There have even been protests in the streets of Khartoum calling for a harsher sentence than the one that was handed down for this supposed insult to Islam's prophet Muhammad (some wag somewhere has probably already accused Ms. Gibbons of insulting bears, but I digress). I'm curious as to how organic and "grassroots" such street protests really are, the memory of the engineered frenzy over the Danish cartoons being fresh in my mind -- but that's another matter.
To point out how degraded and morally bankrupt this government is would be to belabor the obvious. And in any case much of the best writing about this sort of beahvior on the part of a state -- the sublime, almost surreal ridiculousness with a rich undercurrent of menace and violence -- has been done. You'd have to go back to Soviet-era dissident literature to find it, but it's there.
You can see here some of what Christopher Hitchens is talking about when he refutes the argument that all the 20th century's bloodiest regimes were secular ones: any government will behave like a gang of bloodthirsty religious fanatics if it breathes enough of its own exhaust without having the good grace to asphyxiate. You could tweak some names and transplant this episode to Khrushchev's Russia or Kim Jung Il's North Korea or Islam Karimov's Uzbekistan, and it would be just as believable, just as true to form -- because at their core, Sudan's government and these others are the same damn thing.
But all this is peripheral to the most interesting and illuminating bits of this story, which, it turns out, are in the debate itself.
Those on the left who don't understand what multiculturalism actually is, have offered up their customary threadbare apologia for the Sudanese government. Those on the right who have the same problem are ready to point out how barbaric "they" are, as if people and their political leaders are the same thing. Nothing new there. But even among those who appear to be coming down on the "right" side of this issue -- witness the anger and disgust expressed by many members of the Muslim blogging community -- people seem to have missed the point.
Some have pointed out that Ms. Gibbons didn't name the teddy bear herself, but merely allowed her students to do it (notice how even relating the episode makes one sound faintly absurd). This is correct, but completely beside the point. It implies that a crime really was committed, but they just arrested the wrong person. Perhaps the children should be brought up on charges?
Others, most notably Britain's Foreign Secretary, have said that Ms. Gibbons is only guilty of having made an error, and did not insult the prophet Muhammad on purpose. This, while probably also true, is likewise irrelevant, not to mention somewhat self-negating. Do we now believe that schoolteachers or anyone else should be arrested and imprisoned, flogged, or shot dead if they insult or offend someone's religion on purpose? By way of answering, some vintage Hitchens (in the aftermath of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons):
The question of "offensiveness" is easy to decide. First: Suppose that we all agreed to comport ourselves in order to avoid offending the believers? How could we ever be sure that we had taken enough precautions? On Saturday, I appeared on CNN, which was so terrified of reprisal that it "pixilated" the very cartoons that its viewers needed to see. And this ignoble fear in Atlanta, Ga., arose because of an illustration in a small Scandinavian newspaper of which nobody had ever heard before! Is it not clear, then, that those who are determined to be "offended" will discover a provocation somewhere? We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.
Which brings me to the assertion from still other of Ms. Gibbons' defenders that this was a "cultural misunderstanding". The implication here is that if only we Westerners would study harder and mind our words and actions better, we could display the appropriate level of sensitivity and avoid unfortunate incidents like the one that befell Ms. Gibbons. (Note that this apparent defense of Ms. Gibbons, like the two previous ones, is mounted mostly by people on the political left.)
My response is that, as liberals, there is nothing left for us to understand about any rejection of universal humanity in favor of scriptural adherence or doctrinal purity -- beyond the basic realization that this is our enemy. Far from needing to be better understood, whatever is decent and just and humane in Islamic cultures around the world needs to be better defended -- from the people who always claim to be defending Islam. This latest spasm of grotesque and cynical behavior from a grotesque and cynical government may seem like a small matter -- it looks as if Ms. Gibbons will be detained for a short while and then deported -- but it points us toward the largest and most essential questions we've seen so far in this young and already troubled century.
The most important question we're faced with whenever something like this happens is not "what to do?" because there isn't always something we can do. Nor is the question "what is the law?" because lawmakers can be damn fools and often are. Anyone with a conscience knows, for example, that torture and arbitrary imprisonment are wrong no matter what damn foolishness they send up from Congress for the President to sign.
The most important question here is "what is compatible with civilization and what is not?"
I don't believe there's anything inherent in Islamic scripture that makes it any more or less bloodthirsty than, say, Judeo-Christian scripture; those who do are letting their bigotry show, not to mention plain wrong. But if we look at the world as it is, we have to admit to ourselves that something terrible is happening in, and to, the global Islamic community. The Gibbons case in Sudan is one manifestation of this. Hitchens calls it a civil war within Islam, and I think he's right. The question of how that war should be prosecuted is wide open. The question of what side we in the West are on, and who we want to win, should not be.
