Danish Cartoons

The so-called ‘Danish cartoons controversy’ set in motion by the publication of twelve drawings under the title ‘the face of Mohammed’ by the Danish broadsheet Jyllands-Posten in September 2005 has become one of the iconic controversies surrounding Islam in Europe. But the cartoon controversy was not only one controversy, but many. The paper argues that there are different controversies depending on what the object and the scope of the controversy are. But there are also different controversies depending on how a given object of controversy is framed, e.g. in legal terms and some in non-legal terms, and what is taken to be at stake in the controversy. The paper focuses on the non-legal terms of the cartoons controversy and considers how one might understand what was at stake in the controversy thus understood. An important part of the non-legal controversy can be captured and understood by interpreting it in terms of the concept of ‘civility’ as a social theoretical concept and analytical category. The introduction of this analytical perspective gives a more complete picture of what was actually at stake in the cartoons controversy. The introduction of the concept of civility makes it possible to understand how some views and interventions in the controversy were displaced or misrepresented, which gave defenders of Jyllands-Posten a rhetorical advantage that allowed them to dominate the controversy, at least in Denmark. But the very framing of the debate in terms of civility also leads to a problem due to the discursive logic of civility claims. This ‘paradox of civility’ is a practical problem facing any attempt by minority groups to raise issues of civility. This discursive phenomenon might have empirical explanatory significance, since the logic of claims of civility might explain some of the dynamics in the cartoons controversy and perhaps also some other public controversies about Islam in Europe.

In this volume, four leading thinkers of our times confront the paradoxes and dilemmas attending the supposed stand-off between Islam and liberal democratic values. Taking the controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammad as a point of departure, Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood inquire into the evaluative frameworks at stake in understanding the conflicts between blasphemy and free speech, between religious taboos and freedoms of thought and expression, and between secular and religious world views. Is the language of the law an adequate mechanism for the adjudication of such conflicts? What other modes of discourse are available for the navigation of such differences in multicultural and multi-religious societies? What is the role of critique in such an enterprise? These are among the pressing questions this volume addresses.

This book delves into the physical public spaces of communication, majālis in East Arabia and their equivalents, digitally mediated cyber spaces. All are transformative spaces wherein Arabian social groups (Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula) regularly interact, listen to one another, discuss diverse topics, communicate traditional and modern knowledge, and question or circulate ideas. These social groups communicate multi-layered information and codes of meaning that inhabit every aspect of Arabian daily life. Those who dominate these two participative spaces of interaction have the ability to communicate particular knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, heritage, ideologies, norms, and values. Islamic religious ways of thinking abound in these public spaces and some can find preference to deconstruct or reconnect segmented communities. The book attempts to apprehend some of the cultural, social, and political changes rapidly shaping two predominant, religious clusters of contemporary Sunnī Islam in Eastern Arabia: the ‘Sufis’ (traditional Sunnī Muslims), and the ‘Salafis’ (Wahhabi Sunnī Muslims). Furthermore, by focusing on the micro cultural foundation that regulates the unification or fragmentation dynamics between a Sufi master or a Salafi shaykh and his respective disciples, this book reveals new information on how in-group micro-life is co-created before it manifests at the macro social level. The book captures cognitive identity as part of the public religious discourse in terms of fiqh (religious reasoning) or madhhab (school of religious reasoning), each distinctively tenting Sufi or Salafi clusters with different identity markers. Due to the discursive nature of fiqh, exposure to group discourses and counter-discourses is essential in order to gain insight into the process of constructing cognitive religious identity. In portraying public cognitive religious reasoning as a main identity marker, the book reveals how cognitive identity re-manifests itself in the realms of attires, melodies, and digitally-mediated-Islam. By using an interdisciplinary framework, employing different disciplines and approaches, the book will be of specific interest to students and scholars of Islam, Communication, New Media, Ethnology, Anthropology, Religion, Heritage, Identity, as well as Middle East Studies.

In September 2005, as part of an editorial on self-censorship and Islam, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammed. The controversy that has accompanied the publication and reprinting of the cartoons has been widely interpreted as yet another illustration of an ineliminable tension between multiculturalism and liberalism. Such an interpretation would have us believe that what is at issue in defending the cartoons is our commitment to civil liberties as a mainstay of liberal democracy. But is this really what is at issue? A closer examination suggests that what is actually being defended in this case is not civil liberty but civil privilege. In particular, what is at issue is the privilege to exclude and define Muslims.