KEY POINTS:
My grandfather practised criminal law in Delhi during the 1940s. One of his most controversial cases involved a Muslim man who killed his Hindu neighbour in a fit of rage after the neighbour named his dog Muhammad.
Apparently the client was charged with murder, with a mandatory death penalty. My grandfather was able to convince the judge that, given the sectarian climate of India just before Partition, there was a strong element of provocation in the neighbour's act. The judge agreed, and commuted the man's sentence to life imprisonment.
With all due respect to my grandfather, I think this was clearly a travesty of justice. What provocation existed here? Is this how we are supposed to protect the honour of religious symbols and personalities?
My primary religious teacher was my mother. Like most South Asian Muslim mums, she insisted I learn to read the Arabic text of the Koran. She rarely spoke about Muhammad. The most I learned was that he was sent by God to this earth to teach people how to live.
When I reached my teens, mum used to read stories from an Urdu book which told stories of the Prophet Muhammad, his family and friends. The common theme in all these stories was that Muhammad taught those around him of the importance of sabr, an Arabic word which has entered the vocabulary of just about every language commonly spoken by Muslims.
The word literally means patience. It has a number of connotations. One is that you repel evil with good. If someone wrongs you, it is far better if you don't take any revenge. It also means you control your anger.
The common theme in all the various connotations of sabr is that of controlling one's ego. When you have your ego under control, you won't act out of proportion with the alleged wrong someone has done to you.
No doubt this kind of teaching would be familiar to readers of all denominations. It appears in the sacred literature of all faiths. Even a modern secular saint like Gandhi reminds us that if we all followed the principle of an eye for an eye, we'd all go blind.
So then how does one explain the events of the past fortnight in Sudan? What kind of Islam leads a teacher to be arrested for suggesting her student name his teddy bear Muhammad? And is this really another case of Muslims ignoring their Prophet's teaching of sabr, instead going troppo to preserve the honour of their religious symbols and personalities?
This is not a symptom of religious values. Which faith teaches you to rally for someone's death over a mere teddy bear? What this really shows is that in many parts of the Muslim world, people are living in a Dark Age.
Europeans have been through this process. Around 900 years ago, back in the days when most of Europe was lost in the Dark Ages, the then-deranged Muslim ruler of Jerusalem decided to tear down the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He was quickly deposed, and the Church hastily rebuilt. Jerusalem apologised.
It was too late. Within a few months, reports of similar attacks on Christian pilgrims and symbols in Palestine had spread across Europe. The Pope declared the first crusade. Historians agree that in leading this battle, the then-pontiff was less interested in defending the honour of Christ or Jerusalem than in shoring up his own power and diverting attention away from crises within the Church.
Today, the tables have turned. Hence the responses to the Danish cartoons and the Pope's Regensburg address. And now again with Sudan's teddy bear crisis, we see the undemocratic, corrupt and incompetent government of a Muslim-majority state using a pseudo-religious cause to manufacture hysteria and divert people's attention away from the government's failures.
The generals, emirs, kings and presidents-for-life that rule most Muslim-majority states (usually with the help of their Western patrons) had failed to effectively deal with the poverty, illiteracy and other economic and social ills too numerous to list here. These rulers are forever seeking diversions.
Yet it seems that the teddy bear incident has proven so ridiculous that even dictatorial nominally Muslim governments outside Sudan have realised using this incident as a religious wedge won't work. You can't fool all the people all the time.
I still wasn't convinced. I went to the websites of newspapers widely read in the Muslim world. I found Abdallah Iskandar of al-Hayat making excuses for Ms Gibbons and blaming the Sudan government for seeking to divert the attention of Sudanese from domestic problems. Sumayyah Meehan of the Khaleej Times writes under the headline: Making a mountain out of a molehill.
Maybe Muslims outside Sudan are waking up to themselves. But for the rioters of Khartoum, urged on by a corrupt dictatorship, the names of teddy bears remain of greater importance than addressing the problems arising from two decades of civil war and having the largest population of internal refugees of any country on earth.
* Irfan Yusuf is associate editor of AltMuslim.com.
