Of Mosques and Cartoons

No Religious Or National Group Is Immune To Feelings Of Outrage Over Actions They Interpret As Blasphemous Or Patently Wrong. The Sensibilities Of Muslims and Americans Are Quite Similar

By Richard Bulliet.
First Published 2010-08-17
Courtesy Of "Middle-East-Online"

The controversy over the mosque proposed for the neighborhood of Ground Zero reminds me of the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005. Muslims reacted with outrage when a Danish newspaper, the Jyllands-Posten, published twelve editorial cartoons that they deemed defamatory to Islam and Muhammad.

The question of the legal right to publish was settled three months later when the Public Prosecutor declared that press freedom overrode the strictures of Denmark’s blasphemy law. This left unresolved the question as to whether it was right for a newspaper to deliberately confront Muslim sensibilities.

Just as Muslims around the world expressed indignation and threatened violence in the face of what they saw as an affront to their most holy beliefs, some two-thirds of the American population see the Lower Manhattan Islamic Center proposal as an affront to the secular sacredness of Ground Zero. Their anguish is palpable, and some threaten violence.

The mosque planners maintain that they are Muslim moderates who see their project as a peaceful and ecumenical gesture designed to benefit the entire community. Their well-known personal histories and published works support these claims.

Their detractors describe the project as a monument to terrorism and a slap in the face to loyal Americans. Particularly disrespected, they say, are the feeling of the families of the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks.

By comparison, the vast majority of non-Muslim Europeans defended the editors who chose to publish and republish the Danish cartoons. Muslims who protested the publication, they said, were overly sensitive, fanatic, and ignorant of the principles of Western democracy.

Muslims worldwide, on the other hand, saw the cartoons not just as an insult to their religion, but also as a form of imperialist aggression. The raucous demonstrations that occurred in a number of Muslim countries resulted in the destruction of Danish property, insults to Danish sovereignty, and an indefinite number of deaths. The deaths were apparently all of Muslims victimized by their own riot police.

The current controversy indicates that when Americans feel that Muslims are violating an American feeling of sacredness, they look beyond the people and organizations directly involved, and beyond the matter of constitutional rights. Instead they imagine that world terrorism is somehow both the perpetrator of the project and its likely beneficiary.

The Danish crisis indicated that when Muslims felt that the sacredness of their faith was being violated, they paid little heed to the legal right of European newspapers to print the cartoons. Instead they imagined that Islamophobia was the motive cause and Western imperialism the beneficiary.

At the present moment, many Americans can’t stand Muslims who are insensitive to American feelings associated with 9/11. The issue of constitutional rights is secondary. During the cartoon crisis, many Muslims raged against the insensitivity of Europeans who saw nothing wrong with ridiculing the founder of their faith.

The reverse comparison is also valid. A minority of Americans, led by President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg, feel that freedom of religion takes precedence over any issue of sensitivity. Then, a minority of Muslims reluctantly accepted the notion that freedom of the press takes priority over injured feelings.

Five years have passed since the Danish cartoon crisis. There have been a half-dozen or so credible threats against the editors and cartoonists involved. Fortunately, vigilant police work has prevented any plot from being carried to fruition. In the cases that have been publicized, there has been good reason to believe that the cartoon controversy was only one of several motivating factors.

We do not know yet whether the intemperance and threatening words being expressed by some of the opponents of the Lower Manhattan project will eventuate in physical attacks on the principals or, once it is finished, on the center itself. Given the intensity of the anger, it would be rash to predict that no hothead will attempt to transform words into actions. Hopefully, effective public leadership and police work will keep tempers from exploding.

Whatever the next few years may bring, the comparison between the current firestorm and the cartoon crisis is clear. No religious or national group is immune to feelings of outrage over actions they interpret as blasphemous or patently wrong. The sensibilities of Muslims are no more fragile than those of Americans. Nor are Muslims more intemperate in expressing their anger than Americans.

That is why a consistent and conscientious assertion of the priority of established freedoms over the passions of the moment is the only way to navigate these perilous times. And that is why I applaud the positions taken by President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg.

Richard Bulliet is Professor of History at Columbia University and author of Islam: The View from the Edge and The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization.

Copyright © 2010 Richard Bulliet – distributed by Agence Global