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More than three years ago, President Barack Obama famously told a Cairo audience that "we meet at a time of great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world".

His speech, titled A New Beginning, sought to transcend the acrimony of the Bush era.

This week, as violent protests rage across the Middle East and beyond, the president might ask himself: What went wrong?

The truth is that there is no single explanation.

One answer is that last year's wave of political uprisings, the so-called Arab Spring, is responsible.

After all, protests began in Egypt, which last year became the most populous Arab democracy, and spread to Libya, which became the largest by area.

The Arab Spring did indeed invigorate a range of Islamist movements and weakened the law enforcement capabilities of the affected states.

However, this cannot explain why some of this week's most serious violence took place in Sudan, and other protests in places normally calm, as Qatar.

Additionally, such violence long pre-dates the Arab Spring and frequently took place under dictators, the most prominent examples occurring in the Middle East in 2006 after a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

The second argument is that we are witnessing profound anti-Americanism, dormant for much of last year, fused with religious extremism - with the controversial Innocence of Muslims film merely a trigger.

According to a June 2012 Pew survey, just 15% of those in Muslim countries held a favourable opinion of the United States, compared to 25% in 2009.

Polls indicate that anti-Americanism stems from a variety of grievances, including US policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, American wars in the Middle East, and US backing for friendly dictators.

The irony is that, whereas Barack Obama is sometimes pilloried by critics in the West for naively supporting the revolutions, most Arabs see his actions as too late and too little.

Although Arab ideas about freedom of expression are fundamentally divergent from Western ones - 84% of Egyptians want the death penalty for those who leave the Muslim religion - there are big generational gaps.

Those under 35 - the generation widely held up as the engine of the Arab Spring - are far less likely to pray several times a day, attend the mosque regularly, or read the Koran daily. They are being catalysed less by religion, and more by politics.

Furthermore, anti-Americanism is not universal.

Despite the widespread xenophobia evident in Egypt, 35% of Egyptians actually want Egypt-US relations to remain as strong as they were before the revolution, and a surprisingly high 20% want them to get even better. Sixty percent of Tunisians say that they like American ideas about democracy.

A Gallup poll this year showed that 54% of Libyans approve of American leadership, near the highest approval ever seen in the region.

Indeed, Libya has seen a series of protests supportive of the US, and against the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.

Even where it is widespread, anti-Americanism is simply not a sufficient explanation for outbreaks of violence.

In many cases, protests might have had little energy had local religious and political entrepreneurs, eager to bolster their following and create disorder, not exploited them.

In Khartoum, for instance, local buses were laid on to transport prayer-goers to protest sites.

In Libya, to speak of a protest is misleading. The assault in which US Ambassador Chris Stevens died was probably a co-ordinated, complex undertaking by an organised militant group, perhaps in concert with al-Qaeda's North African affiliate. It represents broader Libyan opinion no more than Anders Breivik did that of Norway.

This wave of violence will have longer-term repercussions.

The US has no legal mechanism to censor the provocative film. American freedom of expression cannot be a subject of compromise for any administration. This means that such triggers for protest will recur, as there is no shortage of provocateurs.

Above all, however, many Americans will rightly or wrongly see this week's protests as indicative of the failure of engagement, not a sign that more is needed.

There will be new pressures for the US to disengage from the Middle East, revert to fortress-style embassies, and accelerate the refocusing of American attention to Asia.

Some will argue that Mr Obama's efforts to temper anti-Americanism were exercises in naivety; others that he went nowhere near far enough.

Either way, the irony is that just as fragile post-revolutionary governments are most in need of assistance to build institutions, small sections of their populations are making that task much harder.

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But just as it is here and everywhere, religion is a TOOL

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The fall of dictatorships does not guarantee the creation of free societies. There is often a period in which we witness the legacy of tyranny. The Arab uprisings have overthrown tyrants in Egypt and Libya, but the populations and lawmakers have yet to grasp that democracy is not only about free elections but creating free societies.

Arab societies are on a journey. They can easily take the wrong turn. The attacks on the American embassies in Libya, Egypt and Yemen are examples of the ongoing presence of intolerant, tyrannical actors in Arab societies.

These are people who were born and raised in dictatorships. They are accustomed to thinking that a government controls its citizens -- that a film or documentary cannot be produced without government approval. For decades, this has been the reality of their lives, and they strongly believe that the Western world and its citizens have a similarly controlling relationship between individuals and government.

In light of this assumption, they hold the U.S. government responsible for the tacky and distasteful film produced by a right-wing Muslimphobe.

Little wonder, then, that Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy has called for the prosecution by the U.S government of the filmmakers, and Egypt's top cleric, Mufti Ali Goma, has called on the United Nations to forbid denigration of faiths. Morsy studied in the United States and Ali Goma regularly visits the West on the interfaith circuit, yet both men don't yet grasp that religious freedom and the freedom of expression are inextricably linked in America.

It is hard for younger Arabs not born into freedom to understand how individual liberty works in real life.

