Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy

by Jonathan A.C. Brown

Western demands that other people act ‘reasonably’ because that is what ‘reasonable people’ should do still smell of British colonial efforts to bring native customs into accord with ‘good conscience.’ Especially in its avatar of ‘common sense,’ Reason in global discourse today carries its ancestry barely concealed: the early modern British ideal of unifying, upper-middle-class values, a relaxed but assumed Anglo-Saxon Christian temperament, French anticlericalism and Jefferson’s democracy-justifying yeoman wisdom.109 Muslim protests over French cartoons mocking the Prophet in 2011 were rebuffed in the West with indignant referrals to the freedom of expression, a right self-evident to those possessed of ‘Reason’ and ‘common sense.’ A year earlier, however, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority had banned an advert featuring a pregnant nun as a ‘serious offense’ to Catholics.110 A young Egyptian web entrepreneur and self-proclaimed ‘liberal’ advocating the motto, ‘You are free as long as you do no harm’ betrayed the cultural boundaries of his own Reason. Discussing freedom of expression in a talk-show dialogue with a conservative Sufi shaykh, he immediately agreed that, ‘of course, insulting Muhammad could not be allowed. It harms his followers.’