ISLAMABAD, March 7: The recent cartoon controversy is steeped in western world’s thinking which finds it difficult to live with religion and consequently looks down upon Muslims as backward people.

This was stated by Dr Farish Ahmad Noor, a Malaysian scholar, in his talk given at the Islamic Ideology Council here on Monday.

Dr Noor, an academic researcher at the Centre for Modern Orient Studies at Berlin, is presently in Pakistan to provide relief to earthquake victims.

Explaining the western reaction to the Muslim world’s protest against the blasphemous cartoons, he said: “We should be not surprised if the West created a few more crises and controversies to test whether the Muslim reaction was universal.”

The subject of his talk was western discourses on Islam and Muslims in the West. He was of the view that a Muslim global village had emerged. Dr Noor informed the audience that the western academia was crying out loud for renewal of a civilized dialogue with the Muslim world.

However, the controversy also had geo-political impact on Washington’s war on terror, though in fact this kind of inter- religious discourse was going on for the past 200 years.

In Dr Noor’s view, the heart of the matter was the human rights cost of the war on terror.

The cartoons were published only in the right wing newspapers of Europe, but other newspapers that did not hold rightist views came on board in an expression of solidarity to defend certain European values. Even Russia offered to hold an exhibition of the cartoons because it wanted to be close to the Europe.

However, the reaction in the Muslim world caught the West by surprise and made it stand back, and there were calls for a renewal of a civilized dialogue mostly coming from the West. However, Dr Noor thought such a discourse might be problematic for the Muslims for various reasons. In the first place, there is no such thing as one Christian West, while the image of Muslim is also multiple.

There are certain European beliefs obstructing the debate. What may be ascertained from the cartoons controversy is the emergence of a mindset that any thing non-European did not belong to Europe, and because of this reason Muslim should be considered outsiders.—Jonaid Iqbal