Last week I awoke to the news of an Islamic protest march through the centre of Sydney. It wasn’t an entirely peaceful protest. I am Australian, but I live in Africa where this kind of thing is common, and often worse. Earlier this year, one of my students from Nigeria was unable to attend the first two weeks of term because his town was literally under siege by Muslim insurgents who were burning churches and the homes of Christians. No doubt the Christians were doing their own share of insurgency also. Nevertheless, it was still shocking for me to see pictures of Muslim protestors marching through Hyde Park to uphold the honour of their prophet Muhammad. One photograph showed a child holding a banner that read, “Behead all those who insult the prophet!” How should Christians respond?
There is no doubt that their prophet was being insulted. They were protesting a new movie being made in the United States, apparently depicting Muhammad as a womanizer and child molester. Subsequent media attention has, unsurprisingly, focused on reassuring us that Muslims are not generally violent people, that Islam is a religion of peace, and that these minority factions exist within many religions. We have nothing to fear from Islam, apparently. My Nigerian student might disagree.
But whether this is true or not, the western media has once again largely missed the bigger picture of what is going on here. The protests weren’t about violence in the name of religion, and the relevant point isn’t whether this is a minority sect within a largely peaceful Islamic sub-culture. The protests were about honour. It is completely nonsensical to me, and to many in the west I suspect, that a group of people would march through Sydney protesting the production of a film in the United States. What did they expect the Australian government to do? What could have they possibly hoped to achieve? But they did achieve something. Muhammad had been publicly disgraced; shame had been brought upon the Islamic religion. The protestors sent a clear message that that isn’t OK with them. We’ve seen this plenty of times in recent events, from the cartoons of Muhammad in the Danish press, to the trial in Melbourne of Pastor Danni Nalliah for vilification. The protests weren’t about policy, they were aiming to restore honour.
To be sure, Muslims will disagree on how best to honour their prophet and their god. The founder of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia, Keyser Trad, was quick to respond that the protest “[did] nothing to uphold the prophet’s honour as they claim.”1 But the issue isn’t violence or whether Islam is inherently violent or not. Whatever method they advocate to do it, something every Muslim will hold dear is that Allah, Muhammad and the Islamic religion be seen to be honoured. Islam is an inherently honour based religion. Allah must be seen to win.
If you are scratching your head at this point, and wondering why honour is so important to Muslims, why a bunch of people thought what happened yesterday was honouring anyone, and why common sense didn’t prevail (because protesting in Sydney could accomplish very little in California), then you need to stop and consider that perhaps what you call common sense isn’t actually all that common. Perhaps what is sensible, what you call rational, is in part determined by culture.
For a very long time, Christian missionaries have been noticing that cultural differences run far deeper than just food, clothes and customs. People from different cultures actually think differently. They rationalize differently. I’m not talking about the kind of rationality you use to do mathematics. I’m talking about the thoughts you think in order to motivate action: the thoughts you have to determine what kinds of activities are morally acceptable, practical, useful, wise and ethical.
Over the next few days I’d like to think through this idea with you. My plan is firstly to explore the idea of culturally determined rationality, then to draw out some implications for commending the gospel, and then finally think about how we western Christians might respond when we see Muslims doing things like the protest march that happened last week.
More on this tomorrow—until then, what kinds of things would you put in the category of “rational thought”? Coming up with how you define rationality will be useful for what follows.