Cartoons of the Prophet: A Pitfall Trap

Were Danish Muslims correct in drawing international attention to the issue?

For those who have been watching other channels or not reading right the way through to the center pages of their newspapers, a quick resume of this story. On September 17, 2005, a Danish newspaper ( Politiken ) reported that a writer had trouble in finding an illustrator for a children's book on the Qur'an and the life of the Prophet. A rival newspaper ( Jyllands-Posten ) then decided to demonstrate that it could find several, where its competitor found none. In order to provide cover for this petty piece of journalistic bickering, Jyllands-Posten concocted a story about freedom of the press and the rights of journalists to print what they want. Its twelve clunky and crude caricatures were published on September 30, none of them showing any particular artistic merit, nor originality. Inevitably, cartoonists decided to wheel out old stereotypes about dodgy bearded Muslims, donkeys, headscarves, scimitars and crescents. Profound knowledge of Islam, Islamic culture or history was not particularly evident.

Inevitably, the article and cartoons offended many people. It was bone-headed – to say no more – to depict the founder of a billion-person-strong religion as a man with a bomb in his turban. Nor was it clever to include a poem like: “Prophet, daft and dumb, keeping woman under thumb.” More than that, the pictures were produced in full knowledge of the offense they would cause. The editors knew full well of the Islamic tradition of aniconism, which proscribes figure paintings as leading to idolatry. The most important idolatry of all, for most Muslims, would be images of the Prophet himself, mixing the message fatally with the messenger.

How Blasphemy Could Have Been Opposed

If readers and editors were able to remain calm-headed, it is highly likely that the issue would not have exploded into an international crisis. In no democratic country is freedom of the press (i.e. the issue on which the newspaper launched its misguided campaign) an absolute right. Press freedom is always subject to a variety of conditions, such as truth, accuracy, privacy, public interest and a reasonable assumption of the likely consequences for public order. Those who feel that journalists have infringed these conditions always have a means of redress – through complaints mechanisms, ombudsmen, and ultimately through the civil courts.

And modern democracies also have plenty of experience in dealing with blasphemy and religious hatred cases in the media. To take the case simply of the UK, over the last two years there have been the highly effective protests by Christian groups against Jerry Springer: the Opera, television stations demanded that far-Right parties re-edit offensive election broadcasts, and indeed the Government intends to extend the protection given to Christianity in the blasphemy laws to all religions, in the new Racial and Religious Hatred Bill.

The Jerry Springer: the Opera campaign could have been an excellent model for concerned Muslims about how to proceed.

The Jerry Springer: the Opera campaign could have been an excellent model for concerned Muslims about how to proceed. This is a play with an undoubtedly blasphemous premise – that Satan and Jesus publicly row and argue on an American television talk show. When it was broadcast in January 2005, a record 63,000 people contacted the BBC to complain, BBC management spent around 5 months being investigated by regulatory authorities, and the Arts Council refused funding for a nationwide theater tour planned by the organizers. Furthermore, due to consumer protests, several major shops have refused to stock the DVD.

What should be pointed out here is that Christian groups maintained their protests against those responsible for the offensive production, rather than holding the government responsible. They conspicuously protested against individual editorial judgements, rather than calling for blanket bans against “blasphemy”. And they kept their protest entirely within the UK, without calling on co-religionists in other countries to mount “sympathy protests”.

Muslims Fatally Undermining Their Own Cause

In the case of the Jyllands-Posten 's “Muhammad cartoons,” Muslims have failed to learn these lessons – and have once again succeeded in alienating the wider public, rather than winning sympathy against the crude racism that they were protesting against. We can see this, because the results have been the precise opposite to what Muslims wanted. Instead of blasphemous paintings being seen by 150,000 readers of a Danish newspaper, they have now been reprinted in Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Iceland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, USA, and UK – millions at the lowest reckoning.

There have been major failures in the pan-European Muslim campaign against the cartoons. The first has been the immediate assumption on the part of Muslims in Denmark that the government has a responsibility for editorial decisions in a newspaper. This is a basic, basic error. A free and critical press, entirely independent of State control, is intrinsic to the European concept of democracy.

