From:
Transnational Media Events: The Mohammed Cartoons & The Imagined Clash of
Civilizations, edited by Elisabeth Eide, Risto Kunelis
Article by: Ibrahim Saleh
In a world of wrenching change, the Danish cartoon affair has widened a growing
fissure between Islam and the West, especially the Islamic world view the “war
on terrorism” as a “war on Islam”, where memories of colonization and of the
Crusades are drawn, when Western invaders ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad as an
imposter. The publication of satirical cartoons led to violence, arrests,
inter-governmental tensions, and debate about the scope of free speech and the
place of Muslims in the West.
What seemingly started off as a local difficulty
about community integration in Denmark following the publication of the
controversial cartoons has been later escalated into a worldwide chasm. It would
be naive to suggest that the western media did not know what they were getting
themselves into, especially since Muhammad is a man, whose influence covers over
1.3 billion people in the world today. According to the Muslims, any image of
Muhammad is blasphemous, while some Westerners perceive its publication as a
core right of free speech to depict anything. A number of governments,
organizations, and individuals have issued statements defining their stance on
the protests or cartoons. Such dilemma raise two main questions: “Why do
westerners still fail to realize the blind spots in the controversy?” and “Who
hates who in this media hostility?” Free speech protects the rational mind: it
is the freedom to think, to reach conclusions and express one’s views without
fear of coercion of any kind. And it must include the right to express unpopular
and offensive views, including outright criticism of religion. If intimidation
and threats are allowed to compel writers, cartoonists, thinkers and
institutions of learning into self-censorship, the right to free speech is lost.
If Muslims are allowed to pressure critics of Islam into silence, critics of
religion will be next. In Arab/Muslim media many perceived the cartoon
controversy as the newest example of cultural confrontation between the Western
world and Islam, between the belief that religion should not set any barriers on
that sort of expression on one hand (from many media in the West), and the
belief that Muslims should not be insulted on the other hand. Nevertheless, the
cartoon imbroglio has given ammunition to the two entrenched forces for
censorship within the Muslim world, namely, authoritarian regimes and their
Islamic fundamentalist opposition. Both would prefer to silence their critics
though the evincing outrage over the Danish cartoons, the authoritarian regimes
diverted the attention from their own political and military failures and
bolstered their religious credentials against the Islamists who sought to unseat
them.