He Who Shall Not Be Named.

Some good advice would be to never mix sport with religion. In particular mixing football and religion. In fact some might say that mixing anything with religion is like putting salt in your coffee or soap on your dinner, the results are always distasteful.

The lastest piece of nonsense that has come to my attention is this business of the German football team F.C. Schalke whose fans have been singing a club song celebrating their blue and white colours at every game since 1927. Apparently someone just noticed that one of the verses makes reference to “he who shall not be named”. You know who I’m talking about.

The verse in question goes thus, “Mohammed was a prophet / who understood nothing about football / but from all the blaze of colour / he picked the blue and white.” The song is an adaptation of an 18th century German hunting tune (whatever that is) and the original goes something like this, “Mohammed is my patron! He knew real beauty. He, for whom only green was holy from all the colours.” Neither version appears to have any negative slant toward Mohammed or Islam but this hasn’t stopped the General Secretary of the Islamic Council in Germany making the following statement.

“It is not right that the prophet is mentioned in a club anthem. I would wish that out of respect for the Muslims in this country the Mohammed-stanza is not sung,” The Turkish press have gone a little further variously describing the chant as an insult to the “prophet” and proof of western Islamophobia.

In the broad spectrum of what might constitute offensiveness this song barely moves the needle. There are indeed some truly offensive football chants that are sung with gusto and abandon on a weekly basis in football grounds around the world. Just ask Sol Campbell affectionately known as “Judas” by the fans of Tottenham Hotspur F.C. who engendered a particularly personal response from the fans for his infamous disloyalty to the club.  Also you could ask the fans of Tottenham Hotspur themselves, a team with traditionally jewish support who face barrages of hissing from thousands of opposition fans at every game (meant to represent the sound of gas entering a gas chamber). Many other sets of fans bait each other mercilessly and consistently and little or nothing is usually done about it.

I personally find it offensive to my beliefs that every time someone thinks they have been offended these days they demand some kind of pound of flesh or a righting of the percieved wrong. To paraphrase something that many people have said before me “You have the right to believe whatever you like, but you do not have the right not to be offended by others”

The sad thing about all this fundamentalist preciousness is that the Quran makes no mention of any of these things. There is no ban on the use of Mohammed’s name, these things all come from the Hadith an oral history of Mohammed’s alleged beliefs developed by muslims in the centuries following Mohammed’s death. You now, kind of made up.

http://facesofmohammed.freehostia.com/

I suspect the real issue for not just Muslims but all people of faith is not blasphemy but ridicule. Religious belief by its very nature is wide open to ridicule. The belief in fantastic supernatural stories from an ancient time, faith in invisible gods, the living of ones life by the dictates of ancient desert dogma, these are all very easy to mock and religion cannot stand to be made a mockery of. So far better to try to ban any adverse criticism and make it illegal and if that doesn’t work maybe threats and intimidation will.

In western society the influence of religion on public life has been severely limited since the time of The Enlightenment when wise men realized that allowing religious ideas of one kind or another to dominate society was extremely unhealthy and downright dangerous. The clergy were effectively neutered. The problem for Islam is that it demands far more respect than it is due and gets far too much respect for it’s demands.

This brings me to the buzzword of the moment “Islamophobia”. Anyone who challenges Islam these days is now labelled Islamophobic. So what exactly is a phobia? The clinical definition is “an irrational, intense, persistent fear of certain situations, activities, things, or people.” Most people’s issues with Islam are far from irrational infact they are profoundly rational. So to label critics or even football chants as Islamophobic is illogical indeed. The hysteria that is generated by any percieved slight to their beliefs however betrays the true phobics

I think a good yardstick might be that if your faith cannot bear criticism or ridicule with out you throwing all your toys out of the pram, it may be time to reassess your faith.