The “free speech” protest (and counter-protest) outside of a mosque in Phoenix, Arizona on Friday threw an old question back into the public square: Is drawing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad necessarily a hateful act?
If you are anything like me, a bright red, block-lettered “YES” or “NO” just popped up in your mind’s eye upon reading the previous sentence — probably even before your physical eyes got around to registering the question mark.
For those who can relate, I only ask that you hold off on embracing that easy-to-reach gut response (at least for the length of this column).
So, I’ll repeat the question in a slightly different form: Is personally transgressing the codes of a religion — and mocking one of its central figures in the process — always an expression of deep hatred?
This, I think, is a necessary question. Someone who would draw a simple depiction of Muhammad himself — no bombs in his turban or scimitars in his hand, just a sketch — now is met with the same disgust one used to reserve for those who spray paint swastikas on the graves of Holocaust survivors.
First, disregarding the codes of someone else’s religion surely can’t be considered an expression of hatred. If eating unleavened bread on Passover were an expression of hatred, nearly everyone in the world would be an anti-Semite. In the same way, someone outside the faith need not worry about transgressing the long-held Islamic tradition against displaying the prophet.
No. Obviously, the true transgression of drawing the prophet comes from implicitly mocking a religious figure that many hold dear, not from breaking a tradition of certain sects of Islam.
Let’s take two examples of those who have drawn cartoons of Mohammed in the past and have received bullets in return: Charlie Hebdo and the American Freedom Defense Initiative, the group that hosted a “Draw Muhammad” event in Texas last month which was fired upon by armed gunmen.
The groups, both of which have drawn Muhammad, could not be more different on a genetic, ideological level. They show two sides of what motivates people to draw Muhammad; on one side, an attempt to ridicule a religion, on the other, a terrified attempt to marginalize a people by distortion and demonization.
Charlie Hebdo is a radical leftist satirical magazine that has spent far more time ridiculing the anti-Muslim right wing of French politics than any other magazine. The president of SOS Racisme, the leading anti-racism NGO in France, called Charlie Hebdo “the greatest anti-racist weekly in this country. Every week in Charlie Hebdo, every week, half of it is against racism, against anti-Semitism, against hatred towards Muslims.”
Adam Gopnik, a long-time columnist for the New Yorker, wrote of them: “When the Charlie cartoons made Muhammad look foolish, they were not saying that Muslims were evil — they were questioning the entire business of turning a person into a prophet. Not to get this is not to get why they were cartoonists.”
Their depictions of Muhammad were never a ploy or a tool to attack the Muslims of France. They believed that the strength, or weakness, of an idea came from the idea itself — not the character or social position of those who might believe in it.
By depicting Muhammad, they were satirizing what they saw as a ridiculous concept, not marginalizing the kind of people who held those beliefs. (Despite the prevalent strain of idle talk, these two concepts are far from equivalent.)
True, Charlie Hebdo didn’t like Islam — which is all “Islam-phobic” really means. But any fair observer would see that they were anything but anti-Muslim. Their beef was with monotheism, not necessarily everyone who believes in monotheism.
The American Freedom Defense Initiative (also known as the Stop Islamization of America) has more obvious goals in mind. This is the group which seems to fall into all the stereotypes which are the base elements of the stupid, left wing “’Murica” jokes.
They believe that all who follow Islam are evil, that Islam is irreconcilable with the west, and that Sharia gaining power in the U.S. is a tangible threat.
Their beef is with both Islam and Muslims. One of their cartoons is a portrait of Muhammad with open-mouthed snakes coming out of his beard.
These, like anti-Semitic cartoons of past and current eras, stem from a real fear of Islam itself, not a playful, thumb-the-nose dismissal of it. The tone is that Muhammad is an evil god, followed by evil people.
Their background is Christian and pro-Zionist, not from a place of unbelief. They are not trying to be “outrageous.” They’re fighting an ideological war, which they believe the U.S. is losing.
Their bigotry, of course, doesn’t mean that they deserve to be shot at. But the character of their anger and fear — which the Texas shooting, by the way, has done nothing to help — is the same one which motivated well-meaning Christians to create the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Unlike Charlie Hebdo, they do not understand the subject they are ridiculing.
Again, Gopnik is very good about summarizing the subtle, if important, difference between Charlie Hebdo and the AFDI: “It is not merely that an assault on an ideology is different from a threat made to a person; it is that it is the opposite of a threat made to a person. The whole end of liberal civilization is to substitute the criticism of ideas for assaults on people.”
The question remains: is it hateful to draw cartoons of the prophet Muhammad?
As it turns out, the easy-to-reach “YES” and “NO” answers have little relevance here — after all, there is more than one way to draw a prophet.