The Cultural Debate on Satire and Free Speech, and Questions Regarding Islam and Violence

There are two really interesting articles in the New York Times today regarding two important issues that have arisen as a result of the tragic shootings in France. I read them during my lunch break - in between hunting for window insulation kit, which I could not find.

1. Charlie Hebdu Attack Chills Satirists and Prompts Debate

Such debates unfold differently in different countries. But the conversation could be especially acute in the United States, where sensitivities to racially tinged caricatures may run higher than in places like France, where historically tighter restrictions on speech have given rise to a strong desire to flout the rules.

Charlie Hebdo has had “a much more savage, unforgiving, doing-it-for-the-sake-of-doing-it” spirit than any American publication, said Tom Spurgeon, the author of The Comics Reporter, a website that tracks comics news from around the world.

“That’s not so much an American impulse,” he said. Especially today, “there’s a sophisticated dialogue about what privilege means, and a feeling that you don’t need to insult people, especially downtrodden people, to make your points.”

Political cartooning’s emphasis on “kicking up” against authority goes back to its origins in the 17th century, when the end of Europe’s religious wars opened up political space where iconoclastic irreverence could flourish, the historian Simon Schama, a professor at Columbia, said in an interview.

“No one had a monopoly of authority, particularly any kind that could be exercised through reverence to images,” Mr. Schama said, adding that political parties “agreed to fight their battles with words and images rather than swords and guns.”

The powerful certainly made efforts to rein in the mockery, as when the French king Louis-Philippe’s censors banned disrespectful images of his plump physique, only to see one of his most dogged antagonists, Honoré Daumier, evoke him with an actual pear.

But it wasn’t just the powerful who felt the sting of cartoonist’s pens. In 19th-century Europe and America, minority groups who felt maligned, like Jews or Irish-Americans, also lodged frequent complaints against what they saw as stereotypes, only to be largely ignored.

“There have always been interest groups that have protested against political cartoons, but there was nothing they could do about it,” said Richard Samuel West, a scholar of political cartoons. In conflicts with whatever opponent, “you always saw the art form emerging triumphant.”

Continuing censorship battles in the 20th century gave rise to underground comics, with their nothing-is-sacred sensibility. And Charlie Hebdo, which arose in the wake of the 1960s battles over France’s then-restrictive speech laws, did outré political satire better than just about anyone, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman said.
Photo Joe Sacco, an author of long-form journalistic comics like “Footnotes in Gaza.” The line between satire and provocation is a delicate one in the cartooning world.

When it reprinted the Danish cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad in 2006, “they were the only magazine to do it for absolutely the right reasons,” Mr. Spiegelman said. “The others that published the cartoons were baiting Muslims, but for them it was part of their self-perceived mission to be provocative, to provoke thought.”

The Iranian-French graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, the author of “Persepolis,” praised Charlie Hebdo’s willingness to “give the finger to all kinds of authority,” whether religious or political. “I wasn’t always in love with what they did,” she said in a telephone interview from Paris, where she lives. “But I was in love with the idea we had one magazine that was this subversive.”

But not everyone in the comics world has taken such an admiring view. Mr. Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter said that when he posted some of what he called Charlie Hebdo’s “ugly, racist” covers in a show of solidarity on Wednesday, he got a number of emails from cartoonists challenging the decision.

“Some people questioned such work as simply cruelty hiding behind the idea of free speech,” Mr. Spurgeon said.

“But when it comes down to killing people,” he said, republishing them was an easy call: “For me, that’s black and white.”

Mr. Spurgeon attributed that response to a generational divide between American cartoonists who came of age in the anything-goes, do-it-because-you-can underground comics scene of the 1960s and ’70s, and younger cartoonists who are alert to what they consider the position of white male privilege that such work often issues from.

In an essay from the website The Hooded Utilitarian that circulated widely on social media, Jacob Canfield, a 24-year-old cartoonist in Ann Arbor, Mich., argued that Charlie Hebdo’s “white editorial staff” members were not simply free-speech martyrs but frequent, deliberate peddlers of “a certain, virulently racist brand of French xenophobia.”

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2. The other interesting article deals with how so many violent terrorist activities are associated with Islam or mention Islam, and what does that say about Islam. This by the way is an article from the perspective of the Muslim community and how they are relating to these crimes that appear to be associated with their religion.

Raising Questions Within Islam After the France Shooting

Others, though, insist that the sources of the violence are alienation and resentment, not theology. They argue that the authoritarian rulers of Arab states — who have tried for decades to control Muslim teaching and the application of Islamic law — have set off a violent backlash expressed in religious ideas and language. Promoted by groups like the Islamic State or Al Qaeda, that discourse echoes through Muslim communities as far away as New York or Paris, whose influence and culture still loom over much of the Muslim world.

“Some people who feel crushed or ignored will go toward extremism, and they use religion because that is what they have at hand,” said Said Ferjani, an official of Tunisia’s mainstream Islamist party, Ennahda, speaking about the broader phenomenon of violence in the name of Islam. “If you are attacked and you have a fork in your hand, you will fight back with a fork.”

Khaled Fahmy, an Egyptian historian, was teaching at New York University on Sept. 11, 2001, after which American sales of the Quran spiked because readers sought religious explanations for the attack on New York.

“We try to explain that they are asking the wrong question,” he said. Religion, he argued, was “just a veneer” for anger at the dysfunctional Arab states left behind by colonial powers and the “Orientalist” condescension many Arabs still feel from the West.

“The Arab states have not delivered what they are supposed to deliver and it can only lead to a deep sense of resentment and frustration, or to revolution,” he said. “It is the nonviolence that needs to be explained, not the violence.”

Only a very small number of Muslims pin the blame directly on the religion itself.

“What has ISIS done that Muhammad did not do?” an outspoken atheist, Ahmed Harqan, recently asked on a popular television talk show here, using common shorthand for the Islamic State to argue that the problem of violence is inherent to Islam.

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