Drawing the Prophet: What's Not Being Said

Muslims, on balance, typically treat their founder and their symbols with unusual respect. If I sat cross-legged in our living room and one of my feet seemed to get too close to a Quran on the coffee table, my father would slap my leg away. And explicit depictions of the prophet are, as you know, cause for riots.

Conservative Muslims have used their values to bully other Muslims and even non-Muslim into submission. Yesterday was Everybody Draw Muhammad Day on Facebook, a mean-spirited response to the bullying. Many Muslims disapproved of this, and Pakistan's government took drastic action, suspending Facebook and YouTube.

I think average Pakistanis have more to be worried about than offensive depictions of their Prophet. For one thing, they've for years been offensively depicting their prophet's religion to the outside world through their own political and social dysfunction.

But what's not being said is how many moderate Muslims and closet secularists in the Muslim world just don't care one way or another. And they need to begin speaking up, as a few have done so far, to help drive the fanatics back into their caves, and to keep those in the middle from finding it so publicly respectable to side with the fanatics in public demonstrations and Internet ranting.

The genie of pluralism will not be pushed back into the bottle in this emerging global village. Conservative Muslims cannot go on demanding rules to "forbid offense," especially since so many of their own social demands offend others within a pluralistic society. If moderate Muslims don't help them "get" this, Islam as a whole will suffer.