Yesterday I expressed some unease at the way the theological and philosophical debate about blasphemy obscures other reasons why there are protests in the Middle East. This article from Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times is an excellent example of what I mean:
“PISS CHRIST,” a famous photograph partly financed by taxpayers, depicted a crucifix immersed in what the artist said was his own urine. But conservative Christians did not riot on the Washington Mall.
“The Book of Mormon,” a huge hit on Broadway, mocks the church’s beliefs as hocus-pocus. But Mormons haven’t burned down any theaters.
So why do parts of the Islamic world erupt in violence over insults to the Prophet Muhammad?
Note how the two examples of religions tolerating satire are drawn from the US? Kristof then goes International to talk about the violence of Islam.
A more apt comparison would have been with how American Muslims react to satire and ridicule. I do not doubt they raise protest – just as Christians raised protest over the “Piss Christ” art – but they do not engage in violent protest. For one thing, the police are strong enough to put a stop to such violence. But also, society is strong enough that chaotic protests, effigy burning and death are non-existent. Kristof’s sleight-of-keyboard suggests he might be pursuing and ideological agenda, rather than honestly compare like-with-like.
A better example of how to tackle this point was given this morning by none other than Douglas Murray. The Spectator columnist is a known Muslim-baiter, but during his appearance on Sunday Morning Live today, he was keen to point out early on that the protests we have seen this week were isolated and localised to particular countries, and that it was wrong to treat all Muslims as a monolithic block.
http://youtu.be/MAiOEV0v2RM
The ‘Innocence of Muslims’ nonsense also raises the questions on the other side of the controversy: should the American filmmakers have published the video? Should they have been are allowed to upload it to YouTube?
First: The principles of free speech are pretty clear cut in this case. The video is pretty awful, but does not call for violence towards anyone. So banning such a video would set a terrible precedent. It would allow the religious to censor criticism of their religion… And God knows, the Christian fundamentalists in the USA would relish that opportunity.
However, the question of whether the authors should have made the video is another matter. I wish they had not. They did it for hateful, disrespectful reasons. It comes from a bigoted mindset, and is designed to provoke and inflame. People who make that kind of art tend not to be very nice, interesting, or intelligent. But, to repeat the key point of the article I wrote about Günter Grass for the New Statesman, To say this is an act of artistic and moral criticism, not a statement on the principles of free speech.
Finally: should YouTube have removed the clip or suppressed it in certain countries? They did precisely this in Egypt, I believe. I think that this might be the most interesting part of the whole affair. On the one hand, YouTube is a private company, with its own Terms & Conditions that are distinct from the law of the land. If it wants to set a higher bar for free expression then I suppose it has the right to do that. On the other hand, YouTube has become so ubiquitous that It has become part of our public square, a shared communal space that is essential for democracy. Perhaps it has to act more like a government than a private company, and take a more permissive attitude to free expression.
I really shouldn’t let the weekend start without jotting a few notes about the ongoing unrest in the Middle East, provoked by the YouTube video “The Innocence of Muslims” and fuelled by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
The protests have sparked another round of analysis of the the Muslim faith, with the predictable indictment of Islam as uniquely intolerant. The Onion published a very funny NSFW cartoon, blasphemous to all religions except Islam, with the headline ‘No-one Murdered Because of This Image’. Funny, yes, but not actually accurate as satire. The fundamentalist Hindus of India are not above threats and riots when their sacred images are appropriated. The internationally acclaimed artist MF Hussain spent his twilight years in exile because of threats made by his own countrymen, such was their dislike of his Mother India paintings. And Richard Gere’s effigy was burned by an angry mob after he kissed Shilpa Shetty.
The fact that Hindus riot too is instructive. When they do, it is at the encouragement of nationalists groups like Shiv Sena, who seek political power through demonisation and division. When Muslims riot, it is similarly due to local leaders seeking to win political support. Even the Salman Rushdie fatwā (also in the news this week due to the publication of Rushdie’s autobiography, Joseph Anton) was raised by Ayatollah Khomeini as part of a power-play. The old Ayatollah had been losing political support in the months leading up to Valentine’s Day 1989, when the infamous decree was issued. Continue reading “Blasphemy and Cynical Plays for Power”
So, French MPs have voted to ban the burka.
We know where this story will go next. Somewhere in France, a woman will engage in a piece of civil disobediance and enter a public space wearing her veil. She will draw attention, crowds, the press. She will be asked to leave, but she will not leave. Eventually, she will be deported from the area by the gendarmerie or other state agency. Worse, someone may try to pull off the offending strip of cloth.
This event will be photgraphed and videoed by more than one person, and the footage will be on YouTube within the hour. It will then become a staple of anti-secular propaganda, proving the intolerance of the European mind and the inherent anti-Islamic sentiment sweeping the West.
Some might suggest that my worries about this inevitable end-point are purely pragmatic. They might agree that the new French law is counter-productive in the PR war against fundamentalist Islam… but then go on to argue that sometimes, the right decisions are not popular and that we cannot allow short-term realpolitik to trump the principle of the thing.
Here, I have to disagree. I think that the question over policing what people wear is the principle at stake here. Dictating dress codes is an incursion on an individual’s free expression. If we condemn a misogynistic religion or a patriarchal culture when it proscribes what women wear, then how can we support a government that intervenes (and sets prohibitions) in precisely the same arena? It is appalling.
