Free speech or Foul?

Protestors set fire to the Danish embassy in Beirut as agitations against Danish and European newspapers which published caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed intensify.

BY SAMIDHA SATAPATHY

5 February 2006
MUMBAI, INDIA

It is being called a clash between Western free speech and Islamic taboos by the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. What started with the publication of cartoons in a Danish paper has become a full scale battle of religious dignity, anti-racism, and the looming specter of fundamentalist encroachment on liberal (European) rights and privileges.

This is how it begins. 30th September, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten publishes some cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Muslims in several countries including the UK protest, because any kind of representation of the Prophet Mohammed is considered blasphemous in Islam. On Thursday, the office of the EU in Gaza is assailed. On Friday, dozens of protestors forcibly enter the Danish embassy in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. Danish symbols were pelted with rotten eggs and tomatoes, in the lobby and outside, and a Danish flag was burnt. Only when the Danish ambassador agreed to publish an apology in the local media did they disperse.

Other protests included Iraq's top Shia Muslim cleric Ayatollah Ali Sistani condemning the publication, while also pointing out militant Islamists were partly to blame for distorting the image of Islam. Reports also indicate that hundreds of students demonstrated in the Pakistani cities of Lahore and Multan, and the Pakistani upper house of parliament has unanimously passed a resolution condemning the cartoons. Also, editors of Jordanian and French newspapers who chose to republish the cartoons have been dismissed.

The effects of the controversy has reached significant proportions. Global outrage has led to the recall of ambassadors, and Danish citizens in Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian territories have been forced to leave after death threats. In the Muslim world, Danish businesses have had to lay off hundreds of workers because of boycotts. 

While papers in Norway, France, Germany, Italy and Spain go on to print the cartoons, the British media is praised by foreign Secretary Jack Straw for not publishing these images. Straw condemns the European papers for being "disrespectful." He says, "There is freedom of speech, we all respect that. But there is not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory. I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been insulting, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong."

Europe, quite understandably, suffers much anxiety over what might happen if its free speech is curbed. Fascism, the cold war, Nazism, are all a part of its arguably recent history. The Muslim world, quite understandably, is extremely sensitive to portrayals of its religious leaders and icons within a non-religious framework. Anti-Muslim sentiments have after all been inflamed in almost every Western country in the name of anti-terrorism.

There is a sort of impasse here, one feels. On the one hand, offending religious sentiments, especially of minority groups, is undemocratic and an act of discrimination. On the other hand, the right to criticize legitimate institutions without fear of punishment or censorship is one of the hallmarks of democratic societies.

What these cartoons are, we cannot see, but several reports describe one of them as featuring the prophet Muhammed with a bomb on his head. The Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001 (Vic.) prohibits statements regarding religion that may incite hatred, serious contempt or severe ridicule but exceptions are allowed for artistic works, for academic, religious or scientific purposes, or in the public interest, but only provided such purposes are conducted "reasonably and in good faith." The meaning of 'reasonable' and 'in good faith' are hard to determine usually, just as what all is offensive about the cartoons is hard to determine when we cannot see them.

And is it worse that a religious injunction was disobeyed, as both sides of the party claim, or is it worse that the collapsing of 'Islam' with 'violent religion' continues? Unless we see the cartoons, we cannot begin to criticize what all is wrong with it. That is the paradox: to criticize the cartoons for their anti-Muslim sentiments, it would be necessary to support their demand for free speech.