Letters

Down with the Ayatollah!
Critical of the Fatwa: While I have never before written a letter to the editor, I felt the need to after I read "Critical Fatwa" by the Ayatollah of Rock [B-Sides, January 12]. The brief, supposedly humorous article manages to offend in a variety of ways: 1) The drawing by Mike Gorman reinforces the all-too-common American conception of Muslims as rabid, "towel-headed," violencemongers. 2) It trivializes fatwas, which have caused the deaths of many, and are (to some, from some) respected religious opinions. 3) The use of stylized Hindi (rather than, say, Arabic) script in the title, which only serves to buoy outdated and ignorant Orientalist conceptions of Eastern countries.

As an agnostic who doesn't much care for Eric Clapton, I don't have some hidden ax to grind here -- I was just upset that a paper that I respected for being anti-racist and anti-profiling (racial, religious or otherwise) turns out to support those values only when they are popular.
Alexandra Bannister
Maryland Heights