The Culture-specific Meanings of the Muhammad Cartoons³

This article deliberately avoids reprinting the images in favor of an academic analysis. To this end, images of the original cartoons were last accessed on January 30, 2006, at: http://face-of-muhammad.blogspot.com/.

The following detailed political iconographic analysis studies five of the 12 cartoons to arrive at an interpretation and understanding of the conflicting meanings that the visuals implied in the West and for Muslim audiences.

Contextualizing the Cartoons

Summarizing the general characteristics of the drawings, it becomes apparent that the majority of the Muhammad cartoons depict the Prophet in an unpleasant, threatening way. In most of the cartoons, Muhammad is depicted with aggressive looks, a dark and wild beard, and thick eyebrows. Overall, the head cutouts have the strongest impact, since they draw attention directly to his face. This was the case with the most controversially discussed cartoon, “Bomb in the Head.” When Muhammad is shown in front of a backdrop, he is depicted either as a heavenly creature, as a pauper in the desert, or as an oriental sultan in a palace. The dominant colors are black, white, and green, the latter being considered the color symbolizing Islam. The visual messages are clear, but the meanings attributed to images depend on the social, cultural, and political context in which they are perceived. Thus, the cartoons have to be interpreted in the light of their reception contexts, which, in this case, are highly culturally coded.

The Danish Reception Context of the Cartoons

Denmark is a small Scandinavian country with a population of 5.4 million. The first Muslim immigrants started to arrive in the country during the 1960s and 1970s (Yılmaz 2006). Currently, the Muslim population in Denmark accounts for about 150,000 people, a very small percentage of the Danish population.⁶

Recent literature and reports on the situation of minorities in Denmark point to an increasingly negative trend with respect to attitudes toward the Muslim minority. Studies conducted as early as 1995, reported that cultural racism is gaining ground in Denmark and that the media play a significant role in spreading stereotypical images of Muslims (Wren 2001). Another Danish study “points to the media's role in popularizing a neo-racist discourse that positions the Muslim identity as a direct negation of the ‘Danishness’ ” (Hussain 2000, 96). And for Wren (2001, 158), the “construction of immigrant as a ‘problem’ has become real in its consequences through informing generally racist practices within a variety of institutions.”

When placed within this context, the negativity of the cartoon depictions of Muhammad takes on a different dimension. It is possible to imagine and draw faces in different ways. But, of the five cartoons examined here in detail, all but one preferred to depict Muhammad in clearly negative terms.⁷

Obviously, the existing public discourse of the “Muslim threat” had an influence on the choices made by the artists. They were asked by Jyllands-Posten's cultural editor to depict Muhammad's face as they see him, and they imagined him not as a positive figure, but rather as an unfriendly and dangerous fellow. One can argue that the artists were guided by the medium in which they worked: the essential stylistic elements of the cartoon as an art form are exaggeration, ridicule, and distortion.⁸

The Muslim Reception Context of the Cartoons

Modernization and Westernization in Muslim countries have a long history, resulting, among many failures, also in some successful transformation processes. Problems relating to the adjustment of non-democratic systems to the demands of modernization and democratization still present an important challenge in a number of Muslim countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In fact, democracy, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press are alien, and sometimes contested, terms to Muslim citizens in a variety of contexts. In former colonies with Muslim populations, a general resentment against Western “imperialism” is as pervasive as it is influential in forming public opinion. Moreover, the Muslim world in general still has to deal with historic imprints of the traumatic shift in power relations between the East and the West. As Farhang Jahanpour (2006, 1) notes: “Up to the end of the 17th century, there was not such a big economic, social, artistic or intellectual gap between Islamic and western countries.” The historical developments that led to Western domination over the world entirely changed this balance with negative consequences for the Muslim world. To quote again from Jahanpour (2006, 1–2): “When Islam led the world in science and learning, it was self confident and tolerant. By contrast, the present anger demonstrates a loss of self-confidence. In its heyday, Islam encouraged science, philosophy, literature and arts, as well as theology. It is truly sobering to think that over nine hundred years ago, Omar Khayyam, one of the greatest agnostics the world has ever seen, could write and preach what many Muslims dare not repeat now.”

The situation indicated in the above remarks presents a real challenge to many Muslim societies today. Even though the cartoons are stereotypical, and targeted particularly against people of Muslim faith, they are also telling of the enormous frictions in the contemporary Muslim world.

