The
Mohammad cartoons:
It takes two to avoid a clash
of civilizations
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
February 6 2006
LONDON - Iconoclasm - the
destruction of the figurative depiction of God and his
prophets- was one of the important factors that in the
ninth century strengthened the split between Roman
Catholicism and Byzantine Orthodoxy. In fact the
iconoclastic movement of the Eastern Church was in part a
sympathetic reaction to the puritanical values of Islam.
Later the Reformation led to similar moves against
Catholic practices with Protestants stripping out of
their churches images of Mary and the saints and the
crucifix became bodiless.
The reaction against the Danish
newspaper cartoon drawing of Muhammad with his turban
pierced with a bomb should come as no surprise to
Christendom.
The Danes are going through a
strange period of over emphasis, which undoubtedly has
something to do with insecurities over their threatened
culture and small population on the outer edge of
northern Europe. During World War 2 the sense of
beleaguered independence worked the other way, making the
Danes the heroes of the struggle to save the Jews at risk
under the German occupation.
But latterly this quirky
individualism has led Danes to vote in referenda against
two important developments in the expansion of the
European Union and to become arguably, under the
influence of a rapidly growing anti-immigrant political
party, the most extreme of all Europeans in legislating
against the consequences of immigration.
Indeed, when a non-European
foreigner marries a Dane the couple may have to live in
nearby Malmö over the bridge in Sweden, such is the
rigor of a relatively new Danish law. This tendency
toward a certain rabid distrust and dislike of immigrants
is not to be found in next-door Sweden even though Sweden
proportionately has more immigrants. No Swedish newspaper
has decided to reprint the cartoons as an act of
solidarity.
Censorship is one of the most
sensitive of all issues. A rating system is accepted in
countries around the world as a way of protecting
children from sex and violence in the cinema. And in some
countries - Sweden and Britain come to mind - gratuitous
violence and sex can still be deleted by a government
censor.
Journalists regularly practice
self-censorship. I do in this column - I don't put into
print the kind of verbal vitriol I might utter with
friends after a few glasses of wine when I'm discussing
the war in Iraq. I'm aware that I have to take my readers
with me.
Famously, the Washington Post
decided not to print a quote from the attorney general
during the Watergate scandal threatening, if the paper
pursued its investigations, that Mrs Katharine Graham's
(the newspaper's owner) "tit would be caught in the
mangle".
Taste and respect should be
important journalistic virtues.
The Muslim reaction to the cartoons
is not a demand that non-Muslims live by Muslim religious
codes, as many have charged, it is simply asking for the
basic politeness that societies everywhere believe in -
there is more than one way of making a point and crude
insults never got anyone anywhere.
This doesn't mean that immigrants
in Western societies shouldn't conform to what the local
culture considers are important values - like freedom of
speech or the equal role of women. They must. If they
don't approve or like the societies to which they are
drawn for economic reasons they shouldn't migrate. They
have to respect not just the opportunity to work but the
way the host society works. You can't enter someone
else's house and insist on altering the furniture.
Emigration from one's own country and culture has always
involved an act of renunciation, not just of family but
of culture too.
Likewise, we in the richer world
have to recognize the transformed world we now live in
where communications are so fast and borders so porous.
We shouldn't live in a way that gives gratuitous offence.
We need a franker discussion on certain aspects of our
Western culture. When we debate same-sex marriages or the
reach and extent of pornography in the hotel industry or
even how young women dress are we sensitive to the fact
that we no longer live alone?
We are part of the global village
and we can upset and hurt other peoples by displaying our
own extreme personal ideas of liberty. A woman's best
friend is what she can hint at, not what she can wave
like a football fan's flag. As Jean-Christoph Rufin,
winner of the Prix Goncourt, wrote in his recent novel
"Brazil Red", "The genius of civilization lay precisely
in making sexuality blossom while keeping it hidden away,
in revealing through dissimulation, in moving the very
soul through modesty and artifice."
In this and all things a little
more modesty would serve the West well. We should reflect
that it takes two to make a clash of
civilizations.
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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