A Benevolence That We Must Expect
When I confront the difference in how largely Christian societies and largely Muslim societies handle what they consider sin in general and criticism in particular, Christians tend to refer to it as proof of their benevolence. In America, you can boldly declare on national television that God does not exist and the worse reaction you will get is the loss of a few conservative viewers. Make such a proclamation in Iran and the signal to such a program will be cut abruptly, the channel will be fined and your head may be permanently separated from your neck.
To an extent, I think I am a benefactor of this benevolence. I cannot even begin to imagine what it would be like to refuse to go for Friday services at the mosque, much more deny the existence of Allah if I was born to a Muslim. I could wake up one day and find policemen at my front door, having been reported for insulting the Almighty Allah, the Holy Prophet (Peace be upon him) and Islam (the religion of peace). Unlike Mubarak Bala, I might slip through the cracks and no one will hear of me again, and that will be all too well because no one can hear from me again.
But this benevolence I am so thankful for, is not inherent in Christianity.
I know this because even though some of my friends and family have resigned themselves to my existence, tolerating my defiance and praying to God to have mercy on me; they betray an overwhelming desire to have my different-ness altered. They do not like that I am who I am, that I hold these beliefs (or the absence of these beliefs, for that matter). If they could, they would have my mindset and/or myself swapped for a more conforming, recognisable being. If they could, they would force me back to the church by persuasion, coercion or plain old blackmail. They have tried at several points. It’s only natural that they do.
But I also imagine that if the law and the society allowed it, they will also readily have me committed to a mental institution (my family wouldn’t sha. They couldn’t bring themselves to). They think that it’s too much book that scattered my head. Where else to get the wiring fixed than at a psychiatric hospital?
Some decades ago, the Church had inventive ways of punishing heretics: all dissenting views were denounced and quickly burnt if they were in written form, lives may be lost and in one particular unsavoury period, countless women were burnt at the stake on the suspicion of witchcraft.
The benevolence of Christian societies is founded in the fact that there has been sufficient distinction between the state and religion to strip the church and its attendant beliefs of the power to end a human being in the way it used to be able to do. The state, at least on paper, is stronger than the church; and the state, at least on paper, holds that fundamental rights (including freedom to hold any belief and practice any religion) are sacramental.
Muslim states are testament of what happens when that line between state and religion, reason and blind-belief, is repeatedly blurred. The centuries old religious text is both a code for spirituality, and also the divinely inspired grundnorm. Err from it and you haven’t only wronged Allah and his emotional faithfuls, you have breached the fundamental law of the land.
There will be hell to pay.
