Muslim Caricature -- My Thoughts (Long)
So, the global Muslim reaction against the caricature depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in newspaper cartoons.
I realize I have been silent on this matter, even though by all means I-the Near Eastern Studies student-should be blogging about it real-time as each new turn of events pops up on news alert screens. But I’ve refrained from reacting precisely because it’s been a breaking-news matter all over the media. I needed to take a step back and look at how the controversy has been reported. So far, I find the reporting informative but inadequate.
The beginning hours when the news first broke consisted of answering the basic questions: who, what, where, when, and, to a lesser degree, how. Who was involved? What was the nature of the conflict? When did it happen? What did the caricatures depict? How did the Danish newspaper initially respond? What’s going to happen?
Eventually, the “why” crept into various articles, as did more in-depth analyses on the causes of the controversy: Why were Muslims so offended? (Explanation of Muhammad’s role in Islam and prohibition against iconic depictions) Why didn’t the newspaper censor the cartoons? (Debate on the nature of political cartoon as naturally exaggerating, freedom of the press, the cartoons as a commissioned project to search for artists for a Prophet Muhammad biography, etc.) Why now? (The caricatures were first published September 30, 2005.)
As I sat back and gathered up pieces of news of the recent outbursts (embassy attacks, protests violence, etc.) of an ongoing five-month controversy, I’m frustrated by the lack of perspective grounding, something that many news articles failed to provide. If I take in point-blank only what the media feeds me, then my view of the controversy would be something like this: the entire homogenous, unified “Muslim world”-a term I would have to equate with the non-West, incidentally-is in uproar over the printing of a bunch of religiously offensive cartoons.
I understand that Muslims are offended at the irreverent depictions of the Prophet in the cartoons. I understand that any depiction of humans and living creatures is not permitted. I also understand that it was rather unscrupulous of the Danish and other European presses to have printed these cartoons. But understanding and my own indignation at the cartoons themselves notwithstanding (for I do find them needlessly crude), the point remains that the media is not telling the whole story.
Islam is not homogenous.
Leaving the rightness/wrongness of the protests aside, I must emphasize that pockets of protests here and there do not equate a unified Muslim world homogenous in all its tenets. The protests must be interpreted in light of the realization that Islam, just like Christianity and Buddhism and Hinduism and other religions, encompasses many different sects and subgroups. Such subgroups must be recognized in order to view current news with proper perspective.
I will list a few recent examples:
♦ Attack of Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus. Syria is ruled by the Baath party, and is a secular government. The government did not instigate the attack. Rather, radical opposition to the Syrian government, which enjoyed widespread popular support as the Muslim Brotherhood, seized on the opportunity and attacked the embassies in a way that placed blame onto the Syrian government. The Washington accusation that the Syrian government somehow caused the attacks-picked up and spread around by the press-is false.
♦ Attack of Danish embassy and church in Beirut. I won't go into Lebanon’s complicated postcolonial history. Just keep in mind that the protest on Sunday started out as a peaceful gathering of 20,000 people. Considering the number of casualty, this could not have been caused by a mob of 20,000. I’m inclined to think that the attack was incited by jihadists, if not-too-distant assassinations in the previous years serve as any indication.
But with news articles starting out with “Thousands of Muslims have rioted in Beirut, setting fire to the Danish Embassy, burning Danish flags and lobbing stones at a Maronite church to show their anger over caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad,” I can’t help but shudder at the blatant essentialization of “Muslims” as one unified, homogenous group, and what such an essentialization would do to gloss over the intricate politics that makes up Lebanon’s diverse population.
♦ Now a Western view. From Newsday:But the reaction to the cartoons cannot be understood outside of a broader post-Sept. 11 political context: Many Muslims see the drawings' publication as a deliberate attempt to insult them at a time when they perceive themselves to be a suspect and stigmatized minority in Europe and a humiliated civilization in the Middle East.
Brava for Carol Eisenberg for bringing up the need to contextualize (see next section for the need for contextualization). It is very important to acknowledge that feelings were hurt-or more importantly, that religious propriety was insulted-as a result of publishing the cartoons. But again, I must emphasize that all Muslims do not make up a single “Islamic civilization.” I wish there were region-specific articles of post-Sept. 11-grounded examinations of the caricature controversy-How did 9/11 affect Muslims in [insert region or county name], which in turn affected response to the caricature controversy? Somehow, generalizing “all Muslims” and assuming that Sept. 11 affected them all in the same way did not sit well with me.
