By
Asma Barlas
11
September 2020
French
satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is at it, again: it has chosen to republish
the derogatory cartoons of Prophet Muhammad which provoked a violent attack
against it in 2015. The editors say it is "essential" to reprint
these on the eve of the trial of the perpetrators of that violence.
The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is seen at a newspapers
kiosk in Paris on the opening day of the trial of the January 2015 Paris
attacks on September 2, 2020 [Reuters/Christian Hartmann]
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A decade
earlier, in 2005, the Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten also
published a dozen defamatory cartoons of the prophet which it then republished
three years later.
It was the
printing of these cartoons that ultimately provoked some Muslims to resort to
violence and, as is customary, it was their backlash that became the nub of the
"cartoon controversy".
The
original affront to Muslim religious sensibilities was swallowed up by
assertions of the cartoonists' right to free speech and to engage in humour. In
fact, in most critics' views, it was not just the cartoonists who were victimised
by "Islamic rage," but also the principle of free speech itself.
However, it
should be possible to condemn violence by Muslims without giving a free pass to
those who defame and vilify their religion, their prophet and their scripture.
Yet, this rarely happens.
Instead,
the Muslim-baiting intelligentsia relies on precisely its own vilifications to
incite the violence which it then feigns to be horrified and surprised by. I
say feigns because, by now, pretty much everyone knows that, goaded to a point,
some Muslims will respond violently to caricatures of their prophet as a
terrorist, among other things. I also say feigns because provocateurs require
such a response to anathematise all Muslims as a threat to European identities
and values.
If it is
easy enough to understand why some Muslims respond violently to derogatory
tropes about Islam, the prophet and the Quran, what does it say about those who
compulsively keep recycling these? I have speculated about this need at length
elsewhere but will make only some brief points here.
First, it
is difficult to see how anyone - not only a Muslim - could find a cartoon of
the prophet as a terrorist/suicide bomber amusing without also treating
terrorism itself lightly. After all, how many of us can laugh at a cartoon of a
suicide bomber, irrespective of who that person is supposed to be? As for the
purported irony of such representations of the prophet, what is satirical about
these, when Muslims are already viewed as born terrorists-in-the-making?
Second,
European vilifications of the prophet and Islam have a much older pedigree than
free speech and have nothing to do with humour. To be precise, they have their
roots in medieval Europe and the changing self-conceptions of Christians over a
millennium.
For
instance, Tomaz Mastnak, a historian of the Crusades, argues that it was in the
mid-ninth century when Western unity began to express itself as Christendom,
that Muslims also came to be seen as the "normative enemies" of
Christianity. Until then, they had been viewed as just another pagan group and
generally ignored - even the Muslim conquest of southern Spain did not make it
into leading chronicles.
Over time
though, Europe's Christians came to see in Islam not just a "sinister
conspiracy against Christianity [but] that total negation of [it] ... which
would mark the contrivances of Antichrist". This is how Robert Southern
describes it in his book Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages and he
attributes this suspicion to the "strong desire not to know [Islam] for
fear of contamination".
Instead, he
says, even the Christians who lived in "the middle of Islam"
(Muslim-ruled Andalusia) looked to the Bible to explain it, which is how they
came to consider it the Antichrist. In short, according to Southern, it was ignorance
and the fear of contamination that made "the existence of Islam the most
far-reaching problem in medieval Christendom".
Given this
history, it is not surprising that medieval Christians would also portray the
prophet as a heathen idol, the devil, Mahound (as in Salam Rushdie's Satanic
Verses), an imposter, and the Antichrist. He appears in such guises from the
Crusades to the Reformation, with his representation as a religious imposter,
reaching its literary apotheosis in Italian poet Dante Alighieri's Divine
Comedy, in which he is confined to the eighth circle of hell.
Two
centuries later, he reappears as an Antichrist in the work of German reformist
Martin Luther, who of course, believed the pope and the Catholic Church were
much worse. A century later, Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, lauded as the father of
international law, was still calling him "a robber" and declaring
that, in contrast to the Christians, who "were men who feared God, and led
innocent lives … they who first embraced Mahometanism were robbers, and men
void of humanity and piety".
With the
coming of the Enlightenment, the prophet's critics also began assailing him in
secular language, as the "worst type of … fanatic" (French writer
Voltaire) and "the greatest enemy of reason who ever lived" (German
philosopher Immanuel Kant).
Such
depictions did not, however, portend a change in his representation as the
antithesis of European civilisation. If he was no longer called an Antichrist,
in European minds, he was still thought to be outside reason and rationality.
This is why I see the cartoons of the prophet as a terrorist to be just a
secularisation of the figure of the Antichrist.
Both images
serve, equally powerfully, to locate him and, by extension, Islam and Muslims
as Europe's natural enemies. This is why reducing the cartoons to just an issue
of free speech obscures their historical and ideological genealogy.
Lastly,
(free) speech is conducive not only to critique, humour, honesty, and dissent
but also to assertions of dominance and enactments of power. Though power is
enacted differently, its exercise is "inseparable from its display",
as American writer Saidiya Hartman argues in her book Terror, Slavery, and
Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.
In the
context of slavery in North America, for instance, being able to represent
power was "essential to reproducing domination". As an example,
Hartman notes that a slave-holder's "display of mastery [over a slave] was
just as important as the legal title to slave property". This display
usually involved demonstrating the slave holder's "dominion and the
captive's abasement," publicly. It also took the less obtrusive form of
organising "innocent amusements and spectacles of mastery" as a way
for the dominant classes "to establish their dominion" over the
enslaved and dominated.
Borrowing
from Hartman, I want to suggest that, today, some Westerners seek to
demonstrate and reproduce their dominion over Muslims by caricaturing and
maligning our sacred symbols at will. They are thus able to achieve
epistemically what they cannot physically or legally. Even if this displacement
from the physical to the psychological signifies the limits of Western power,
speech is integral to its display. This is why derogatory caricatures of the
prophet function as spectacles of mastery and as an ideological means to
bolster intra-Western unity against Muslims.
It is as
much to such enactments of mastery as it is to the content of specific attacks
that Muslims like myself react angrily, and what we condemn is not the idea
that people should be free to speak but the use of speech to dominate and
degrade the already marginal or vulnerable. Defending domination in the name of
freedom just confirms that not all conceptions of freedom are equally worth
defending.
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Asma
Barlas is a retired professor of politics in New York.
Original
Headline: Reprinting the Charlie Hebdo cartoons is not about free speech
Source: The Al-Jazeera
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/reprinting-charlie-hebdo-cartoons-using/d/122834
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