With complex, controversial issues such as the Muhammed cartoon affair, there’s a temptation to avoid voicing an opinion at all. Whichever side of the argument you take, you’ll inevitably find yourself in the company of some unsavoury bedfellows. However, that’s life. There is no black or white. Here’s my shade of grey…
Freedom of speech is not absolute. It requires responsibility and sensitivity to the context. You wouldn’t stand up at a friend’s funeral and shout “I’ve been shagging his wife!”, for example. With that in mind, one of my mixed feelings was sympathy for normal, unassuming Muslims whose deeply cherished faith was being ridiculed for the sake of a newspaper trying to prove a point. No religion should be above criticism, satirical or otherwise, but the boundaries between fair criticism and downright offence are different for each social grouping. In this case, we’re dealing with a religion which is sensitive about *any* sort of pictorial representation, so extra care is required. As it turns out, the cartoons aren’t much good. As satire, they’re nothing special, and as symbols of our fine Western civil rights, they’re pretty weak.
While we’re on the subject of the freedom of speech, the same guidelines have to apply to people protesting against perceived abuses of that freedom. If the various Muslim councils had calmly voiced their dissatisfaction with the behaviour of Jyllands-Posten, the whole thing would probably have turned out differently. Instead, we have Danish embassies burning in the Middle East and people killed in Afghanistan and Somalia. Here in London, the protest was smaller than certain newspapers probably wanted to suggest, but was notable for some of the laughably ironic banners held by protesters, such as “freedom of expression go to hell”. Right… so that’d include your freedom to stand in the street holding that banner, then? Many other banners would constitute incitement to violence and were all photographed, according to police on the scene, so look out for dawn raids in a town near you.
But what an over-reaction! The cartoons have now been printed in lots of other newspapers worldwide, but let’s not forget that the original furore erupted after they appeared in *one* newspaper with a circulation of 150,000, written in a minority European language. I’ve been having a browse around the Jyllands-Posten website; here’s an excerpt from a recent editorial (my translation)…
… Mr Prime Minister, now enough is enough. Now we’ll see if we can get the UN and NATO to help us in the war against the Muslims…
See? There’s something of the Daily Mail about that tone. Well, they probably don’t deserve that particular comparison… either way, the editor was shocked by the response and made an apology at the time. No big deal. If your religion doesn’t have the resilience to shake off little setbacks like that, what hope do you have?
But then, of course, all this worldwide hysteria wasn’t started by the regular Muslims, quietly going about their daily lives. After the cartoons had originally appeared last September (with only localised protests in Copenhagen) a group of ultra-conservative clerics set off for a little PR tour of the Middle East, armed with copies of the offending pictures. Oh, and just in case they couldn’t whip up the desired level of hysterical outrage, they decided to include a few extras in their press pack… some far nastier pictures totally unrelated to the original set, depicting Muhammed as a pig and a paedophile (more details in the Observer). Alhamedi suggests that this, in turn, was an attempt by the Saudi government to deflect attention away from the fact that rather a lot of people had been trampled to death during the Hajj.
Cynical stuff, and if the extremist Islamic factions want to create a worldwide climate of animosity towards Islam, they’re going the right way about it.
Incidentally, the original commission and publication of the offending cartoons was a reaction to the difficulty that author Kåre Bluitgen faced in soliciting artwork for his book “The Koran and the Life of the Prophet Muhammed”. Mindful of the Islamic law against idolatry, many artists were too fearful of the potential backlash to submit work. Anyway, the book is due to go on sale this month, so hang on to your hats…