The Essayist # 18: Islamic Idol

I have never understood the Muslim sensitivity with regard to Mohammed. Islam finds the notion of the Incarnation ridiculous ("Far be it from His glory to have a son," saith the Quran), yet for all intents and purposes treats its human prophet as though he were divine, hence unfit for graven image. The logic behind proscriptions against idolatry dwells in confusing an image of God for His reality; a sculpture of a calf, however golden, cannot be the King of the Universe. Muslims have long accused Christianity of dancing with polytheism in regards to the Trinity, of divinizing Jesus of Nazareth; how they fail to see the degree to which they do the same escapes me.



But you know what? That's a question that a good imam could probably answer for me without too much bother, if he so desired: a religion as old as Islam has probably expended a good deal of intellectual capital on filling such gaps. Religions exist to do that very thing.

The recent flare-up regarding South Park and Mohammed has actually very little to do with the Islamic faith or its own understanding of its founder. Rather, it has everything to do with a sense of spiritual superiority that certain kinds of Muslims bask in vis-a-vis the rest of the world. It is a function of Pride; old, ugly, world-devouring Pride.

No religion submits willingly to mockery. A transcendent Deity almost by definition runs afoul of the hobgoblins of human reason. Much in our understanding of such a being would seem ripe for humor, reason's pugilist, but to mock God is to pretend that one understands Him and finds his pronouncements wanting. A religion that did not protest its pearls being defecated on by swine would be unworthy of the name.

So when South Park mocks Catholicism, as it frequently does, I often find myself scowling at the unreason, the conflated facts, the hyperbole being past off as truth. And then I remember that there is reason that the Church presents such a wide target. I remind myself that the real problem is not Trey Parker and Matt Stone but decades of episcopal governance that treated pedophiles as media liabilities rather than criminals. The Church leadership has earned its mockery with its foolishness, with the cruelty of its silence, and they will not be released until they have paid the last penny.

This requires a certain degree of humility, of accepting that the Church is more than the sum of its bishops, that to mock a Pope and to mock God are different acts. For all the frequency of its religious humor, South Park does not mock God, or even religion in a general sense. What South Park mocks is humans pretending to understand more than they actually do. This...

I am the Alpha and the Omega.

...is not a parody of God. This is a parody of human expectations of God, of our idolatrous tendency to treat Him as a projection of ourselves (He first appeared thus in the millenial episode, in which people worldwide demanded God show himself to celebrate the year 2000). Jesus has been a recurring character on the show from the beginning, and I admit to a teasing nature in the treatment of Him; often trapped in the sort of petty human concerns that the real Jesus brushed aside in the Gospels. But he has always been a sympathetic character.

So when Matt and Trey put Mohammed in a bear costume, they were not actually making fun of Mohammed. They were making fun of the kind of apoplectic Islamism that screams death threats when a teddy bear -- a child's plush toy -- is given the same name as a prophet. The entire two-episode story arc was an incitement only to the incitable, a raised middle finger aimed directly at eyes bloodshot with rage. And, pace Bill O'Reilly, those are the ones who most deeply deserve to be provoked. For they are motivated not by love of God but mere pompous refusal to bear the wit of sinners, of insisting that their "perfect" understanding of the divine will means they are not fools, and ought to be free of the foolishness of others, even when the fools have a point.

If the history of the last century teaches us anything, it teaches that free speech is remarkably easy to silence. All one needs is the will to do so: the short temper, the melodramatic protestations of victimhood, the embrace of any and all forms of force at even the near occasion of a threat.

Writing in the NYT, Ross Douthat captures the problem perfectly: (Hat Tip: Insty)

In a country where the latest hit movie, “Kick-Ass,” features an 11-year-old girl spitting obscenities and gutting bad guys while dressed in pedophile-bait outfits, there isn’t much room for real transgression. Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place.
Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing.

And this is why telling an Islamic radical that we make fun of other religions, too, is beside the point. That's precisely why he considers himself superior to us. "Islam" is Arabic for submission to the will of God, and our willingness to dip our religious heritages face first into the hog waller is Arabic for an incapability of submitting even to our own gods. So when Matt and Trey, for the sake of argument, show Buddha doing lines of coke or Jesus defecating on George Bush, all the radical sees is the expression of a people who worship nothing but their own pride. The trouble with treating nothing as sacred is that, eventually, nothing is sacred.

And that dollop of truth justifies to our radical every lie he's ever swallowed; that Americans are the Devil's Spawn, that women cause earthquakes with their hemlines, that Blood Jews roam the world to dine on Palestinian children, and the greatest of all lies, that the God he worships commands this madness. Hungering and thirsting for Righteousness, he makes do on a smoky gruel of Wrath.

So maybe the only real response is that of Jon Stewart, who ended his commentary by standing in front of a gospel choir singing "Go Fuck Yourself," directly to the ghostly anonymous swine at RevolutionMuslim. But I think we should go one better; to the acceptance of free speech as something worth putting our lives on the line for, of refusing responsibility for the savagery of bigots. Not long ago, responsible people of good will attempted to dissuade idealists from marching for Civil Rights on the grounds that violence would ensue. A similar dynamic is at work now, and the bigwigs at Comedy Central and elsewhere need to hear that we know who the problem is.

To that end, let me say that I wish no ill against the Islamic faith, but with savages who kill in its name, and to them I say, bluntly, that You Will Burn in Hell, and the Devil will laugh as he force-feeds you a Naruq made of pigskin, and you will beg Abraham for a few tears of pity, and Abraham will tell you that when you could have had pity, you drank your brother's blood instead. God is not mocked.