I have spent
the last week reflecting on the almost impossible balance that needs to be
maintained between our hard-fought
freedoms for literary and artistic self-expression – which includes the
freedom to subvert conventional pieties (religious or secular), the freedom to
dissent against majority opinions or those of the powerful (secular or
religious) through polemic, satire, drama, whatever non-violent weapons are at
hand – and the desirability on a human level of avoiding unnecessary distress
to those one is opposing.
Empathy
towards another person’s (or group’s) sensitivities is a noble quality. Seeing
the world through the eyes of others is meant to help us towards a larger
vision of the human, a more refined understanding of our shared (but multifarious)
humanity. But if you believe the other’s world-view is detrimental to your well-being,
how best to convey one’s hurt, or one’s outrage, without provoking their hurt,
or outrage, in response? Is it possible to profoundly challenge another’s view
of the world while maintaining an attitude of respect for the integrity of the
other’s view? What if the other is a believer in slavery? Or an anti-Semite? Or
a misogynist? Or a dyed-in-the-wool racist? This dilemma is complex enough when
we are talking about individual relationships – me and you. But when we are
talking about group sensibilities the difficulties multiply exponentially.
All of these
thoughts have been in play as I have pondered on the events of this tumultuous
week. ‘Group think’ has been everywhere: it was in the massed crowds showing
solidarity with the victims of the tragedies in Paris; and it was in the
well-meaning and I am sure heartfelt ‘not in my name – this is not Islam’
responses of the majority of Western Muslims to their co-religionists’
outrages. But was I alone in feeling uncomfortable at the role played this week
by the Prime Minister of the State of Israel in the events in Paris? Solidarity
with French Jews, OK. But playing so prominently the ‘You can always come to
Israel’ card to a shocked and grieving diaspora community – as if they didn’t
know this? - seemed insensitive rather than supportive: a piece of political rhetoric
compounded by the strange nationalistic appropriation
of those who died in the supermarket.
Why were their funerals – and not the two
Jews who died in the Charlie Hebdo attack - in Jerusalem? Were the supermarket
victims all ex-pat Israelis? I don’t think they were. I don’t think any of them were - but what they
shared was that they died in a ‘Jewish’ supermarket. So Israel claimed them. (It
was left to Israel’s President, Reuven Rivlin – not for the first time in
recent months - to provide, en passant,
the necessary rebuke to Netanyahu: Jews should come to Israel , he said, not
out of fear, but ‘We want you to chose Israel because of a love for Israel’).
If the four who died in the supermarket weren’t Israelis,
then what we saw so prominently exhibited to the world was a problematic elision
by Netanyahu of the distinction between Jew and Israeli. We rightly complain
when diaspora Jews are attacked or abused because of the actions of the State
of Israel – but these funerals fed right
in to the more-common-than-we-like-to-think non-Jewish failure to distinguish
between diasporic Jewry and the Israeli state. It played straight into the homogenising
group think that says all Jews, wherever they live in the world, are the same.
A mirror image of the unthinking anti-Muslim polemic that pontificates that ‘all Muslims’ are deluded fanatics – or terrorists
in waiting.
Back to the
cartoon. One of the dominant motifs over this last week has been the much
voiced Muslim response that the hallmark of Mohammed was his empathy, his
patience, his tolerance, his gentleness – his
capacity to forgive: We should, through our actions and deeds,
display the sublime character of the Prophet (peace be upon him). The Prophet
faced many great challenges but he exhibited impeccable beauty of character in
his actions. He did not react inhumanely or violently. He was attacked verbally
and physically in Taif but he forgave the people. His uncle and companions were
murdered but he reacted peacefully and in a humane manner. And there are many
such examples from the life of the Prophet (peace be upon him) we must display (see the
statement by leading imams at https://www.facebook.com/JosephInterfaithFoundation).
So I found
it rather moving – and exhibiting a touch of inspiration – for the figure on
the cover to be tearful, empathising with the victims, and to appear below the
headline ‘Everything is Forgiven’. It is a response both profoundly religious
and profoundly humanistic: it fuses religiosity and secularism in a powerful
vision of shared human values. Rénald Luzier – ‘Luz’ – has created a timeless image
that both subverts the stale boundaries between what is ‘religious’ and what is
‘secular’ – and belies the proud, self-confessed atheistic stance of the
journal’s editorial board. The image offers us a reflection on the role of
compassion and forgiveness in the face of fear and terror and death.
Yes, it does
this through an image of a bearded man in a turban – and no doubt many will
project the notion of the Prophet Mohammed onto this picture. But it is no more
a representation of the reality of the Prophet whom Muslims reverence than are those
analogous imaginative gestures towards a shared cultural reference point found
in the dozens of images of ‘God’ drawn by cartoonists for the New Yorker over the last several decades. It is a sort of
category error to confuse the image with what it points towards.
Cartoons are not
icons: eastern Orthodoxy created devotional objects for Christian meditation – spending
time reflecting on the image of Christ could lead to a greater sense of piety,
of the need to mirror the attributes of the Christ figure in one’s daily life. And western art is of course unthinkable
without its religious imagery – though representations of God are rare. It is
strange perhaps that Islam has borrowed the Judaeo-Christian tradition of not
representing God and extended it to the Prophet – this extension of the
prohibition about image making is like the Judaic ‘fence around the Torah’, an
additional circle of protectiveness lest one stray too near what the core
prohibition is: idolatry. The problem always comes when a religious tradition
makes an idol out of the law designed to keep one from making idols. And we are
not to make idols out of divinity/God in any monotheistic tradition because, as
it is said, Allah Hu-akbar – ‘God’ is
greater/bigger/more incomprehensible than any image can ever capture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depictions_of_Muhammad
A fuller discussion can be found at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/10/drawing-prophet-islam-muhammad-images
This
tradition of figurative representation of Mohammed may have fallen out of
fashion – and be unknown to adherents of Islam. But ignorance of one’s own
multi-dimensional faith tradition is not
of course restricted to Islam. And of course cartoons are not usually
devotional material.
But Luz’s
front cover does allow us to contemplate some of the core values of Islam, Judaism
and Christianity as well as humanism: our capacity for regret, empathy,
forgiveness, compassion. It leaves open the question who is doing the
forgiving, and who is being forgiven. If the cover is an act of defiance – though
I’m not so sure it is – then it is the defiance of the sorrowful: not an act of aggression but an act of
humility, of hurt, of vulnerability, of solidarity with those who suffer. And
which of us does not suffer in these days of turmoil and fear?
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