Imagism
I would not be surprised if some Libyan father is putting their foot through their son's Lego multi-storey car park right now. Mozarella sales have collapsed. Despite the promixity to Italy, that is where it is imported from apparently. On the other hand, I imagine that exports of that other great Danish export, bacon, have not been so poorly effected.
The newsreader on the BBC said that there have been protests from Lahore to Lebanon about the publication of the cartoons in the Danish newspaper The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and their subsequent publication in other European countries. Well, I can think another place beginning with L where there have also been organised protests, although not as violent. The businesses in the centre of town closed up early today in anticipation of the gathering crowds.
Sometimes, people seem to forget how wide a swathe Islam cuts across the middle of the planet. Despite the protests, my feeling is that here people are pretty stoical and a little embarrassed by the rabid, hysterically violent over-reactions that have taken place in Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Riding in a taxi yesterday, the driver pointed to a pile-up at the side of the road and said, "This is the problem here, not cartoons," although he did add "What advantage did they want to get from publishing them?" I had no clue how to answer him.
While the word over-reaction is definitely not misplaced, there have been the same colossal breakdowns in communication that always surround these things. It has to be said first of all, that Jyllands-Posten did not publish any cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed as a pig, although some such cartoons seem to have made their way onto the internet. My boss put a computer print out mock-up of this crude cartoon mock-up on the notice board in the corridor, with Mohammed's head replaced with the head of Jyllands-Posten editor Carsten Juste. Having seen theactual 12 cartoons that were published, I would not even say that the cartoon which has caused the most hysterical ruptures actually portrays Mohammed as a terrorist. My take on the cartoon of Mohammed wearing a bomb with a lit fuse coming out a turban is to suggest that the teachings of the prophet have been interpreted as a pretext for terrorism.
These subtleties predictably, though understandably did not take long to fly out of the window as the air became thick with paroxysms of anger and indignation. Added to that, of course, is the irony that the offices of a newspaper which suggested that Islam was breeding violent fundamentalist intolerance is now being ear-marked on websites for, er, violent Islamic intolerance. 'How dare you say that Mohammed is the cause of terrorism? We will firebomb you for saying that!' There is no doubt about it - many Muslims, living as they do in overtly religious dictatorships of one sort or another, are not so much the brooding nemesis of free speech as they are sometimes portrayed, but are not quite certain about what it is. When you are conditioned by a media which does not tolerate true freedom of expression, you do not necessarily develop the critical faculties to observe the subtleties of pluralism. Against that background, it is not such an unpardonable crime to assume that other places are the same; that if a Danish newspaper publishes an offensive cartoon, then this reflects the views of all of the Danish people, with a little cloud of suspicion cast over the rest of the western world. It is about as logical as boycotting Maltese goods because you have choked on a Malteser. As a Muslim once put it to me after his football team was thrashed in the World Cup Finals: "The referee was a Christian!" The background noise of persecution mania hums constantly in the Arab world. I secretly think that some actually relish the opportunity to indulge and confirm their paranoia about the west.
Some more fair-minded people here have described the west as hypocritical. "Isn't it in the west that girls aren't allowed to wear hijabs to school? You don't allow us the freedom to express ourselves, but you can?” Mahmoud said. I think it is an engaging counter-argument to pursue, and not completely without substance but, finally, untenable. It seems convenient to overlook the fact that the French ban is also on kippahs and crucifixes.But as much as I disagree that there is some secret Western conspiracy to offend and undermine Islam and, as much as this reaction has brought out the worst, paranoiac instincts that some Arabs harbour, I can not agree that the cartoons should have been published. There are so very many things that are ripe for satire and lampooning in the Arab world, but the image of Mohammed is hardly one of them. Although it must be said, I do not think the cartoons actually set out to portray Mohammed in a truly unsympathetic light. One has him as a lonely shephard against the backdrop of a red sun. I imagine that Mohammed probably did look something like that.
Analogies have been made about the negative, sometimes brutally obscene portrayal of Jews in the Arab media. As condemnable as it may be, I have never heard of a cartoon in a Muslim newspaper actually attacking the articles of the Jewish faith and would find it very hard to believe that there has ever been one. Others have pointed out that Jesus Christ has regularly been at the hands of treatment far more extreme than the picture of Mohammed with a bomb on his head without violent repercussions from Christians. But this is to miss the point. The 12 cartoon layout which the Danish newspaper so deliberately and intentionally chose to detonate on the world was a direct challenge to the deeply held Islamic belief that the representation of Mohammed in pictorial form is blasphemous. The Danish newspaper's question was, 'Are we entitled to free speech?' It is a question that does need to be asked, but what about the question, 'Are they entitled to that belief?' ?
