Facebook fiasco — III

Someone wrote to me expressing their anger when the whole Facebook contest was heating up. He signed off by saying, “I can die for this issue.” My question, which irritated him, was “How?’ But he was doing what a lot of Muslims do; give a noticeable display of outrage, cite honour and machismo for something he could not actually do. Threats first, discussion later. Thinking almost never factors into it.

My first two articles detailed some of the erroneous facts surrounding the issue, this one will elaborate on why some of the emotional responses are so counter-productive.

Analogous to the Facebook issue, I once asked a friend in the Tablighi Jamaat about his foreign trips and the freedom to proselytise in western countries. He complained it wasn’t as free as one thought, but when I asked him if he thought it was just to give the same freedom to foreigners coming into our country, it raised his ire. His freedom of speech was hollow, to be belittled when it didn’t suit him. The world is seeing through this. That’s why it’s hard to take us seriously.

It’s true that this competition was Islam bashing under the guise of free speech. It’s also true that our demand for giving religion respect is hypocritical because we do not accord others the same. Increasingly, Islam and Muslims are becoming separate entities.

Nadeem Farooq Paracha quotes examples of depictions of Hindus in our cinema, there is no respect of their religion, they are always cast as inhuman villains. Cable TV will show egregious action films in Punjabi and Urdu that belittle them crudely. But again, no one cares and happily they consume the entertainment.

A blogger (a hafiz-e-Quran no less), wrote against the ban on her page. But her reasoning was nothing less than sterling. She bemoaned the hypocrisy of the “one click jihadi” prone to violent rhetoric, but unwilling to practice Islam. By that she meant people who scour the web to talk of ghairat, war and supremacy without living honest lives, without making difficult choices.

The Prophet (pbuh) himself made those tolerant choices; there are numerous examples when he forgave people for excesses upon his person, when he prayed enemies would throw garbage on him, the path he (pbuh) would take would be strewn with thorns. But it seems as if Pakistanis think they know better.

By the way the “I love Islam and “I love Mohammed” (pbuh) pages have many more members than the anti-Islamic ones combined. By banning Facebook should we delete those too?

In fact, the only logical next step is to ban the internet altogether because there will always be blasphemous material in one place or another. This implies two things: that the Muslim faith is so weak that being exposed to one cartoon will shatter it and that Muslims have impulse control issues — if something is available they won’t be able to stop themselves from looking at it. But which Muslim wants actively to see these cartoons?

The Muslim world is already behind in every indicator of education and development. Unfortunately, there is no silver lining to this, today’s Muslims are not morally superior either, Muslim countries are corrupt, violent and by and large without democracy. The internet is one tool to change that, to get access to information and education beyond the pale of those in power. But in our emotional turmoil, we forget all that.

Look at America. Despised around the world for championing freedom with a record of interference and violence globally that easily exposes its own hypocrisy. While the west has slowly brought itself to condemn the barbarity of Israel’s flotilla incident, America remains coy. But slowly, it seems like we are no different from America, saying one thing with conviction for public consumption, but thinking and doing something else.

Facebook is a toy, something we could conceivably do without, but it represents so much more. It represents our attitudes and reflective ability, both of which are in question. Delete your accounts if you are so offended, but don’t make the choice for the rest of us.

Published in the Express Tribune, June 3^rd, 2010.