Mozart and Muslims
By Dr Akbar Ahmed
Washington, DC

Sept. 28, 2006 - The voluntary closing of the Deutsche Oper Berlin because of the anticipated sensitivities of Muslims hearing about their Prophet’s severed head assumes great symbolic significance in the age of globalization in which we live. Images, events and words--as we saw in the case of Pope Benedict a few days ago--have the capacity to inflame societies across the world in a matter of hours.
Although I totally support free speech and freedom of _expression, and have been saying so publicly, all of us need to be sensitive to the culture and traditions of other faiths. I am not talking of a purely academic or idealistic discussion but the possibility of people losing their lives as a result of some perceived attack on faith made across the world. I believe that the lives lost and the properties destroyed--including mosques and churches--after the Danish cartoons controversy erupted could have been avoided had there been people of greater wisdom and compassion at the start of the crisis.
The first crisis that acted as a catalyst in the context of our discussion was that of Salman Rushdie’s book “The Satanic Verses.” It appears that we did not learn any lessons from that controversy. The West continued to insist on freedom of _expression and the Muslims continued to insist on their right to protest when the central figure of their religion, that is, the Prophet of Islam, was under attack. Lives were lost and property damaged across the world. From the Salman Rushdie controversy to that generated by the pope’s remarks, we have seen relations between the West and the Muslim world steadily deteriorating.
The tragic events of September 11, 2001, in one sense could be viewed as a symptom of this growing crisis between the two civilizations. Five years ago, the world was poised at the crossroads: one road led to a clash of civilizations and another toward dialogue and understanding. Developments after September 11 have confirmed in the minds of millions across the world that there is a global conflict in progress. Nearly 3,000 American lives were lost on that day and another 3,000 have been lost in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is estimated that tens of thousands of Muslims have lost their lives in these wars. As a result, an entire generation of young Muslims is coming of age that sees the world through the lens of an ongoing attack on the foundations of its faith.
It is in this context that anything that can provide these Muslims with an alternative paradigm should be encouraged. It was the reason why Pope John Paul II reached out to the Muslim community by changing the direction of relations between Christianity and Islam after a thousand years of confrontation. He visited mosques and apologized for the Crusades, which won him admiration among Muslims. Another example is that of my friend Judea Pearl who overcame the impossible burden of his son’s brutal beheading in Karachi to reach out and begin a process of dialogue with the very people whose society had killed his son.
It is time for Muslims to reciprocate these gestures. As a Muslim committed to interfaith dialogue, I would appeal to the president of Iran not to make provocative remarks about the Holocaust nor to threaten the Jewish population with extermination. It is time for all of us to think about the boldness of the theater owners in Germany. They did, after all, stop a production of Mozart, the quintessential iconic Germanic figure, in order to express their belief in the dialogue of and understanding between civilizations.
(Akbar Ahmed is chair of Islamic studies at American University and former high commissioner from Pakistan to the United Kingdom. He is also author of “Islam Under Siege: Living Dangerously in a Post-Honor World.”)

 

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Editor: Akhtar M. Faruqui
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