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Bridge chasm between the West and Muslim world: Badawi

P. S. Suryanarayana

Protests continue across Asian countries over blasphemous cartoons

SINGAPORE: Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who currently presides over the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), has acknowledged the existence of "a huge chasm" between the West and the Muslim bloc.

Mr. Abdullah Badawi's comment is seen in the East Asian diplomatic circles as a political punctuation for the current waves of protest across the OIC countries over the Danish cartoons and their defence in some Western quarters.

Disapproving of the "demonisation of Islam" in some Western quarters, Mr. Badawi called for the proliferation of "bridge-builders," the "critical mass" of whose efforts could help destroy the divisive "walls" between the "two civilisations."

"End mockery of religion"

"When the bridge-builders reign supreme, the people of the West will speak for Islam and the Muslims will speak for the West," he said, addressing an international conference in Kuala Lumpur on Friday.

Malaysia's pro-Islam Opposition party, known as PAS in local parlance, held a protest march in Kuala Lumpur for the second successive Friday, while the protest rallies in neighbouring Indonesia, the world's most populous majority-Muslim country, have been tempered by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's call to eschew radicalising the fundamentalists any further.

In a transparent reference to the fallout of the Danish cartoons, Mr. Badawi called for an end to the mockery of any religion and the sacrilege of symbols held dear by the faithful.

Tracing the origins of the chasm to the Crusades, he blamed the post-colonial hegemonic tendencies of Western leaders for the inter-civilisational crisis that persisted to this day. Calling for harmony between Christians, who numbered over two billion across the world, and the 1.2 billion Muslims, he identified some stumbling blocks such as the Western "desire" to control global oil and gas reserves, including those in Muslim countries.

In a clear political broadside at U.S. President George W. Bush, Mr. Badawi said: "Anyone, who seeks to dominate and control, who attempts to establish global hegemony, cannot claim to be spreading freedom and equality at the same time."

AFP reports:

Muslims across Asia vented their anger on Friday over satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed. The protests over the drawings first published in a Danish newspaper showed no sign of easing. Nearly 20,000 people took to the streets in Bangladesh, where Prime Minister Khaleda Zia called for an apology for the ``extremely arrogant'' drawings. Some 4,000 demonstrators took to the streets of the Pakistani capital Islamabad under heavy police surveillance.

In Afghanistan, about 300 men, some armed with large wooden sticks, marched through the capital Kabul after Friday prayers. In Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, police said they had charged the chief editor of a weekly tabloid with blasphemy for reprinting the cartoons. More than 1,000 rallied in the town of Cirebon in West Java, urging the Government to sever diplomatic ties with Denmark.

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