Anti-Muslim film: the unintended provocation?

Dr. Omar Ashour – the Director of Middle East Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, speaks about anti-American protests all over the world.

It could be a mix – it could be a provocation mainly, but an unintended one, to cause all this protest and strong reactions; and I think part of this was spontaneous and part of it was organized, and organized in a violent way. You have the spontaneous part with basically Muslims refusing to the depiction of their Prophet as a child molester, as a murderer, as a robber and he is the most sacred figure in Islam. And therefore they were protesting against it.

But also the part that was organized had to with many of the political parties that also wanted to show their objection to this and capitalize as well on the anger that was going on on the field, this includes both secular and Islamist political parties. Actually many of the secular parties showed up their objection to more or less gather support on the ground.

But also you had the third dimension which has to do with the US legacy in the region, which has not been a very friendly legacy. And many of the political groups that had issues with the US, that had animosities and hostilities, and unsettled scores with the US capitalized as well on the situation and we saw that quite clearly in the Benghazi attack. But those groups are a minority, they don’t represent the overwhelming majority. The reactions were to a large degree condemned whether in Libya or even in Egypt.

And then you had also the dimension of the domestic politics where local groups were trying to undermine the elected governments in Egypt, in Tunisia using violence and via protesting in a non-peaceful way. By doing so they wanted to embarrass these governments and lead them to a crackdown. In the case of Egypt it would have been a crackdown on the President Morsi. So, if anyone was killed he would have been charged with killing protesters like Mubarak and so on.

Dr. Ashour, but what kind of implications do you see which would result from this scandal? It seems that it is the biggest scandal of all. Remember there’s been that Danish caricature scandal. There’s been a number of other scandals but the reaction to this one seems to be the biggest and the worst.

I’ve explained the reasons…

Yes, but what could be the implications of that? I mean how do you see the situation would be developing?

I think in terms of implication it can be contained. It is for the first time a crisis like that happens. Although it is quite wide, it showed that there is a lot to be done in terms of bridging the gap between the Western world and the Muslim world. There has to be a coordinated communication strategy to more or less prohibit collective punishment, prohibit accusation of the innocent. And in that case the Western governments have nothing to do with that movie, it was specific individuals that propagated, produced and disseminated it. And that has to be clear so that the reaction can be directed in the proper legal and nonviolent channels. And I think a more arranged and coordinated dialog has to be done between the two civilizations.