An ‘eye-opening’ video of a social experiment surfaced on YouTube a few years ago and went viral. To resume, these two Dutch guys took a Quran, removed its pages at the binding, then seamlessly replaced them with the contents of a Bible of the same size to make it appear as though whoever reading from it was quoting the Quran, but was in fact reading from the Bible. This is set against the backdrop of the then-recent Bataclan massacre in Paris, and emotions obviously ran high around this subject.
Our two pranksters set out in the streets of – I believe – Amsterdam, and proceeded to a well-intentioned prank aimed at random passers-by. They would read a selection of unsavory, sexist, and sometimes unfathomably violent, passages to the pranked from the book they held. The reactions were all ones of understandable shock. One raised the valid question of what should be expected of people raised hearing these passages. Another claimed whoever followed this book would surely want to impose their way of life on those less spiritually guided. And then of course came the prank’s revelation, and oh boy had we not seen that coming. Everyone laughed and all moved on.
So it was all good fun, and we all learned a little something. After all, if Christianity’s holy book can dish out the type of literary horror we have come to know the Quran to contain, then we can all rest assured that the content of holy books will not necessarily dictate the behavior of those who profess to follow them.
So how much did this experiment really reveal? Well, maybe it showed us a few things about our cultural bias – no secret there. But the original intent of the video rests on shaky premises.
First, the video opens by introducing the assumption that Christianity has shaped our culture. Historically, this is certainly true, but just the last 40 years have done so much to get Western Europe dissociated from any church, that Europe’s relationship to religion is not one of current affairs – a state of things that is notably distinct from that of embedded Muslim communities (see this interesting article from the Guardian). Case in point: the victims of the prank could not recognize that the passages being read came from the Bible, so their lives were clearly not shaped by it, less still by its violent passages if we are to trust their reactions.
So this brings an interesting question to mind. To what extent is Europe really ‘shaped’ by Christianity? If the experiment samples chosen and edited by the pranksters themselves show us anything, it’s that your average European doesn’t know the Bible well enough to know its most extreme passages. But more generally, can Europe today realistically be said to belong to Christendom other than historically? Isn’t Europe more of a secular playground?
And this is where the experiment falls on its face. Comparing the holy book of Islam, a faith which is alive, well, and vibrant in its European communities and worldwide, to a holy book whose contents have visibly been forgotten brings no valuable data. The real test would have been finding a way to compare the Quran to the holy book of secularism. Of course there is no such thing, but if such a book existed, it would almost certainly be discernible from the Quran.
For the pranked, after the initial shock of realizing that even their own forgotten background Abrahamic faith had built-in aggression, nothing will really change. And they will face the still-to-come Brussels Airport attack, the Berlin lorry attack, the Wuerzburg attack, the Stockholm attack, the Bastille Day Nice massacre, the murder of 12 year-old pop concert goers in Manchester, the London Bridge attack, all of which share the common trait that they were claimed by Islamic attackers.
Aside from the irrelevance of European Christendom as compared to the effervescent umma that organizes mass prayers that force redirection of traffic by occupying entire street blocks, this prank’s premise also shows the unbalance in the discourse. Despite being the target of deadly attacks, it is Europeans who need a lesson in civility and prostrate themselves for having ancestors who once followed a religion as barbaric as the one attacking them now.
After all is said and done, this prank has a logical flaw that is often spotted in rhetoric from both the ideological left and right: exploiting superficial optical similarities.