Off with his head!
They’re kidding, right? This is a joke? It has to be a joke – right? They can’t be serious?
A doctor has been arrested for insulting the Prophet Mohammed in Pakistan…
Naushad Valiyani was detained on Friday following a complaint by a medical representative who visited the doctor in the city of Hyderabad.
“The arrest was made after the complainant told the police that Valiyani threw his business card, which had his full name, Muhammad Faizan, in a dustbin during a visit to his clinic,” regional police chief Mushtaq Shah told AFP.
“Faizan accused Valiyani of committing blasphemy and asked police to register a case against the doctor.”
And the police obliged.
So………no phone books can be thrown out in Pakistan? No newspapers or magazines? They must all contain myriad instances of the name “Mohammed,” so if it’s blasphemy to dispose of any bit of paper on which the name “Mohammed” appears, then that would seem to be the rule, yes?
Shah said the issue had been resolved after Valiyani, a member of Pakistan’s Ismaili community, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, apologised but local religious leaders intervened and pressed for action.
“Valiyani had assured Faizan that he did not mean to insult the Prophet Mohammed by throwing the visiting card in the dustbin,” Shah said.
So why didn’t Shah tell the “local religious leaders” to fuck off? Why didn’t the “local religious leaders” tell each other that they were a disgrace to the species? Why – oh never mind.
Do you ever wonder that the Islamists will some day make their rules so restrictive that no normal life is possible? I remember a similar strange situation where the Pakistanis were freaking out about paper recycling, since some disposed Koran *might* end up becoming toilet paper. But sure, by all means, make every instance of the word Mohammad in paper sacred. They’ll all end up buried in their own paper waste.
Huh. Lately there have been way too many days that the only way I can consume the news and stay sane is to do so while drinking. My liver hates the internet.
Mohammed is also mentioned in The Satanic Verses, of course.
Sajanas: toilet paper with Koranic verses printed on it was on the market a few years ago, but it seems that its promoter got arrested (in Germany).
http://islamexposed.blogspot.com/2010/09/koran-toilet-paper.html
This is one of the things that has me so perplexed about this case — surely this not the first time that the printed word “Mohammed” has been thrown out, right? Honestly, do these idiots ever think?
Why don’t these people take a cue from devout Jews (“G-d” instead of “God”) and write the name of their prophent with a few letters missing. How ’bout “–ham—?”
I do remember that, in 1994, McDonald’s introduced wax-paper burger wrappers featuring the flags of all of the nations competing in that year’s World Cup (held in the U.S.). One such flag was Saudi Arabia’s, which contains the statement “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah” on it in Arabic.
Various Muslim parties cried offense, because disposing of such wrappers meant trashing (literally) the name of God. McDonald’s reportedly backed down—but, given that the wrappers had already been printed, I’m at a loss to understand what could have happened next. What exactly was McDonald’s supposed to do with thousands of disposable burger wrappers?
I have never understood why naming someone Mohamed was OK in the first place. If he is so easily offended then having some squalling, snot-nosed, sack-of-crap wearing, rug rat associated with him should set him right off.
Well, Rieux, they could build a McMosque….
I wonder if you could get a McRib wrapped in gods name?
I’m guessing, considering some of the pork parts that likely go into one, that would offend as many non-muslims as muslims.
+1
One real problem is the fact that there is no humour in Abrahamic religion. There is a bit of jeering, but no laughing in the Bible or the Koran. Yet in its own terms, each religion must hold that humour is God’s own invention: though many of course would hold it to be one of the Devil’s.
Maybe a stand-up comic in the mosque, church or synagogue could go through a routine where the Devil was the butt of all the jokes. But one can see straight away the problem: all too easily the whole system of notions that is the creed itself would get a laugh too, and laughing at oneself is dangerous if one takes oneself over-seriously.
The result is ridiculaous stuff like this, where the saddest fact is that so many Pakistanis can’t see what fools their creed makes of them.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa and Camus Dude, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Off with his head! http://dlvr.it/BJwyx […]
It’s a pity the police weren’t sensible enough to throw stones at the sales guy for claiming to be the prophet. Stupidity knows no bounds and religion strives to plumb the depths of stupid.
