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‘The journalists of
Jyllands-Posten are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs’
The Danish cartoon controversy and
the self-image of Europe
Heiko Henkel
As the controversy over the Danish ‘Muhammad
cartoons’ gathered momentum, the apparent ease with which the cartoons – or
rumours about them – were able to mobilize ‘civilization-speak’, and occasional
violence, around the globe was one of its most disturbing features. If one saw
the angry crowds in Pakistan, Malaysia, Syria and elsewhere on the evening news,
or read through pages of commentary in Europe’s newspapers and blogs lambasting
the intolerance of Muslims, it sometimes felt as if the Danish cartoons had
indeed simply highlighted the clash of two hostile civilizations. While much
evidence suggests that this is not the case, the public controversy about the
cartoons has certainly pushed in that direction.
We now know that the images did not simply ‘spread’
but were initially distributed by a disgruntled Danish Muslim, who not only
presented governments and organizations across the Middle East with the
published cartoons but included in his portfolio especially offensive images
that were not, in fact, published by Jyllands-Posten. But even if we allow for
this and the fact that governments in the region had vested interests in
promoting the issue, and if we also concede that the cartoons’ religious offence
probably didn’t cause the torching of the Danish embassies but, like the 2005
Paris riots, provided disenfranchised groups of young men with an excuse to act
– the ease with which a single publication in a provincial Danish newspaper
could trigger massive global protests condemning Denmark or the West wholesale
as enemies of Islam must set off alarm bells for those weary of civilization
theories. What interests me here, however, is the no less troubling tendency,
especially among continental European commentators, to view the affair as a
conflict between Islam and ‘the European value of freedom of expression’. What
is perceived as Muslim intolerance has become a foil against which Europeans
increasingly assert the notion of European culture.
Placing the cartoons
Given the overwhelmingly peaceful
existence of religious Muslims in Europe and their largely measured reaction to
the Danish cartoon saga, why does ‘Islam’ so easily become the object of
European outrage? And why do so many Europeans across the political spectrum
feel compelled to jump to the defence of our ‘freedom of expression’ over the
publication of openly racist cartoons? With black eyes looking slyly from
underneath bushy eyebrows, the hooked nose, and the curved dagger already drawn,
the figures that stare at us from some of the cartoons clearly betray kinship to
those that populated the anti-Semitic cartoons of the 1920s and 1930s. Surely,
this should cause liberal Europeans to reflect and be less sanctimonious in
their condemnation of Muslim intolerance. The Danish cartoon controversy
highlights a pincer movement that has increasingly come to characterize Europe’s
relationship with its Muslim minority. By depicting the most venerated figure of
Islam as a bloodthirsty terrorist with clearly racialized features, the cartoons
explicitly do the work that much public commentary in Europe does implicitly:
linking dark-skinned people to the notion of irrational dogma and violence. No
less damaging, however, is the blanket condemnation of Muslim protests against
the cartoons as intolerant. To demand toleration from the targets of a racist
slur coupled with blunt religious insult, and to brand those who refuse to be
silent as fundamentalists – thus denying them any legitimate place within
European society – is more than simply inconsiderate. It performs a double
delegitimation of religious Muslims on the grounds of being both foreign and
intolerant.
To find evidence that the drawings were not simply
‘satire’, as it is so often claimed, one only needs to read the article that
accompanied the twelve cartoons when they were published by Jyllands-Posten in
September 2005.1 Here, the journalist Flemming Rose frankly explains that the
published cartoons were the result of a deliberate challenge sent out to all
members of the ‘Association of Danish Cartoonists’, daring them to submit
cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. The staging of this deliberate provocation,
Rose insists, was important to counteract the creeping advance of
self-censorship, increasingly preventing Danes from poking fun at Islam. It
should be noted here that while some supporters of Jyllands-Posten now claim to
defend ‘free speech’ in general, Jyllands-Posten clearly does not. When the same
newspaper was offered a series of Jesus cartoons in 2003, the editor declined
with the argument that they would provoke public outcry amongst its Christian
conservative readership.2 More importantly, the solicitation and publication of
the ‘Muhammad cartoons’ was part of a long and carefully orchestrated campaign
by the conservative Jyllands-Posten (also known in Denmark as Jyllands-Pesten –
the plague from Jutland), in which it backed the centre-right Venstre party of
Prime Minister Fogh Rasmussen in its successful bid for power in 2001. Central
to Venstre’s campaign, aside from its neoliberal economic agenda, was the
promise to tackle the problem of foreigners who refused to ‘integrate’ into
Danish society. Venstre’s electoral success highlights the fact that Danish
society, with its traditionally strong ethos of equality and social proximity,
has found it difficult to come to terms with the challenges of cultural
heterogeneity produced by transnational migration. And while Fogh Rasmussen’s
own party has sought to avoid openly racist rhetoric, its minority government
depends on the support of Denmark’s notoriously racist Dansk Folkeparti, whose
shameless attacks on foreigners regularly outflank Le Pen’s Front National. In
fact, one of the original twelve cartoons published by Jyllands-Posten
eloquently makes this point in a remarkable act of genuine political satire. We
see, pointing to a blackboard filled with Arabic script, a Danish schoolboy
called Mohammed naughtily sticking his tongue out at us – or at the editor of
Jyllands-Posten as the case may be. The boy sports the football shirt of a club
called Fremtiden (The Future), suggesting that this little Mohammed represents
Denmark’s future. The writing on the board says, in Farsi: ‘The journalists of
Jyllands-Posten are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs.’
