BURNING AND LEARNING

Can a movie titled Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World be more relevant and timely this week? If Al Brooks had added a question mark to the title, the answer would be no, can't do, and not likely.

Perhaps the most insightful statement about the recent Danish cartoon controversy came from Tariq Ramadan, Europe's best-known Muslim intellectual (a label that means a whole lot less today as Europe seems intolerant as a continent and the term "Muslim intellectual" seems oxymoronic and blasphemous even by Muslim standards:

"In the Muslim world, we are not used to laughing at religion, our own or anybody else's. This is far from our understanding. For that reason, these cartoons are seen, by average Muslims and not just radicals, as a transgression against something sacred." Ramadan notes, however, that Muslims who live in European countries "must understand that laughing at religion is a part of the broader culture in which they live in Europe, going back to Voltaire." For Westerners, he explains, "[c]ynicism, irony and indeed blasphemy are part of the culture," so for Muslims in the West, "it is really important to be able to take a critical distance and not react so emotionally."

Advice that would have been good for Muslims in the East, South, North, West and Middle. But today it's too late for calmer heads to prevail in Syria, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.

Yes, embassies and missions are burning over a series of cartoons. And yes, I know it's wrong and unacceptable and blasphemous and all to caricature the big Moh, but these cartoons were published in Europe. When did the Muslim mobs get to tell the rest of the world what to do and why? That's the West's job (laugh...this is irony.).

Frankly, it appears that our stone-throwing, effigy-dangling brethren need a little of what the West has to give them, just as the West could learn a little more respect for matters of the Holy Spirit from the East. And if that little something happens to be a bit more respect for irony and cynicism, both products of the natural societal friction of a broader and open worldview, so be it.

After 9/11, many in the media opined that irony was dead. Four and a half years later, the world has become so much more dangerous, the gap in values between the West and the Middle East has been so widened by the Bush administration's handling of post-9/11 geopolitics, we now know the pundits were only partly correct.

Irony is deadly in 2006.