“It’s a pity the police weren’t sensible enough to throw stones at the sales guy for claiming to be the prophet.”
That presumes that the police weren’t going to be taking sides in this matter but rather judging it on the merits of the case. What seems to be happening here is very similar to the case of the Christian woman who is currently under a death sentence for blasphemy – in other words it is a sectarian attack on someone of a minority religion who doesn’t know their place (i.e. below that of the sunni majority). Th doctor in this case insulted the salesman who responded by using the blasphemy law as a weapon. Nobody could seriously believe that the actual charge but that isn’t the point, the point is that not being a member of the majority religion automatically places you at risk of attack based on the blasphemy laws.
What a crazy religion! Even if this were the extremest of exceptions, this religion is simply mad, mad, mad! What else can you say about the minds of people who get exercised over something some pathetically childish? What gets me is that people think the gnu atheists are off their stump. Well, I’ve gotta say, with religion like this around we’ve got reasons to be strident and uncompromising with the idea of faith. Because there’s absolutely nothing in the religion that can really counter this. Muhammed’s name is — what? Sacred? Holy? (I thought he was just a man. Wasn’t he? Actually, he was a cut-throat thug, a murderer and an abuser of little girls, but, hey, what’s all that when you’re holy?) Well, if it is, why do they name their kids him? For you can be sure that a reasonable percentage will live lives that will, in some sense, and certainly all of them will live lives that will, at some point, be desecrations of the name, far worse than throwing a sales rep’s business card into the recycle bin. And one wants to know what one is to do with every piece of paper with the name Muhammed on it? After all, the name Muhammed must be festooned everywhere (and most were probably named after brothers, fathers, grandfathers, friends, mentors, etc., anyway): driver’s licenses, VISA receipts, conference name cards, usw. Ishad Manji did a recent piece for the National Post, but if whe really thinks that there’s some way of liberalising Islam, she’s not paying attention.
Damn. I am surely in trouble. A few years ago, I failed a student in a class I was teaching. And the student’s name was “Mohammed”.
Maybe the sales rep took offense at having his card binned before his eyes and decided to pay off what he felt was a score. This seems to be what a lot of people do in Pakistan, and this won’t be the first time that the religious “authorities” have been given another “cause” with which to terrorise everyone else.
Sorry, Sigmund. I see you got in just ahead of me.
I suppose that no one pays any attention to the fate of bits of paper till someone starts a scare. They seem to have no defences against idiocy or manipulation of belief or dogma. Perhaps their religion is too frightening: all that hell-fire, all those appalling punishments, all those absurd rules about personal actions, all that primitive tribalism and ignorance. Perhaps there is no balance or moderation, no protection against obsession. Allah is a tyrant – he can do anything; maybe binning a piece of paer really is a sin worthy of eternal torment. How do they really know? Perhaps there really is no sound moral basis to stand on: only the words of a clever and ruthless conman and his ignorant and bigoted interpreters.
Analyzing something like this for internal logic is missing the point. We are a species of emotional, tribalistic apes. One of the emergent features of our collective mental processes is that we occasionally engage in hysteria and mob violence.
If you want to understand this sort of thing, you’re better off reading the research on police states and informants in Soviet controlled Germany and Russia. Its a process by which everyone knows that people with certain traits will be horribly treated or killed, so everyone struggles to publicly appear to be as conformist as possible with what they think society expects of them, and as critical and condemning of those in the victimized group. This is just a survival tactic, but it makes everyone complicit in the communal violence, which in turn triggers a feedback in which people rationalize that what they’ve done must not have been so horrible, perhaps because the people they’ve victimized deserved it.
Its not a process based on rational thinking. No one actually sat down and decided that they really believed, based on logic and reason, that throwing away a business card with the name “Mohammad” on it was a bad act. Once it was suggested that it was, and more importantly that the community was about to turn on a particular individual, the process by which everyone desperately attempts to loudly proclaim their membership in the community began… and thanks to the ongoing pathology, the way to do that is to condemn this guy.
Moe just opened his ham shop. Wait, can I say that?
True, Patrick; but don’t forget how convenient such a situation of conformity is for paying off scores. And in such a state of society, can anyone really tell the difference?
Best option is to get the name Mohammed tattooed all over your body, then no one can harm you without cutting or bruising his name.
