Salman Rushdie et al on standing up to fundamentalists [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

News World International is carrying a piece on the brouhaha about holding the Miss World Contest in Nigeria a year or two ago.

The country is only half Muslim, but the Islamic fundamentalists raised such a fuss about holding the contest in Nigeria, that the contestants were confined to their hotel rooms. Things were tense until Iziyoma Daniels, a young woman reporter for the largest newspaper in the country, fed up with protests against "lewdness" by members of a religion that allows polygamy, wrote a satirical piece in which she said that if Mohammed were alive, he would have chosen one of the contestants for a wife.

The article sparked outright bloody riots nationwide.

First the newspaper apologized, then they fired Daniels. That wasn't enough. Even the Nigerian government blamed Daniels for inciting the riots, and she felt that she had to leave the country. Her father bribed border guards to let her into Benin, where the family had friends, but even then, the imams put a fatwa on her, which meant that anyone who harbored her would be in danger. She fled to Europe and is currently living in Norway, the only country that would give her political asylum.

Salman Rushdie was interviewed in connection with the story. He said that apologizing to fundamentalists was a mistake, becauase it only emboldened them to demand more. However, they viewed not apologizing as a form of aggression. He compared it to thugs who break into your house and beat you up and then claim that you're the aggressor when you defend yourself.

I'm a liberal Christian, but I wonder how long it will be before a movie like Dogma or a novel like Live from Golgotha provokes nationwide riots in the U.S.