If you have seen some of the work that Charlie Hebdo produces, you will know that it takes on everything and everybody — it has depicted the Christian trinity with as much scathing impudence as it has the Pope. It has lampooned presidents and queens. And it has featured Prophet Mohammad. The magazine’s stock in trade is irreverence. Cartoons use gentle mockery or stinging satire to throw an issue into sharp relief and thereby hold it up for scrutiny. As the Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Steve Benson once said, cartoonists are the “canaries in the coal mine” — they alert humans to cracks in the system. Beheading the canary is hardly a smart thing to do.
There have been at least three incidents in recent memory when Prophet Mohammad has been the subject of cartoons and on all three occasions, extremists have responded with violence. Before the shooting at the Charlie Hebdo office in 2015, a set of cartoons published in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005 met with violent protests, threats, and even diplomatic stand-offs. And in 2007, Bangladesh’s biggest newspaper Prothom Alo published a cartoon strip that saw massive unrest in the country and the arrest of cartoonist Arifur Rahman.
Up until the 1500s, the Catholic Church simply burned at the stake heretics or disbelievers or anyone really that it disagreed with. Queen Mary, nicknamed Bloody Mary, had more than 300 Protestants put to death. Her sister Elizabeth I hanged and quartered Catholics. It was an age when all of Europe considered religious dissent or even just atheism an “infection of the body politic” that had to be cauterized. Between 1400 and 1800, some 50,000 people were burnt to death in Europe for ‘witchcraft’, which modern historians believe was nothing but the Church’s way of appeasing the faithful by exterminating random people deemed ‘devil-worshippers’.
We have come a long way from those days. Putting someone to death for their disagreeable views on gods, religions, kings, or prime ministers is no longer deemed agreeable. Of course, one can be angered or offended or disgusted by such views, but sane voices point out that the same freedom of speech that allows the ‘heretic’ or ‘blasphemous’ book or painting or cartoon to exist allows one to stage a protest march or write angry op-eds or draw an angrier cartoon.
The Quran itself, as some experts explain, says that blasphemers will be punished in the hereafter, clearly leaving the right of chastisement to God. At any rate, we are no longer in the dark ages, and violence and savagery, howsoever grave the provocation, is not the mark of civilised nations. ‘Provocation’ itself is too subjective a concept — Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people in a New Zealand mosque last year, claimed to have been ‘provoked’ by ‘Islamic terror’. The religious fundamentalists who murdered Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, MM Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh were ‘provoked’ by their rationalist, secular writings. At what point on the scales of justice do we allow offended sensibilities to tip over against human lives?
The idea of modernity, of progress and civilisation means that we no longer allow heretics or apostates to be burned at the stake nor non-believers to be converted by the sword. This understanding that diverse beliefs or even the absence of belief has legitimacy means that religion is not forbidden ground for critics and cartoonists in modern democracies. When fanatics demanded that the film PK , which mocked Hindu superstitions, be banned, the state rightly refused, and French President Macron has said that newspapers and magazines have the right to publish any caricature.
After the 2005 controversy, Jyllands-Posten journalist Flemming Rose wrote in The Washington Post : “The cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions... They made a point: We are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society. The cartoons are including, rather than excluding Muslims.”
That’s what satire does — treats nothing as sacrosanct, mocks everything. Actually, American cartoonist Bill Mauldin said it better: “Ours is the role of the lowly gadfly,” he said, “We circle and stab, circle and stab…” By taking jabs at everyone, satire equalises. And if there’s one thing democracies are premised on, it is equality.
Where the writer tries to make sense of society with seven hundred words and a bit of snark.
