Cartoons put a great religion to the test
By Bashir Goth

To Muslims, Islam is the religion of peace and reason. The holy Qur'an is said to be the greatest miracle given to Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam. Other prophets were given visual and tangible miracles. Jesus Christ's miracle was to raise the dead, restore the vision for the blind and heal the leper. Moses had his staff turned into an obvious serpent that dazzled the Pharaoh magicians; he also struck the sea with his rod to split it asunder, allowing him and his followers to escape the persecution of the Pharaoh. For David God made the Iron supple for him and taught him the language of the birds, while the wind was subjugated for Solomon and he also could understand the language of animals and use birds as messengers.

As for Muhammad, Muslims believe that his greatest miracle was the word, Al Qur'an, as can be seen in the first Qur’anic verses ever revealed to him:

“Read in the name of your Lord, who created, created man from a clot. Read! And your Lord is most bountiful. (He who taught) the use of the pen taught man which he knew not.” (96: 1- 5)

However, it seems Muslims today have lost their intellectual fortitude. The Muslim nation is the nation that dazzled the world with its free and powerful theological and philosophical discourse in the Middle Ages. The nation that had translated Greek and Roman knowledge, studied it with voracity and opened new vistas in the fields of alchemy, astronomy, geography, history, medicine, philosophy and great theological rhetoric. The nation that boasted of carrying the touch of knowledge in the hands of great men of learning such as Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, Ibn Sina or Avicenna, Abu Nasr Al-Farabi or Alpharabius, Jabir Ibn Hayyan or Geber, Ibn Al Haitham and great sufists like Al Hallaj, Hassan Al Basri, Al-Ghazali, Abdul Qadir Al Jilani, Jalaluddin Rumi and Ibn Al Arabi. To say that such a nation is defeated by amateur catoons penned down by an an adventurous artist in a little known European newspaper is an insult to the core message and mammoth history of Islam. Read more on Awdalnews.com , WardheerNews, Somaliland.org,Saylac.com,Online Opinion Australia's e-journal of soical and political debate , Somalilnd Times and Ethiopian SSinformer