COMMENTARY: An open letter to Jesus and Muhammad
By Heikki Aittokoski
Revered Sirs,
I don't know if You read Hesari, but I am writing this anyway, since I cannot come up with any better channel of communication.
I am just a poor foreign-desk journalist, and I am sending You this appeal: put a stop to it, please.
In a purely professional sense, I'm fed up to here with this cartoon conflict. It seems as though international politics - at least seen from this European viewpoint - is dominated by the Koran and uranium. There would be a great deal more to write about in the world than the ongoing struggle between the Christian and the Muslim worlds.
Revered Sirs,
Let's face facts. A lot of blood has to flow in the Jordan before the debris of the clash of cultures can be cleared away. The two-way mutilation and mud-slinging has continued for so long already.
Let us consider the case, if we may, of Dante Alighieri, in whose La divina commedia (written between 1306 and 1323), You, Prophet Muhammad, are cast into the Eighth Circle of Hell - in other words, pretty low down in the scheme of things. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translated Your lament: "See now how I rend me; how mutilated, see, is Mahomet".
Not very constructive, was it? All the same, Dante had a right to write in this vein.
Revered Sirs,
You both represent religions of the Word, but the Word - in the real sense of the term - seemed only to be in the beginning. As soon as we move from words to actions, then an ugly image is drawn on the page, and it is utter tripe and nonsense to say the pen is mightier than the sword.
The pen has smashed up still further what was first torn asunder by the sword. The pen has primarily been used to fuss and whine about the swords, a collision course from the outset.
As Isidorus Pacensis* wrote in his Chronicles about the decisive Battle of Tours in 732 AD:
"And in the shock of the battle the men of the North seemed like a sea that cannot be moved. Firmly they stood, one close to another, forming as it were a bulwark of ice; and with great blows of their swords they hewed down the Arabs."
All this was done and written in Your name, of course, Jesus. The same kind of bragging was - and still is - carried on by the other side, too, as both of You are perfectly well aware.
Revered Sirs,
I am in a sense unhappy that transport by air, television, the Internet, and SMS messaging have all been invented.
Without these revolutionary breakthroughs, the current global turmoil would naturally not be possible. I cast my mind back with something approaching longing to the autumn of 1683, when the Ottoman troops under Kara Mustafa attempted to surround and take Vienna.
Kara Mustafa failed, and he paid for it with his head, being executed in Belgrade in December. Immediately after the abortive assault, the Austrians drew insulting images of the Ottoman commander, which spread around Europe - but they remained, as it were, "for insiders only".
The same thing probably also happened with the 14th century French miniature of You, Prophet Muhammad, in which You are depicted on a divan surrounded by bare-breasted ladies. There's nothing new under the sun.
Except this Internet thing. There you can find pictures of people having their heads cut off, barbaric acts in Iraqi jails, zealots preaching fire and brimstone on one side or the other. It is increasingly easy to do what people have always done: pass the legacy of hostility and hatred on to the next generations.
Revered Sirs,
When politics and religion are mixed, it is a Molotov cocktail that is served up.
But to me it seems that there is a fundamental difference today between the European and the Muslim societies. The former are soft, while the latter ones are hard, and the hardness of the former societies lies precisely in the fact that they can afford to be soft.
And here, too, of course, there are limits. As You well know, Jesus, Your message has repeatedly been shaped and manipulated to serve the ends of Realpolitik. If one turns the other cheek too much, the cheek starts to hurt.
In the worlds of values there will have to be a coming-together, and it is not my fault, Prophet Muhammad, that the societies belonging to Your particular faith look to me to need to take more steps. Do not regard me as some kind of cultural imperialist; I am but a poor journalist.
Revered Sirs,
I would beg You to turn to your superiors and to fulfil my heart-felt wish: at the point when I sometime retire from this profession, I would prefer to see rather fewer news items about the Middle East, please.
Yours,
Heikki Aittokoski
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 10.2.2006
* Isidorus, Bishop of Badajoz (Pacensis) in Spain, an ecclesiastic and early chronicler who flourished in the mid-8th century AD.
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 14.2.2006 - THIS WEEK |
 COMMENTARY: An open letter to Jesus and Muhammad |
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