The freedom to proselytize also guarantees the right to apostatize. Heresy and blasphemy are essential parts of free and democratic societies. Arab activists cannot seek to emulate the West's political and social achievements by looking at the United States and Europe today, but must observe and learn from the religious battles of 17th-century Europe, the smashing of the tyranny of the Roman Catholic Church, the ending of burning witches and the forbidding of hanging heretics.

It is this history of unbolting the doors of dissent that led to the conditions in which John Locke and John Stuart Mill could write and think freely and then influence Thomas Jefferson and the other U.S. Founding Fathers. There are no shortcuts to freedom, except to learn from the mistakes of the West in the past.

The Arab uprisings are not over yet. They are still unfolding and shaping the future. This culture of shouting and killing those with whom Muslims disagree must end. When the Prophet Mohammed's companions shouted "Allahu Akbar," (meaning "God is Greatest," a popular slogan for those yelling outside embassies today) the prophet reprimanded them saying "Our Lord is not deaf."

The millions of protestors last year in Arab capitals that chanted "hurriyah, karamah, adala ijtima'iyya" or "freedom, dignity and social justice" cannot allow for the emotions of bigots to derail their revolution.

Freedom is not only about majority rule, but ensuring that women, religious minorities and intellectual dissenters are able to flourish without fear. http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/14/opinion/husain-arab-spring-democracy/ind
ex.html?iid=article_sidebar

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Terry Jones, a Christian pastor based in Florida who has a long history of making incendiary statements about Islam, is promoting "Innocence of Muslims."
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Politicians and the media in the Muslim world have also played an important, though perhaps unintended, role in stirring up violence in the wake of a number of these perceived attacks on Islam.

A YouTube video of "Innocence of Muslims" that provoked the Libyan mob to attack the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was initially published in July, but it was not until versions of it dubbed in Arabic appeared online and were broadcast by religious Egyptian news channel al-Nas that protests sprouted in Egypt.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/13/opinion/bergen-embassy-incitement/index.
html?iid=article_sidebar

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The recent protests across the Middle East have revived a debate about blasphemy in Islam – how it is defined, and how devout Muslims should respond.

While some Muslims cite the Quran or hadiths – sayings or actions attributed to the prophet Muhammad – as justification for violent retribution, Muslim scholars and analysts alike say there is no clear mandate in Islamic theology for such a response.

Instead, they say, the recent violence reflects societies roiled by power struggles and competing ideologies, in which Muslims are used as pawns for political gain.

"The punishment for blasphemy and even the definition for blasphemy is not in the Quran. There are some hadiths that address it, but it's ambiguous," says Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom in Washington. "So it's very vague and … it's manipulated by those who want to raise a mob and wield power within a society."

In this case, the offending material appears to be an amateurish 14-minute YouTube clip that portrays Muhammad as a bumbling philanderer and child molester who makes up his religion on the fly and incites his followers to unrestrained violence.

The movie clearly was meant to incite a response.

"Sadly, we had idiots on our side take the bait – hook, line, and sinker," says Arsalan Iftikhar, a Muslim commentator and author of "Islamic Pacifism: Global Muslims in the Post-Osama Era."

"Of course there are going to be a lot of [non-Muslim] right-wingers who are saying Islam is a religion of violence," he adds. He attributes the violence to decades of dictatorial rule with little freedom of speech.

Mustafa Abu Sway, a professor of philosophy and Islamic studies at Al Quds University in Jerusalem, says that in Islam it is not up to individual Muslims to seek retribution.

"Their role is to send out the correct information about the life and teachings of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him," he says.

Nor is it correct according to Islam to take action against any individual for the trespasses of their fellow citizens, says Professor Abu Sway. "Muslims should not blame innocent people and make them pay for the actions of others," he says.

A statement from the Quran, quoted in a 2011 article in the Review of Religions, says, "Let not a people's enmity incite you to act otherwise than with justice."

But in some instances, hadiths have been used to justify murder as a punishment for blasphemy, the article continues. One such hadith quotes the prophet Muhammad as saying, "Kill the person who abuses the Prophet and whip the one who abuses his companions."

In Islam, the primary authority is considered to be the Quran, which Muslims believe the prophet Muhammad received from Allah. But hadiths also carry weight in Islamic jurisprudence, and translations and interpretations of both sources can vary widely.

New laws are needed to prevent materials such as the offending YouTube clip from being disseminated, says Abu Sway of Al Quds University.

"It's a moral imperative for Muslims and non-Muslims alike to enact laws that would prevent such actions," he says.

But Ms. Shea, coauthor of the book "Silenced: How Apostasy & Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide," argues that trying to protect all citizens' religious sentiments from offense negates freedom of speech.

Such restrictions also often fail to deliver on promises that they will bring social harmony, she adds, and instead create resentments that people "didn't even know they had."

"It just feeds the sense of outrage," she says. "The societies are constantly roiled by extremists." http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2012/0918/Anti-Muslim-video
-What-Muslim-teachings-say-about-retribution-for-blasphemy

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