The Tyranny of Silence Read online

  Already a debate was forming. On the one hand were people who felt the fuss about self-censorship was exaggerated; no Muslim would ever think of demanding that Europeans submit themselves to Islamic dogma, and anyway, depicting the Prophet was not at all prohibited, so it was nonsense. On the other hand were people who insisted that such fears were real, and self-censorship absolutely existed: many Europeans were showing Islam special consideration, since they were afraid of becoming targets of violence.8

  By proposing a practical demonstration—Show, Don’t Tell, a time-honored journalistic recipe—we would allow readers to form their own impressions. I liked the idea. I told Jørn Mikkelsen that I had just been in touch with Claus Seidel, chairman of the Danish cartoonists’ society, and would ask him for help with the names of some cartoonists. When Seidel got back to me with a positive response and sent me a list of the society’s members, I sat down at the computer that same evening and wrote the following:

  Dear cartoonist,

  We write to you following last week’s debate about depiction of the Prophet Muhammad and freedom of speech resulting from the children’s book by Kåre Bluitgen. It appears that several illustrators declined to depict Muhammad for fear of reprisal. Jyllands-Posten is on the side of freedom of speech. We would therefore like to invite you to draw Muhammad as you see him. The results of your work will be published in the newspaper this coming weekend.

  I look forward to hearing from you.

  Yours,

  Flemming Rose

  Culture Editor, Jyllands-Posten

  Having added that the paper would be paying a symbolic fee of 800 kroner, I printed 40 copies of the letter, fetched a stack of envelopes and a sheet of stamps, and began addressing and stamping by hand. When done, I put the whole lot in a plastic shopping bag, cycled to the post office on Købmagergade, and deposited them in the postbox shortly before 9:00 in the evening, in time for next-day delivery.

  After that, I gave the project no thought for several days. The idea was that the drawings would appear in the Sunday issue’s Insight section, since various deadlines meant we wouldn’t be able to use them in the Friday Culture section that I edited. But toward the end of the week, I received word from Jørn Mikkelsen that the project had been put on hold, since there was now apparently some doubt about Kåre Bluitgen’s claim, and also some disagreement among staff members about the viability of the project.

  At this point, I think I should raise the question of why I picked cartoonists, not illustrators. With hindsight, some people claimed that illustrations would not have been nearly as provocative or offensive as caricatures or cartoons. I’m far from certain about that claim. The question of what certain groups might consider offensive is a rather unpredictable matter. There was Burger King’s ice-cream cone that was shaped like the Arabic word for Allah. There was the television commercial for a hair product with the slogan “A new religion for hair.” There was the question of the crucifix on Inter Milan’s soccer jerseys. Few of us in our wildest imagination would consider those things potentially offensive to religious sentiments.

  I wanted to find people who habitually expressed themselves in images; I didn’t care whether the drawings were realistic, abstract, satirical, expressionistic, impressionistic, or anything else. That was indeed apparent in the cartoons that we received. They differed greatly from one another, both in the way in which they represented Muhammad—in fact, only four or five drawings actually portrayed the Prophet and thereby violated the alleged ban on depiction—and with regard to whom the satire attacked. Many were not directed toward Islam and the Prophet at all.9

  Three days after my invitation to the Danish cartoonists, I received an email from Claus Seidel, the chairman of the Danish cartoonists’ society, wanting to know what the response had been like. My invitation, he said, was becoming the subject of lively debate within the cartoonist community. “One of the arguments against has been a certain apprehension about landing on an anti-Islam bandwagon and appearing to be opposed to immigration,” he wrote. “No one wants to be a part of that. I hope you can see that point! Can you outline the angle you’ll be taking in the article? Feel free to call!”

  Jørn Villumsen of Politiken was one of the cartoonists who declined the invitation. The reason, he said, was partly because he didn’t have enough time and partly because he didn’t want to violate the Islamic ban on depicting the Prophet:

  Let those who believe in Muhammad have their image of him in peace. Why should we interfere? When I’m photographing and meet people who don’t want their picture taken, I respect that. That’s why I don’t think this is about freedom of speech at all; it’s about pissing on people who have another belief, something they hold dear. It seems to me to be a confrontation cooked up by the press for no reason whatsoever. Call me again when this has more substance.

  That same week, I received an email from Annette Carlsen, who shared a studio with several members of the cartoonists’ society. Carlsen wrote that she was receptive to the idea, but she noted that the cartoon genre was by nature satirical and therefore more provocative than any illustration in a children’s book. For that reason, she wanted to get an idea of the context in which her drawing would appear. “I would like to see what sort of text you have in mind to accompany the drawings,” she wrote.

  I wrote the piece on Wednesday, September 28, two days before the cartoons were due to be published. I read it over the phone to the paper’s editor-in-chief, Carsten Juste, who approved it. The actual page presenting the drawings had already been laid out to allow my article to be slotted in the middle.