Bugger – just noticed PZ got there before me!
Shatterface: Islam stretches in a great arc from Nigeria in the West to Indonesian-occupied New Guinea in the East. So the tattoos would have to be in all the likely languages as well, from Swahili to Bahasa Indonesia, not just Arabic. You would finish up looking like an international signpost.
Could confuse a fanatical assassin enough perhaps to buy you a bit of time.
I think Gordon and Sigmund are on the right track. This has nothing to do with religion; this is about police corruption. Probably the chief of police is the salesman’s uncle’s brother’s cousin or something.
In this (possibly unique) case, religion is simply an innocent tool of corruption. I realize it’s usually the other way around (decent hard-working corruption violently misused by religion) but there you go.
Grendels Dad-
I think that you are allowed to add Mo to your name after completing a pilgrimage to Mecca. As Cassius Clay and Lew Alcindor did.
So, no rug rats unless being born there counts as an automatic naming event…
At that point, no one would dare suggest otherwise for fear of being so labelled themselves… not unlike US politicians fear of being ‘soft on terrorism’
You are aware that this case would not exist in the absence of blasphemy laws, right?
Well, Yahzi, I think that it does have to do with religion, in the sense that religion provides the environment in which this moral confusion over conformity and opportunism takes place. What can the police do when as soon as a complaint is made religious extremists start whipping up another riot? Teddy bears, visiting-cards, quarrels with the neighbours…
On the other hand, I’m glad that Patrick brought up the German and Russian police states. What all these societies seem to have in common is the idea of a central dogma from which anyone can fall away for the most trivial of reasons. It creates a climate of terror in which people go about their daily lives, and it also offers a situation in which petty and dishonest (not just insecure) people can gain power over their neighbours, or even rise higher, at other people’s expense. Religion, of course, has been doing this for far longer.
This is a “society” in which everything is corrupted, and there seems no way to stop that.
This case is not about religion, it’s about yet another pharmaceutical company forsaking the trust of a physician all in the name of prophet.
;>D
Onoes!! What about all the newspapers I’ve thrown out – or worse, recycled – that contained reports on the cricketing exploits of Mohammed Azharuddin and Mohammed Yousuf and the political bastadry of Mahatir Mohamad? I’m so scrood.
Hey, if the name Mohamed appears on my computer screen, do I have to keep that screen open for ever and ever?
Now what are we going to do, Jan? Perhaps we’ll be safe if we only visit Islamic websites. Or perhaps I shouldn’t be suggesting new wheezes for oppressing and brain-washing those who tremble before the Lord. I wonder if there’s a fatwah about it? Perhaps if I just stick a picture of a teddy bear somewhere on the screen it’ll be all right? Hard to know, really…
I think the solution is obvious: get rid of blasphemy and apostasy laws, and become blasphemous and an apostate. This gets rid of the demon that is ‘sacredness’ which is what powers this madness. If we all bow down to sacredness, then we’ve lost.
Really? When did religion get its innocence back?
Is this the core of the religion? No. There are probably things closer to the heart of Islam than going ballistic because a business card carrying the ‘sacred’ name was binned. But don’t forget McDonalds and the hamburger wrappers. Sure, culturally insensitive, but the sensitivity is religious. If people weren’t keyed up about the holiness of something, there wouldn’t be a problem. Even if it has to do with religious minorities, it’s still religious. You can only get someone arrested over a name if you add religion. Don’t forget that the expletive ‘Christ!’ or ‘Jesus!’, even ‘God!’, used to be in very bad taste indeed. It might not get you thrown into pokey, but, hey, you could be ostracised if not arrested. And don’t foget, too, that, political or not, novelists, cartoonists and others have been sentenced to arbitrary murder because they misused the ‘sacred’ name. Was this political? Yes, it had a political dimension. Was it religious? Of course. Religion is politics all the way down.
@Buford: so how come “mohammad” is teh most popular name chosen in the UK for male infants?
Methinks this case is all about a sunni pharma rep who got pissed off at being dissed by a shia doctor. The doc should have waited until the rep was gone. Then the local mullahs get in the act and it’s blasphemy, blasphemy, all is blasphemy. One wonders why anybody would want to live under such a system, let alone vociferously defend it against every imagined insult, every imagined enemy.
