OSTENSIBLY THE attack that took the life of US ambassador Chris Stevens and three others in Benghazi, and the related protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Gaza, were a response to insults to the Prophet Muhammad in an obscure US film posted on Facebook. It portrays him as a megalomaniac, womanising, child molester.
But, whether or not, as the US suggests, the attack was preplanned, the film was largely just the vehicle for opportunist radicals, probably Salafists, to mobilise the current of bitter anti-Americanism that runs through the Middle East.
The killing of the popular diplomat who had identified himself with the revolution before Gadafy’s overthrow, and who was successfully articulating US outreach to the new Libya, was above all a political attempt to drive a wedge between the two countries and between communities. It was rooted in the unresolved dynamic and struggle for power of the revolution’s aftermath – significantly there were protests in Tripoli and Benghazi and outpourings of rage across Libya on Wednesday against the killers and against the Salafists generally.
That volatile mix is easily inflamed by the blasphemy/insult to Islam argument, the most potent mobiliser of discontent, and most difficult to answer. The refusal by the US – rightly – to prosecute what are clearly Islamophobe bigots deliberately provoking hatred is seen as tacit support for them. Where Islam is predominant the prohibition on blasphemy trumps liberal arguments for free speech, although the Libyan authorities’ promise to bring the perpetrators to justice is most welcome.
For western democracies there are no easy answers. The US Cairo embassy’s appeal for religious tolerance ahead of the Libyan attack fell on deaf ears. The diplomatic campaign against Iran’s fatwah on Salman Rushdie took many years. And time and again, from Afghanistan to the Middle East, the issue has flared whether around a Danish cartoon or the alleged desecration of the Koran, prompting attacks on international targets. And only this week Channel 4 has had to pull a programme on Islam from its schedule after threats.
In the end, however, the threat posed by the religious extremists driving this agenda, like those in Pakistan who persecuted 14-year-old Rimsha Masih, is a challenge that modernising Islam’s majority itself must face up to sooner rather than later. It is a political and theological battle for hearts and minds it must wage, an existential threat to it as much as to the non-Muslim world.