Muslim Punk?

The October 4, print edition of Rolling Stone has an article on a recent tour of Muslim Punk Bands called Taqwatour.

How cool is that?

I love cultural fusion.

Some of the bands mentioned include The Kominas, Vote Hezbollah (it's a joke), Al-Thawra, and Secret Trial Five.

Blind Man vs. Muslim Cabbie

First, there was a dispute over the rights of cab drivers in Minnesota to refuse service for passengers who were carrying alcohol.

Now, a blind man from Vancouver, B.C. has sued a cab company over being refused service because of his seeing eye dog.

Both cases dealt with a balancing of the religious convictions of the Muslim drivers and the rights of passengers to get a ride without too much hassle.

This discrimination might not require a great deal of government intervention, if it wasn't for the fact that the drivers were operating under a license to drive a cab. Such a privilege should come with some public responsibilities. After all, where would such religious convictions end? Should it be permissible to discriminate against passengers who carry pork? An unmarried couple?

I'm all for accommodating religious beliefs, but not at the expense of the work being done.

Opus Revealed

So, this is what the fuss is all about.

If anything, it looks like a playful ribbing of the cultural differences between Islam and Western culture. Of course it deals with generalizations, but not something that readers can't appreciate as a shortcut to humor. Yet, the main thing is that the cartoon by Berkeley Breathed isn't mean. It's nowhere near some of the barbs that the late Johnny Hart ( of B.C. fame) would make about Islam or any other belief that didn't coincide with his own. If anything Breathed makes as much fun of Americans as he does Muslims.

Even if you can't appreciate the humor of Opus, I can't see a reasonable justification for newspapers to drop this strip.

Update:

There's an article in Editor & Publisher dealing with the controversy. The reasons given for papers not carrying Opus are a combination of Islamic references and sexual innuendo. At least 25 clients have declined to publish the offending comics. Prior reports have mentioned the Washington Post as one of those papers, a really poor example coming from one of the nations flagship media institutions.

Opus on Islam

On his website, cartoonist Berkeley Breathed reports that two of his upcoming Opus strips are being pulled by various papers, including the Washington Post. The reason appears to be because the strips deal with Islam in someway. If that is the case, it might be that the papers want to avoid the controversy that arose in Denmark after a paper published several cartoons depicting Muhammed. I would suspect that the editors don't want to deal with a bunch of reader complaints over a "comic".

I do look forward to checking out Breathed's strips when they come out to see what all the fuss is over. In my opinion he is one of America's most talented cartoonists and it was great to see him return to work after a long absence.

(Via Comics Reporter)