Teddy Bear Insults Islam...What?

A 54-year-old British school teacher could receive 40 lashes and 6 months in jail for allowing her Sudanese pupils to name a class Teddy bear "Mohammed," reports CNN. Perhaps not as egregious as the punishment sentenced to a Saudi gang rape victim for "embarrassing" the Saudi judges who had let her rapists off the hook, it is still a ridiculously disproportionate punishment to the crime, if there really is one at all. To me it is one more instance of religious stupidity compounded by warped concepts of "honor."

The irony is that Sudanese officials have charged the school teacher with "insulting" Islam, even though the Koran does not prohibit engraved images, people name their children after the prophet all the time, and, um, hello - it's a teddy bear! The name was chosen by school children, many of whom are probably named after the prophet, too, and have several family members who share the name. It wasn't meant as an insult, it was supposed to be an honor.

I acknowledge that there is a lot about the role of "honor" in other cultures that I do not understand. It could be my own limitations as a Westerner, as a neurotic self-denigrating humorist, as a post-modern ironist, or as a simple crank. Yet I find it horrific and sick that the concept of "honor" is used to justify a lot of brutality and killing, often in so-called "honor killings" against women who have somehow transgressed social expectations regarding their "proper place" as wives and daughters or have caused men to feel insulted. While much of the reporting on this phenomenon is concentrated on the Middle East and Central Asia, it would be unfair to disregard similar instances in Western culture - notably, "gay panic" or the more murderous instances of transphobia.

I don't get it, and honestly, I don't want to "get" it, because it seems more a disease than a point of cultural competency, a plague of the male psyche borne on carriers of religion, myth, historic oppression and warped definitions of sexual and gender identity.