I'm sure European Muslim representative organizations do understand full well – but before they could clarify this, the Islamic Society in Denmark had muddied its case. During a tour of the Arab world, to promote awareness of the blasphemous cartoons – which in itself is a curious decision in the nervy times we live in – a large amount of misinformation was spread in the Middle East. Firstly, the Islamic Society in Denmark put out that it represented all of Denmark's 180,000 Muslims, although it has a membership of only around 15,000. Contrary to some reports, Jyllands-Posten is not owned by the government, nor by the ruling party. Furthermore, the Danish leaders condemned three new cartoons that were never published in the Danish media – and refused to reveal where they had originated from.

This decision to internationalize the issue was particularly misguided. It is just about possible to understand why Danish Muslim leaders did this – because the 1 billion Muslims outside Denmark are a fair bit more impressive than the 180,000 inside it. But this makes a mockery of democracy and law. It is like losing a fight in the playground, and pretending that bringing your big brother to sort it out is a just solution. The decision to internationalize the cartoons issue meant that Danish Muslims ignored possibilities to resolve their grievances within the Denmark they are supposed to be integrating into. If the representatives of Danish Muslims are the ambassadors and foreign ministers of foreign governments, what message does this send? Where is the space for democracy, if the Danish government has to choose between breaking its constitution (i.e. infringing press freedom) and seeing boycotts put up to 10,000 Danish jobs at risk?

What is most tragic about this case, is that Muslims across the world have reinforced so many of the negative stereotypes we have tried for years to break down. The original newspaper article suggested that western media cannot report freely without fear of retaliatory violence – and it appears to have proved entirely correct. More than that, reaction has been entirely non-discriminatory between a few journalists and the entire Danish nation. If Muslims object to being tarnished by the actions of a few extreme individuals, why should they believe that Danes do not? Where is the justice, when Muslim groups burn the Danish flag, demand that all Danish citizens leave Gaza and boycott all Danish products?

Conclusions

European Muslims made all of these same mistakes in the 1980s, with the Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses affair. There also, European assumptions of freedom of expression were met with incomprehension by local Muslims, burnings of flags and books, and threats of violence by foreign Muslim powers (in that case, Iran). What was the outcome? A public relations disaster, that failed in all its aims and created a host of negative stereotypes against Muslims that still exists. More recently, the Netherlands saw the Submission affair, a television program created by Ayaan Hirsi and Theo Van Gogh. While Europeans thought it tasteless, they were taken aback by an international outcry by Muslims, culminating in a brutal murder of Van Gogh in broad daylight. What was the outcome? Again, a public relations disaster that failed in all its aims and created more negative stereotypes against Muslims.

Encouragingly, some lessons seem to have been learned now in 2006. Many European Muslim organizations, with experience of the Iraq protests, have learned a little about influencing democratic politics. They know that they have to show targeted, mass local support, through the correct channels. The 63,000 complaints to the BBC over Jerry Springer: the Opera would seem an excellent target to emulate. It's about using the pluralism of western media to debate editorial judgements in detail. It's about cutting through the veneer of “the right to press freedom,” to demonstrate that editors often have poor judgement as to truth, accuracy and public interest.

But Muslims in Europe also have a new task for the twenty-first century – which is to convince their brothers in the developing world not to interfere. My contention is that European Muslims could have done without Palestinian organizations raiding the EU offices. They could have done without Arab dictatorships allowing their oppressed people to let off steam by burning foreign flags and attacking embassies.

And, as I am sure khatibs (imams giving Friday sermons) across the world have stressed, Muslims everywhere could help by channeling their energy to defend the Messenger's name, in order to practice the message he brought in their own lives.

Read also Is There Nothing Sacred? by Bashy Quraishy

Dal Nun Strong holds a BA in Modern History from Hertford College in Oxford and a postgraduate Diplôme in International Trade from Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. He currently works for the British Department of Transport.