BTW: I see that NPR has finally discovered the case of Asia Bibi – probably because the pope has commented. And they wonder why people don’t contribute anymore!
At the end of the page I linked to before (@3), you’ll see extracts from the Book of Reliance of the Traveler, which explains Islamic toilet law for travelers. It really is mad.
I suddenly remember how Holland used to be plastered all over with “God hoort U, vloek niet” placed by the Dutch association against swearing, on tram shelters and bus stations. People used a felt pen to replace the comma with a “w” which changed the command “God hears you, don’t swear” to “God doesn’t hear you swearing”.
Do you ever wonder that the Islamists will some day make their rules so restrictive that no normal life is possible?
Well, that’s pretty much the case in Saudi Arabia, the conservative Gulf States and whole swaths of Pakistan and Afganistan.
Islam, orthodox Islam, proscribes most normal human behaviors beacuse its continued existence and propagation is predicated on creating a human desert, one in which no one sins because no one no longer does much of anything.
Under Islam life grinds to a halt. I think the death of scientific and technologcial progress, not to mention the almost complete lack of Nobel Prize winners from the Muslim world attests to that sorry state of affairs.
Also, from what I can glean the Muslim world long ago ceased to grow enough food to feed itslef, and were it not for the financial assistence and foreign aid of us oh-so filthy Kuffars, large parts of it would would be subject to mass famine.
We have the thankless task of feeding this worthless monster, all the while having to endures its endless predations
If Jesus was Jewish then why did he have a Puerto Rican name?
Okay, the latest outrage is now the poor screaming Sudanese woman, whipped for wearing ‘trousers’. Yes, it gets more absurd:
Shocking video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xef384fWFs&feature=sub
Link to Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/13/sudan-woman-flogged-youtube?INTCMP=SRCH
And to top it all, in the video, a policeman is laughing.
I too agree that Vatican should be auctioned off for charity and turned into a theme park.
Communism and Fascism provide an equally morally bankrupt environment. The point is that this particular case is no more about religion than Stalinism was about atheism. Religion is an incidental factor, simply the nearest club with which to enforce the police state. We should not blame religion for this anymore than we should accept atheism being blamed for Stalinism. In this particular case.
If you want a case where it is religion that is the root and cause of the problem, there are plenty of those. Just not, in my analysis, this one; and in general I am always prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to the other side.
Please re-calibrate your sarcasm meter. :)
So did Communism. And the response was the same: people carried out their normal behaviors, only in secret. Which is exactly what is happening in Saudi Arabia.
The point of a police state is not arrest wrong-doers; it is to make everything illegal so that at any given time you can arrest anyone. Police states only exist as long as they don’t enforce the laws (except selectively).
Although, as you point out, Islamism has gotten to a point where it can’t feed itself. Just like Communism did. And the response will be the same: either the collapse of the system, aka the USSR, or the entrenchment of the system, aka North Korea.
Ian Mac Dougall #11
There is at least one account of laughter in the OT: when the elderly Sarah hears that she will bear a child to Abraham she laughs and immediately denies it out of fear of God. Later when the child is born, they call him Isaac, from the Hebrew root for laughter and Sarah says ” God hath made me to laugh so that all that hear will laugh with me.” Not exactly a thigh slapper, I grant you.
Lots of things in the Bible make me laugh, but I think that goes rather against authorial intent.
Thanks for the insightful post Yahzi.
Communism has nothing to do with atheism. You may as well blame moustaches for providing a morally bankrupt environment.
Julia F @ #44: Thanks for the information. I must annotate my Bible accordingly.
Sad about Sarah. She should have kept on laughing.
I linked to the disgusting Sudanese video in News yesterday.
Hey, I’ve long held that the book of Jonah was slapstick comedy.
come on… he gets this mission he doesn’t want to do… tries to run away … gets eaten but not killed, vomited up
So he finally sucks it up and preaches death and destruction, and God screws with him again by calling the whole thing off….
So Jonah is sitting there, waiting for the big destruction but it doesn’t happen.. and God messes with him again by growing a shade plant, then killing it with a bug.
Poor Jonah… he don’t get no respect…