The current chaos, the damaged Danish embassies, and the war of words is despicable. This includes condemnation of what started the riot, the decision to publish and test passions, the threats of violence, the actual violence, the suggestions of violence and the general crystallization of a non-issue into an issue.

Unbelievably, we find pitted here, in a false confrontation, the passion for human freedom and the freedom of human passion.

Which is more dear to us - freedom or passion?

It is convenient for people who believe less or not at all in a religion to condemn the religious passion. In Europe, this rests on the polarization between the politics of state and the power of the church, and rests on a history of defamation of Muslims and Mohammed when the Muslim culture was in the ascendant looking down on Europe.

Muslim societies, in their current distressing decay, look up to western societies - this is but natural - yet without having experienced the anti-church-like ethos that characterized the emergence of the republic in violent persecution of monarchy, aristocracy and ecclesiastical culture.

Paradoxically the Muslim reaction today is only a little less violent than the butchers of the French revolution, and the public opinion and anger is but the voice of the masses, against the hegemonic republican-secular state institutions now ascendant in Europe.

In the intervening periods, all Islamic societies in their own diversity have absorbed republicanism and democratic elections in moderate doses, as modern sources of legitimacy, if not so much in the interest and public opinion of their respective polities, then definitely in response to opinion of western friends, whose influence is but all-pervasive at the moment.

Through all this, the passion and veneration for the teachings and character of Mohammed and what he achieved, even though it lasted for a very brief period, has survived intact. This fact has no relation to the hagiographic defamation that is presented to dispute the character of Mohammed. For Muslims in general, in all cases, the veneration and respect for Mohammed supersedes all other disputes which are either trivial or just plainly false. Such is the inspiration of the last prophet. The passion for Mohammed lives. The reaction of the Muslim world is testimony to this.