In the wake of the latest unpleasantness between the Islamic world and the secular West this last week, one thing is certain: We haven't seen the last cartoons of Mohammed with a bomb tucked into his turban.
Thousands of angry young men from Gaza to Jakarta took to the streets last week to protest the representation of their spiritual leader as a violent hatemonger, firing Kalashnikovs into the air and burning French and Danish flags to emphasize the point. Reaction from Western leaders ran the gamut from conciliating platitude to principled articulation of liberal commitment to free speech.
When asked by a BBC reporter whether he regretted running the cartoons, Flemming Rose, culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, responded acidly, "I think asking me that question is like asking a rape victim if she regrets wearing a short skirt."
Rose's analogy may be somewhat disingenuous-short skirts are, after all, generally worn to provoke a more amorous reaction-but one thing is clear: The Danish cartoons were intended to provoke. And for this, we may all owe them a debt of gratitude, the Muslim community not least.
Amid all the journalistic martyr poses and political huffing over sensitivity, an important if rather obvious fact is being overlooked: Sometimes the truth hurts.
This is not to suggest that the cartoons present us with "truth" in a simple, straightforward way. Mohammed was not a terrorist, as the cartoons suggest (although I find difficult to find any fault in the notion that suicide bombers may not be greeted in the afterlife by a bevy of panting virgins). But what the cartoons do communicate-and this with devastating force-is the perception that many in the West hold of Islamic culture, a perception that has unfortunately been reinforced this past week by Muslim outrage over a provocation that would have attracted more yawns than protests had any other religious group been singled out. And, as many in the United States have very painfully learned in the years since Sept. 11, perceptions have consequences.
As a Christian theologian, I find my reaction to the events of this past week strangely mixed. On the one hand, I have it on good authority that the seat of mockers is no place for the righteous. Those cartoons were designed to wound, and wound they did. Part of my response, therefore, must surely be to grieve with those who grieve over the very public defamation of their culture.
On the other hand, I am acutely aware that such criticisms can often lead to positive change, even when they distort or exaggerate the truth-and what, after all, do caricatures do, but caricature? Christianity has been the subject of sustained satire ever since its birth two thousand years ago, and I am inclined to think that we Christians may be better for it. Sometimes these criticisms have come from within. Sometimes they have come from without, as when François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire led an insurgency of intellectuals and social activists against the repressive social policies of the Roman Catholic church in eighteenth-century Europe. Their battle cry: "Écrasez l'infâme!"
The "infamous" thing Voltaire was out to "crush" was Christianity itself. In a steady stream of satirical poems, plays and treatises over a period of several decades, Voltaire flayed the religious establishment of his day to the very bone, attacking not only the foibles of greedy prelates and over-zealous inquisitors, but also Christian claims to unique revelation and boldly asserting that Christianity was the only religion on the planet to practice such violent intolerance.
On this last point, of course, Voltaire was quite mistaken. But that wasn't the point. Voltaire was a master satirist, and as such, he knew that slavish fidelity to the facts could often get in the way of making a political point. Voltaire and his fellow philosophes had found a powerful weapon in their war on Christianity: ridicule. Insensitive, disrespectful, inaccurate, arrogant-all the contemporary negative buzzwords apply.
But even a distorted image can help us learn things about ourselves we might otherwise never have seen. The fact that Christian churches no longer advance their influence through military conquest or discipline their members by judicial torture is due, at least in part, to the efforts of Christians and non-Christians alike who had the courage to heap scorn and defiance on the sincerely held beliefs of others. These have been painful, humiliating experiences for the church, but Christianity became a bit more Christian because of them.
As a non-Muslim, it is not my place to tell Muslims how they ought to react to the effrontery of unbelievers. In the coming days, Muslims will have to interrogate their own traditions in order to decide how best to respond to these insulting caricatures. Calls for the beheading of the cartoons' authors bear witness to one kind of reality; calls for a more peaceful response bear witness to another. Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora seemed to have had just this issue in mind-the martyrion of his community-earlier this week when he condemned the violent protests in Beirut: "Islam has nothing to do with any of this, no matter how others disrespected the prophets, about whom God says, 'We have protected you from those who ridicule.'" Let's hope he's right.
David Fink is graduate student in religion.
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