No matter how forcefully moderate Muslims denounce violence, the terrorists of September 11, 2001, and of the Madrid and London bombings were self-declared Muslims who committed those crimes in the name of Muhammad. Their political actions, as well as their underlying religious motivations, create global public awareness and “brand” Islam with the stigma of being the cradle for terrorist mass-murderers and lunatics of all sorts. The majority of moderate Muslims' lives are overshadowed by Muslim extremism in two ways: they are both abhorred and terrified by the terrorist actions, and they are associated with this same threat due to their shared religious belief. Moderate Muslims need to find ways to combat fundamentalism and extremism, and revive the self-confident, tolerant tradition which lies in the Islamic past. As Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim intellectual living in Europe, points out “because the radical voices are loudest and are covered more by the media, they have the upper hand. We have to turn up the volume of reason and ensure that our discourse gets the upper hand” (Spiegel Online 2006b).

In trying to delineate the general problems facing the Muslim world, it is important not to lose sight of the tremendous variety of Islamic beliefs and lifestyles, many times unnoticed and unacknowledged in the West. For some authors, the talk about “Islam” in the West, especially in the media, creates an illusionary unity which does not correspond to the diversified realities in the Muslim world's wide geography. Yilmaz (2006, 1) goes as far as to argue that “Islam does not exist. It is impossible to locate it as a unified or homogenous set of practices, ideas, or beliefs.” According to this view, it is the talk about Islam that presents it as a homogenous unit. Thus, approaching Islam as a homogenous unit is misleading—not only for societies in the West, but also for Muslims themselves. One example of how generalizations can lead to wrong interpretations is the association between Islam and iconoclasm. It is correct that the image of the Prophet Muhammad is sacred and thus cannot be depicted by humans. But to conclude from this that Islam in general forbids any visual depiction of human beings is simply wrong. This generalization is not only often repeated by Western, but also by Muslim commentators. In fact, the Shi'a tradition of Islam generally represents a tolerant stand toward visual depictions (Devji 2006, 2) and Sunni Islam even saw times of allowing Muhammad depictions, though with a veiled face.

Conclusion

The reaction to the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in Danish cartoons transcended multiple levels of political action—local, regional, national, international, transnational, and finally global—that are usually kept apart from each other. At each level, different agents and actors were involved in the crisis. The cartoons themselves, which triggered political actions that varied from the peaceful to the violent in Muslim countries, acquired different levels of meaning throughout their journey from a local national newspaper to the agenda of global politics.

The cartoons can be interpreted as reflections of racial biases that have been building up inside Danish society well before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. On the other hand, the depictions also reflect an imminent, valid, and pervasive fear of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism that has been haunting European societies since the Madrid bombing attacks in March 2004.

From the perspective of Danish Muslims, the cartoons reinforced two well-entrenched stereotypes of the Danish: that they disrespect Muslim religious beliefs, and that they collectively stigmatize all Muslims as dangerous “Muslim terrorists.” Disappointed by the lack of attention paid to their pleas in late 2005, representatives of Danish Muslim communities turned to powerful Muslim organizations and leaders in the Middle East. This increased attention led to further action against Danish authorities and dissemination of the cartoons to a wider international audience, resulting in the outbursts of violence against Denmark and other Western countries and their symbols abroad.

The cartoon crisis thus can be seen as a mutual failure to understand the cartoons' meanings and emotional connotations. The political actions though appear to be less motivated by the cartoons themselves, than by the lack of political dialogue and discussion in the immediate aftermath of the cartoons' publication. This communicative void between organized state actors and unorganized actors of civil society allowed for the intervention of fundamentalist actors who “occupied” the topic and instrumentalized the cartoon controversy for their violent goals. If a comparable incident is to be prevented in the future, channels of communication between Western civil societies and Muslim countries have to be established that enable controversial, but peaceful, exchanges of opinion. Additionally, both state and non-state political actors in the West have to become more self-assured of what is at stake: freedom of expression and freedom of the press as core values that cannot be compromised. This seems an enormous challenge, but not an impossible task. For political science, the cartoon crisis implies that the concept of “the political actor” has to be enlarged and adapted to the new conditions of globalized political communication.