Point/Counterpoint Free Expression and the Sacred: Should There Be Limits?

No!

No, because no two groups of people will agree on who gets to set the limits and what those limits are.

For example, you do not have to draw Muhammad to spark demonstrations. The cartoon that most enraged my Muslim readers did not have a depiction of Muhammad in it at all.

I drew the cartoon two years ago after over a hundred people were killed in riots against a Miss World Contest in Africa, which local Muslims thought was offensive to women. My cartoon pointed out that radical Muslims who prevented women from voting, kept women from school and stoned women to death were also rather offensive to women.

After the cartoon was published, some of my Muslim readers complained in person to my editor, some wrote angry letters which we published, and some picketed outside our building. In a conversation with one woman who defended wearing the headscarf, I said what I believe: I had no problem with anyone wearing a headscarf or any other religious outfit. But, I added, "You wouldn’t force other women to wear the headscarf, would you?"

After a pause she replied, "Well, if it was for her own good."

This is why I go to the drawing board every day. I am drawing to help prevent a world where someone else decides what I must wear for my own good. Others would say that there should be limits on my speech and my dress.

While I am willing to be called anti-Muslim to express my views, I am also willing to be called anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish and anti-American. I have been called all three things and worse. I do not get up in the morning thinking, "How can I insult Muhammad, Jesus or Moses, today?" Usually, I do not deal with religions at all unless you consider George W. Bush’s devout faith war a religion.

However, if a religious group comes to my government and asks for my tax dollars or wants to pass laws that cover me, that religion and its adherents enter into the political process and must — in a democracy — be treated with the same consideration as any politician or political group. Likewise, if someone kills an abortion doctor in the name of Jesus or uses planes to kill thousands in the name of Muhammad, that someone is open to be drawn with as much consideration as I would draw any murderer.

Cartoonists must be free to draw about religion because it is often fanatics acting in the name of religions who try to hijack our freedoms. They are the ones who want to set the "limits." One of the French newspaper editors who

ran the Danish cartoons noted that if you let every religious group have control over what you print, there would be nothing left to put in the paper.

Just because a cartoonist draws one cartoon critical of some Islamic terrorist, it does not mean that that cartoonist is against Islam. Right after 9/11, for example, I did a cartoon that made fun of how ignorant we Americans are of everything Islamic. We have the freedom to criticize ourselves and we use it.

Many American and European cartoonists have drawn cartoons bitterly against the war in Iraq even when it was not a popular position to take.

Unfortunately, quite a few of the world’s cartoonists who do not have that freedom are cartoonists in the Arab world whose governments forbid them from drawing about their own leaders. One cartoonist I know who lives in exile draws cartoons longing for peace and reconciliation but cannot live in his own country because he sometimes is critical of that country’s clerical leaders.

Cartoonists everywhere have a genetic flaw. We may love our countries but we sit a little outside and see the imperfections. That is where we find humor.

For the US press, this current controversy was not about American cartoonists, but whether to run the Danish cartoons. Most papers, including some of the "alternative papers," which regularly ridicule religions, chose not to run them. Consequently, most Americans never had a chance to see whether the cartoons really were offensive. Instead, all Americans saw were the angry faces of what looked like irrational Muslims rioting. If editors had let their readers see the images, readers might have understood why Muslims were insulted.

The biggest newspaper in Philadelphia discreetly ran one of the cartoons with an explanation that it was not endorsing the cartoon, but rather it was trying to inform its readers. Some local Muslims mounted two loud, peacefully protested and wrote articles explaining their views.

My own newspaper did not run the Danish cartoons. While I did not need to ridicule Muhammad, I strongly felt that it was important as a cartoonist in the free world to retain the right to draw him. After some bad starts, I drew a cartoon of the Buddha, Jesus, a rabbi, Muhammad, the Christian God from Michael Angelo’s Sistine Chapel, and Vishnu all happily laughing as they read "The Big Fat Book of Obnoxious Religious Cartoons."

The cartoon ran in our paper. One reader sent one mild letter of complaint. I received many supportive letters and requests for copies of the cartoon.

The reaction confirmed what I believe. It is not whether you draw holy figures in a cartoon, but rather it is how you draw them. If the Danish cartoonists had drawn respectable looking cartoons of Muhammad, this controversy would never have happened. As it was, the cartoons were political statements and it was the politics, not the image that fueled the protests.

The Danish cartoons have led to some positive results. I would not be exchanging views on an Islamic website had no one published those cartoons. I have been on three panels with Muslims in Philadelphia and Washington D.C. to discuss the issue; people I would never have met and who never would have met me. At all three, Americans on both sides of the issue have packed the rooms to peacefully share their opinions. And, one of the people who protested my cartoon about Muslim women two years ago has invited me to join a class he is teaching on Islam. I plan to attend and listen to him speak freely.

  Signe Wilkinson is an editorial cartoonist best known for her work at the Philadelphia Daily News. She won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1992. From 1994-1995 she was president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. She has been featured on several programs on the cartoon debate since the cartoons ridiculing Prophet Muhammad were published in Denmark. She has also been actively engaged in open discussion on freedom of expression.