  The comedian Frank Hvam recently admitted that he “wouldn’t have the guts to mock the Koran on television.” An illustrator commissioned to depict the Prophet Muhammad for a children’s book wishes to remain anonymous. The same is true of the translators of a collection of essays critical of Islam. A leading museum of art removes an exhibited work for fear of Muslim reaction. The current theater season embraces three satirical plays attacking U.S. President George W. Bush, yet not one concerning Osama bin Laden and his allies. In a meeting with Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, an imam urges the government to exert its influence on Danish media in order to ensure a more positive image of Islam.

  The above examples are cause for concern, whether or not the fear that is felt is justified. The fact is that it exists, and it spawns self-censorship. What we are seeing is an intimidation of the public space. Artists, writers, illustrators, translators, and performers are skirting around today’s most significant cultural encounter: between Islam and the secular, Western societies rooted in Christianity.

  Modern secular society is rejected by some Muslims. By insisting on particular consideration for their religious sentiment they demand a place apart. This is incompatible with secular democracy, in which the individual must be prepared to suffer scorn, mockery, and ridicule. That may not always be a pretty sight. And it doesn’t mean that religious sentiment should be mocked at any price. But all that is beside the point.

  It is no coincidence that people living in totalitarian societies often end up in jail for telling jokes or portraying dictators in a critical light. Usually in such cases reference is made to public feeling having been offended. It has not come to that here in Denmark, but the examples cited show that we are on a slippery slope; no one can predict where self-censorship will end.

  Therefore Jyllands-Posten has invited members of the Danish society of cartoonists to depict Muhammad as they envisage him. Of some forty who were invited, twelve responded. Their drawings are published here, signed with the cartoonists’ real names.

  I then cited the names of the 12 cartoonists, before concluding:

  Only twenty-five of the forty invited are active, and some of those who are active are subject to noncompetition clauses. A few have offered reasons for their declining to take part. Others have referred to pressures of work, while others still have refrained from responding at all.10

  One
of those to whom I sent the piece was Lars Refn, who of all the 12 cartoonists was the most critical toward Jyllands-Posten, though that was in no way obvious from our correspondence. His reaction to my article was simply, “That’s how it is!” In other words, he was supportive. As for the idea itself, Refn wrote: “Thanks for your invitation regarding a cartoon on the subject ‘Muhammad and freedom of speech.’ It will be a pleasure for me to send you a submission by noon on Friday.”

  By this time, Kåre Bluitgen’s claim that artists invited to illustrate his children’s book had been censoring themselves had been substantiated. The illustrator who finally took on the job had explained in the Danish daily Information that he insisted on anonymity because he feared for his safety. “I’m truly vexed by the fact that I’m afraid to step forward, and I know how stupid it is to yield to that kind of fanaticism,” he explained. “I don’t have this picture of the great specter of Islam knocking on the door all of a sudden, but I am afraid of being accosted on the street and getting beaten up or worse.”

  In January 2006, shortly before the issue exploded onto the global stage, the same anonymous illustrator expounded on his motives in the weekly Weekendavisen:

  When the publishers offered me the job, the editor brought it to my attention that illustrating the story would in certain areas of the Muslim community be considered controversial, since there was a tradition for interpreting the Koran in such a way that it was forbidden to depict Muhammad. Like so many other people in Denmark, I knew nothing about it at that time, and had the editor not mentioned it to me I would have just gone ahead with it like any other job. It was a book I really wanted to illustrate, because I found there to be something very picturesque and intriguing about the whole universe in which the story takes place, but I was of two minds. Would I be jeopardizing my own safety and that of my family, or was this concern an Islamophobic overreaction?11

  The illustrator pointed to three events that made him frightened of releasing his name: the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the murder of Theo van Gogh, and a violent attack on an associate professor affiliated with the Carsten Niebuhr Institute at the University of Copenhagen in the autumn of 2004. (The professor in question had been accosted outside Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens by three young Muslims who pushed him into a car and beat him up, warning him to refrain from reciting verses of the Koran in his university lectures.)

  The anonymous illustrator confirmed Kåre Bluitgen’s claim that three other illustrators had been too worried to take on the work. That claim was also confirmed by Bluitgen’s editor at Copenhagen publishers Høst & Søn. Moreover, apparently another illustrator had originally taken on the project, also insisting on anonymity; but ignoring Kåre Bluitgen’s explicit instructions, the illustrator in question had systematically portrayed Muhammad from behind. His depiction was an attempt to side-step the issue of showing the Prophet’s face.

  “He turned up, and all fifteen of his drawings had Muhammad with his back to the reader, despite our clear agreement. So we had to drop the whole thing and start from scratch,” Bluitgen explained.

  According to Bluitgen, that first illustrator had contacted the Center for Contemporary Middle East Studies at the University of Southern Denmark to ask how dangerous the work might prove to be. The center had said there would be little danger for a non-Muslim Dane to draw Muhammad. Paradoxically, one imam who was later to become a leading figure in the campaign against Jyllands-Posten also declared the whole issue to be a non-starter. Abdul Wahid Pedersen told the Danish daily Information that the ban on Muslims depicting the Prophet simply did not apply to non-Muslims: “We cannot as Muslims interfere in the actions of others.”

