The Tyranny of Silence

by Flemming Rose

  1. In December 2004, the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden, opened an exhibition titled No Name Fever: AIDS in the Age of Globalization, in which Algerian-born artist Louzla Darabi exhibited a work titled Scène d’amour. It shows a reclining woman, legs apart, having sex with a man in a standing position whose face cannot be seen. The woman is clearly enjoying the act. At the top of the painting, the opening verse of the Koran is written in Arabic:

  In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful

  Praise be to God, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the Worlds

  Most Gracious, Most Merciful

  Master of the Day of Judgment

  Thee do we worship, and Thine aid we seek

  Show us the straight way

  The way of those on whom Thou hast bestowed Thy Grace, those whose portion is not wrath, and who go not astray.

  According to Darabi, there was a tradition among Muslims in her home country of Algeria whereby man and wife would address God by quoting the verse before lovemaking. She explained that her painting demonstrated the tie between love and faith and that carnal love could also provide a way into a spiritual world. At the same time, she emphasized the point that the work could be viewed as being critical of the patriarchal society and violence against women, as well as challenging a widespread taboo in the Muslim world: women’s sexual pleasure.17

  During January, the museum received some 700 emails from offended Muslims complaining about the work and wanting it removed. Some of those emails contained threats, referencing the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004. “You and your disgusting work will set Muslims in Sweden alight. Learn from Holland! The biggest superpower in the world cannot protect itself, so the question is how you are going to protect yourself,” warned one.

  In January 2005, less than three weeks after the exhibition opened, the museum removed the work. Interviewed by Jyllands-Posten, Museum Director Jette Sandahl explained:

  Freedom is conditional on the freedom of others. We have no right to offend one another. You don’t have the right to say what you want about other people. The rights and freedom of the Other are integral to the philosophy of law. . . . We’re not looking to offend our visitors.

  “Isn’t that censorship?” she was asked.18

  “I can see where you’re going,” she said, “but we show a lot of extremely offensive stuff here, and we are not a fearful gallery. But once in a while you have to take account of the sensibilities of your audience.”

  The logic of Sandahl’s account was flawed to say the least. Either you reserved the right to offend or else you did not. One should not, as the director of a public museum, distinguish between those whom it’s OK to offend and those whom you do your best to placate. It was obvious that in this case, preferential treatment was being given to a selected minority, either out of fear or to show consideration. Moreover, the idea that if you say something that might be construed as offensive, you somehow restrict the liberty of others is nonsense.

  2. In the summer of 2005, Britain’s Labor government proposed a bill criminalizing, to an unprecedented extent, speech deemed critical of religion. Salman Rushdie and comedian Rowan Atkinson responded in a public letter to the home secretary:

  We understand, as we have previously stated, that the government’s intentions are to plug a loophole and protect Muslims specifically in the way that others are protected under racial legislation. But a law which draws a wide brief in order to protect a specific instance seems misguided from its outset. . . . It will inevitably aggravate tensions amongst the various faiths, clog up the courts, and induce censorship in our artistic, broadcasting, and publishing establishments. It will also, we fear, create a climate in which expression is constrained for those who might wish to criticize some of the palpable ills associated with religious hierarchies, while encouraging those who want to use the courts and media for self-aggrandizement.19

  3. In the autumn of 2005, a group of Muslim activists demonstrated in Saint-Genis-Pouilly, a small French town on the border of Switzerland. The local cultural center had decided to stage a reading of Voltaire’s 1741 satire Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet. The activists wanted it canceled. The mayor refused. But on the evening of the performance, riot police were deployed to keep the peace. Demonstrators set fire to a car, and isolated scuffling occurred.20

  4. In the autumn of 2005, London’s Barbican Theatre decided to remove a scene involving the burning of the Koran from Christopher Marlowe’s classic 1587 play Tamburlaine the Great. Theatergoers were also spared several of the play’s references to the Prophet Muhammad. The theater’s directors explained that they feared an uncut version of the play might inflame passions in the tense social climate following the London terror attacks of July 7, 2005. However, that blatant instance of self-censorship was quickly denounced by patrons, literary scholars, and some Muslims.21

