By Ian Cobain

THE dove is the symbol of peace all over the world but not in Gainesville, Florida, where Pastor Terry Jones, head of the Dove World Outreach Church, attempted to desecrate the Quran.

World leaders, from Barack Obama and Ban Ki-moon to Hillary Clinton, Gen David Petraeus and Angelina Jolie condemned the pastor's plan. Even Sarah Palin “refudiated” Pastor Jones's decision but the pastor, a firebrand in more ways than one, said that he had “prayed” over it and threatened to go ahead as planned.

After several days of international outrage, during which Pastor Jones played a childish but dangerous game with the media by declaring that he'd cancel the burning if the 'ground zero mosque' was “moved”, Pastor Jones finally called off the event and travelled to New York to try to meet Imam Feisal Rauf, the Muslim American behind the Cordoba House initiative.

That meeting did not materialise, but extremist Christians at ground zero ripped out pages of the religious text and set them on fire while protests took place on the other side of the street supporting Cordoba House and condemning the burnings.

If you're wondering how the United States can allow anyone to burn a holy book, bear in mind that the constitution protects American citizens' rights to “freedom of expression” in the First Amendment, under which this action falls. It has become obvious that Pastor Jones represents a lunatic fringe that even many American conservatives find offensive and disreputable. Legally, however, there's really nothing anyone can do to stop a person from burning a holy book, be it the Torah, the Bible or any other book.

But Americans overall won't be fooled by the likes of Pastor Jones and his lunatic imitators.

On Sept 11, for example, David Grisham, director of the Repent Amarillo Church in Amarillo, Texas, decided he'd host his own bonfire. As word spread over the Internet, a Facebook group was created by people in Amarillo who opposed the event.

On Saturday, Grisham showed up at Sam Houston Park with a copy of the Quran and a box of matches, but was met by Amarillo residents of all faiths and even no faith, who protested the event simply because they felt it was wrong. As one of them argued with Grisham, a 23-year-old skateboarder called Jacob Ishom sneaked up behind Grisham and grabbed the Quran from his hands. He delivered it safely to a local Muslim leader and instantly became a Facebook hero.

Book-burning has long been a method of protest around the world. Wikipedia has a whole entry devoted to the ceremonial act of burning books, called 'libricide'. Amongst the notable book burnings in history are the burning of the Torah by Roman soldiers, the burning of Luther's version of the Bible in Catholic Germany by order of the Pope in the Thirty Years' War and the burning of the New Testament by orthodox Jews in Jerusalem in the 1980s.

But as German poet Heinrich Heine said, “Where they burn books, so too will they burn human beings.” This turned out to be highly prescient: 80 years after his death, his books were burned by the Nazis in 1933, and we all know what happened to people in the Nazi crematoriums a few short years later.

Gen Petraeus voiced his concern that the act of burning the Islamic scriptures could endanger the lives of Americans who live and work in the Muslim world. Protests were held in Indonesia and Afghanistan; effigies of Pastor Jones were burnt and predictably, innocent people died. Americans who worked in Kabul were instructed to not leave their homes on Sept 11, until the furore died down.

In Pakistan the issue didn't receive all that much attention, taken up as we have been by the floods, but the airing of the controversy on television made people aware of the situation in the run-up to Sept 11 and the Eid weekend. Images of angry Muslims marching in protest, burning American flags and effigies, are already flashed on television screens and printed in newspapers all over the world with depressing regularity.

This time in Pakistan, though, common sense seemed to prevail and no significant protests were visible. It seemed like an almost miraculous display of restraint. Perhaps we really have learned something about the futility of burning our own property and harming our own lives when we don't like something being done halfway around the world.

Whenever a provocative act designed to upset and anger Muslims takes place, we must make sure that not a single person loses his or her life in any planned protest against it.

In the United States, many people looked at Pastor Jones's actions with disgust, but there are others who thought his actions were justified because they have the impression that Muslims burn American flags and Bibles and churches with impunity in their own countries. n

The American far right thrives on the falsification that Islam is an inherently violent religion. Pakistanis who protest against Islamophobic acts, when they take place in the future, will only be proving them right if any protest turns violent, if death threats are issued, if lives are taken and property damaged. Peaceful protest is the only way Pakistani Muslims can earn the respect of the world, a commodity which we need badly in these times. binashah@yahoo.com