| Nothing To Joke About The University of Ottawa is one of Canada's largest universities. During the so-called "cartoon protest" it cancelled of a symposium on these “cartoons” for fear of offending its Muslim students. Universities that have been the bastion of free speech during the middle-ages, when student and faculty challenged the alleged divine rights of kings, are now cowering before violent prone fanatics who preach a return to an ignorant time when questioning dogma was punishable by death. Where is an Erasmus when you need him? I asked a Sohrab what he thought about the riots over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. “It was all a bit ridiculous”, he said, “when Muslim men get together privately (for other than prayer) they joke about the Prophet all the time. "We have,” he said “thousands of jokes about the Prophet, mostly bawdy jokes about the Prophet and his 54 wives.” “I thought that the Prophet had 14 wives,” I said. “Fourteen officials wives, yes, but if you count all the women in his household it comes to 54”. We talked a bit more about sex and Islam. He was somewhat perplexed at the prudish face Islam presents to the West. “Islamic literature contains many explicit erotic writings which leave nothing to the imagination,” he said, “why Muslims would want to appear as complete prudes in public, I do not know.” I asked him if the cartons had shown the Prophet, not as a terrorist (the cartoon showing the Prophet with a bomb on top of his head instead of a turban) but in sexually compromising poses, meant to be funny, would the response have been the same? He answered in the affirmative. A bawdy cartoon of the Prophet that gave him human form, he explained, would probably have elicited the same rabid response, not only because of the image of the Prophet having sex, but because, for Muslims, watching someone having sex on paper, in film or in real life is a sin. Another Muslim who would like Muslims, men in particular, to enjoy a bawdy joke at their expense and share the joke with others, especially those who view Islam as humourless, is N... N... is a French-speaking Muslim comedian from Tunisia who now calls Quebec, Canada her home. She has an act which (at this writing) had yet to be produced in public called “Arab and a Slut” (my translation of “Arabe et cochonne”.) Recently, she was a guest on a very popular Radio-Canada Sunday current affairs talk-show. One of the first question asked was whether she was afraid of appearing on stage when the first Muslim woman comedian to dare to do so was assaulted by Muslim men during her show in London, England. I saw part of her show (the British comedian) on television, it was quite tame, no jokes about the Prophet or the Koran. Still in the eyes of some Muslim men she was deserving of a beating. “Yes,” she said “but it has to be done”. From my understanding, she had deliberately chosen the name of her act to make fun of Muslim men’s obsession with sex and virgins, an obsession, she explained, that was having a detrimental impact on Muslim women everywhere. Since 9/11, she said, more and more Tunisian women were wearing the veil for fear of aggression, and that the veil was a not a sign of submission to God but was imposed on women by a man (the Prophet Muhammad) who believed that the sight of a single women’s hair would get males thinking about the woman’s pubic hair and one thing would lead to another. The Prophet and Muslim men's passion for virgins also meant that Muslim women in her native Tunisia who were no longer virgins were having their hymen surgically re-constructed. This obsession, it seemed, had given birth to a new industry in North Africa, a virgin-reconstruction industry. N... and the Danish cartoonists chose ridicule to make a very serious point. Swift and Molière would have approved. The Danish cartoonists inadvertently brought the Prophet down to earth to the consternation of Muslims around the world. In the free-world a small minority of Muslims said BOO, and the free-world got a lot less free. Bernard Payeur, February 13, 2006.
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