Context, context context
♦ Riots everywhere?!? Just how many Muslims are protesting? The example of Afghanistan jumps to mind. New York Times reports that protest in Kandahar, Afghanistan led to at least five people dead. An unfortunate event. But think about this: Afghanistan is predominantly a Muslim country. The city of Kabul alone has 2 million inhabitants, of which I would venture to say that at least half are Muslims (a very safe estimate). A protest of a few hundreds here and a thousand there is hardly representative of the Afghan population. Couple that with Afghan authority calling for calm-the “Muslim world” is hardly one-minded in carrying out violent protest.
♦ And now we turn to Egypt. Keep in mind that the caricature controversy has been ongoing since September. Thousands of protestors in Cairo. Multiple calls for the government to break diplomatic ties with the Danish government. And let’s not forget that prominent on the playing field of Egypt’s politics is the vocal and influential Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Oh, and remember the recent election last fall? Even though it wasn’t much of a pluralistic democratic election (just look at Mubarak’s winning percentage of votes), it was still an election and a ripe time for propaganda.
The Muslim Brotherhood and the (secular) Egyptian government were not exactly friends with each other. In fact, the Mubarak government would sooner delegitimize its opponents in order to gain more power for itself. Even before the demand to cut diplomatic relations was brought up, what better timing for Mubarak-last fall-than to have the opportunity to serve as the herald of Islamic cause, decrying the caricatures as sacrilege while gaining support for himself as someone who would stand up for Muslim causes against Western attack?
In the case of Egypt, one must put into context the country’s postcolonial history and how anti-West sentiments affect its politics in order to understand why protestors and the government responded the way they did.
I can continue rambling on about Iran, Pakistan, and even Bosnia, since it also got involved in the anti-Danish controversy. But I hope my point is clear: the press has been unsatisfying, imho, in providing a comprehensive, contextualized view of politics in a controversy that, in many ways, extends beyond the religious and touches on local and global political issues.
Maybe I’m looking at the wrong places, maybe there are plenty of commentaries out there that analyze the controversy in thoughtful, historicized, contextualized manners. But seeing how I’m browsing major news sources and using popular search engines for my daily news dosage, it doesn’t make me feel any better that I’d have to deliberately search for what I want in order for an article to turn up. Imagine how many people just simply don’t have the time beyond skimming through daily headlines.
Perhaps if I sit and observe more, the analytical articles will come after the why articles, just as the why articles have followed the initial wave of who, what, where, when, and how articles.
[ETA: I realize I didn't include a link to the background of the controversy. Once again, Wiki comes to the rescue. Backstory here.]
I realize I have been silent on this matter, even though by all means I-the Near Eastern Studies student-should be blogging about it real-time as each new turn of events pops up on news alert screens. But I’ve refrained from reacting precisely because it’s been a breaking-news matter all over the media. I needed to take a step back and look at how the controversy has been reported. So far, I find the reporting informative but inadequate.
The beginning hours when the news first broke consisted of answering the basic questions: who, what, where, when, and, to a lesser degree, how. Who was involved? What was the nature of the conflict? When did it happen? What did the caricatures depict? How did the Danish newspaper initially respond? What’s going to happen?
Eventually, the “why” crept into various articles, as did more in-depth analyses on the causes of the controversy: Why were Muslims so offended? (Explanation of Muhammad’s role in Islam and prohibition against iconic depictions) Why didn’t the newspaper censor the cartoons? (Debate on the nature of political cartoon as naturally exaggerating, freedom of the press, the cartoons as a commissioned project to search for artists for a Prophet Muhammad biography, etc.) Why now? (The caricatures were first published September 30, 2005.)
As I sat back and gathered up pieces of news of the recent outbursts (embassy attacks, protests violence, etc.) of an ongoing five-month controversy, I’m frustrated by the lack of perspective grounding, something that many news articles failed to provide. If I take in point-blank only what the media feeds me, then my view of the controversy would be something like this: the entire homogenous, unified “Muslim world”-a term I would have to equate with the non-West, incidentally-is in uproar over the printing of a bunch of religiously offensive cartoons.
I understand that Muslims are offended at the irreverent depictions of the Prophet in the cartoons. I understand that any depiction of humans and living creatures is not permitted. I also understand that it was rather unscrupulous of the Danish and other European presses to have printed these cartoons. But understanding and my own indignation at the cartoons themselves notwithstanding (for I do find them needlessly crude), the point remains that the media is not telling the whole story.
Islam is not homogenous.
Leaving the rightness/wrongness of the protests aside, I must emphasize that pockets of protests here and there do not equate a unified Muslim world homogenous in all its tenets. The protests must be interpreted in light of the realization that Islam, just like Christianity and Buddhism and Hinduism and other religions, encompasses many different sects and subgroups. Such subgroups must be recognized in order to view current news with proper perspective.
