Islam and the Protests: Rage, but Also Self-Criticism
Islam and the Protests: Rage, but Also Self-Criticism
Though most Muslims felt insulted by a film trailer that disparaged the Prophet Muhammad, many were embarrassed by the excesses of protesters and preachers
AFTER the noon prayer in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on September 14th, a copiously bearded speaker delivered a rousing, finger-wagging open-air sermon. Thundering against the incendiary anti-Muslim film trailer that recently appeared on the internet, he warned his brothers to prepare for battle, urging them to take up weapons against incoming “Crusader armies”. Soon after, youths resumed a rock-throwing assault on police protecting the nearby American embassy.
As with past incidents of what many Muslims see as Western attacks against their beliefs, similar scenes unfolded across the Muslim world, producing tragic results. The anger displayed at all these events was certainly real, and widely shared among Muslims. Yet the television coverage of protests obscured an obvious fact. As in many other protests across the region, the crowd at the fiery Friday sermon in Cairo numbered in the mere hundreds, in a space where throngs a thousand times bigger have become commonplace. In the midst of a city of perhaps 20m inhabitants, the rest went about their business as usual. The number of youths who actually picked up rocks barely rose to the dozens. Their anger was aimed as much at the police as against “the West”. The street-fighting looked more like a rowdy sporting event, replete with parading to the cameras, than a clash of civilisations.
The news focus on violence and on the shrillest voices of protest shifted attention from other important responses to the offending film. In many Muslim countries the furore has boosted moves to strengthen laws against blasphemy, just when such laws had come under unfavourable scrutiny. In Pakistan, for instance, a young Christian woman was belatedly freed from custody when her accuser was found to have planted evidence used to charge her with blasphemy. In Egypt human-rights groups had protested against the imprisonment of several Coptic Christians for allegedly putting blasphemous material on the internet.