Juan Cole: All cartoon politics are local

[Briar]

All cartoon politics are local
Muslim outrage reflects specific national conflicts -- most of them exacerbated by Bush's policies.



The global controversy over the Danish caricatures of the prophet Mohammed continued to spin out of control this week, as Iraqis demonstrated for the withdrawal of Danish troops, and Afghans attacked NATO soldiers, leaving four dead and dozens wounded. The dispute has typically been treated in the Western media as a further sign of the fanaticism of Muslims. But the tempest did not arise out of nowhere. Muslim anger has been greatly heightened by the widespread belief that at best the West has treated the Islamic world unjustly and at worst launched a war against it. Moreover, the caricatures have most often been deployed by Middle Easterners and Muslims in disputes with each other -- disputes that have been sharpened by the Bush administration's blundering interventions in the region. Western attempts to cast the issue as one of freedom of expression display an ignorance of the local context of these conflicts, which are not mostly about religion so much as they are about religious nationalism and about power struggles within Muslim societies.

After the cartoons were published on Sept. 30, right-wing Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen reacted to the angry response by refusing to meet with ambassadors from Muslim countries and sternly lecturing Muslims on their need to put up with the caricatures. He finally sounded a more conciliatory note this week, complaining of a global crisis. He was clearly worried, like another Dane, Prince Hamlet, about what would happen "if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me."

Muslim touchiness about Western insults to the prophet Mohammed must be understood in historical context. Most Muslim societies have spent the past two centuries either under European rule or heavy European influence, and most colonial masters and their helpmeets among the missionaries were not shy about letting local people know exactly how barbaric they thought the Muslim faith was. The colonized still smart from the notorious signs outside European clubs in the colonial era, such as the one in Calcutta that said, "Dogs and Indians not allowed."


Indeed, the same themes of Aryan superiority and Semitic backwardness in the European "scientific racism" of the 19th and early 20th centuries that led to the Holocaust against the Jews also often colored the language of colonial administrators in places like Algeria about their subjects. A caricature of a Semitic prophet like Mohammed with a bomb in his turban replicates these racist themes of a century and a half ago, wherein Semites were depicted as violent and irrational and therefore as needing a firm white colonial master for their own good.

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/02/09/culture/

[sasha031]

1. thank you for posting this

we have to understand what is behind this...

[Briar]

2. More...

(It is worth noting that in 2004 the Danish editor who commissioned the drawings, Flemming Rose, conducted an uncritical interview with the American neoconservative and Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. Pipes, an extreme right-wing supporter of the Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank, has warned of the dangers of Muslim immigration into Denmark, claiming that "many of them show little desire to fit into their adopted country" and that male Muslim immigrants made up a majority of the country's rapists.)

[Igel]

3. Cole's dead on.

All cartoon politics is local.

One can understand why, provided only with local context (and possibly a distorted idea of the cartoons), the protesters demonstrated. But for that, one must understand something of the protesters mentality, perceptions, world-view, and the set of facts available to them.

One can also understand why the newspaper asked the cartoonists to draw their perceptions of Muhammed. But for that, one must understand something of their mentality, perceptions, world-view, and the set of facts available to them.

Seeking to understand both perspectives is a valid and commendable enterprise. Without understanding, judging and condemning one side or the other is pointless and even wrong-headed. It's good to see that Cole presented both sides, as currently understood by those involved.

Oh ... wait ...

[Briar]

4. Jonathan Steele

had something to say about the local Danish situation in today's Guardian:

"Denmark is still at the spectrum's prejudiced end, a traditionally mono-ethnic country that has not yet accepted the new cultures in its midst. Public discourse is stuck where it was in Britain a generation ago, with angry talk about "guests" who ought to conform to the "host country" or go home. Try telling that to a Kurdish refugee from Saddam Hussein's Iraq, let alone to his Copenhagen-born son.

"In an excellent piece in Der Spiegel, Jytte Klausen, a Danish political scientist who has interviewed more than 300 Muslim leaders in western Europe over the past five years, says "religious tolerance and respect for human rights have been sorely lacking in Denmark". She quotes Brian Mikkelsen, the minister of cultural affairs and a fierce advocate of cultural "restoration", as saying just before the cartoons appeared: "We have gone to war against the multicultural ideology that says that everything is equally valid."

"When the demonstrations started and other papers in Europe printed the cartoons in "solidarity" with Jyllands-Posten, they compounded the initial anti-Muslim error by trying to stir up a continental clash of civilisations. But why should a progressive paper in Britain feel "solidarity" with anti-immigrant Danish editors who made a major error of judgment rather than with British Muslims who universally deplored the cartoons?"


http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1707343,00.html