  That’s a very interesting statement, because as events emerged, it became clear that in this instance Muslims absolutely did want to interfere in the actions of non-Muslims, even in countries in which Islamic law was not in force. In the spring of 2006, I visited the Islam scholar Bernard Lewis at his home near Princeton University in New Jersey, and he emphasized that very issue, noting that it was new: Muslims were now demanding that non-Muslims, in non-Muslim countries, should adhere to Islamic precepts.

  “I have been unable to find even one example discussing non-Muslims having insulted the Prophet in a non-Muslim country. So all this trouble about non-Muslims offending the Prophet in non-Muslim societies is a completely new phenomenon without any basis in Islamic history or case law,” the then 90-year-old scholar commented.

  When I asked him how that was to be understood, Lewis replied:

  I don’t think anyone would say as much, but there seems to be an underlying assumption that Europe is now a part of the Islamic world or at least is becoming as such. It is in a state in which a country can be categorized as neither infidel nor Muslim, a state in which it is populated by infidels and governed by infidels, yet has made a treaty with the Islamic state. This was the case in some countries in Europe bordering the Ottoman Empire. But it’s odd inasmuch as Europe has a long tradition of insulting the Prophet, and that has never before triggered this kind of reaction, because what the infidels do in their own lands is basically no business of Islamic law.12

  Although Bluitgen’s book provided ample documentation of the kind of self-censorship that had motivated the project, Jyllands-Posten was still reticent about publishing the cartoons. But a number of other issues convinced managing editor Jørn Mikkelsen and me of the need to run the piece. Comedian Frank Hvam, swayed by the fear of violence, had already voiced reservations about challenging Muslim limits in the same way as he regularly challenged those of other groups in the society. Translation of Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s 2004 collection of essays, De maagdenkooi, into a number of European languages had given rise to fears of reprisal among translators and publishers alike. (The book had been published in Danish under the title Jeg anklager (I Accuse) by Jyllands-Postens Forlag in the autumn of 2005.) According to the author’s agent, several European translators had insisted on anonymity, unwilling to lend their names to a book signed by Hirsi Ali, who lived in hiding, watched over by bodyguards around the clock. Without the author’s approval, the book’s anonymous Finnish translator had even removed a controversial statement concerning the Prophet, whom Ali had referred to in an interview as a “tyrant” and a “pervert.”13

  Yet another example of self-censorship, to which I referred in my piece accompanying the cartoons, was an episode that took place at London’s Tate Britain gallery in mid-September 2005. One of British conceptual art’s foremost figures, 84-year-old John Latham, had opened a retrospective, including a work titled God Is Great. That piece was composed of a thick glass panel in which were embedded cut-up copies of the Bible, the Talmud, and the Koran. The piece had originated in reaction to the Gulf War in 1991. The idea of presenting the holy books mounted and projecting from the stable, transparent background, said Latham, was to show that religions originate from the same source. The written text was vulnerable, and the use of the word “God” by institutionalized religion was infected with prejudice, a state of affairs that Latham considered to be dangerous. Latham explained:

  The pieces that I’m calling God Is Great are there to indicate that underneath the theologies is a real source from which they are all extruded, if one is talking about the physical character of them, or emanated if they are in a kind of spiritual sense. People do know a source that they experience and they call this person Allah or God or Jehovah, or whatever it is that they call this source. And that’s got to lose its sectarian characteristics.14

  Although Latham and the Tate Britain curator agreed that the piece was central to the retrospective, the gallery’s director, Stephen Deuchar, decided to remove it just before the show opened after two scholars of Islam warned there was a risk that the piece would be construed as an affront to the Koran. “We didn’t want John Latham’s work to be misrepresented and given a political dimension he didn’t intend,” he explained to the Observer.15

  Curiously, giv
en that the Bible and the Talmud were accorded the same treatment as the Koran, no one bothered to ask why Deuchar had not also consulted experts on Christian and Jewish beliefs. It was as though a silent consensus existed that British Muslims were so utterly unpredictable and so dangerous that they should be treated in the manner of small children. Or perhaps they were seen as wild animals not to be taunted at any price. Both standpoints seemed crassly offensive and discriminating.

  Latham was furious at the gallery’s decision. He demanded that God Is Great be removed from the Tate’s permanent exhibition and returned to him. “Tate Britain have shown cowardice over this. I think it’s a daft thing to do because if they want to help the militants, this is the way to do it,” he hit out in the Observer.

  According to Tate Britain director Deuchar, staff members at the gallery were afraid of attack by Islamic extremists, a fear founded not on specific information, but on the general climate in the wake of terror bombings in the London underground system on July 7, 2005.16 Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the civil liberties organization Liberty, commented:

  I’m concerned about the signal this sends at a time when we see free speech quite significantly under threat. I think that after 7 July we need this kind of artistic expression and political expression and discourse and disagreement more than ever, which is why this is worrying. Is three holy books in a piece of glass going to incite controversy? Frankly, whether it does or doesn’t, controversy is what we have in a flourishing democracy.

  Had I researched the issue more thoroughly, I would have found many more examples of self-censorship and demands to shut down free speech in the months before we published the cartoons. Here are just six: