Why There Is No Book of Muhammad

And why everyone already knows why this musical will never exist.

Years ago a friend took me to see the Book of Mormon on Broadway, half-apologetic the entire way there, as though the evening might offend me. But my experience was just the opposite. I sat delighted at the whole show and its masterwork of irreverence. Audiences packed the house then, and fifteen years after opening night, they still do. Its popularity and longevity tell you something about both the show’s quality and the remarkable absence of consequences for its creators.

Now ask yourself: where is the Book of Muhammad? Surely the question has crossed more minds than will ever admit it publicly. A Broadway musical skewering Islam with the same cheerful savagery applied to Mormonism—the prophets, the revelations, the jurisprudence, the treatment of women. Imagine the songs, the set design, the reviews.

You can’t quite imagine it, can you? Somewhere between the imagining and the opening night, the mind runs the calculation and arrives at the answer everyone already knows. And in that knowing—that shared, unspoken, entirely rational fear—lies one of the most consequential truths about American public life today: one religion operates under the normal rules of a free society, while the other has been carefully, comprehensively exempted from them.

This is a civilizational tell.