Please don't flame me. I'm just posting the article. I think this is an Op-Ed piece, so I'm thinking the four paragraph rule does not apply. Mods, correct me if I'm wrong. Thanks.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB07Ak02.html Why can't Muslims take a joke?
By Spengler
Religious humor has become commonplace in the secular West, but it came with a price.
More than any people on Earth, the Danes should know the terrible price of religious humor, for the first great Christian humorist arose from their dour midst as if by immaculate conception. "Humor is intrinsic to Christianity," wrote Soren Kierkegaard, because "truth is hidden in mystery". But Kierkegaard the humorist was sent to the Danes after the Enlightenment had laid waste to Christianity, that is, after the French revolutionary army had conquered traditional Europe. He wielded humor out of desperation, after Denmark already had started down its long slide toward secularism.
<snip>
Deprecatory cartoons of Jesus would have earned you the dungeon or the stake during most of Christianity's 2,000-year history. Britain still has not abolished the Blasphemous Libel Law against mockery of the Church of England, although the last Englishman punished for blasphemy was a certain William Gott, who received nine months' imprisonment in 1922 for comparing Jesus to a circus clown.
<snip>
With freedom of choice and access to information come doubt. Western scholars doubt whether Mohammed ever existed <2> or, if he existed, whether the Koran was invented two centuries after his death, or indeed whether the Koran even was written in Arabic. Christianity and Judaism are bloodied - indeed, drained almost dry - by nearly two centuries of scriptural criticism; Islam's turn barely has begun.
More revealing than the refusal of the mainstream American media to repost the Mohammed cartoons is the disappearance of more dangerous material previously available. Newsweek's "Challenging the Koran" story of July 28, 2003, has vanished from the magazine's website. The government of Pakistan had banned that issue, which among other things reported a German philologist's contention that the Koran was written in Syriac rather than classical Arabic, translating the "virgins" of Paradise as "raisins". As I observed before, the topic of Koranic criticism has disappeared from the mainstream media. Since the suppression of the Newsweek story the Western media have steered clear of the subject.
<snip>
Muslims rage at affronts to their faith because the modern world puts their faith at risk, precisely as modern Islamists contend. <3> That is not a Muslim problem as such, for all faith is challenged as traditional society gives ground to globalization. But Muslim countries, whose traditional life shows a literacy rate of only 60%, face a century of religious deracination. Christianity and Judaism barely have adapted to the modern world; the Islamists believe with good reason that Islam cannot co-exist with modernism and propose to shut it out altogether.
<snip>
With stable institutions and material wealth, the secular West evinces a slow decline. Not so the Muslim world, where loss of faith implies sudden deracination and ruin. In the space of a generation, Islam must make an adjustment that Christianity made with great difficulty over half a millennium. Both for theological and social reasons, it is unequipped to do so. Muslims might as well fight over a cartoon now; they have very little to lose.
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