Shazad Iqbal
Whenever an artist creates anything offensive about Christians, they normally just whine a bit and move on. Muslims, however, are a bit less tolerant of artistic expression. Such is the case of Bradford, UK Muslim (no surprise there) Shazad Iqbal. Despite having “IQ” in his last name, Iqbal’s IQ is clearly quite stunted, as he believes a seventh-century child-porn fairytale to be of divine authorship. What piece of “art” got Iqbal all worked up? The intentionally-cheesy music video for Katy Perry’s newest single, “Dark Horse,” in which a man wearing a necklace of the name of Allah gets turned to sand. Surprisingly, most Muslims aren’t criticizing the video due to the belief held by some scholars that music is haram (forbidden) in Islam.
Iqbal started a petition on change.org to have the video removed from YouTube. It went viral among the Islamic world, since as we all know, Muslims cannot handle or tolerate criticism. Iqbal’s sentiment behind the petition was as follows: “This is the reason for lodging the petition so that people from different walks of life, different religions and from different parts of the world, agree that the video promotes blasphemy, using the name of God in an irrelevant and distasteful manner would be considered inappropriate by any religion. We hope that the video itself depicting such images is removed. Such acts are not condoned nor tolerated, we hope YouTube will remove the video.” Blasphemy against Christianity is frequently seen in music videos, and most Christians don’t make a huge fuss asking for the videos to be taken off the internet. However, with Muslims, anything that offends their seventh-century sensibilities is seen as a grievous offense, and of course, the only way they can think to not un-bunch their panties is to kill or destroy whatever is bothering them.
After the petition had reached 40,000 signatures, Iqbal commented, “I’d firstly like to thank everybody for the support and signing the petition. I would also like to say in making this petition my intention is not to cause controversy or to cause hate but rather to gain support in having the video removed.” You don’t want to cause hate? Then let artists do their thing without telling them what they can and can’t say. Followers of other religions have learned to not be crybabies about art in our free western society; why are Muslims so far behind the times?!
Iqbal’s petition garnered over 50,000 signatures within the first two days of its existence, and it momentum is still going. He took down all his pictures off of Facebook and his other social media profiles, likely for fear of being put up on a site like this. Well, there’s this little thing called an internet cache, and it’s working in my favor.
Anyway, go watch “Dark Horse” just to piss off the Muslims. It’ll probably be the next Innocence of Muslims that will be blamed for the next Islamic terror attack. Speaking of which, take a look at these comments from Iqbal’s petition. Such tolerance, and that totally wasn’t a bomb threat…
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