In middle school, so far as I can remember, Islam was a religion that doesn't allow anyone to draw pictures of anything, for fear of offending Allah by trying to mirror Creation.
But I later learn, after going to the British Museum in London, that that "rule" applied only to religious imagery, and many affluent Arabs still put on display sculptures and paintings of people in their homes.
I'm not sure how Islam ban drawings, but we can assume that some extremists and fundamentalists trying to impose strictly the law of the Q'uran in all aspects of Islamic life would also ban drawing and painting of animals and people.
Imagine that kind of life where creativity is stifled and only abstract patterns are allowed. Imagine the demolishment of statues of Buddha and delighting in the destruction of history. It's like the Cultural Revolution that ravaged China, when the brash youths and ideologues rebelled against history, destroying everything.
In the medievel history (Dark Ages) of Europe, when the Roman and the Byzantine Empires collapsed, Ireland and the Middle East helped preserved Latin and Greek literatures until the Renaissance.
I thought it was only Arabs that managed to save the history of the Heroic and Classical Age, but I found out that Ireland also has an important part in history. Ireland was the main place that the Roman Empire could not quite conquer, and it was the main place where Islam never touched.
But I later learn, after going to the British Museum in London, that that "rule" applied only to religious imagery, and many affluent Arabs still put on display sculptures and paintings of people in their homes.
I'm not sure how Islam ban drawings, but we can assume that some extremists and fundamentalists trying to impose strictly the law of the Q'uran in all aspects of Islamic life would also ban drawing and painting of animals and people.
Imagine that kind of life where creativity is stifled and only abstract patterns are allowed. Imagine the demolishment of statues of Buddha and delighting in the destruction of history. It's like the Cultural Revolution that ravaged China, when the brash youths and ideologues rebelled against history, destroying everything.
In the medievel history (Dark Ages) of Europe, when the Roman and the Byzantine Empires collapsed, Ireland and the Middle East helped preserved Latin and Greek literatures until the Renaissance.
I thought it was only Arabs that managed to save the history of the Heroic and Classical Age, but I found out that Ireland also has an important part in history. Ireland was the main place that the Roman Empire could not quite conquer, and it was the main place where Islam never touched.
posted by Alan at February 03, 2006
2 Comments:
In January 2002 the New Statesman published a front page displaying a shimmering golden Star of David impaling a union flag, with the words "A kosher conspiracy?" The cover was widely and rightly condemned as anti-semitic. It's not difficult to see why. It played into vile stereotypes of money-grabbing Jewish cabals out to undermine the country they live in. Some put it down to a lapse of editorial judgment. But many saw it not as an aberration but part of a trend - one more broadside in an attack on Jews from the liberal left.
A group calling itself Action Against Anti-Semitism marched into the Statesman's offices, demanding a printed apology. One eventually followed. The then editor, Peter Wilby, later confessed that he had not appreciated "the historic sensitivities" of Britain's Jews. I do not remember talk of a clash of civilisations in which Jewish values were inconsistent with the western traditions of freedom of speech or democracy. Nor do I recall editors across Europe rushing to reprint the cover in solidarity.
Quite why the Muslim response to 12 cartoons printed by Jyllands-Posten last September should be treated differently is illuminating. There seems to be almost universal agreement that these cartoons are offensive. There should also be universal agreement that the paper has a right to publish them. When it comes to freedom of speech the liberal left should not sacrifice its values one inch to those who seek censorship on religious grounds, whether US evangelists, Irish Catholics or Danish Muslims.
But the right to freedom of speech equates to neither an obligation to offend nor a duty to be insensitive. There is no contradiction between supporting someone's right to do something and condemning them for doing it. If our commitment to free speech is important, our belief in anti-racism should be no less so. These cartoons spoke not to historic sensitivities, but modern ones. Muslims in Europe are now subjected to routine discrimination on suspicion that they are terrorists, and Denmark has some of Europe's most draconian immigration policies. These cartoons served only to compound such prejudice.
The right to offend must come with at least one consequent right and one subsequent responsibility. If newspapers have the right to offend then surely their targets have the right to be offended. Moreover, if you are bold enough to knowingly offend a community then you should be bold enough to withstand the consequences, so long as that community expresses displeasure within the law.
So far this has been the case. Despite isolated acts of violence that should be condemned, the overwhelming majority of the protests have been peaceful. Several Arab and Muslim nations have withdrawn their ambassadors from Denmark. There have been demonstrations outside embassies. Meanwhile, according to Denmark's consul in Dubai, a boycott of Danish products in the Gulf has cost the country $27m.
The Jyllands-Posten editor took four months to apologise. That was his decision. If he was not truly sorry then he shouldn't have done so; if he was then he should have done so sooner. Given that it took yet one more month for the situation to deteriorate to this level, these recent demonstrations can hardly be described as kneejerk.
"This is a far bigger story than just the question of 12 cartoons in a small Danish newspaper," Flemming Rose, the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten, told the New York Times. Too right, but it is not the story Rose thinks it is. Rose says: "This is about the question of integration and how compatible is the religion of Islam with a modern secular society - how much does an immigrant have to give up and how much does the receiving culture have to compromise."
Rose displays his ignorance of both modern secular society and the role of religion in it. Freedom of the press has never been sacrosanct in the west. Last year Ireland banned the film Boy Eats Girl because of graphic suicide scenes; Madonna's book Sex was unbanned there only in 2004. American schoolboards routinely ban the works of Alice Walker, JK Rowling and JD Salinger. Such measures should be opposed, but not in a manner that condemns all Catholics or Protestants for being inherently intolerant or incapable of understanding satire.
Even as this debate rages, David Irving sits in jail in Austria charged with Holocaust denial for a speech he made 17 years ago; the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza is on trial in London for inciting racial hatred; and a retrial has been ordered for the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, on the same charges. The question has never been whether you draw a line under what is and what is not acceptable, but where you draw it. Rose and others clearly believe Muslims, by virtue of their religion, exist on the wrong side of the line.
As a result they are vilified twice: once through the cartoon, and again for exercising their democratic right to protest. The inflammatory response to their protest reminds me of the quote from Steve Biko, the South African black nationalist: "Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked."
g.younge@guardian.co.uk
The problem is that when cartoonists accept the consequences for satirizing the Muslims, they accept them on the basis that they may receive condemnations and censure but not murder. Many, though not all, Muslism are activevly calling for beheading the cartoonists, murder and destruction of those who have insulted Islam. They forced cartoonists into hiding. They have burned the embassies and have vilified the government for the acts of a press that did not know how sacred the image of Muhammed was to Islam practitioners.
Even the Jews who stormed into Stateman's offices have not made threats of murder. Instead, they as a group marched into the office to demand an apology.
You are right that the story is not about the clash between civilizations as people so often dramatised it, however. The press has an obligation to be sensitive to the people who might read it, but the cartoon was not intended to offend.
It was intended to satirize the problem of self-censorship and freedom of speech, the very thing to which you referred about freedom of speech not equating to an obligation to be insensitive. It was intended to satirize the difficulty of writing a children's book about Muhammad without fear of being attacked by extremist Muslims.
How a bomb for a turban on the head of a religious figure was supposed to represent that, I don't know. But the the extremists regard any drawing of the Prophet as an insult to Islamic law, no matter what the occasions. There is no way to represent a person without drawing him. Even God is drawn, though not with a face, but with his beard hanging below.
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