The guiding stars of the intellectual press, from The Economist to The Nation, have insisted on framing the controversy over the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed as a question of free speech vs. basic tolerance. This oppositional set-up makes it difficult not to pick sides in a row where there simply is no appealing side.
If you’re for “free speech,” then you’re with the notoriously anti-immigrant right-wing European press that endorsed and reprinted the cartoons (originally published in the Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten). On the other hand, if you speak out against the European provocations, you have to disentangle yourself from those whose fervor for “upholding” Muslims’ rights and “defending” the reputation of the Prophet leads them to violence.
In order to articulate a moderate — but-compelling — alternative that rejects both the “right” to antagonize (often confused with the right to criticize) and the violent righteousness of religious extremists, we need to grapple with the meaning of the cartoons in two contexts. First, we need to evaluate the way the issue has been presented in the international press; and second, we need to consider the meaning of the cartoons for many Muslims. To reduce these vital questions to the dry binary discussed above, or to conceal the complex issues at hand behind gross generalizations like “Islam” and “the West,” is the political equivalent of tying your shoelaces together before taking a walk.
First, let’s consider the concern with violence. The fact that some Muslims are committing acts of violence is deeply troubling, both because of the disregard for human life and property, and because various political and religious authorities have condoned these acts.
Unfortunately, the media hysteria about “Muslims” and “violence” conceals as much as it lays bare. By interminably linking “Muslim” with “violence,” the press obscures the vast majority of Muslim responses to the cartoons, which have been moderate and non-violent, and include withdrawing diplomats, organizing boycotts, and staging demonstrations. While a peaceful march in Istanbul might not be considered headline-worthy network news, the media has a responsibility to Western audiences and the Muslim world to report on the full range of Muslim responses.
The incessant focus on Muslim violence, combined with chatter about the “growing divide” between Islam and the West, further obscures the diversity of responses to (read: interpretations of) the cartoons. While it is important to recognize the Islamic character that these demonstrations share, it is equally important to identify the political and historical influences that make them distinct.
Consider, for instance, that Muslims in Afghanistan were protesting the cartoons at a US Air Force base in a country that has borne the weight of 25 years of bloody foreign invasion; that Shi’a Muslims in Beirut were protesting the Danish consulate in a predominately Christian neighborhood in a country that was torn to pieces by 20 years of sectarian civil war; and that the Palestinian militants who assaulted the EU offices in Gaza were members of the recently disenfranchised and predominately secular Fatah party, not the victorious and Islamist Hamas.
Without determining which groups are responsible for which disruptions, and understanding how these groups play into domestic and regional dynamics, we end up with a map of riots divorced from their social and political contexts, removed from history, and connected to one another only by virtue of the banal fact that some Muslims are reacting violently to the Muhammed cartoons.
If we want to get at the varying local and regional significance of the cartoons, it is essential to move beyond the paltry explanatory powers of the “Islam vs. the West” mantra. There is no homogenous, ahistorical “Islam” outraged at a coherent (and looming) “West.” This representation is the stuff of cartoon fantasies, not cartoon controversies. The real-life issues at hand are complex and urgent, spanning the spectrum from resentment over Western invasion and interference to domestic despair about poverty and unaccountable governments. These legitimate grievances are often translated into potent ideologies, ranging from Islamism to anti-Zionism to Arab nationalism. And it is the cross-pollination of these ideologies that is revealed, for instance, in pictures of demonstrators burning Israeli and US flags at protests ostensibly about the European press.
But hold on. What does an Israeli flag have to do with a Danish newspaper? More generally, why is the controversy so easily boxed into a debate about free speech in the West, while in many Muslim contexts it overflows into long-standing, and sometimes barely related, political questions? One part of the answer is careless anti-West ideology that, in a flurry of increasing abstractions, conflates the right-wing European press with the European Union and the entirety of the West, thus catching every possible political issue, including the Israeli occupation, within Muhammed’s bomb-shaped turban. But this is only part of the answer.
The other part is Western amnesia about the long and sordid relationship between “Islam” and “the West.” While for many Western observers, the cartoon controversy began with the cartoons, for many Muslims, the cartoon controversy is merely another drop of ink in the historical well. Whereas many Westerners are blissfully unaware of the consequences of over a century of Western colonialism and contemporary neo-colonialism, the Muslim world does not have this luxury. From this perspective, the details of the cartoon controversy are inextricable from the historical and political contexts that give vital—if vague—meaning to the demands and actions of the demonstrators.
If we want to criticize and condemn the violent responses of some Muslims, but don’t want to share a soapbox with the European right, challenging our own historical amnesia is the place to begin. By locating the contemporary violence within a history of violent relations, we can see the roots of a shared responsibility for the contemporary intolerance. This idea of shared responsibility breaks down the divisive binaries of “Islam vs. the West” and “free speech vs. tolerance.”
In adopting such a view, we are able to avoid identifying with a specific, partisan, geopolitical entity such as “the West,” and free from choosing between the equally desirable principles of free speech and tolerance. With these misleading frameworks out of the way, we can contextualize the contemporary violence and learn to distinguish between its many manifestations. More importantly, we can hold Muslim extremists accountable for their actions without falling into tropes of Western supremacy — tropes that are both painfully unoriginal and shamefully hypocritical.
