Weaponising humour as assault

How did a "religion of peace" subscribed to by millions of ordinary, decent believers, become an ideology of hatred for an angry minority?

Prasenjit Chowdhury Kolkata

The convulsion following the string of cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten has not only bifurcated the world between pan-Islamism and Islamophobia, but has raised many a question. Does the right to free speech also come to encompass the right of purposeful and at times malicious assault? Is the rise of Islamism conditioned (or not) by the refusal of Muslim civilisation to accept the social dynamics of capitalism and its attendant vices? While some said that it was just a prelude to the Islamisation of Europe, some said it was an act of fatal transgression arising out of a paranoid xenophobia for anything that Islam stands for. Is the "secular" west going to buckle under pressure from societies with a "medieval" mindset where what is most at stake is the freedom of expression, perhaps the most precious of freedoms the west has attained? The debate has snowballed into faultlines such as civilisation versus barbarism and darkness versus enlightenment.

Is the rise of jihadi Islam with its attraction to disenfranchised groups in the west, and conversion to it by individuals seeking action and redemption, powered by a venal antagonism for America, due to a gap left by the failure of radical leftism? While some say the cartoonist who depicted Mohammad with a bomb for a turban is clearly the prophet as his vision is coming true with every violent protest (and more importantly, anyone who feels his religion is threatened by a cartoon must have chinks in his armour of faith), still others fume at the paradox at how cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb in his turban touted as "press freedom" contrast with cartoons of hook-nosed, money grabbing Jews riled as "anti-Semitism". The rub is, both portrayals are crude. While the west and its media would brook a caricature of Christ, as it often does, it must not turn its back on the Holocaust and it does not tolerate any insult on the infliction of the most horrendous crime on humanity. Freedom of speech often bungles on the no-go areas, often as a matter of perverse relish.

For those who think that the suppression of the blasphemous cartoons is akin to the death of Europe's secular civilisation, it bears recall that Islam has been subject to rigorous scrutiny, often by some of its remarkable adherents. In a brilliant series of three articles published between January and March 1999 in Dawn, Pakistan's most respected daily, the late Eqbal Ahmad, writing for a Muslim audience, analysed what he called the roots of the religious right, coming down very harshly on the mutilations of Islam by absolutists and fanatical tyrants whose obsession with regulating personal behaviour promotes "an Islamic order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion." And this "entails an absolute assertion of one, generally de-contextualised, aspect of religion and a total disregard of another. The phenomenon distorts religion, debases tradition, and twists the political process wherever it unfolds."