– Mahmood Mamdani
Excerpt from the text of talk on receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of Johannesburg, 25 May 2010
Yesterday, when I was in Cape Town, a friend gave me the week’s edition of Mail and Guardian. I went straight for my favorite section, the cartoon by Zapiro. To my surprise, Zapiro featured a cartoon of Prophet Mohamed, agonizing: “OTHER Prophets have followers with a sense of humour! …..” I want to take this opportunity to reflect on times and places when humour turned deadly. Such a reflection should allow us to think though the relationship between two great liberal objectives, freedom of speech and civil peace. Since Zapiro seems to present his series of cartoons as a second edition of the Danish cartoons, I shall begin with a reflection on the original.
When the Danish cartoon debate broke out I was in Nigeria. If you stroll the streets of Kano, a Muslim majority city in northern Nigeria, you will have no problem finding material caricaturing Christianity sold by street vendors. And if you go to the east of Nigeria, to Enugu for example, you will find a similar supply of materials caricaturing Islam. None of this is blasphemy; most of it is bigotry. It is well known that the Danish paper that published the offending cartoons was earlier offered cartoons of Jesus Christ. But the paper declined to print these on grounds that it would offend its Christian readers. Had the Danish paper published cartoons of Jesus Christ, that would have been blasphemy; the cartoons it did publish were evidence of bigotry, not blasphemy.
Both blasphemy and bigotry belong to the larger tradition of free speech, but after a century of ethnic cleansing and genocide, we surely need to distinguish between the two strands of the same tradition. The language of contemporary politics makes that distinction by referring to bigotry as hate speech.
Just a few weeks after the Danish cartoons were published, the German writer Gunter Grass was interviewed in a Portuguese weekly news magazine, Visao. In that interview, Gunter Grass said the Danish cartoons reminded him of anti Semitic cartoons in a German magazine, Der Sturmer. The story was carried in a New York Times piece, which added that the publisher of Der Sturmer was tried at Nuremberg and executed. I am interested less in how close was the similarity between the Danish and the German cartoons, than in why a magazine publisher would be executed for publishing cartoons. One of the subjects I work on is the Rwanda genocide. Many of you would know that the International Tribunal in Arusha has pinned criminal responsibility for the genocide not just on those who executed it but also on those who imagined it, including intellectuals, artists and journalists as in RTMC. The Rwandan trials are the latest to bring out the dark side of free speech, its underbelly: how power can instrumentalize free speech to frame a minority and present it for target practice.
To understand why courts committed to defending freedom of speech can hold cartoonists responsible for crimes against humanity; we need to distinguish between bigotry and blasphemy. Blasphemy is the practice of questioning a tradition from within. In contrast, bigotry is an assault on that tradition from the outside. If blasphemy is an attempt to speak truth to power, bigotry is the reverse: an attempt by power to instrumentalize truth. A defining feature of the cartoon debate is that bigotry is being mistaken for blasphemy.
Can we deal with hate speech by legal restriction? I am not very optimistic. The law can be a corrective on individual discrimination, but it has seldom been an effective restraint on hate movements that target vulnerable minorities. If the episode of the Danish cartoons demonstrated one thing, it was that Islamophobia is a growing presence in Europe. One is struck by the ideological diversity of this phenomenon. Just as there was a left wing anti-Semitism in Europe before fascism, contemporary Islamophobia too is articulated in not only the familiar language of the right, but also the less familiar language of the left. The latter language is secular. The Danish cartoons and their enthusiastic republication throughout Europe, in both right and left-wing papers, was our first public glimpse of left and right Islamophobia marching in step formation. Its political effect has been to explode the middle ground. Is Zapiro asking us to evacuate the middle ground as testimony that we too possess a sense of humour?
If so, Zapiro has misread the real challenge that we face today. That challenge is both intellectual and political. The intellectual challenge lies in distinguishing between two strands in the history of free speech-blasphemy and bigotry. The political challenge lies in building a local and global coalition against all forms of bigotry. The growth bigotry in Europe seems to me an unthinking response to two developments: locally, the dramatic growth of Muslim minorities in Europe and their struggle for human and citizenship rights; globally, we are going through an equally dramatic turning point in world history.
The history of the past five centuries has been one of western domination. Beginning 1491, Western colonialism understood and presented itself to the world at large as a civilizing and a rescue mission, a mission to rescue minorities and to civilize majorities. The colonizing discourse historically focused on barbarities among the colonized – sati, child marriage and polygamy in India, female genital mutilation and slavery in Africa – and presented colonialism as a rescue mission for women, children, and minorities, at the same time claiming to be a larger project to civilize majorities. Meanwhile, Western minorities lived in the colonies with privilege and impunity. Put together, it has been five centuries of a growing inability to live with difference in the world, while at the same time politicizing difference. The irony is that a growing number of mainstream European politicians, perhaps nostalgic about empire, are experimenting with importing these same time-tested rhetorical techniques into domestic politics: the idea is to compile a list of barbaric cultural practices among immigrant minorities as a way to isolate, stigmatize, and frame them.
But the world is changing. New powers are on the horizon: most obviously, China and India. Neither has a Muslim majority, but both have significant Muslim minorities. This Danish case teaches us by negative example. To the hitherto dominant Western minority, it presents a lesson in how not to respond to a changing world with fear and anxiety, masked with arrogance, but rather to try a little humility so as to understand the ways in which the world is indeed changing.
There is also a lesson here for Muslim peoples. The Middle East and Islam are part of the middle ground in this contest. Rather than be tempted to think that the struggle against Islamophobia is the main struggle – for it is not – let us put it in this larger context. Only that larger context can help us identify allies and highlight the importance of building alliances. Perhaps then we – and hopefully Zapiro- will be strong enough to confront organized hate campaigns, whether as calls to action or as cartoons, with a sense of humour.
Mahmood Mamdani teaches at
Columbia University