Mocking Mohammad

There is the Islamic Republic of Iran demonstrating its contempt for Jews, for history, for the veracity of the Holocaust's human devastation by launching annual cartoon contests, and there is the West demonstrating its lack of regard for the hypocrisy that exists within Islam which asserts itself through jihad yet crying Islamophobia every time someone points out that for a religion of peace, Islam has distinguished itself by a singular lack of dedication to peace, destroying the lives of multitudes of Muslims and non-Muslims through the call to jihad.

In Iran's case, mocking the Holocaust and denying its existence is a form of hatred and contempt that rests on the premise that scorn and mockery are the ultimate insult complementing hatred. It is vicious slander of the most extreme kind. In the case where a news source like Jyllands Posten or Charlie Hebdo, two sources that make it their business to mock pomposity, hypocrisy and crass symbolisms of all kinds, there is no intention to single out Islam, but to give it the kind of treatment meted out to all who merit it.

Every time someone who is involved in pushing back against Islamist fanaticism  by some kind of challenge, similar to the one that Dutch politician Geert Wilders and anti-jihad campaigners Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer organized in Garland, Texas, it is done to demonstrate just how virally pathological Islamist passions are in their berserk reactions to depictions of Mohammad, presumably forbidden in the Koran (ordered by a man responsible for the Koran).

Bosch Fawstin's winning entry in the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest in Garland, Texas. (Image source: Bosch Fawstin)

But in free societies such as liberal democracies, nothing is forbidden, everything is discussed, and free speech reigns triumphant. Except that, it doesn't. It should, it is protected by law and by social and cultural mores, valued as a signal freedom in democracies, but as those Western countries and those democracies become increasingly colonized by migrating ethnic and religious groups, those freedoms are truncated through threat of violent reprisals.


Simply put, religious fundamentalism is threatening the freedoms that Western liberal democracies treasure as indicative of their human values and human rights. Amusement can be found in hypocrisy, but hypocrisy itself is not amusing. Islamists are enraged at the criticism launched by free thinkers against many of the precepts of Islam and its fundamentalist values that run counter to human rights. Non-Muslims can find amusement in the values that abridge the human spirit while claiming that Islam requires total surrender of self to spiritual abasement.

Most sane, well-rounded people are capable of finding amusement anywhere; dark humour has its own place in the human spirit; it offers hope of surmounting the worst possible threats to human existence. There is a liberation of the spirit in being able to laugh, however grimly, at life's misfortunes. Jews and Christians can find amusement in their own religions, but Muslims cannot; there exists nothing whatever light-hearted in the worship of Islam.

The covenant between the almighty spiritual being and humankind is capable of rising above mirth, and it does reflect an aspect of love between people and their spiritual guide. In Islam god must be feared even as he is worshipped, nothing about him can be taken in vain; blasphemy in Islam is punishable by death; one very certain way to convince the faithful that their religion is not to be toyed with, even with affection beforehand.

In Muslim countries great proportions of society live grim lives totally dedicated to worship of the divine. There is no room in that grimness for humour; life is a rehearsal for a far better time after death when Allah permits those whose exemplary life in stern worship allows them to ascend to Paradise, as Mohammad did. There, all human care vanishes. And so, life is a transitory element, an often bitter existence, with better times to come once it ends.

Does that explain the urge to rage and to hate and to kill in the name of Islam? It must, since the call "Allahu Akbar!" [God is Great] accompanies so many distorted, malignly cruel slaughters of those whom the faithful feel have no right to life and deserve to die as sacrifices to Islam, to redeem its honour after it has been besmirched by mockery through humorous cartoons, or alternately, any depiction of Mohammad, even one so anodyne it is unlikely to draw anyone's attention who is not an Islamic psychopath.

It isn't that Mohammad is considered to be anything but an historic human figure called upon by god to promulgate his word. Allah made Mohammad his emissary on earth, without imbuing him with godly proportions. But since he was designated by god to deliver his divine message he is closely aligned with the reverence due to Allah; so to laugh at Mohammad is to dismiss and denigrate god, and this is simply unfathomable, eliciting murderous rage in the hearts of the faithful.



Islam, for all intents and purposes, is a tribal god, a Bedouin god, a god meant for a people accustomed to continual conflict and suspicion against other tribes. Cultures that beheld women through a patriarchal misogynistic lens, and which lent themselves to tribal antipathies found a natural religion in Islam. Since, after all, it was designed by a man who had that cultural experience and knew well what would be fitting as a religion for such people.

No explanations are required, no rationalizations, no intelligent parsing of meaning and consequences, but to accept what is written, from god's mouth to Mohammad's quill. For any who would question, who would reject, who would mock, the death penalty is as good a repressive encouragement to total submission as any.

If non-Muslims cannot recognize the superior, finished religion of Islam, correcting the insufficiencies of its precursors, Christianity and Judaism, they have no right to life. As Mohammad himself pioneered the way of Islamist conquest by launching his own crusades of forced conversion with slaughter the alternative, present-day Islamists emulate the source.