Rarely do I have public radio "driveway moments," sitting in my car listening to a program instead of going inside and turning on the radio, but sometimes work's not that exciting and there's a soy chai to be tended to.
This morning, KGNU aired a good Alternative Radio interview with Emran Qureshi who wrote an op-ed in the NYT entitled The Islam the Riots Drowned Out on their "Morning Magazine." Qureshi has a solid grasp of the history of Islam and the Islamic world as well as how the resurgence of Salafism and the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt have been trying to combat the Iranian revolution's dominance (prior to 9/11) of the image of Islam is a context worth understanding. Qureshi sets forth how this fundamentalist one-uppmanship has taken its toll on Islam. Also, he has a measured response to the issue of censorship.
The controversy comes at a time when many in the Islamic world view the war on terrorism as a war on Islam. They draw on memories of colonization and of the Crusades, when Western invaders ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad as an imposter.
Ironies abound. Saudi Arabia leads the protests, yet is systematically destroying its Islamic heritage. The Wahhabis who dominate Saudi Arabia do not believe in honoring Islam's holy men and women or the Prophet Muhammad (they've proscribed the celebration of his birthday). Driven by sectarian zeal, the Saudi authorities have razed and dug up virtually every site in Mecca and Medina linked to Muhammad, members of his family and his companions.
No, the answer is not more censorship. But it would be nice if Western champions of freedom of speech didn't trivialize it by deriving pleasure from their ability to gratuitously offend Muslims. They view freedom of speech much as Islamic fundamentalists do — simply as the ability to offend — rather than as the cornerstone of a liberal democratic polity that uses such freedoms wisely and responsibly. Worse, these advocates insist on handing Muslim radicals a platform from which to pose as defenders of the faith against an alleged Western assault on Islam.
I find his comparison of the critique of "the cartoons as hate speech" argument that I'm fond of as a bit disingenuous. He asks whether muslim-produced literature that could be construed as hate speech should be banned as well? The argument's not exactly apples-to-apples, what with Western media's inherent responsibility of weighing free speech vs. hate speech. Haters in the muslim world are obviously not going to police themselves and the western media wouldn't even know who they are, really, so they wouldn't publish them. If a media organization who is attempting to adhere to 'free speech principles' (whatever that means in Europe) itself produces encourages hate speech, that should be recognized for what it is: hypocrisy and a failing of the responsibility that comes with free speech. Regardless, his article takes a good angle to critique the popular view of Islam in America.
KGNU has mp3 archives of their interviews and when the place it up, I'll put a link here to the interview segment (the whole "Morning Magazine" tends to be 30mb and some people really don't need to hear Jim Hightower's inane ideations just to get to an interesting interview). Update: Since this was an Alternative Radio live interview, KGNU cut off their recording. You'll just have to take my word for it that it was worth sitting in the car for.
On a perfectly superficial aside aimed at "non-native" people trying to pronounce foreign-language words with some sort of ethnocorrectness: Bravo at your attempt but, please, pick a dialect. For example, if you want to pronounce "Karbala" and "Qawaali" be definite and consistent in the dialect chosen. There's nothing worse than a "dialect of the moment" pronunciation of Saudi, Iraqi, Pakistani, and Indian cities, places and things. You can pronounce both words as Arabic or as Urdu words (which sound slightly different), but mixing the two (especially mixing up the two), makes one sound very eracism. It really hurts the ears. After a while, I'd rather hear the anglicized pronunciations rather than a well-meaning butchered attempt.
The second interesting interview, which was actually before the first and only kept me in my car for a short period of time, was with Jim Spiri, a civilian contractor who was fired from KBR for writing an article about a Las Cruces, NM soldier whose casket he helped load on a plane back from Iraq,
The night Jesse Zamora was carried to the C-130. This incident seem to have blown up in KBR's face. Spiri's obviously a patriot and didn't really succumb to any anti-Bush goading of some of the callers, but he does come down pretty hard on KBR's management of their contract. From the segment, it seems like he'd been a good worker and was ground up in the bureacracy that complicates government contracts, something that hits home. Edit: Here's the interview with Jim Spiri on KGNU 03/02/2006