As it turns out, Jyllands-Posten’s provocateurs have
found many vocal allies across Europe who argue that Muslim protests against the
cartoons confirm the newspaper’s initial proposition, and claim the right, even
the duty, of the press in democratic societies to (re-)publish the cartoons in
order to resist Muslim intimidation. Others have argued against this that the
cartoons’ racist and inflammatory imagery makes them a case of ‘hate speech’
that should be punishable by law. While racist features are clearly evident in
some of the cartoons, I am not sure that legal injunction adequately addresses
the matter. Rather, the widespread (although by no means unanimous) support for
Jyllands-Posten in Europe indicates the emergence of a political constellation
that demands a political – and perhaps philosophical – response. For Europe’s
lingering xenophobia coupled with deplorable opportunism on the political
Centre-Right does not alone explain the enthusiasm with which so many Danes and
other Europeans have come to rally in support of the cartoons – and apparently
feel so little sympathy for their offended Muslim countrymen and -women.
To understand why so many Europeans turn a blind eye
to the stigmatization of Muslims in Europe it is important to consider that,
over the past fifteen years or so, the critique of ‘Muslim fundamentalism’
has become a cornerstone in the definition of European identities. As well as
replacing anti-communism as the rallying point for a broad ‘democratic
consensus’ (and, in this shift, remaking this consensus), the critique of
Islamic fundamentalism has also become a conduit for imagining Europe as a moral
community beyond the nation. It has emerged as a banner under which the most
diverse sectors of society can unite in the name of ‘European values’: feminists
and Christian conservatives, social democrats and neoliberals, nationalists and
multiculturalists, civil rights activists and consumption-oriented hedonists.
The tendency to define Europe in contrast to Islam is not new, of course.3 But
the deepening crisis of the European project, with its growing social inequality
and the failure of the European Union to provide broadly convincing alternatives
to national models of sovereignty and democracy, make it attractive once more.
Amidst the dissolution of older social ties, the formation of transnational
European elites, and the struggle of nation-states like Denmark to retain the
semblance of national sovereignty, the perception of an Islamic threat to
European values provides the opportunity for a dramatic call to arms,
conveniently diverting public concern from more divisive issues.
Yet while the critique of fundamentalism provides a
platform for demonstrating community, it also highlights the internal
heterogeneity and tension that characterize the European response. While some
lament the incompatibility of Muslim culture with distinctive national (and now
increasingly European) culture(s), others criticize Muslims for failing to
adjust to Europe’s open and universalist civility. The latter response is often
articulated in terms of modernization theory. Real or imagined Muslim
intolerance here becomes more than the failing of individual Muslims or Muslim
organizations. It becomes the emblem that marks religious Muslims as
‘fundamentalists’, and thus as categorically unfit for democratic society. To
clarify this point, let me turn to Jürgen Habermas’s influential intervention in
the debate on multiculturalism.
