Danish Cartoons

Last week, I received an email about the Danish cartoons:

“Mohammed with a bomb in his turban, in particular, is an image with obvious meanings which would be shared between both the West and the Middle East.”

I think the problem here, is not the representation of Muhammad as such, but the symbolism of depicting Mohammad with a bomb.

Stewart Lee and Richard Hall caused 7000 complaints from the Christian right to flood in to the BBC after airing Jerry Springer, The Opera. The problem was of course, not the amount of swearing, which frequented about 6500 times less than protesters claimed, but having Jesus appear in a nappy claiming he was “slightly gay,” exposing the pettiness of Christianity’s attitude towards homosexuality.

To be sure, protests would probably be no less violent than those in the Middle East regarding the cartoons if it were not for the fact that we have some semblance of a state in Europe, as compared to the (can I get away with) anarcho-despotism (?) of the Middle East governments.

Let’s for a minute turn to what our earliest Islamic records say:

Narrated Said bin Abu Al-Hasan:
While I was with Ibn ‘Abbas a man came and said, “O father of ‘Abbas! My sustenance is from my manual profession and I make these pictures.” Ibn ‘Abbas said, “I will tell you only what I heard from Allah’s Apostle. I heard him saying, ‘Whoever makes a picture will be punished by Allah till he puts life in it, and he will never be able to put life in it.’ ” Hearing this, that man heaved a sigh and his face turned pale. Ibn ‘Abbas said to him, “What a pity! If you insist on making pictures I advise you to make pictures of trees and any other unanimated objects.”

Bukhari Hadith, Volume 3, Book 34, Number 428

Narrated Abu Talha:
I heard Allah’s Apostle saying; “Angels (of Mercy) do not enter a house wherein there is a dog or a picture of a living creature (a human being or an animal).”

Bukhari Hadith, Volume 4, Book 54, Number 448

So the punishment is supposed to be dealt out in the afterlife, rather than by angry mobs in this world. Hmm…

Besides, Jesus, Abraham, Moses etc… are all revered in Islam, but it’s not as if the Sistine Chapel has been the target of riotous Muslims. It’s all this which leads me to believe that the riots are more due to their symbolic significance rather than the actual representation of Muhammad.

I am frequently enraged by comments made on atheist websites when I see posts like:

Hi cartman. Nice to see you posting again. What are you some kind of islamophobe?
You keep nocking these poor opressed Muslims. Have you no decency?

http://www.infidelguy.com/ftopict-15866-The-Words-of-a-Leading-Progressive-Muslim.html

and then link to some example of religious nutcases, which is in no way representative of the 1 billion+ Muslims in the world. What’s important here is not what is being said, but what is not being said. Just as Hitler privately discussed the full meaning of the “final solution”, but publicly spoke only of “what needed to be done” (brilliantly satirised in the South Park episode, “Passion of the Jew”), we hide behind abstract concepts of “Islamo-fascism” or Islamism to hide our true classification of the Islamic world as the inferior other.

We cannot also forget that corrupt governments in the Mideast achieve political gain by being “with and for the people.”

But is the Iranian response ideologically different to President Bush’s after 9/11? Oh dear, I seemed to have stepped into some intellectual faux pas by comparing a bunch of cartoons to flying planes into skyscrapers. But bear with me here for a minute. Slavoj Zizek uses a simple example to show our ethnocentric universalistic hypocrisy:

As for the ‘clash of civilizations’, let us recall the letter from the seven-year-old American girl whose father was a pilot fighting in Afghanistan: she wrote that – although she loved her father very much, she was ready to let him die, to sacrifice him for her country. When President Bush quoted these lines, they were perceived as a ‘normal’ outburst of American patriotism: let us conduct a simple mental experiment and imagine an Arab Muslim girl pathetically reciting into the camera the same words about her father fighting for the Taliban – we don’t have to think for long about what our own reaction would have been: morbid Muslim fundamentalism which does not stop even at the cruel manipulation and exploitation of children…Every feature attributed to the Other is already present at the very heart of the USA.

Zizek, S. 2002, ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’

America, Europe and the Mideast have all failed in waking up to the real. American and European governments fail/refuse to acknowledge the negative effects of their domination of ever vanishing global energy. Mideast governments failed to acknowledge the problems in Islamic orthodoxy, and ignore the difficult step to reopen the gates of Islamic philosophy that were closed in the thirteenth century.

What should be the next step? The rising hatred towards Islam in Europe, I believe goes to show that multiculturalism as the post-war European project is a failure, and may end up in confirming Huntingdon’s “Clash of the civilisations” as a self-fulfilling prophecy – “yes you may be different, but only different enough that you’re still [Insert European nationality here]” Universalism leads to treating the other as inferior – Whose universalism is the true universalism? Why, Western capitalism of course!

Moral relativism is a dead-end for political change, and will ultimately fail to protect the victims of genocide, sexual violence, and racial hatred, as the case of Israel and Palestine so clearly shows.

I believe that the rioters and a lot of the Muslim world understand this in their own way. For god’s sake we beam our views into their living rooms 24/7 by way of CNN, Star TV, and the BBC.

So, the cartoons are an easy political target of desperation. Oddly enough, we’re expected to be intelligent enough to work out what they’re desperate about.

As many of you know, I’m a great fan of Ulrich Beck, and therefore I will side with him that only realistic cosmopolitanism may save Europe’s future. We need a contextual universalism that is defined in terms of negatives that all can agree with – The right not to be a victim of genocide, the right not to be raped, etc… More importantly, that universalism should apply to us as equally as to those we want to apply it to.

Anyway, as a British Indian apostate from Islam, this kind of thing does literally keep me awake at night, and sometimes gives me a nightmare or two as well.

Here are links to some of the best comments on the situation:

• Muslim Parliament of Great Britain
• All cartoon politics are local from Salon.com
• Charlie Brooker suggests forming a support group for pariahs in a comical look at the affair
• Mark Kermode looks at how British blasphemy laws have affected the UK cinema industry

I’ll leave you with these final words from Beck himself:

Nonviolent coexistence with those who are culturally different must be part of the definition of civilized society. None of us can count on being shown the tolerance that we deny to others. Neither violence to ourselves nor affronts to our own dignity give us the right to treat neighbors as aliens and use violence against them. We certainly cannot (as we sometimes hear) excuse a Palestinian woman who blows herself up in a café filled with Israeli women and their children.
What we can do, though, is understand that the differentiation and exclusion involved in an emphasis on ethnicity involve as well a dynamic of violence in which the minimum requirements of civilization are at last rendered irrelevant.

Beck, U. 2004, ‘The Truth of Others – A Cosmopolitan Approach’, Symposium: Talking Peace with Gods, Part 1, pp. 430-449