The Muslim News - ‘CartoonGate’ and the bigger picture

Issue 202, Friday 24 February 2006 - 25 Muharram 1427

‘CartoonGate’ and the bigger picture

The current controversy appears to pick up the debate where the publication of the Satanic Verses left off. Almost twenty years on, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed asks whether history is repeating itself.
My first recollection of Muslims and Islam taking centre stage in Britain was during the publication of The Satanic Verses. I don’t remember much about British Muslims in the press before then. We were mostly fairly benign and unknown. And then suddenly, a stream of ardent, fiery bearded Muslim men wearing traditional subcontinental topis presented themselves to an unsuspecting British population, burning books and British flags and denouncing an entire population as devilish and out to vilify Muslims and Islam all over the world. Muslims protested that Rushdie’s book was blasphemous, and unlike Christians, Jews and Sikhs, Muslims had no recourse to the law. It’s unfair, we said. We stamped our feet, burnt some more books and vented our untempered emotions.
Disappointingly, almost twenty years later, the image of Muslims on television is the same. Still emotional, still angry, still burning flags. There has been little critical analysis of the Muslim response to The Satanic Verses, no lessons learnt, which is why two decades on our response is no more sophisticated and no more effective. Did we not learn that violent protest and emotional fury were impotent and irrelevant tools? Anger and demonstrations around the Muslim world had very little impact then, and most likely served to alienate a global audience that probably knew very little about Islam. That was then. Sadly, this is also now.
But CartoonGate (as I’ve heard it called) is and isn’t like the Rushdie saga. The media championed the God of Freedom of Speech in both cases, a god that must be placated and obeyed at all costs. Muslims rose up emotionally in both cases. Muslims interpreted both in the same way - as a mockery of the beloved Prophet (p). But these two cases are not the same, because the cartoons have a much darker and frightening significance. The media on one hand and our emotions on the other have got Muslims whipped up into a frenzy where we have lost all ability to be articulate and communicate with reason, and we have been diverted from exposing and tackling the real issues which these cartoons have uncovered.
On an interview with Newsnight, the cultural editor of the offending Danish newspaper that published the cartoons, described how Muslims should accept “our ways” if they wish to live in Europe. This is how we do things, has been the resounding message. The implication is that Europe is “we” and Muslims are “they”. Muslims need to be concerned by this subtlety, by the inherent mistrust and misportrayal of Islam and Muslims. The cartoons and all the subsequent dramas that have unfolded reveal a deep vein of hatred and mistrust of Muslims, who are tolerated in the West, on ransom of accepting “our” values.
There is only a superficial tolerance of Muslims, and this tolerance is easily shattered. It clearly doesn’t take much to bring to the surface the view that Muslims are a perfidious minority.
A begrudging acceptance of Muslims is coupled with a profound ignorance of Islam. If you read the letters pages of newspapers, or listen in to ordinary people on the radio, the lack of knowledge about Islam - or even worse, their views of it as a dangerous violent dogma - is shocking. In Britain, Muslims make up about one in every thirty people. If the thirty people that we each know, really knew us, if we had really communicated with them and got to know them as human beings, then the cartoons and their message could not possibly resonate with them. They would look at them and feel that this had no connection with the Muslims that they know. That was the Prophetic approach to conveying to people what Islam was. People believed Prophet Muhammad (p) because they had years of evidence from their own eyes to back up his claims. “Would you believe me if I told you that…” he would state.
His honesty was so well-known and documented, that no-one could believe otherwise. In the same way, if we had engaged with those around us, built up human connections and shown ourselves to be ordinary human beings with feelings, emotions and values, the veils of ignorance, fear and mistrust would already have been slowly erased.
It’s right that Muslims should protest that we have been offended by these cartoons, if they portray Prophet Muhammad (p) in a derogatory manner. But Islamic etiquette demands this should be with good words and gentleness. Islamic wisdom also demands that we should not stop at analysing a situation only at the first and most obvious lesson. If the Rushdie affair taught us anything, it is that if we tackle the underlying issues rather than the symptoms we are more likely to face long term success. The publication of the cartoons is the symptom of sentiments and problems bubbling under the skin of Europe about what Muslims are and how they fit in.
If in the aftermath of The Satanic Verses we had worked on becoming real human beings with real feelings with respect to those around us, and in the eyes of the media, then this time around we might have found an exercise of civic conscience and restraint, which would have avoided this whole saga. Society itself would have been sensitive to Muslim feelings and beliefs. Compounded by the shock of 9/11 and the tragedies of 7/7, we have found ourselves no further forward and instead we are looking towards a more frightening and dangerous future.

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