Depicting Muhammad

On the BBC’s website is a little story about a plan to make a biopic about the life of Muhammad. For myself, I think this is a great idea! He’s an interesting person that people outside Islam generally know nothing about. We’ve had movies about Jesus and movies about Moses, but only two so far about Muhammad and it’d be nice to see that change, especially if it’s, you know, a good movie.

Of course one of the slight snags to this plan is that Islam prohibits depections of Muhammad. That’s something of a problem if you want to make a movie about the man, though it’s a problem one of the two movies about him managed to overcome.

Of course like all Muslim laws, this one only applies to people who are, you know, Muslim. Folks like me who aren’t don’t have to follow them, and especially those of us who live in a democracy that has free speech and the like don’t have to follow them and can, if we wish, go out of our way to be obnoxious about Islam and Muhammad. Hell, I think that just to be obnoxious right now, I’ll throw up the Jyllands-Posten cartoons onto here.

Nothing like a little obnixiousness!

Anyhow, I hope the project goes forward. I’d rather like to see a good movie about Muhammad, especially if they do it without the childish pandering of not actually showing him or hearing his voice. That’s just stupid.

Also stupid is expecting other people to obey your religious beliefs. If you’re going to do that, why not get angry over the fact that non-Muslims eat pork? Or drink alcohol? Or have sex outside marriage? Or don’t use your calendar? Or that we don’t fast during Ramadan? Or any of the number of your rules we break because we aren’t Muslim?

Basically the message here is this: Muslims, you aren’t anything special in a free society. We have the right to mock anyone and any religion we please and we certainly have right to not follow your religious rules and you don’t have the right to try and force us to.

Get over yourselves.