This week, Ed Brayton, normally one of my favourite bloggers, has been encouraging readers to participate in “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day”: an event which originated last year as a protest against Comedy Central’s self-censorship of a controversial episode of South Park, following death threats against the producers issued by a Muslim extremist group. In retaliation, protestors decided to spend a day drawing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, deliberately violating the Muslim religious taboo against visual representations of the Prophet.
I won’t be participating in “Draw Muhammad Day”. In fact, I think it’s a stupid and counterproductive stunt. Here’s why.
I am certainly not opposed to mocking, satirizing or criticizing religions, and I do not, in general, hold back from doing so because of any fear of causing offence to their adherents. But there is an important distinction to be drawn here. Mockery, satire and rhetorical attack serve a valuable social end when they are directed against a hegemony. They remind us that the people and institutions which shape and control our lives are not sacrosanct or above criticism. It is thus worthwhile to mock, satirize and criticize political leaders, corporations and élites, to our hearts’ content. It is worthwhile to direct rhetorical barbs at those religious sects which wield substantial temporal power and influence in our society.
But mockery and deliberate offence directed against an already-disadvantaged group serve a negative social end, not a positive one. They serve to further entrench existing oppression, to reinforce the boundaries between “us” and “them”. In itself, this isn’t a controversial proposition. Few of us today would be willing to laugh at racist caricatures from the blackface-minstrel era, for example; or at jokes made at the expense of gypsies, or the disabled, or Jews, or gay people. Few people would argue with the observation that this kind of humour perpetuates bigotry.
Both in Europe and in the United States, Muslims are frequently the victims of discrimination and prejudice. It’s hard to deny the truth of this claim. The far-right capitalizes heavily on the fear of Islam as a means of stoking the fires of xenophobia. The speeches of Nick Griffin, Geert Wilders and Jean-Marie Le Pen are laced with anti-Muslim rhetoric, much as their counterparts a generation earlier would have deployed anti-Semitic rhetoric. Across the Atlantic, right-wing extremists have threatened to burn Korans and to hang effigies of Muhammad, have campaigned to prevent Muslims building mosques, and have described Islam as a “revolutionary, totalizing political ideology”. Republican candidate Herman Cain is on record as saying he would refuse to appoint a Muslim to any post in his administration. Some incidents have been uglier still: a high-school algebra teacher was recently suspended for taunting a Muslim student over the killing of Osama bin Laden.
All too often, verbal attacks on the Muslim religion provide convenient rhetorical cover for the expression of racist and xenophobic sentiments. It is, of course, true that Islam is a religion and not a race. But it is also true that, in the West, the great majority of Muslims are of Asian or African ethnicity and descent, and Islam is indelibly associated in the public consciousness with particular immigrant communities. In the real world, Islamophobia and xenophobia cannot be neatly separated.
I’m certainly not suggesting that the sponsors of “Draw Mohammed Day” are themselves racists or xenophobes; I know well that the vast majority are not. But they are, if unwittingly, lending support to a pattern of existing oppression, and providing rhetorical cover to those who use attacks on Islam as a pretext for bigotry. Some of these dangers are illustrated by the past influence of the vociferous anti-Muslim extremist Pat Condell, who, until he revealed himself as a member of the xenophobic UK Independence Party, was regularly quoted with approval by leading figures in the atheist and secular movements.
“Draw Muhammad Day” is claimed to be a “celebration of free speech”, a statement that its participants will not let themselves be intimidated into refraining from criticizing religion. But, as Shahed Amanullah points out:
… the fact is that millions of Muslim-Americans — many of whom have known about South Park caricatures of Muhammad for years — behaved exactly the way free speech advocates wanted them to: by remaining silent or expressing their feelings peacefully. The handful of thugs at a New York-based site called Revolution Muslim — who, by the way, are unwelcome in every New York mosque for their extremist rantings — were the only exceptions. And now these Muslim-Americans are being subject to mass insult as thanks for their respect of South Park‘s free speech rights…
Maybe it is to show all Muslims that attacks on free speech won’t be tolerated. But the fact is that over the course of 10 years, millions of Muslims respected the free speech of South Park and didn’t even lodge a polite complaint with Comedy Central. What exactly are we being punished for? Our inability to enforce a zero-tolerance policy and prevent a blogger from hitting the Enter key?…
Imagine for a moment if an African-American blogger complained about an unfair stereotype in a cartoon in the same crass manner as the Revolution Islam folks. Would free speech advocates respond by hosting a contest to draw as many vile stereotypes of blacks as they could? I can’t imagine that anyone would even propose such an idea.
Certainly, in a free society, critics of Islam have every right to cause gratuitous offence to Muslims if they so choose. I’m a free-speech absolutist: no topic and no opinion should be suppressed by violence, in any circumstances. But, equally, I am entitled to point out that they are perpetuating bigotry, even if inadvertently, and causing hurt to an already-oppressed minority.