Charlie Hebdo cartoons are bigoted'

VIDYA VENKAT
Blasphemy involves critiquing a tradition from within, of which Islam has had a long and
honourable history (Ijtihad), says renowned academic Mahmood Mamdani.
Back with a Prophet Mohammed cartoon on its cover, Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical
magazine, has resolved to take on Islamic fundamentalists, after a terror attack on its office
premises in Paris last Wednesday claimed the lives of 10 staff members including that of its
editor, Stephane Charbonnier. In an email interview to Vidya Venkat, Professor Mahmood
Mamdani, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology at
Columbia University, author of 'Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the
Roots of Terror', explained the difference between critiquing a religion and ridiculing it, and why
it is one thing to oppose censorship and quite another thing to reprint Charlie Hebdo cartoons in
solidarity. Edited excerpts:
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks, there is widespread
condemnation of Islam itself. George Packer, in his New Yorker article, for
example, had held Islam and its tenets and those believing in them
responsible for the attacks. Are we misdiagnosing the problem here?
In my view, George Packers is a knee-jerk response. It fails to recognise what is
new about the Charlie Hebdo killings. The information we have so far suggests
that it was a paramilitary operation. Though carried out by a local unit,
decentralised in both planning and execution, the attack was strategised and
sanctioned from headquarters. The killings need to be seen as a strategic and
organised military attack. As such, it is different from the kind of grassroots
demonstrations we have seen in the past, such as in responses to the Danish
Cartoons.
Proponents of the Charlie Hebdo brand of humour and satire see the need
to share and endorse the culture of free speech. Your view?
I support the right of free speech as part of a right of dissent. But that does not
mean that I support every particular exercise of free speech or dissent. It is well
known that the history of free speech is contradictory. We recognise it by
distinguishing hate speech from other forms of free speech. Some states ban hate
speech legally, other states refrain from a legal ban and leave it to society to
discourage it politically and morally.
When asked to comment on the Danish Cartoons on Prophet Mohamed, the
German novelist Gnter Grass said they reminded him of anti- Semitic cartoons in
a German magazine, Der Strmer. The New York Times piece that carried the
interview with Gunter Grass added that the publisher of Der Strmer was tried at

Nuremberg and executed. Among those tried in Arusha following the Rwanda
genocide was a radio journalist. Following mass violence in the Rift Valley in
Kenya, the ICC issued a list of those charged with crimes against humanity; one of
these was a radio journalist. In all three cases, the journalists were accused of
spreading hate speech.
My own preference is for the political and the intellectual over the legal. I am
against all forms of censorship. While I think you have a right to say what you
think, I will not support anything you say or write. I also reserve the right to
disagree with you, vehemently if necessary. It is one thing to support the right of
Charlie Hebdo journalists to print the cartoons they did, and quite another to
reprint them as an expression of support.
Blasphemous cartoons with a sexual theme, as some of Charlie Hebdos
cartoons were, are not new in Europe. But in places such as Britain such
cartoons, for example, that of Sin published by Penguin books, have been
removed having internalised legal restraint as civility. Is that kind of
compromise of power even possible now with voices in the West strongly
condemning the terror attacks and using it to channelise their collective
anger against Islamic fundamentalism?
Western societies have worked out internal compromises over time in an
endeavour to build durable political societies. The scope and nature of these
compromises are politically defined. Their thrust is to call a ceasefire in struggles of
great historical significance in the name of civility. In many Western countries,
there are laws against blasphemy. But they are restricted to official Christian
denominations. For example, Britain has laws criminalising blasphemy, as do
several other European countries, but they do not apply to Islam.
Before the Second World War, Jews were the customary target of satirists of a
particular type. Voltaire, popularly considered the founding father and grand
defender of the freedom to satire, was an ardent anti-Semite, and a number of his
satires targeted Jews and Judaism. After the Holocaust, Jews were brought into the
Western political fold. It became conventional to speak of a Judeo-Christian
heritage in the West, when it had been customary to speak of a longstanding
conflict between Judaism and Christianity before. So, today the law in many
European countries, including France, criminalises Holocaust denial. But no law
criminalises the denial of colonial genocide, including widespread colonial
massacres in Algeria, the country of origin of the largest number of French
Muslims.
The political and social compact in Europe has been evolving historically. The
state stepped in to moderate the conflict between ardent Christians and secular
Christians. Jews were included in this compact after the Holocaust. Muslims have

never been part of this compact. The Muslim minority in Europe is the largest in
France, around 10 per cent. In the Mediterranean city of Marseille, it is roughly 30
per cent. It represents the weakest and the most disenfranchised section of French
society. There are more Muslims in the French police and security services than
there are in al-Qaeda or other terrorist cells. But you would not know it. At the
same time, the representation of Muslims in the French elite, whether political,
economic or cultural, is nominal, the exception being the French football team,
once led by the legendary Zinnedine Zidane.
Of course, it is possible to include Muslims in the social and political compact in
France. But that will take a major political, intellectual and cultural struggle.
Centers of power and people in France will have to accept that it is possible to
be French and Muslim, that it is OK for a pious Muslim woman to wear a hijab,
as it is for a Catholic nun so long as this act of piety does not banish either from
participation in the public sphere. In other words, we are talking of a political
struggle for meaningful citizenship.
You have referred to the case of Sin published by Penguin Books. I wrote about it
when discussing the Danish Cartoon controversy. The example goes back to 1967
when Britains leading publishing house, Penguin, published an English addition of
a book of cartoons by France's most acclaimed cartoonist, Sin. The Penguin
edition of Massacre was introduced by Malcolm Muggeridge, and carried a number
of anticlerical and blasphemous cartoons, some of them with a sexual theme. In
the wake of complaints by a number of his bookshop friends that the cartoons
were likely to offend practicing Christians, Allen Lane took precipitate action: He
went to Penguins Harmondsworth warehouse with four accomplices, filled a
trailer with all the remaining copies of the book, drove away and burnt them. The
next day the Penguin trade department reported the book out of print.
In that same piece, I cited an additional case which is also relevant to this
discussion. This concerns the Amos and Andy show in the U.S. It began as a radio
program in 1928 and graduated to prime time television in 1951 and then a
syndicated show in 1953. Every year, the NAACP would protest that the show was
a racist caricature of black people, implying that Negroes are inferior, lazy, dumb
and dishonest, that every character in the all-Black show is either a clown or a
crook. The CBS turned a deaf year to this, every year, until the Watts riots in
1965. CBS withdrew the show in the aftermath of the Watts riots. Even then, CBS
official Amos n Andy website said it hoped that Black people will learn to laugh at
themselves: Perhaps we will collectively learn to lighten up, not get so bent out of
shape, and learn to laugh at ourselves a little more.
That people need to learn to laugh at themselves is often a point made by
publishers of provocative cartoons. You could place those same words in the
mouth of the publishers of the Danish Cartoons or Charlie Hebdo, and it would