I often hear the argument that women who wear the veil are “brainwashed”, an assertion that certainly makes sense to me.1 But such a claim is unfalsifiable, impossible to verify. It is therefore a useless and illegitimate argument to put forward in the political arena, and not a good enough reason to legislate. If we are truly convinced that brainwashing has taken place, then we must engage in “reverse-brainwashing”, putting forward alternative arguments, explaining the theory and the history of patriarchy, in the hope that people make different choices. We might begin by discussing the value of facial expressions in communication, while taking an honest look at the idea of the “male gaze” and the undoubted objectification and sexualisation of the female form that is endemic in all cultures.
This is a longer and more frustrating approach, but far better than one which says that you are empowered by being criminalised. Unfortunately, such long-term thinking rarely appeals to politicians, who favour the heavy-hand of legislation over deeper, cultural approaches. A burqa ban is also a convenient dog-whistle for the far-right groups, who mainstream politicians are happy to pander to at the expense of a minority with no discernible political power.
If the burqa and the niqab are oppressive to women, then the only people who can shrug off that oppression is the women themselves. Ripping off that ‘oppression’, by force and at a time of our own choosing, does not look like liberation at all. It merely substitutes one form of dictatorship for another, returns no autonomy to the women themselves, and unwittingly endorses intolerance. The philosopher Alain Badiou has a great formulation:
Basically put: these girls or women are oppressed. Hence, they shall be punished. It’s a little like saying: “This woman has been raped: throw her in jail.”
Interesting articles taking a similar view at the F-Word and Oye Times. ‘Her Eyes’ by Ranoush on Flickr. Creative Commons Licence.
1. One might also suggest that women who wear too little are similarly brainwashed. After all, are they not persuaded to do so by the diktats of the celebrity gossip magazines?
Last week we learned that South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have suffered death-threats on an Islamist site, after they attempted to depict the Prophet Mohammed in South Park. Contributors to site called Revolutionmuslim.com warned they might be killed, like the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. The Revolutionmuslim site is now down, but their threats are cached by Google:
We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.
The post also contained a link to a Huffington Post article which describes where Stone and Parker live. The group later presented a ‘clarification’ on SlideShare, which is still live, and which repeats the threat:
As for the Islamic ruling on the situation, then this is clear. There is no difference of opinion from those with any degree of a reputation that the punishment is death. For one example, Ibn Taymiyyah the great scholar of Islam says, “Whoever curses the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) – a Muslim or a non Muslim- then he must be killed…” and this is the opinion of the general body of Islamic scholars.
… This shows that taking this stance is virtually obligatory, but it does not mean that our taking this stance is in some way an absolute call toward the requirement that the creators of South Park must be killed, nor a deliberate attempt at incitement, it is only to declare the truth regardless of consequence and to offer an awareness in the mind of Westerners when they proceed forward with even more of the same.
Quite chilling. In the end, Mohammed was shown on South Park in a bear suit, and then underneath a big black ‘censored’ box, with references to his name bleeped out. Producers at Comedy Central made clear that it was they, and not Stone/Parker, that inserted this censorship. In the second of the two part episode, the man in the suit was revealed to be Father Christmas, not Mohammed.
What is odd about all this is that, before the Mohammed cartoons controversy in Denmark, South Park quite happily featured Mohammed, unveiled, uncloaked, and unbearsuited. The episode freely circulates in repeats and on DVD, and can be viewed in this short Boing Boing interview with Parker and Stone:
This week, the saga took a strang twist, when cartoonist Molly Norris published and circulated a cartoon entitled ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day‘, highlighting the ridiculous outcome of the South Park situation, where drawing anything can be taboo if it is labelled ‘Mohammed’:
The images and the idea were dedicated to Parker and Stone, but their heritage can be traced back clearly to the beginnings of conceptual art: René Magritte’s ‘The Treachery of Images‘ (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”), perhaps? Norris ‘Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor’ label was quickly taken to be a real movement (it was not), and the ‘day’ assumed to be a proper publicity drive (which it wasn’t). Norris quickly removed her image, and made clear that she was not attempting to disrespect religion herself.
This entire episode marks a continuation, rather than a departure, from the frustrating discourse around blasphemy and ‘offence’. Since the Rushdie affair, and especially since more recent examples such as the Theo Van Gogh murder, the ideal and right of free expression has been on the back foot. Matt Stone’s quote in the video above highlights the sorry state of affairs:
Now that’s the new normal. We lost. Something that was OK is now not OK.
When people like Stone and Parker do attempt to take this on, they are foiled by their own network. Cartoonists like Molly Norris back away from any controversy. In the UK, the recent production of Behud by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti reminds us that no-one is brave enough to put on Behzti, her controversial play set in a Sikh Temple. Even the board of the illustrious Index on Censorshipbacked away from publishing a Mohammed cartoon earlier this year.
We are living in one of two worlds. Either
the fears of all these people are justified, in which case, we have actually descended into a sort of fascist dystopia; Or
we are being over-cautious, and self-censoring unnecessarily
My personal sense is that it is the latter state of affairs is where we are at. The Revolution Muslim group seem tiny, pathetic and are easily dealt with using existing laws against threatening behaviour. Likewise with other protesting groups in both the USA and the UK, who can be easily countered if free speech activists and artists co-ordinate properly. Moreover, public opinion is certainly with free speech, and against those who think that blasphemy is a legitimate reason to censor.
Those with a personal connection to Theo Van Gogh, or Hitoshi Igarashi (Salman Rushdie’s Japanese translator) may disagree over the nature of the threat. Crucially, however, either situation is untenable and an assault on democracy, and cannot be allowed to stand.
My feeling is that political leadership is required. Only political leaders can guarantee police and legal protection for those who push the boundaries of satire… and the companies that facilitate this. We don’t have this at the moment, and artists seem to be swimming in uncertainty, lost and scared.
