense a cuddly toy. It
simply did not cross her mind that there could be some
blasphemous implication.
But then
again, gods, messiahs, and prophets cannot claim a
patent to their names because all over the world, people
are named after them. How many Jesuses do you know?
Who
knows, maybe the teddy bear was named after Catherine’s
ex-husband.
We all
have had enough of this intolerance and seething
religious outrage, caused both by Muslim extremists and
the ignorant Islamophobics, at the expense of
everything, including reason. We must ask ourselves what
earthly good we can do, and how we can bring people to
their senses. Maybe we can preach the South Park
philosophy, where sense of humor is a way of life,
irreverence is forgiven, and every episode concludes
with the key to harmony—acceptance. |
