Amani Alkhat read online that a notorious pundit would soon host a Muhammad drawing contest in Texas. But she wondered which Muhammad they would draw since there are more than 150 million.
Muhammad is, after all, the world’s most common name.
Of course she knew the self-proclaimed activists meant to draw the prophet of Islam, and the chosen prophet of about one quarter of the world. The event’s leader, Pamela Geller, is an infamous New York blogger and full-time anti-Islam activist. She’s banned from entering Britain for her role in hate groups, and on Wednesday sheforced New York Mass Transit Authority to outright ban political speech on public transportation after she claimed free speech protections allowed her buy advertisements on public buses saying “killing Jews is worship.”
“We draw Muhammad because we are free,” wrote Geller in a post on Breitbart, where she in a frequent contributor. “We draw Muhammad because our unalienable rights are enshrined in the first amendment.”
So Alkhat, who runs the blog Muslim Girl, conceived her own Muhammad drawing event, figuring that, instead of drawing the prophet, whose image would be totally imagined, she could get folks to draw their friend Muhammad.
“Sheer ignorance like the type that Pam Geller displays can’t really be talked back to, it isn’t something that you can even try to intelligently respond to,” Alkhat said. “Complete hatred can only be combatted with mockery, all we can really do is make a joke out of it.”
She asked passersby on the streets of New York if they knew anyone named Muhammad, and asked them to draw him on a white board if they did. Then she photographed. The results: a collection of drawings of Muhammad, just like Geller plans for Garland, Texas next week.
Except that any images at Geller’s event will be totally made up. Because like Jesus, Abraham and Buddha, no portrait of Muhammad survives from his time. That upset Alkhat, she said, because she knew that every drawing would just be a stereotyped caricature of an Arab.
But Geller is not averse to stereotypes. She cites examples of Muslim people in violent militia groups or crimes by Muslims to characterize the religion as the “religion of hate.” Alkhat said that was like generalizing Christians based on the KKK—a fundamentalist Christian group that lynched thousands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—or like blaming World War II—a war fought almost entirely between Christians—on the Christian faith.
She hoped her drawing display would highlight the diversity of Islam, which is the world’s second largest religion and the predominant faith of nations from Morocco to Kazakhstan to Indonesia. She said the Muhammad drawings people turned up ranged from “as white as white can get” so someone who’s “beard takes up half his body.”
“That’s just a testament to how diverse and how far Islam expands, that Muhammad is the most common name in the world and it really showcases the diversity of the religion,” Alkhat said.
Geller is hosting her contest in Garland because she considers the local convention center symbolic; Muslims held a convention there earlier this year. She says her contest is a protest for free speech—similar to her New York bus ads—after Muslim men shot dead 11 people around the office of a French magazine that illustrated the prophet.
According to the New York Times, she’s a single mother in New York City who lives off a $4 million dollar divorce settlement and blogs about Muslim crime. With no college degree or qualifications in international affairs or history, she makes periodic appearances on Fox News to explain the Islamist threat to America. She has also described her fears that Muslims want to take over the country and replace the constitution with religious law.
“How is it not the definition of racism when you take the smallest minority of them and use that to cast the entire population,” Alkhat said.
In a post on Breitbart, Geller said her competition got more than 350 submissions.
“We hope that this event will give others the courage to stand up as well and show the world that they aren’t going to submit to intimidation,” she wrote. “Otherwise, it is no exaggeration to say that all will be lost.”