Double Oscar-winner and Indian composer A.R. Rahman is in big trouble: A fatwa has been issued against him because he dared to score a new movie about the Prophet Mohammad. Another fatwa should we say?
The Sunni group called the Raza Academy says that the film – directed by Iranian director Majid Majidi, also included in the fatwa of course – should not use the word Mohammad as its title and that Muslims are not allowed to depict God in images. We know that right? A few people in Paris knew that very well, and they paid with their lives. But a fatwa is a weird threat, it is the term for an Islamic legal opinion, and its weight depends on the authority of the person issuing it. Salman Rushdie, who had a fatwa over his head for decades because of his book ‘The Satanic Verses’, lived in hiding for years and years and is very fortunately still alive.
The Raza Academy wants the Indian government to ban the movie, declaring ‘We will contact Home Minister Rajnath Singh and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to demand a ban on the film and legal action be taken against A.R. Rahman and Majid Majidi for hurting the feelings of Muslims,’
Rahman is a very successful musician (he scored ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ among many, many other films) and he is himself a Muslim! So I am not sure I get it. First of all, why do Muslims want to rule a country which is not predominantly Muslim? Then, when this craziness is gonna stop? Again if not all Muslims agree with these barbaric practices from another century, they should speak up very loudly against this, otherwise they are on the fatwa-issuers’ side and it will be harder and harder to believe that Islam is this religion of peace they pretend it to be.
It’s time to stop being politically correct with religious fanatics, they should be treated for what they are, demented people, and unfortunately the line that the supposed elite wants to draw between extremists and peaceful Muslims gets thinner and thinner.
After the assassinations of the French cartoonists, Salman Rushdie rightly said that ‘if The Satanic Verses had been published today, the members of the literary elite who rounded on Charlie Hebdo in the wake of the French satirical magazine winning a PEN prize for courage would not have defended him.’… ‘it seems we have learned the wrong lessons,’ he declared in an interview with L’Express, ‘Instead of realizing that we need to oppose these attacks on freedom of expression, we thought that we need to placate them with compromise and renunciation’.
I agree with him completely, it is so easy to use the term Islamophobia and to accuse cartoonists or filmmakers of insulting a religion or an ethnic group, when in fact the tyranny comes from these religious people who can’t tolerate a critic, or even a depiction of their prophet.