  5. On September 13, 2005, the European Court of Human Rights issued a ruling regarding a novel by a professor of Turkish history, Abdullah Riza Ergüven. Yasak Tümceler (The Forbidden Phrases) portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a historical figure whose holy words were in some cases inspired in “a surge of exultation” while in the arms of his young bride Aisha. “God’s messenger broke the fast with sexual intercourse after dinner and before prayer,” Ergüven wrote. “Muhammad did not forbid sexual intercourse with a dead person or a living animal.”

  The Turkish penal code forbids insults against “God, religion, the Prophet and the Holy Book.” In May 1996, Ergüven was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, later reduced to a fine. The European Court of Human Rights upheld the ruling, on the grounds that Ergüven’s book had contained “an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam” and that “believers could legitimately feel that certain passages of the book in question constituted an unwarranted and offensive attack on them.”22 In my view, the decision was a shocking step backward, part of an alarming tendency among European institutions to approve restrictions on free speech because of religious or cultural sensibilities.

  6. Following the London terror attacks in July 2005, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen and two of his government ministers scheduled a meeting with a number of imams, representatives of Muslim associations, and elected politicians of Muslim background. They planned to discuss how to prevent radicalization and terror. Even before it was held, the meeting was controversial: members of the Danish parliament claimed that the government was lending credibility to imams who in several cases directly opposed Muslim integration into Danish society.

  After the meeting, two of the imams said they had used the occasion to ask the prime minister to curb the Danish press.23 Those unambiguous appeals to the government to take action against criticism of Islam created even more uproar.

  I could go on. Examples of self-censorship, intimidation, and pressure exerted by governments and interest groups on free speech were legion, both before and after we published the cartoons. Most involved Islam, though there were some examples relating to Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, and others.

  Many chose to pretend such activity wasn’t happening. It seemed to be too uncomfortable to think about. But that was how I perceived the context in which the Muhammad cartoons were published in the autumn of 2005. I linked it to the specter of Orwellian thoughtcrime, and with my experiences in the Soviet Union, where telling jokes deemed to be defamatory of the Soviet state had the risk of three years or more in a forced-labor camp. (After the death of Stalin in 1953, at least 300,000 prisoners who had been sentenced for telling jokes were released from forced-labor camps, according to historian Roy Medvedev. He does not include those who died in the camps.)24

  Other people gave greater weight to other factors—particularly the continuing public debate on immigration, which many felt had turned into a smear campaign against Muslims. A number of incidents were cited. Shortly before the cartoons appeared, Denmark’s minister of culture, Brian Mikkelsen, spoke out against what he called “a medieval Musl
im culture.” On his webpage, a member of the right-wing populist Danish People’s Party published a series of articles in September 2005 in which Muslims were likened to cancer cells and said they would never be integrated into Danish society. Many viewed that action as part of a government movement to collaborate with the Danish People’s Party in curbing Muslim immigration.

  The Muhammad cartoons were thus also seen as part of a campaign against Muslims. That was not the case. As I saw it, there were two reasons to publish the cartoons: first, to highlight self-censorship and its effect on cultural life and second, to fight the fears that underlay self-censorship. The more frequently the taboo was challenged, I thought, the more difficult it would be to maintain intimidation.

  So what was in the drawings?

  In the debate that followed publication of the cartoons, the diversity that they expressed seemed to get lost in the deluge of commentary. Everything was about Kurt Westergaard’s drawing of the Prophet with a bomb in his turban. That shortsightedness meant that important points were being missed. Things became even more confused when some of the first death threats were aimed at two cartoonists whose images of Muhammad few considered controversial. One had drawn a sandal-clad Muhammad walking in the desert with his donkey. It was a neutral image that could easily have appeared in an illustrated biography of the life of the Prophet. The second had shown a Copenhagen schoolboy named Muhammad wearing the jersey of the local soccer club Frem, on which was printed the word Frem-tiden (the Future). That Muhammad, who clearly had nothing to do with the Muslim prophet, stood pointing at a passage in Persian that had been chalked on a blackboard, which translates as “The editorial staff of Jyllands-Posten are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs.” So the cartoonist was directing his satire at my colleagues and me, rather than at the Muslim prophet and Islam.

