Sudanese court verdict
Nov. 30th, 2007 01:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseFollowing on from this.
UK teacher jailed over teddy row BBC News
My first response to this? Please, Sudan, fail harder. But attempting to state that a little more articulately: considering that the teacher in question apologised for any offence she’d mistakenly caused in court and is still being imprisoned really smacks of idiocy. Sudanese authorities do very much appear to be attempting to ‘make an example’ of a non-Muslim foreigner which would be the sensible course of action if said foreigner had intended to deliberately insult Islam. In which case the British Consulate would be supporting the action because it wouldn’t be in their interest either to have some Muslim-hating wackjob being seen as representative of Britain or Western Europe. In fact, if the teacher had chosen the name herself, even in ignorance, she might still warrant some penalty precisely for being ignorant of such matters in a Muslim country, but the fact of the matter is that the choice was made by the children she taught who were Muslims themselves. And it’s very easy to see that while she might have had a general knowledge of what would and wouldn’t be allowed under Islamic law; since the children themselves chose, she might have thought that it wouldn’t cause offence since Muslims were doing the deciding. It would be in the same vein as a Catholic making a joke about church scandals and having a non-Catholic friend laugh, only for that Catholic to then take offence that the non-Catholic dare find humour in the matter. Similarly, while a Catholic would genuflect in a church, a non-Catholic needn’t be expected to because while they would doubtless respect the religious atmosphere there they couldn’t be expected to necessarily participate in it.
Really though, what worries me most of all is the seeming belief that ‘the West’ or ‘Europe’ is engaged in some vast anti-Islamic conspiracy. Because ‘the West’ is some homogenised mass of individuals who all think the same thing, hold the same faith, share the same language and so on. You may as well say that Sufism and Wahhabism is exactly the same for all the sense that attitude makes. And it really doesn’t bear thinking about when there are people out there who want to divide the world up into ‘us and them’ so militantly that things like communication and mutual understanding are tossed by the wayside. I don’t for a minute doubt that there is anti-Islamic sentiment in some quarters in the same way there’s very obviously anti-anything that isn’t Islamic sentiment elsewhere. But parading around your ignorance and intolerance on either side was never going to be the way forward. If you want to influence the world by spreading your message, whether that be Western representative democracy or Islamic religious teaching the way to do that isn’t by attempting to frighten the other side into acceptance. All it takes is one understanding and tolerant Muslim to make her non-Muslim peers wonder exactly what it is that Islam is really about and inspire them to go find out for themselves, just as all it takes is one headline case of some cantankerous priest to make a former Christian remember just why he stopped believing in the goodness of the Church in the first place. The actions of a single person can never honestly be taken to be representative of anything other than that individual themselves but it is all too easy to generalise, especially when emotions run high. And in this situation what does such generalisation achieve? The anti-Islamists get to pat themselves on the back because there are Muslims out there who’ll happily live down to all their expectations thus furthering awful stereotypes, sensible Muslims end up wondering when the madness will ever end, likewise sensible non-Muslims, world politicians get to wonder if they really do want to engage with such a medieval country after all and a bunch of school children lose the teacher they were seemingly rather fond of.
There’s a form of industrial strike where workers obey the letter of the law instead of the spirit of it, though in this case the law is workplace regulations; it’s used to slow down progress. And somehow I can’t help but feel that that’s what’s happened here because the worst of the matter may well be that the people who are insisting on such extreme action genuinely believe that they’re doing the right thing, to the point where they can’t see the forest for the trees and that, more than anything else, is what may easily be the greatest obstacle in the path of developing a genuine understanding between Western Europe and Islam.
UK teacher jailed over teddy row BBC News
My first response to this? Please, Sudan, fail harder. But attempting to state that a little more articulately: considering that the teacher in question apologised for any offence she’d mistakenly caused in court and is still being imprisoned really smacks of idiocy. Sudanese authorities do very much appear to be attempting to ‘make an example’ of a non-Muslim foreigner which would be the sensible course of action if said foreigner had intended to deliberately insult Islam. In which case the British Consulate would be supporting the action because it wouldn’t be in their interest either to have some Muslim-hating wackjob being seen as representative of Britain or Western Europe. In fact, if the teacher had chosen the name herself, even in ignorance, she might still warrant some penalty precisely for being ignorant of such matters in a Muslim country, but the fact of the matter is that the choice was made by the children she taught who were Muslims themselves. And it’s very easy to see that while she might have had a general knowledge of what would and wouldn’t be allowed under Islamic law; since the children themselves chose, she might have thought that it wouldn’t cause offence since Muslims were doing the deciding. It would be in the same vein as a Catholic making a joke about church scandals and having a non-Catholic friend laugh, only for that Catholic to then take offence that the non-Catholic dare find humour in the matter. Similarly, while a Catholic would genuflect in a church, a non-Catholic needn’t be expected to because while they would doubtless respect the religious atmosphere there they couldn’t be expected to necessarily participate in it.
Really though, what worries me most of all is the seeming belief that ‘the West’ or ‘Europe’ is engaged in some vast anti-Islamic conspiracy. Because ‘the West’ is some homogenised mass of individuals who all think the same thing, hold the same faith, share the same language and so on. You may as well say that Sufism and Wahhabism is exactly the same for all the sense that attitude makes. And it really doesn’t bear thinking about when there are people out there who want to divide the world up into ‘us and them’ so militantly that things like communication and mutual understanding are tossed by the wayside. I don’t for a minute doubt that there is anti-Islamic sentiment in some quarters in the same way there’s very obviously anti-anything that isn’t Islamic sentiment elsewhere. But parading around your ignorance and intolerance on either side was never going to be the way forward. If you want to influence the world by spreading your message, whether that be Western representative democracy or Islamic religious teaching the way to do that isn’t by attempting to frighten the other side into acceptance. All it takes is one understanding and tolerant Muslim to make her non-Muslim peers wonder exactly what it is that Islam is really about and inspire them to go find out for themselves, just as all it takes is one headline case of some cantankerous priest to make a former Christian remember just why he stopped believing in the goodness of the Church in the first place. The actions of a single person can never honestly be taken to be representative of anything other than that individual themselves but it is all too easy to generalise, especially when emotions run high. And in this situation what does such generalisation achieve? The anti-Islamists get to pat themselves on the back because there are Muslims out there who’ll happily live down to all their expectations thus furthering awful stereotypes, sensible Muslims end up wondering when the madness will ever end, likewise sensible non-Muslims, world politicians get to wonder if they really do want to engage with such a medieval country after all and a bunch of school children lose the teacher they were seemingly rather fond of.
There’s a form of industrial strike where workers obey the letter of the law instead of the spirit of it, though in this case the law is workplace regulations; it’s used to slow down progress. And somehow I can’t help but feel that that’s what’s happened here because the worst of the matter may well be that the people who are insisting on such extreme action genuinely believe that they’re doing the right thing, to the point where they can’t see the forest for the trees and that, more than anything else, is what may easily be the greatest obstacle in the path of developing a genuine understanding between Western Europe and Islam.
