Defaming the Prophet

Of all the world’s believers, there are equals to but none better than Christians at denigrating the people and leaders of the faiths closest to their own. Through the centuries, anti-Semitic stereotypes, tyrades, caricatures, and blasphemies have coursed their way through the discourse of even the most revered Christian leaders, and just when it seemed time for the faithful to move on, Islam took their next rounds of pillorying, to what should have been the shame of the rest of Christendom. Especially noxious and nauseous has been the Christian stereotype of Muhammed as a sexually promiscuous purveyor of aggression and destruction in the name of a manically violent Allah hell-bent on pursuing infidels to their everlasting damnation.

Perhaps this is why there has been so little serious Christian discussion to date about those  thoroughly disgusting cartoons depicting The Prophet as a ludicrous buffoon, and his religion as a debasement of every truly worthy idea of what is genuinely holy. Thus far, Westerners have shown more interest in defending freedom of the press in the abstract than in chastising this patently and mindlessly offensive behavior in very concrete terms. And while they wile away precious opportunities to promote healing by calling the cartoons and the cartoonists to task, their Muslim counterparts continue to put out newpapers that regularly degrade Jews.

Some of the most patience-challenged in Muslim countries are getting themselves killed in riots self-righteously dedicated to defending The Prophet’s honor, as if The Prophet needed their help at all and as if any of them were worthy enough to offer it in the first place. And Islamic terrorists --- some clergy included --- continue to fan the conflagrations’ flames for personal gain, abrogating all responsibility for keeping the faithful safe from their own impulses. What makes it all even worse is the unlikely prospect that the producers of this dangerous farce can learn anything constructive from the experience.

But maybe we can, most especially about the theological issue that is at stake in the controversy. It is the issue of representing sacred realities visually. From its beginning, Islam has taken with utmost seriousness the Second Commandment’s prohibition of “graven images” and has applied it not only to Allah, but to his Prophet as well. Words about both are acceptable; pictures of either are not. In the sacred sphere, Islam teaches, pictorial images can lead to idolatry, to identifying a humanly created picture with the divine reality it is created to represent. And as the Danish cartoons made plain, pictorial images can also inflame unhelpful passions. Soliciting and printing the cartoons were consummately disrespectful acts of woefully ignorant people.  

If we are going to continue to keep our own counsel about this very public controversy, we probably ought to take a second look at our our own proclivity to slander and defamation when it comes to acknowledging the place that Islam has won for itself and will continue to hold in world history. For instance, in the aftermath of 9/11, Franklin Graham, Billy’s son and successor, gave us a hint of Christianity’s own dark side when he unctiously referred to Islam as an evil religion. He, of course, thinks we need to be concerned primarily about terrorists. I think we need to be even more concerned about him, and about the people who share his toxic view of how God is working in the world. For the sad fact is, he and they can go just as nuts as their Islamic fundamentalist counterparts can and sometimes do.

One thing that gets Christians so bent out of shape toward their Muslim brothers and sisters is surely Islam’s superior track record at conquering people for the cause of their own religion. Three centuries before Muhammed appeared on the scene, Constantine and his successors were running full stop at bringing people to Christ by means of the sword, but the barbarians’ swords too often proved stronger, and in the end just holding back the darkness was about all that Holy Church could manage. It must have really grated on Christian leaders that the Muslim conquests of the eighth century far outstripped anything that their predecessors could even dream about in the fifth.

And then there was that lack of darkness at all in the lands conquered in the name of Allah. For centuries after Christianity packed its own failed efforts in, Islam kept high civilization alive and well, and eventually gave it back to the very Western world that declared its custodians scourges of the earth. It must have really grated on Christian leaders that the light shining in the Dark Ages was anything but the light that their predecessors expected it would be.

The Prophet deserves a better press.