Charlie Hebdo: Who Provoked Whom?

A 17th Century Painting of Mohammed: Provocative and Offensive?

Two weeks after the Charlie Hebdo murders, a consensus seems to be emerging. The murders were heinous and unforgivable, but they have to be seen in the context of the hugely provocative cartoons the magazine published with the deliberate intention of causing offence. The cartoons reinforced racial prejudices against North African Muslims living in France, helping to perpetuate systematic discrimination against an oppressed minority. The murders, though indefensible, were simply the most extreme manifestation of the anger the cartoons deliberately stirred up.

　

A brief examination of the events leading up to the Paris murders suggests otherwise.

　

Charlie Hebdo's blasphemous activities began in 2006, when it reprinted cartoons of Mohammed published the previous year by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten that were greeted death threats and riots. Although the Jyllands-Posten cartoons were as provocative as some of those later published by Charlie Hebdo, they were published as a reaction to an author of a children's book about the life of Mohammed being unable to find illustrators willing to put their names to images regarded as blasphemous by Muslims.


The illustrators may have had good reason to be fearful, given previous violence related to depictions of Mohammed, such as a suspected terrorist plot in 2002 to blow up frescoes containing images of the prophet in a Bologna church. Defiance in the face of this atmosphere of intimidation rather than a desire to cause offence prompted Jyllands-Posten's decision to publish the Mohammed cartoons.

　

So the origins of the Charlie Hebdo massacre lie not in the cruel way the magazine peddled stereotypes about France's Arab Muslim minority, but in the desire among some Muslims to impose an outright ban on any images of Mohammed and the refusal in some quarters to accept such an imposition.


I believe the French-Algerian commentator Ramdani Nabila gave the game away in the aftermath of the attacks when, having reeled off the usual criticisms of Charlie Hebdo's racism, Islamophobia etc, she stated in response to the seemingly innocuous cover of its "survivors' issue" that, just as you can't be a little bit pregnant, you can't be a little bit blasphemous.


The issue is not the casual prejudice and unfair mockery that French Muslims undoubtedly suffer, but any depiction of Mohammed, whether it be in cartoons, illustrations for children's books or medieval frescoes. This is not about protecting a religious minority from the cruel prejudices of their non-Muslim neighbours. It is a campaign, masked in the language of human rights and minority protection, to import Middle Eastern blasphemy laws that are designed to secure the privileged status of one religion, not to protect anyone from being offended.