Douse the Fire

Dr Mohammad Manzoor Alam

Dr Mohammad Manzoor Alam’s take on the fast-spreading bush fire of Muslim protest against hate film on the holy Prophet (PBUH).

"America, hear us – don't insult our Prophet!" chant Beirut demonstrators.Courtesy (Reuters/Sharif Karim)

By now it is an established pattern of US-EU-Israeli war against Islam, ill-concealed as war on terror. Before every physical attack on a Muslim country, during invasion, and after the war, they keep up a constant barrage of abuse and slander against Islam, its holy Prophet (PBUH), its holy book, its holy symbols.

All these are part of a larger strategy. Over the centuries, hostile propaganda, vilification and disinformation have been part of warfare, especially relied upon and developed by Europeans and their descendants who today own America and Australia. Zionist settler colonialism, too, was built on the same model.

The current phase of US-EU-Israeli aggression is backed by a huge hostile propaganda effort through film (including popular Hollywood cinema), book publishing (both fiction and non-fiction) journalistic writing in magazines, newspapers and Internet, on radio and TV.

People who attack Islam are given the highest recognition. Salman Rushdie’s Booker and VS Naipaul’s Nobel are two examples among many. In their aggression against Islam they are like the opponents of Communism, Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom the West honoured with Nobel in Cold War days, when Communism, not Islam, was regarded by it as Enemy Number One.

Whether it is the Pope quoting some obscure person’s adverse observations about Islam made centuries ago, even without some apparent reason, some cartoonist caricaturing the Prophet (PBUH), or American pastor Terry Jones announcing to publicly burn the holy Quran, there is a lot of method behind this apparent madness. The new film seeking to insult the Prophet (who, infact, is beyond insult) is part of the larger campaign against Islam which, as I said earlier, has replaced Communism as West’s target after the Cold War.

Pastor Terry Jones is a vocal backer of this film as are others of his ilk. These people know that Muslims are so deeply in love with Islam and its symbols that they would become emotional and react irrationally if Islam and its symbols are publicly ridiculed. This is what the enemies of Islam want.

Attacks on American embassies across the Muslim world are part of this pattern: insult to Muslim religion makes them wild and they attack the offender physically. Why it is so is known to everyone who seeks to insult the Prophet (PBUH) and Islam.

Muslims would not, never slander the Prophets of the offenders, whatever the provocation because seeking to insult Moses and Jesus (or any other prophet) is blasphemy in Islam. This, too, the culprits know.

Instead of stopping the mischief at home, America is dispatching warships and drones to the region where the severest attack has occurred. This is what they want, and we oblige them unconsciously by getting caught in the trap laid by them.

Today there are people on the Internet who are advising Muslims to insult Jesus. One person says if Muslims slander Jesus, the Jews of United States would not mind. I want to caution our youngmen and women against such advice.

My advice to the US-EU-Israel alliance is to please stop this vicious game. To our own youth I would make an appeal: Don’t walk into the trap laid by others. Exercise restraint. Nobody can insult Allah, who is above blame, and no one can dishonor His Prophet (PBUH) whose name is announced five times a day by muezzins from their minarets all over the world. Nobody has been honoured thus, nobody will. Allah has told his Prophet (PBUH), And I have raised your mention (wa rafa’na laka zikrak), in the muezzin’s call.

This raging fire of Islamophobia must be doused quickly. Let us, the Muslims of the world, take the initiative.

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