Fundamentalism and republican
citizenship
In a remarkable
reformulation of his original concept of communicative action, Habermas’s
writing on multiculturalism makes the inclusion of the cultural ‘other’ central
to the project of democratic society.4 Given the globalizing tendencies inherent
in modern society, he argues, contemporary democracies can no longer define
criteria of belonging in terms of ethnicity or cultural homogeneity.5 In these
inevitably plural societies, criteria for citizenship must be tied to the
acceptance of a political framework, defined by the constitution, rather than by
the prerogatives of majority culture. In this reorientation from the culturally
defined nation-state to a ‘republican’ state, Habermas argues, ‘the majority
culture must detach itself from its fusion with the general political culture in
which all citizens share equally; otherwise it dictates the parameters of
political discourses from the outset’.6 The emergence of the Federal Republic of
Germany after World War II, he suggests, is an example of such a democratic
framework. Habermas argues that in the postwar period a patriotic commitment to
Germany’s democratic constitution has replaced notions of nationality based on
shared ethnic origins or a set of norms and values. In this perspective of
constitutional patriotism, the inclusion of other cultural traditions in the
national framework is both imperative and possible. Imperative because, in the
context of Habermasian discourse ethics, any truth claim that does not open
itself to the challenge of all competing claims within a discursive community
automatically loses its legitimacy. Possible because once the identity of a
political community is detached from a particular cultural tradition, the bond
of a shared political culture is strong enough to hold society together. By
differentiating the realm of ‘general political culture’ from that of the
various cultural traditions from which individual citizens draw their norms and
values, Habermas gains a dynamic model of a political community in which the
basic rules that govern the community can change over time. This community is
shaped not so much in direct negotiations between different cultural traditions
but as the result of partially shared, if differently interpreted and
discursively mediated, experiences.
Despite the persistent social marginalization that
continues to plague many Muslim communities across Europe, and despite
occasional acts of violence in the name of Islam, there are clear signs of such
a process. José Casanova has called this development that has made Muslim
communities and organizations increasingly active players in Europe’s civil
society a Muslim aggiornamento.7 On the whole, mature multiculturalist democracy
theories, such as Habermas’s or Seyla Benhabib’s,8 are well suited to describe
the trajectory of many sections of Europe’s new Muslim minority. There is,
however, an important ambivalence in the Habermasian model when applied to the
relationship of European majority society to religious Muslims. Even though his
model is in principle open to the inclusion of other cultural traditions,
Habermas leaves no doubt that there are definitive limits to their inclusion in
the European (or any other democratic) framework: ‘integration’, Habermas
writes, ‘does not extend to fundamentalist immigrant cultures’ (my emphasis).9
In so far as this simply means that no democratic society can work if some of
its members refuse to participate in a dialogue over crucial controversial
issues, it may be a necessary and uncontroversial caveat.
The concept of fundamentalism, however, does more
work in this context than is initially apparent. A closer look at Habermas’s
historical reconstruction of modern society shows that it is central to his
dramatic historical narrative of modernization. Philosophically, of course,
Habermas’s critique of fundamentalism derives from Kant’s critique of religious
orthodoxy, understood as the rationally unjustifiable foreclosure of critical
inquiry and debate. But Habermas explicitly ties this philosophical critique to
the Durkheimian model of the historical transition from traditional to modern
society. In Postmetaphysical Thinking, for instance, he argues that the
totalizing metaphysical world-views of traditional society (where religious
orthodoxies apparently held sway) disintegrated in the complexities of modern
society and gave way to ‘decentralized’ modern world-views.10 These
decentralized world-views became, in turn, the precondition for the emergence of
civil society and, eventually, democracy and republican citizenship. It is
obvious, then, that in this scheme the charge of fundamentalism carries a
political denunciation that could hardly be more serious. It marks the addressee
as categorically incompatible with membership in democratic society. And yet,
fundamentalism remains here largely an abstraction. In not only the Habermasian
œuvre but also in much public commentary, it does not (or does only
superficially) derive from the critical analysis of actual Muslim concerns and
social projects, but emerges as the theoretical backdrop against which the
‘unfinished project of modernity’ and its emancipatory potential can be
elaborated.
This problematic conception of fundamentalism is tied
to another ambivalence in Habermas’s republican model of democratic citizenship:
the distinction between the ‘cultural’ and the ‘political’. Habermas is arguably
over-sanguine about the ease with which a shared political culture can be shorn
of particular cultural traditions, given that this includes a whole legacy of
political values and historical narratives that have shaped the understanding of
democracy and indeed politics itself. His own genealogy of democratic society is
a case in point. For many religious Muslims in Europe and elsewhere, the
reconstruction of their ‘arrival’ in modern (and now increasingly liberal
democratic) society differs from mainstream European narratives. Crucially,
their narratives hinge not on the rejection of revealed religion and orthodoxy
but on a continuing reinterpretation of their place in society. In my own work
on contemporary Turkish Islam and its transformation since the 1960s, I am
continually struck by the growing openness and attraction to democratic and
pluralist notions of society in many Muslim cemaats, and at the same time by
their continuing commitment to an orthodox (in the eyes of their secularist
critics: fundamentalist) understanding of Islam.11 What we have here is an
apparent paradox. There seems to be an increasing convergence between many
religious Muslims’ attitude toward democracy and civil society and those
dominant in European publics. And yet this does not mean that religious Muslims
in fact understand this Muslim aggiornamento in terms easily reconcilable with
the historical narrative so central to Habermas’s conception of republican
citizenship. This is not to dismiss the model of republican citizenship as such,
but simply to point out that new cultural traditions may not quite as easily be
incorporated into European political culture(s) as Habermas seems to suggest.