  Two other cartoons targeted Kåre Bluitgen, who had been unable to find illustrators for his book. One showed Bluitgen sporting a turban containing an orange on which the words “PR Stunt” are written. That plays on the Danish phrase at få en appelsin i turbanen (“to receive an orange in one’s turban”), meaning to have a windfall or a stroke of luck. The second showed Bluitgen and six other individuals in a police lineup, along with a witness, who on being asked to identify Muhammad, says, “Hmm . . . I’m not able to recognize him.” Muhammad himself is thus not depicted. But among those in the lineup is Pia Kjærsgaard, leader of the Danish People’s Party and the country’s most forceful political voice against immigration and Islam.

  A fifth cartoon shows a cartoonist in a cold sweat, secretively working on a drawing of Muhammad. The cartoon sticks closely to the story line regarding Bluitgen’s difficulties in finding an illustrator. A sixth consists of a semi-abstract portrayal of Muhammad, with a nose, one eye, and a mouth, the face wreathed with a green crescent and partially covered by a star, symbolic of many flags and organizations in the Muslim world. A seventh portrays the Prophet, bearded, in sandals and traditional dress. He has a neutral expression on his face and a pair of horns protruding from his turban. Is that feature a reference to Moses, who is often depicted with horns in Danish churches? Is the artist alluding to the devil, or to mythological portrayals of the horned god as representative of fertility, body, sexuality, enjoyment and sorrow, life and death? Or do the horns more generally play on the fear of confronting Islamic taboos that formed the point of departure for my invitation to the cartoonists’ society? If the horns indeed were intended to allude to something dangerous and aggressive, it was certainly at odds with the Prophet’s neutral and quite open facial expression.

  The eighth cartoon shows the Prophet in an aggressive stance, saber raised. He is flanked by two women clad in niqabs, only their wide-open eyes visible through the eye openings, while the eyes of Muhammad himself are censored by an equivalent black bar, a reference to the Islamic ban on depiction. The women at his side appear somewhat fearful, an allusion perhaps to the lack of equality between the sexes in Islamic countries.

  The ninth cartoon consists of five identical women in headscarves, all with the Islamic crescent and star, along with a rhyme about the subjugation of women, which says roughly (I am grateful to a Wikipedia contributor for this suggestion), “Prophet, you crazy bloke! Keeping women under yoke!” The artist responsible for the work, Erik Abild Sørensen, died in the spring of 2008 at the age of 89. When I wrote of his death on my blog, comments poured in from triumphant Muslims. One person wrote: “Allah is great, Allah is great. May Allah burn him in hell for all eternity.”

  The 10th cartoon portrays Muhammad or Allah in heaven, receiving suicide bombers who want to be admitted into paradise. However, God or his prophet responds, “Stop, stop, we’ve run out of virgins!”

  The 11th cartoon shows two sword-wielding Muslims charging forward, apparently eager to seek out Danish illustrators who have violated the ban on depiction of the Prophet. Muhammad, however, tells them to calm down, thus appearing as a man of peace: “Take it easy, friends. At the end of the day, it’s just a drawing by a Danish infidel. . . .”

