By Miguel Murado

AT least, there’s something in which those who are for and those who are against the famous Mohammed’s cartoons agree. They all think we are in a serious mess. It suits them to say so. To one side it would prove that the West is always ignorant and arrogant, to the other it proves that Islam is a helpless case.

But we, you and I, we who are neither Islamists nor Jyllands-Posten subscribers, you and I, who do not believe either in the Clash of Civilizations or in the Alliance of Civilizations, because we are not even sure whether there is such thing as a Civilization to begin with… Should we believe in the seriousness of this mess? I’m not quite sure… Realistically, for a conflict on a planetary scale such as this, does it look that serious?

There are more than a billion Muslims in the World. Almost all of them must have heard of the cartoons by now, and most must have been offended by them, either out of their blasphemous nature or out of the perceived arrogance. And yet, almost all of them are reacting the way Christians do when someone takes it out on Saint Peter or Jesus Christ: Just grumbling in front of their TV set or filing lawsuits. Some took to the streets of Europe, but they did it rather peacefully. Sure, a drug-dealer (oddly named Omar Khayyam, like the XI atheist poet!) dressed himself as a suicide-bomber in London and a bunch of idiots uploaded threats in the Internet. But we all know Internet sometimes is no better than the door of a public W.C.

The fact that we had to go to the Middle East to find something to report about says it all. True, an embassy was torched in Syria, a (secular) country that is almost in the brink of war with the West, and another one was set on fire in Lebanon too, again a country that is thinking over whether to begin a Civil War. As for Gaza, well, it is hardly the place in the mood for a reasonable debate. And what to say of Afghanistan? Is it really a surprise to hear of violence in Afghanistan? If anything, what seems odd about this Norwegian garrison that was attacked by the mob there is that there is a Norwegian garrison in Herat to be attacked.

But Herat does not represent Islam as a whole, like those Philippinos who experience live crucifixion during Easter are not the best example to understand Catholicism. It is frivolous to play down serious events, but it is also frivolous to exagerate them and to go about picking up, here and there, incidents that are divided by thousands of kilometers in order to preach the Apocalipsis that wasn`t.

Fundamentalism do exists in the World, and it is a serious matter that has to be addressed (ideally, by the locals), but what the sensationalist Jyllands-Posten was out to prove is something they couldn’t prove: Namely, that Denmark’s Muslim community would react violently to a caricature of Prophet Muhammad. All right, they didn’t, faraway Herat aside. They loose the bet, then.

That for the time being, of course; for, it could very well happen that the debate around the caricatures would end up achieving what the caricatures themselves didn’t: A really serious mess. But that wouldn’t be then a religious matter, it would be politics. Not quite the same thing.

(Miguel Murado is a former Middle East correspondent and current political analyst for the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia)

Miguel Murado
La Voz de Galicia, 09 February 2006