As irrational and illogical as the belief seems coming from my world view, I think that they are entitled to it. It is a belief which could be violated by any child with a crayon at any time. It seems unenforceable, inscrutable, downright bizarre and perplexing. But it is theirs and I believe that they do have a right to it. I fail to see what freedoms are mine they are curtailing through this belief, except in a case where I should calculatedly pursue a course to offend it, which is what has just been done.
The thing with free speech is that it sometimes seems a lofty, high-minded concept when discussed in ivory-tower intellectual circles but loses some of its ethical currency on a street level when it is done without sensitivity. The protesters who marched through London this week with placards proclaiming "7/7 is on its way" were also excercising free speech. To say that 7/7 is coming again could , after all, be construed not an incitement to hatred or violence, but an opinion. But if someone proposed to, say, deliberately march past the house of the relatives of one of the victims of 7/7 with one of those placards then I would defend their rights with as little conviction as I would those who wield free speech as an instrument to ridicule people's most deeply held beliefs and convictions in the name of some kind of intellectual exercise. Free speech was curbed all over the western world after September 11, with scyscrapers being edited out of films and off CD covers. An ironic over-reaction of course, but the underlying notion of sensitivity was not misplaced. The right to express yourself does not necessarily carry with it an incumbent obligation to be sensitive but without it, the scenes we have seen this week are inevitable.
I do understand that Jyllands-Posten's editor Carsten Juste's intention, although it may not have been his only intention, was to explore the boundaries of free speech in Denmark but the image of Mohammed crosses Denmark's borders. In this era of globalization, where the cyberspacial butterfly effect of a cartoon in Scandinavia can be transmitted across the globe in a matter of seconds, it is no use pretending anything else. It is not for the west to try and ram free speech down Islam's throat.
If Juste sincerely did not anticipate the uproar that has been unleashed then he was astonishingly naive. The five dead bodies so far are not his fault, but at least I hope he now has the answers he was looking for and does not feel the need to conduct the same test again any time soon. It's a shame he couldn't have just done a survey or something like that.
The newsreader on the BBC said that there have been protests from Lahore to Lebanon about the publication of the cartoons in the Danish newspaper The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and their subsequent publication in other European countries. Well, I can think another place beginning with L where there have also been organised protests, although not as violent. The businesses in the centre of town closed up early today in anticipation of the gathering crowds.
Sometimes, people seem to forget how wide a swathe Islam cuts across the middle of the planet. Despite the protests, my feeling is that here people are pretty stoical and a little embarrassed by the rabid, hysterically violent over-reactions that have taken place in Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Riding in a taxi yesterday, the driver pointed to a pile-up at the side of the road and said, "This is the problem here, not cartoons," although he did add "What advantage did they want to get from publishing them?" I had no clue how to answer him.
While the word over-reaction is definitely not misplaced, there have been the same colossal breakdowns in communication that always surround these things. It has to be said first of all, that Jyllands-Posten did not publish any cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed as a pig, although some such cartoons seem to have made their way onto the internet. My boss put a computer print out mock-up of this crude cartoon mock-up on the notice board in the corridor, with Mohammed's head replaced with the head of Jyllands-Posten editor Carsten Juste. Having seen theactual 12 cartoons that were published, I would not even say that the cartoon which has caused the most hysterical ruptures actually portrays Mohammed as a terrorist. My take on the cartoon of Mohammed wearing a bomb with a lit fuse coming out a turban is to suggest that the teachings of the prophet have been interpreted as a pretext for terrorism.
These subtleties predictably, though understandably did not take long to fly out of the window as the air became thick with paroxysms of anger and indignation. Added to that, of course, is the irony that the offices of a newspaper which suggested that Islam was breeding violent fundamentalist intolerance is now being ear-marked on websites for, er, violent Islamic intolerance. 'How dare you say that Mohammed is the cause of terrorism? We will firebomb you for saying that!' There is no doubt about it - many Muslims, living as they do in overtly religious dictatorships of one sort or another, are not so much the brooding nemesis of free speech as they are sometimes portrayed, but are not quite certain about what it is. When you are conditioned by a media which does not tolerate true freedom of expression, you do not necessarily develop the critical faculties to observe the subtleties of pluralism. Against that background, it is not such an unpardonable crime to assume that other places are the same; that if a Danish newspaper publishes an offensive cartoon, then this reflects the views of all of the Danish people, with a little cloud of suspicion cast over the rest of the western world. It is about as logical as boycotting Maltese goods because you have choked on a Malteser. As a Muslim once put it to me after his football team was thrashed in the World Cup Finals: "The referee was a Christian!" The background noise of persecution mania hums constantly in the Arab world. I secretly think that some actually relish the opportunity to indulge and confirm their paranoia about the west.
