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Title: The Muhammad Cartoons
Author: Chris Hobson
Date: October 1, 2006
Language: en
Topics: Islamophobia, The Utopian
Source: Retrieved on 7th May 2021 from http://utopianmag.com/archives/tag-The%20Utopian%20Vol.%205%20-%202006/the-muhammad-cartoons
Notes: Published in The Utopian, Vol. 5.

Chris Hobson

The Muhammad Cartoons

As most people know, in January and February Muslims demonstrated in

many countries over the publication of satirical cartoons of the prophet

Muhammad in European newspapers. The cartoons showed the prophet in a

variety of ways meant to satirize him and Muslim belief, for example,

with bombs in his head covering. They were first published in a Danish

newspaper last September and then, when demonstrations began, were

republished by a sizeable number of other European newspapers acting in

support of the first. Some of the demonstrations drew tens of thousands

of people. Some have involved mob violence—attacks on Danish

embassies,deaths from police gunfire—while others have featured symbolic

destruction such as flag burning but overall were relatively peaceful.

It’s not my purpose to give a review of the events but to state a point

of view.

It should go without saying that governments should not ban newspapers

or prosecute editors for printing the cartoons, as has happened in

Russia, among some other places. But in my view that’s not the main

issue.

According to one of the “experts” the New York Times loves to quote, a

professor of European history at Oxford, “The clash has pitted two sets

of values—freedom of expression and multiculturalism—against each other”

(Alan Cowell, “West Coming to Grasp Wide Islamic Protests as Sign of

Deep Gulf,” New York Times Feb. 8, 2006, A10). That is exactly the

opposition that should never occur. I’m not talking law or

constitutional principle here, but morality and decency. People may

possess freedom of expression and still decide what they will express

and not express. To ridicule other people’s religious sensibilities is

disgusting and reprehensible. The matter is as simple as that.The

occurrence of this so-called division between “two sets of values” is

evidence of two things. One is the almost universal ignorance and/or

disrespect in the west about basic Muslim beliefs and values. Thus, most

westerners either do not know or do not care that satirical images of

the prophet are deeply offensive to most Muslims. Portraying the prophet

is not absolutely forbidden in Islam; as Holland Cotter, the New York

Times art critic and someone who knows as much about Islamic art as

anyone writing in the news media, notes in a recent article, “Images of

the Prophet abound in Islamic art and culture; the Metropolitan Museum

has several examples in its Islamic collection. But unlike the cartoons,

such images are not caricatures” (Feb.26, 2006). However, many people’s

attitudes to Muslims’ sensibilities on this point vary between something

like “Suck it up” and a cavalier assumption that Muslims should

acquire“western values” in which such matters would be less important.

These attitudes themselves are deeply condescending and in some cases

outright hostile.

The Danish prime minister self-servingly claimed in an inter-view Feb. 9

that the cartoons had angered Muslim “extremists,” but in fact they

offended mainstream Muslims just as much. Of course, countries such as

Syria and Iraq have been exploiting Muslims’ anger over the cartoons for

their own political purposes. That does not change the fact that the

-anger is widespread, deeply felt, and legitimate.

The second point is the ignorant or bigoted readiness of many in the

west to blur the distinction between terrorism as a political tactic and

philosophy and Islam as a religion—a readiness which, in my view, in

Europe owes a good deal to traditional Christian religious prejudice, to

social prejudice against disproportionately lower-class outsiders, and,

above all, to Eurocentric cultural smugness and narrowmindedness. The

U.S. has not much to be proud of in these respects and yet anti-Muslim

bias is not so open here as in much of Europe.

Some defenders of the cartoons have argued that Arabic newspapers have

featured cartoons of hook-nosed, child-devouring Jews, have printed the

Protocols of the Elders of Zion, etc. That of course is true, but I

wonder if those defenders of the cartoons are really admitting, “We are

as bigoted as you are.” Rather, I think they are saying, “Your

anti-Semitic bigotry shows that Islam is, after all, a religion of hate,

and therefore the cartoons were accurate.” And this conceptions hows the

same deep and self-willed ignorance about Islam that I have already

mentioned.

As a young man, I spent a year living in coastal East Africa. There, I

learned to see veiled women simply as women leading a long-established

cultural way of life, and to hear the early dawn calls of the muezzins

as expressing not some eastern exoticism but simply one of humanity’s

many ways of conceptualizing the infinite. That experience helped me,an

atheist, develop as someone who respects and values the varied religious

sensibilities by which most of the world’s people order their lives and

confront the unsolvable riddles of life’s beginning, passage, and end.

Hence, I am in sympathy with the majority of the world’s Muslims who are

offended to their depths by the bigoted cartoons that some are

mistakenly defending.