A week ago today, France shuttered its embassies, consulates, cultural centers, and schools in twenty countries. The reason given was that a satirical newsweekly called Charlie Hebdo had published cartoons satirizing two very different films: “The Intouchables,” just selected as France’s Academy Awards entry in the foreign-language film category; and “Innocence of Muslims,” a film less foreign to those who follow the news than it has any right to be.
The cover of the Charlie Hebdo issue in question is a crude depiction of an Orthodox Jewish man pushing a Muslim man in a wheelchair: “The Intouchables 2,” it reads. (The actual “Intouchables” is a cloying tale of a rich white man who, paralyzed in a paragliding accident, hires a poor black man to care for him. Guess who gets his joie de vivre back?) When you turn the pages, you see ungainly caricatures, presented more or less as advertisements for a film—only tenuously connected with the front cover’s spoof—sure to “set the Muslim world ablaze.” Muhammad, labelled as such, is shown naked and bending over, begging to be admired. Then the Prophet is crouched on all fours, with genitals bared. “A Star is Born!” the caption reads—a reference to the attention given “Innocence of Muslims,” a trifle of murky and unpleasant provenance, that has been invoked in attacks leading to the death of almost fifty people to date, including J. Christopher Stevens, America’s Ambassador to Libya.
(Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the fifty-five-year-old Californian man believed to be the video’s creator, is in jail after an arrest yesterday for violating eight terms of his probation in a 2010 bank-fraud case. The charges include using aliases; if he is in fact the filmmaker, he would have violated terms from another case that restricted his use of the Internet.)
When word got out a week ago Monday that the paper was printing a representation of Muhammad—an act that many Muslims consider blasphemous—Paris police called the editor (and cover cartoonist), Stéphane Charbonnier, just as the issue was closing. Charb, as he is known, sent the prefecture the front and back covers, and the police urged him to think again. He declined—satire is, after all, his bread and butter—and the issue hit newsstands a week ago Wednesday.
Immediately, the French government increased security and announced its decision to close the twenty foreign outposts last Friday, which was a Muslim day of prayer. French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault issued a statement criticizing the cartoons and any such “excess.” Politicians and editorial pages in much of France attacked the drawings as irresponsible, inopportune, and imbecilic. Why now, they asked, and why at all? The right-leaning newspaper Le Figaro rebuked the weekly for publishing “silly provocations” that fall into the trap of the Islamists, while the Roman Catholic La Croix asserted that “editorial responsibility requires an assessment of the consequences of what one publishes” and that “fuelling the flames to show one’s noble resistance to extremism leads to offending simple believers.” Laurent Fabius, France’s Foreign Minister, said on public radio, “In the present context, given this absurd video that has been aired, strong emotions have been awakened in many Muslim countries.” He asked, rhetorically, “Is it really sensible or intelligent to pour oil on the fire?”
Charbonnier, Charlie Hebdo’s editor, sounds exactly sensible and intelligent when he says that the cartoons will only “shock those who will want to be shocked.” He also told Le Monde, “I don’t feel as though I’m killing someone with a pen. I’m not putting lives at risk. When activists need a pretext to justify their violence, they always find it.”
This is not the first time Charlie Hebdo has met—or sparked—controversy. Last fall, the paper printed an issue “guest-edited by Muhammad”—“Charia Hebdo”—the cover of which promised “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter!” Charb found his offices firebombed and his Web site hacked in response. (The site read: “You keep abusing Islam’s almighty Prophet with disgusting and disgraceful cartoons using excuses of freedom of speech. Be God’s curse upon you!”) The weekly pushed back by declaring “love stronger than hate,” with a slobbery cover cartoon of a Muslim man kissing a pasty-white male cartoonist.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has condemned Charb’s latest cartoons as blasphemous. But blasphemy may well be the point: Charlie Hebdo clearly thinks so. With its offices under police protection, Charb said that mocking Islam must continue “until Islam is just as banal as Catholicism.” The taboo—the blasphemy, the untouchable—is the very reason. Le Monde reminded its readers that religions “can be freely analyzed, criticized, even ridiculed.” This, after all, has been the case “since Voltaire.” The left-leaning French daily Libération went so far as to call blasphemy a sacred right. In a democracy, it said, “every publication is free to establish its editorial line; every reader is free to read or not read; free is every offended person to seek reparation before the courts, the only legal arm. And let’s hope that, in other regimes, arms of a different nature are not used.” Banning anything that anyone calls blasphemous—especially when it is a matter of vocal chords or ink—is a kind of violence itself.
“The aim is to laugh,” Laurent Léger, a journalist at Charlie Hebdo, told CNN. “We want to laugh at the extremists—every extremist. They can be Muslim, Jewish, Catholic. Everyone can be religious, but extremist thoughts and acts we cannot accept.”
Perhaps France’s precautions abroad were tactically wise: the Friday that it closed its embassies, at least nineteen people died in violence in Pakistan, related to government-sanctioned protests against the American anti-Islam video. The next day, a Pakistani cabinet minister offered a hundred thousand dollars for the death of the video’s creator. But there was also a chilling effect in the streets of France, where the Prime Minister banned the protests against the American-made “Innocence of Muslims” that had been scheduled for Saturday, demanding that “les flics” crack down if need be. Interior Minister Manuel Valls confirmed this directive to Reuters, and added, in an even harder line, “Neither will I allow street prayers, which have no place in this republic. And naturally the law will apply to anyone who wears the full face veil.”
But fiery cartoons may be better answered with fiery cartoons, like those in Al-Watan, a secular Egyptian newspaper, which Monday printed cartoons that ring in their own way of the #Muslimrage meme. One depicts a pair of glasses, each lens showing one of the Twin Towers engulfed in smoke. The caption reads, “Western glasses for the Islamic world.” On Wednesday, the Spanish satirical magazine El Jueves published on its cover a controversial cartoon of its own: a police lineup of Muslim men, under a caption “But … does anyone know what Muhammad looks like?”
The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff, wrote this week that the only “culturally, ethnically, religiously, and politically correct cartoon” is an empty one (his illustration of such an uncompromised cartoon was an empty white box). Mankoff might agree with the Charlie Hebdo currently on newsstands, with its big red (self-imposed) banner across the cover reading “Irresponsible newspaper.” The cover depicts “The Invention of Humor”: an oafish caveman adding oil to fire.
As Salman Rushdie recently told the New York Times’s Charles McGrath, on the release of his memoir, “Joseph Anton”—which describes the ten years he lived in hiding in response to an Iranian fatwa over his novel “The Satanic Verses”—the debate over blasphemy is not purely static. McGrath asked Rushdie whether he thinks what happened to him changed anything.
Rushdie replied, “Some of the British Muslims now say, ‘We think we were wrong.’ Some of them for tactical reasons, but others are actually using the free-speech argument: ‘If we want to say what we want, he has to be allowed to say what he wants.’ So I think some little bit of learning has happened.”