Some more fair-minded people here have described the west as hypocritical. "Isn't it in the west that girls aren't allowed to wear hijabs to school? You don't allow us the freedom to express ourselves, but you can?” Mahmoud said. I think it is an engaging counter-argument to pursue, and not completely without substance but, finally, untenable. It seems convenient to overlook the fact that the French ban is also on kippahs and crucifixes.But as much as I disagree that there is some secret Western conspiracy to offend and undermine Islam and, as much as this reaction has brought out the worst, paranoiac instincts that some Arabs harbour, I can not agree that the cartoons should have been published. There are so very many things that are ripe for satire and lampooning in the Arab world, but the image of Mohammed is hardly one of them. Although it must be said, I do not think the cartoons actually set out to portray Mohammed in a truly unsympathetic light. One has him as a lonely shephard against the backdrop of a red sun. I imagine that Mohammed probably did look something like that.
Analogies have been made about the negative, sometimes brutally obscene portrayal of Jews in the Arab media. As condemnable as it may be, I have never heard of a cartoon in a Muslim newspaper actually attacking the articles of the Jewish faith and would find it very hard to believe that there has ever been one. Others have pointed out that Jesus Christ has regularly been at the hands of treatment far more extreme than the picture of Mohammed with a bomb on his head without violent repercussions from Christians. But this is to miss the point. The 12 cartoon layout which the Danish newspaper so deliberately and intentionally chose to detonate on the world was a direct challenge to the deeply held Islamic belief that the representation of Mohammed in pictorial form is blasphemous. The Danish newspaper's question was, 'Are we entitled to free speech?' It is a question that does need to be asked, but what about the question, 'Are they entitled to that belief?' ?
As irrational and illogical as the belief seems coming from my world view, I think that they are entitled to it. It is a belief which could be violated by any child with a crayon at any time. It seems unenforceable, inscrutable, downright bizarre and perplexing. But it is theirs and I believe that they do have a right to it. I fail to see what freedoms are mine they are curtailing through this belief, except in a case where I should calculatedly pursue a course to offend it, which is what has just been done.
The thing with free speech is that it sometimes seems a lofty, high-minded concept when discussed in ivory-tower intellectual circles but loses some of its ethical currency on a street level when it is done without sensitivity. The protesters who marched through London this week with placards proclaiming "7/7 is on its way" were also excercising free speech. To say that 7/7 is coming again could , after all, be construed not an incitement to hatred or violence, but an opinion. But if someone proposed to, say, deliberately march past the house of the relatives of one of the victims of 7/7 with one of those placards then I would defend their rights with as little conviction as I would those who wield free speech as an instrument to ridicule people's most deeply held beliefs and convictions in the name of some kind of intellectual exercise. Free speech was curbed all over the western world after September 11, with scyscrapers being edited out of films and off CD covers. An ironic over-reaction of course, but the underlying notion of sensitivity was not misplaced. The right to express yourself does not necessarily carry with it an incumbent obligation to be sensitive but without it, the scenes we have seen this week are inevitable.
I do understand that Jyllands-Posten's editor Carsten Juste's intention, although it may not have been his only intention, was to explore the boundaries of free speech in Denmark but the image of Mohammed crosses Denmark's borders. In this era of globalization, where the cyberspacial butterfly effect of a cartoon in Scandinavia can be transmitted across the globe in a matter of seconds, it is no use pretending anything else. It is not for the west to try and ram free speech down Islam's throat.
If Juste sincerely did not anticipate the uproar that has been unleashed then he was astonishingly naive. The five dead bodies so far are not his fault, but at least I hope he now has the answers he was looking for and does not feel the need to conduct the same test again any time soon. It's a shame he couldn't have just done a survey or something like that.
Comments
I think you argue your point very convincingly. Actually freedom of speech is not quite unlimited in Denmark. There is an article in the penal code forbidding outright blasphemy.