Murtaza Hussain · @MazMHussain
14th Jan 2015 from TwitLonger
Some thoughts of Charlie Hebdo and iconoclasm:
While I don't think the aftermath of the mass murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists is a particularly good time to be judging the merits or utility of their work, I feel compelled to respond to some of the points being made in The Atlantic and elsewhere on this subject.
It's been suggested that Hebdo's cartoons - particularly those depicting the Prophet Muhammad - were part of some necessary exercise in religious iconoclasm, which all societies and cultures necessarily engage in on the path to progress. In this view it is both inevitable and necessary that blasphemy become not just permitted but "normalized" as part of a natural progression of society away from the influence of organized religion. This, after all, has been the path of Europe over the past two centuries since the French Revolution, and shying away from engaging in a similar process with Muslim religious mores is simply delaying the necessary development of Muslim-majority societies towards Enlightenment values.
There are a few things wrong with this.
Firstly, the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were not, and could not be Islamic iconoclasts for the simple reason that they weren't Muslims. They weren't rejecting anything they were a part of, or breaking any taboos (ie. not depicting the Prophet Muhammad) which were applicable to themselves. As such, they were simply engaging in a game of antagonizing those who would deign feel antagonized by such a gesture. There was nothing more profound at play here. They were engaging in insult commentary, not some kind of anti-clerical Jacobinism.
The fact that the prime target of their insults was a population within France which already felt distant from and at times aggrieved by them (or, one could say, by "people like them") only doubly ensured that the only message which would come across would be the denigration. If anything the feeling of added insult and siege would only make people cling closer to their religious symbols.
The second problem is that the idea that all societies follow the exact same course towards cultural progress and development is not obviously apparent. The conditions of Europe's embrace of secularism were historically unique, and there is no guarantee that Muslim-majority countries will follow the same route or end up in precisely the same place. "Europe" is not a natural endpoint, and for better or for worse (and at least partly due to their traumatic encounter with Western powers in contemporary history) many people in Muslim societies have made clear that they want to try and chart a course which preserves some of their differences.
For all the Muslim writers, artists and intellectuals waging battles for freedom today, very few of them seem to be clamoring for the ability to start engaging in crude or sexualized caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. For some, and I have heard this many times before, "freedom" also means the freedom from suffering insult and humiliation to the things that are most cherished them
Furthermore if secularism comes to be popularly defined by, or even associated with, the gratuitous insult and caricature of the Prophet Muhammad or other religious figures, it will be soundly rejected by the overwhelming majority of Muslim people today, including those who support other political and social freedoms.
None of this is to cast aspersions on what other merit Hebdo's work may have had, and as I've said before I don't think this is a particularly appropriate time for critiquing their drawings. Nonetheless there is a problem with raising something this crude and low to so high a pedestal.
The cartoonists themselves may have been elevated in stature by their martyrdom, but this particular subsection of their work has not in my opinion.