It is no doubt legitimate when Habermas and others
‘draw a line’ between what they see as admissible and what for them is beyond
the pale of democratic society. To make ‘fundamentalism’ the dominant term in
the public debate, however, is unhelpful. It suggests that we know in principle
all that needs to be known about religious Muslims in Europe, in the absence of
any real engagement with the concerns and aspirations of communities that have
often come to embrace democratic society along different historical
trajectories. It becomes crassly tendentious when, as for instance in André
Glucksmann’s commentary on the cartoon affair, the apparent modernity–tradition
hiatus between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’ is the excuse for a verbosely
self-satisfied secularism caught up as much in dubious metaphysical
certainties as the discourse of any Muslim ‘fundamentalist’.12
Undoubtedly, the encounter of European societies with
their increasingly self-confident Muslim minorities is beset with serious
conflicts and hard processes of adjustment. As the controversy over the Danish
cartoons highlights, what makes this process of integration particularly
difficult and unwieldy is that it takes place amidst two powerful and often
converging claims that the Islamic tradition and liberal democratic society are
mutually exclusive. The wholesale condemnation of Denmark or the West by
sections of the Muslim movement shows that Islam can provide powerful ammunition
in polarizing the debate. But so do European discourses that use distorted
representations of Islam as the foil against a bogus ‘European culture’. For
those on the Left, the challenge is not to be drawn into these false
oppositions.
Amid the current excitement it should be remembered
that the frictions that today accompany the process of integrating religious
Muslims into European society are by no means without precedent. What is
European history other than a long and arduous process of integrating diverse
ethnic groups, countless waves of migrants, political projects and religious
traditions? It is a history as ripe with successes as with ongoing tensions and,
let us not forget, with ugly and sometimes genocidal policies against demonized
minorities. Much would be won if rather than seeing in the encounter of Europe
with Muslim communities a clash of civilizations or a confrontation with
Europe’s own less enlightened past, we could see it simply as a new chapter in
the European history of integrating new social projects. Raymond Williams
developed the model of a society in which different social projects – most
importantly those of the bourgeoisie and the working class, but also a number of
residual and emerging projects – competed with one another for hegemony. The
cast in the current drama may have changed. Perhaps it is now Habermas’s
republican notion of society that is solidly entrenched as the dominant social
project in Europe, while Christianity, socialism, neoliberalism and, of course,
numerous nationalist movements compete as secondary, perhaps residual, projects
partially incorporated into the overall republican framework. Muslim movements
are not yet part of this hegemonic configuration, and what is currently at stake
is whether they will be in the future.
Notes
1. F. Rose, ‘Muhammed’s ansigt’ [Muhammad’s face],
Jyllands-Posten, 30 September 2005, p. 3.
2. P. Reynolds, BBC News, 13 February 2006.
3. See A. Pagden (ed.) The Idea of Europe: From
Antiquity to the European Union, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002.
4. J. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action,
vol. 1, Heinemann, London, 1984; ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic
Constitutional State’, in A. Gutman (ed.), Multiculturalism, Princeton
University Press, Princeton NJ, 1994; The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in
Political Theory, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1998.
5. Here Habermas’s argument intersects with his
position in the famous Historikerstreit that galvanized public interest in West
Germany in the 1980s.
6. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, p. 144.
7. J. Casanova, ‘Civil Society and Religion:
Retrospective Reflections on Catholicism and Prospective Reflections on Islam’,
Social Research, vol. 68, no. 4, 2001, pp. 1041–80.
8. S. Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality
and Diversity in the Global Era, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2002.
9. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, p. 229.
10. J. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, MIT Press,
Cambridge MA, 1992, p. 39.
11. H. Henkel, ‘Rethinking the dâr al-harb: Social
Change and Changing Perceptions of the West in Turkish Islam’, Journal of Ethnic
and Migration Studies, vol. 30, no. 5, 2004, pp. 961–77. See also M.H. Yavuz,
The Emergence of a New Turkey: Islam, Democracy, and the AK Parti, University of
Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2006.
12. A. Glucksmann, ‘Choc des civilisations? Non: des
philosophies’, Le Monde, 4 March 2006, p. 20.
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