By the same token, women won’t die if she stays at home or wears a burqa. What if I want to criticize Mohammad for marrying a 9 year old? I’m sure that would offend a lot of people. Should I be sentence to death for blasphemy. What if start calling Mohammad names? Should I be sentenced to death for blasphemy. I’m not threatening to kill anyone, I’m not threatening to harm anything. I don’t see why I should be punished. I’m just expressing my self. Person A should not allowed to express his love for Mohammad if Person B isn’t not allowed to express his hate for Muhammad. They’re both emotions. However, I’d definitely have a problem if someone started saying kill all Muslims. Now that’s a problem because it’s a call for harm to a people.
Hatred of a personality dead or alive is fair game. Calling for someone’s death is not.
A lot of Muslims express their hate for kuffar, yahood, nasara very openly. They’re not punished for that. Heck they’re not even punished when they call for death of someone.
Provoking others, I think I’ve heard that phrase before. Also known as blaming the victim. “Of course she got raped, have you looked at how she dresses.” Imagine if the courts started prosecuting women for provoking men by dressing provocatively.
My mother and sister are important to me and my 5 brothers. Our thoughts and emotions don’t hold any value just because we are a smaller group. What happened to protecting minorities and affording them equal rights?
It’s my job to control my actions if someone says something derogatory about my mother just like it’s the responsibility of muslims to control their actions when someone says something derogatory about people important to them (prophets, companions).
Placing the blame of your actions on the other people’s expression results in what happened when the Danes first made their cartoons back in 2005. I still remember the destruction caused by Mohammad loving muslims. Traffic lights were smashed, restaurants broken into and trashed. That was a time when muslim scholars should have come to the forefront and explained to their people how free speech works. “We love our prophet dearly, however, there are people who do not share our beliefs. To them the prophet is no more special than Bashir down the street, therefore, to them he’s fair game. I know this hurts you deeply but we must not act like barbarians and draw negative attention to ourselves.”
The uproar in the muslim world brought more ridicule to the religion than the cartoons themselves. I didn’t even know the cartoons existed until the protests started happening. The muslims who first saw these cartoons could have simply ignored them and not shared them with other muslims. However, they chose to make a big deal out of it causing the most damage in muslim world itself. Also, drawing the ridicule of the rest of world for being an intolerant people who don’t understand the concept of freedom of speech.
In short people have the right to ridicule whoever they want. No one should be beyond reproach, not christopher hitchens, not mohammad, not nawaz sharif.
PS: I’m not trying to say women should stay home or wear burqas. Just trying to expose the flaw in punishing a person for doing something that might offend other people.
PS2: Personally, I have nothing against Mohammad or his companions. He lived in a different time and it’s unfair to judge his actions by today’s standards. The problem arises when people use his life and standard to run a modern country. They want to impose his rules indiscriminately without considering if they’re harmful or helpful. The religion is beyond reproach.