Debasing the Other: The Cartoon Controversy
By Shelley Walia
The East became the enemy of the
Christian world when Islam struck out at the Mediterranean culture in the seventh century. To counter the onslaught of Islam, the West fashioned a discourse to protect the minds of the public from a pagan religion that was succeeding in proselytizing. Whereas Dante in his Divine Comedy would go on to put Mohammad in one of the lowest circles of hell, Piers Plowman depicted him as diabolic. The idea was to underscore the superiority of Christianity over Islam. Koranic Paradise was deemed to be carnal, whereas Heaven was wholly spiritual. Battle lines were therefore drawn from the dawn of the Dark Ages.
But this was not enough. Take a leap over more than a millennium. And we come to the recent annoyance of the Muslim world through the abuses at Abu Gharib and Guantanamo. With the provocation of the appearance of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in the Danish press, enough fuel is intentionally added to the already raging tempers of the Muslim world. It is a blatant attack on Islam and an unambiguous act of hypocrisy. Visualize a scenario of a caricature of a Jew in Auschwitz in an Iranian newspaper. There would, no doubt, be a pandemonium unheard of in the West. A mere
expression of doubt about the verifiability of the holocaust by the President of Iran has severely provoked the Jews, not to speak of Western leaders and the Western press.
The question of freedom of expression gains a new urgency keeping in view the already existing environment of conflict and the unnecessary war on Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus if Mohammed’s cartoons have led to world-wide
demonstrations, consuming the Muslims with a righteous fury, there is no reason for the West to not take serious cognizance of their age old laws on blasphemy and realize the hurt caused to the Muslims community. Blasphemy, like any other public affront, cannot fall out of the purview of the courts.
Such irresponsible action by the media in Europe which foolishly tried to show its solidarity with the Danish press by publishing the same cartoons all over again has to be outlawed and become an established part of criminal justice, thereby forming the basis of humanitarian constitutional progress. Twentieth-century libertarian movements, instead of offering a full-throated support for the freedom of expression even when it aggravates tempers in a rather volatile world, must take into cognizance the psychological offense caused by such an act.
Previously, the horrifying pictures of torture at Abu Gharib and Guantanamo were used for recruitment by the Al Queda; and now, the cartoons will be another tool in the hands of the terrorists to further influence the youth. Any burlesque of religious sentiments underscores a political agenda, a strategy very much in keeping with the colonial motives of igniting fiery and violent demonstrations that reflect the barbaric nature of ‘pagan’ religions. The naturalness or the primacy of Western culture is asserted for the purpose of ‘othering’ the ‘barbaric’ practice of Islamic religion along with its ‘depravity’, thereby disparaging cultures of the third world into degraded subjects of imperial discourse.
Instead of debasing Islam by ridiculing a prophet, let the Western media bring out the reality of torture in today’s world as well as reveal the subterranean designs of Western interventions in the name of democracy, and not become complicit with the powers that be. It is clear that within the war on terror, this new provocation has been disdainful of fundamental human values and basic social responsibility resulting in the aggravation of discord. Assessment of moral arguments and the consequences of such indiscreet acts in the present dangerous times calls for a radical shift in jurisprudence to ensure that such incalculable damage does not recur. Responsible states owe a duty to the international community. Any affront to national sensibilities can only retard the process of rapprochement.