I will list a few recent examples:
♦ Attack of Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus. Syria is ruled by the Baath party, and is a secular government. The government did not instigate the attack. Rather, radical opposition to the Syrian government, which enjoyed widespread popular support as the Muslim Brotherhood, seized on the opportunity and attacked the embassies in a way that placed blame onto the Syrian government. The Washington accusation that the Syrian government somehow caused the attacks-picked up and spread around by the press-is false.
♦ Attack of Danish embassy and church in Beirut. I won't go into Lebanon’s complicated postcolonial history. Just keep in mind that the protest on Sunday started out as a peaceful gathering of 20,000 people. Considering the number of casualty, this could not have been caused by a mob of 20,000. I’m inclined to think that the attack was incited by jihadists, if not-too-distant assassinations in the previous years serve as any indication.
But with news articles starting out with “Thousands of Muslims have rioted in Beirut, setting fire to the Danish Embassy, burning Danish flags and lobbing stones at a Maronite church to show their anger over caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad,” I can’t help but shudder at the blatant essentialization of “Muslims” as one unified, homogenous group, and what such an essentialization would do to gloss over the intricate politics that makes up Lebanon’s diverse population.
♦ Now a Western view. From Newsday:But the reaction to the cartoons cannot be understood outside of a broader post-Sept. 11 political context: Many Muslims see the drawings' publication as a deliberate attempt to insult them at a time when they perceive themselves to be a suspect and stigmatized minority in Europe and a humiliated civilization in the Middle East.
Brava for Carol Eisenberg for bringing up the need to contextualize (see next section for the need for contextualization). It is very important to acknowledge that feelings were hurt-or more importantly, that religious propriety was insulted-as a result of publishing the cartoons. But again, I must emphasize that all Muslims do not make up a single “Islamic civilization.” I wish there were region-specific articles of post-Sept. 11-grounded examinations of the caricature controversy-How did 9/11 affect Muslims in [insert region or county name], which in turn affected response to the caricature controversy? Somehow, generalizing “all Muslims” and assuming that Sept. 11 affected them all in the same way did not sit well with me.
Context, context context
♦ Riots everywhere?!? Just how many Muslims are protesting? The example of Afghanistan jumps to mind. New York Times reports that protest in Kandahar, Afghanistan led to at least five people dead. An unfortunate event. But think about this: Afghanistan is predominantly a Muslim country. The city of Kabul alone has 2 million inhabitants, of which I would venture to say that at least half are Muslims (a very safe estimate). A protest of a few hundreds here and a thousand there is hardly representative of the Afghan population. Couple that with Afghan authority calling for calm-the “Muslim world” is hardly one-minded in carrying out violent protest.
♦ And now we turn to Egypt. Keep in mind that the caricature controversy has been ongoing since September. Thousands of protestors in Cairo. Multiple calls for the government to break diplomatic ties with the Danish government. And let’s not forget that prominent on the playing field of Egypt’s politics is the vocal and influential Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Oh, and remember the recent election last fall? Even though it wasn’t much of a pluralistic democratic election (just look at Mubarak’s winning percentage of votes), it was still an election and a ripe time for propaganda.
The Muslim Brotherhood and the (secular) Egyptian government were not exactly friends with each other. In fact, the Mubarak government would sooner delegitimize its opponents in order to gain more power for itself. Even before the demand to cut diplomatic relations was brought up, what better timing for Mubarak-last fall-than to have the opportunity to serve as the herald of Islamic cause, decrying the caricatures as sacrilege while gaining support for himself as someone who would stand up for Muslim causes against Western attack?
In the case of Egypt, one must put into context the country’s postcolonial history and how anti-West sentiments affect its politics in order to understand why protestors and the government responded the way they did.
I can continue rambling on about Iran, Pakistan, and even Bosnia, since it also got involved in the anti-Danish controversy. But I hope my point is clear: the press has been unsatisfying, imho, in providing a comprehensive, contextualized view of politics in a controversy that, in many ways, extends beyond the religious and touches on local and global political issues.
Maybe I’m looking at the wrong places, maybe there are plenty of commentaries out there that analyze the controversy in thoughtful, historicized, contextualized manners. But seeing how I’m browsing major news sources and using popular search engines for my daily news dosage, it doesn’t make me feel any better that I’d have to deliberately search for what I want in order for an article to turn up. Imagine how many people just simply don’t have the time beyond skimming through daily headlines.
Perhaps if I sit and observe more, the analytical articles will come after the why articles, just as the why articles have followed the initial wave of who, what, where, when, and how articles.
[ETA: I realize I didn't include a link to the background of the controversy. Once again, Wiki comes to the rescue. Backstory here.]