The Atavists of Religion

Winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature can, very occasionally, talk sense. Here’s Wole Soyinka (via b&w):

The action of the irreverent cartoonists and their editor need never have become a global issue. At best the offending images would have been seen by the small, minor community of its readers. What the atavists of religion have done is to expand the “territory of insult” into a limitless one. It is they who have brought greater contumely on the image of the Prophet through the now inevitable proliferation of the cartoons. More to the point, they have raised questions about the followers of the Prophet and their understanding of the world’s complexity. Let all such ponder, in all sobriety, on the commentary of yet another cartoon — this time by a French newspaper. That cartoon depicts a brooding, frustrated Prophet Mohammed while the caption reads: “It’s hard to be loved by idiots.” If only some of these professed lovers of Mohammed were not also psychopaths of faith! […]

While the mobs rage, the massacres of innocents, even within that same religion of Islam, continue unabated in Darfur. Never, in recent memory, has rape become so routine, almost mandatory, as a cherished weapon of aggression. Ancient societies are wiped out daily in a brutal campaign, openly articulated, to eliminate a racial identity. A refugee problem of gargantuan proportions stares the African continent in the face, a continent already riven apart by multiple civil wars.

Is it in the midst of this rampaging, racist obscenity called Darfur that the world is being invited to shift even its hazy focus, close down shop on vital concerns, wallow in an orgy of remorse, while the United Nations suspends its operations on behalf of traumatized humanity, all on account of some obscure cartoonist possessed by the Muse of irreverence? Clearly the world is askew, but not in the way some see it.