reflect their views accurately, that the problem with Muslims is that they lack a
sense of humor, and that the solution is for Muslims to learn to laugh at
themselves. But laughing at oneself is not quite the same as being laughed at,
especially as a group. Let me return to the question of what you call the
blasphemous cartoons. I think they should be called bigoted cartoons.
The problem with the ongoing discussion of Charlie Hebdo is that it tends to
confuse bigotry with blasphemy. I am personally more favorable to blasphemy, but
have no time for bigots or bigotry.
Blasphemy is part of an important historical practice that involves critiquing a
tradition from within. That kind of capacity for self-critique, for laughing at
oneself, is absolutely necessary for the ongoing reform of traditions and cultures in
the face of changing realities, changing mores and changing intellectual constructs.
In Islam, the right to critique tradition from within is known as Ijtihad. It has a
long and honourable history.
It is generally assumed that with the emergence of modernity, religion as a
social institution loses its hold over peoples lives and over society in
general. But given the emergence of fundamentalist forces, in renewed
forms like IS, do we have to rethink the role of religion in shaping social
phenomena?
You will excuse me if I disagree with the premise of your question. Durkheim
defined religion as a mode of thought and practice that defines objects and actions
as either sacred or profane. In this sense, the secular world can be equally religious:
the state takes the place of an official religion, the flag or the national anthem
becomes sacred objects, and so on.
Second, the notion that modernity will civilize the world by doing away with
barbarism and superstition (pre-modernity) has turned out to be a superstition
itself. The tendency of modernity has been to harness pre-modern practices and
institutions to modern political projects, thereby politicizing (and thus
modernizing) them. Both religion and tradition (in a secular sense) have become
politicized. Just think of how the CIA militarised madressas in Pakistan to wage the
Afghan jihad during the Soviet occupation.
We are going through a resurgence of politicized religion and politicized tradition.
Think of the parties in Europe that now organize in defense of Europe and
against immigrants (really Muslims). Think of born-again Christianity and its
remarkable political influence in the U.S. Think of political Zionism, both in Israel
and the U.S. Think of the BJP and the myriad Sangh Sabha organisations in India
who want a Hindu state as the surest guarantee for the defense of Hindu tradition.

And think of radical Islamist groups that want an Islamic state as a guarantee of a
return to Islam.
My point is that we are seeing a resurgence of movements around the world that
speak the language of nativism, tradition and religion. Not all of them are
reactionary. We should be careful not judge the contents largely by the packaging.
In my view, the debate inside tradition and religion is as important the debate
between secular and religious traditions.
Soon after 9/11 happened, you wrote: Ascribing the violence of one's
adversaries to their culture is self-serving: it goes a long way toward
absolving oneself of any responsibility. Do you see European policies on
immigration and assimilation of minorities at home (or the failure to do that
very well) as contributing to terrorism?
The French like to think of themselves as the custodians of the tradition of liberty,
equality and fraternity. That is true but it is not the whole truth. The French also
need to think of the dark side of their tradition: the colonial tradition, both in
Indo-China and Africa. The French need to recognise that the Algerians, the
North Africans and the West Africans from the former colonies are in France as
immigrants, because the French were in their countries in the first place. These
immigrants have run away from the consequences of colonialism. If the solution
France - has turned sour, where do these immigrants run to now? To an imaginary
Islamic state? If a second or third generation North African is still considered an
immigrant in France, should that not provide us a clue as to the nature of the
problem? Where lies the problem, the promise of the Islamist state, or the reality
of immigrant lives in contemporary France, or both?
Do you see an intensification of the post-9/11 type of Islamophobia
emerging in these countries now that the murders have provided further
justification?
9/11 was centrally planned, organised and executed. In contrast, Charlie Hebdo
was locally planned and executed, even if the strategy and the sanction was central.
This is one difference we need to appreciate. The response to the Danish Cartoons
was in the main a street-level response of ordinary Muslims who saw themselves as
being framed and set up by forces of bigotry. The Charlie Hebdo killings were
done by a military cell, coordinated and guided from a centre. This was a strategic
strike, not a spontaneous demonstration. This is a second difference we need to
appreciate.
The tragedy is that neither the left nor the centre seem to take these differences as
the starting point for their response. So long as a knee-jerk response is the order of
the day, I am afraid we will concede both intellectual and political leadership to the

right. If this trend continues, Islamophobia is likely to grow from an intellectual

tendency to a hate movement in France and other sections of Europe.
vidya.v@thehindu.co.in