  Then, finally, there is Kurt Westergaard’s much-debated drawing of the Prophet with a bomb in his turban. I base much of the following on Jens-Martin Eriksen and semiotician Frederik Stjernfeldt’s excellent analysis of it in their book, Adskillelsens politik (The Politics of Separation).25

  Westergaard’s drawing was denounced by many for stereotyping and demonizing Muslims; parallels were made with anti-Semitic caricatures in Germany in the 1930s. Critics claimed that the cartoon denounced all Muslims as terrorists. In Eriksen and Stjernfeldt’s view, however, such interpretation is unfounded. The drawing comprises three elements: a naturalistic portrait of a bearded man with a calm and neutral expression; a stylized bomb with a lit fuse; and finally the Shahadah, the Islamic creed, inscribed on the bomb in Arabic: “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.” The drawing does not say whether the bomb has been placed in Muhammad’s turban with the intention of killing Muhammad, or whether he intends to deploy it.

  It depicts Muhammad as representative of Islam, in the same way as images of Jesus refer to Christianity, as pictures of Karl Marx refer to Marxism, and as Uncle Sam to the United States.

  Taking the further step to claim that the Muhammad figure not only refers to Islam but also to all Muslims is far from valid. In contrast to the anti-Semitic caricatures of prewar Germany, Westergaard’s drawing includes no generalizing feature that may be taken to be true of an entire community of believers. Portraying Karl Marx with blood on his hands, the crucified Christ holding a glass of beer, or the Christian God armed with a bomb does not mean you think that all Marxists are bloodthirsty murderers or that all Christians are drunkards or terrorists. So Westergaard’s stylized bomb may refer to the specific Muslims who do commit acts of violence in the name of their religion, just as a drawing of Christ armed with a bomb might refer to small groups of Christians who have defended attacks on abortion clinics in the United States. Nothing in the cartoon can reasonably be claimed to stereotype Muslims. Westergaard’s cartoon differs significantly from the German anti-Semitic caricatures, all of which are heavily marked by racial stereotypes, such as the hooked nose, greed, the Jewish star, and the notion of the eternal Jew, signifying that a drawing is to be understood as referring to an entire group. The claim is: all Jews are like that. That is not at all the case with Westergaard’s cartoon, which does not single out and attack a particular group within society, but a religious doctrine.

  Mikkel Bøgh, art historian and rector of the School of Visual Arts at Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, also feels that the juxtaposition of Muhammad and the bomb can be interpreted on several levels.26 Are we meant to infer that the Prophet represents Islam and that Islam is a warrior religion? Or is the idea rather that the image of the Prophet is being destroyed by terrorists who commit acts of violence in his name? Is the cartoon saying that Muhammad is oblivious to the fighting going on in his name, since his expression i
s neutral, even vacant, and he appears unable to see the bomb that is about to blow him to pieces? Or are we to understand from the drawing that Islam as a religion is self-destructive?

  Astonishingly, many of Westergaard’s critics insisted that the cartoon was unambiguous and could be interpreted in only one way. Those critics (a number of whom had never laid eyes on Westergaard’s cartoon or any of the other published drawings) were in no doubt that it portrayed all followers of Muhammad as terrorists and suicide bombers. Others insisted that it could be read only as saying that Muhammad himself was a terrorist.

  The explosive sense of affront and outrage arising from the cartoons raises the question of what prompts us to assign such destructive force to a simple drawing. Why do images seem to possess more power than words? That is a question addressed by American art scholar W. J. T. Mitchell in his book What Do Pictures Want?27

  Mitchell says images have always been potent and threatening. In the Christian story, Adam and Eve were created in the image of God, and God banished them from paradise when they showed themselves to be disobedient, defaming God’s image as it was reflected in their own being. When God decided to give his chosen people a new chance, he did so on the condition that the Israelites obeyed his laws, and by the first of those, he forbade the making of images. “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” That commandment is accorded greater treatment in the Old Testament than all the others put together, and it is punishable by death.

  With any offensive image, the greater the efforts to destroy or damage it, the more vivid it becomes. The physical image may be destroyed, yet the perception of it lives on in memory, tales, and imagination. Mitchell believes that images, in the manner of wild animals, are untamable, refusing to defer to man’s attempts to control or forbid them. “My point is that the (futile) effort to destroy the offending image is invariably counter-productive; it is a battle with a phantom or specter that only makes the offending image stronger,” he says.28