Charlie Hebdo and the need to reconsider liberal satire

Murder is not the equivalent of satire, and so when Jihadists kill satirical writers and cartoonists in the heart of liberal Paris, our first instinct is disbelief that anyone should kill over the production of a quick sketch of an historical figure, Mohammed. Such incomprehension has been expressed across global media; in Kenya, by columnists such as The Standard's excellent Peter Kimani, who correctly can't accept 'murder as a response to satire'.

In the aftermath of the horrific Hebdo killings, commentators have argued this is a case of the right to free speech and to offend versus intolerance and the desire on part of gate-keeping fundamentalists (of any belief system) to ban everything that's contrary to their skewed interpretations of faith.

While I think this binary is a part of the story, I think it's an equally skewed interpretation of events. By which I mean, I think it's a very Franco-centric or liberal-centric position, typical of liberal democracies around the world. Let's take a journey.

In the Qur'an, there are no bans regarding visual depictions of Mohammed; this restriction is instead part of later tradition, particularly in Sunni Islam. However, although sections of the Islamic world will happily produce images of Mohammed, it's nevertheless true that Muslim art has generally shunned portraiture because this might lead to idolatry, which the Qur'an indeed does condemn.

It's all about interpretations of scripture. But, generally speaking, there is everything from sensitivity to outright loathing of depictions of Mohammed across much of Islam, from groups often patronised as 'moderate' to those demonised as 'extremist'.

The problem compounds when we come to satirical cartoons. As academic Grace Musila reminds us with regard to Gado's productions, cartoons deliberately distort 'certain salient features' of a subject; so, cartoons of former President Moi exaggerated the gap between his teeth. But an important difference needs noting: when picking on an individual's personal characteristics, cartoonists are possibly just being 'cheeky'! 

The problem comes when we slip from cheekiness into racism by portraying whole groups in certain ways.  Take the offending Hebdo cartoons portraying 'Arab' Muslims: the noses are long and bent. Take old Western cartoons featuring 'blacks': noses were broad, the skin jet black, and the eyeballs boggled. Hebdo's twenty-first century doodles of 'Arabs' are the direct descendents of older French cartoons that stereotyped Arabs as bent-nosed, dirty and slyly cruel.

They are racist, despite the Hebdo authors' self-proclaimed liberalism; Hebdo has run numerous racist covers in the past, against Arabs, against blacks...  And when you add obvious racism against Arab Muslims to knowingly 'heretical' images of Mohammed, and you factor in previous fundamentalist attacks (Hebdo was firebombed some years ago), well, the possible consequences should be clear.

Not only clear, but it might be suggested that you have not only 'provoked' extremists with the same 'premeditation' that they supposedly exhibited when later murdering you (a disproportionate response, it's true), but moreover you have contributed to Islamic extremism by angering 'moderate' Muslims in a country where many find themselves already economically marginalized in Parisian suburbs.  You have added cultural insult to economic injury.  The problem with the right to offend is that people in return have a right to be offended, and human responses to offence are various.

Now, the rights to free speech and to offend are, to employ an ironic word, sacrosanct things in secular France. Hebdo fitted firmly into a French tradition of anti-clericalism and of legal rights granted to individual citizens. Or, in President François Hollande's version, Hebdo partook of 'The French Way of Life'. That 'Way of Life' has, since the French Revolution, been 'Liberal'.

Liberalism is a clumsy collection of values, loosely cohering into an ideology. Generally speaking, it is an ideology that emerged in Europe in opposition to forms of abusive absolutism. It values individualism over corporate forms of social obedience.  Consequently, it considers faith to be a matter of private conscience, not public living.

We might say then that it is tied up with Enlightenment Northern Europe's sense of free-thinking secularism.  It appeals to legalism in its defence of citizen rights, and values a strong civil society as a way of checking authoritarian State power. France and New Constitution Kenya are liberal in these senses, or aspire to be. Liberalism has some virtues, for sure, but its clumsy system cannot comprehend Islam.

When, following a tragedy of this type, the French (and other Westerners) assert their rights to free speech and to offend, they are asserting traditional cultural values of liberalism that stem from the peculiarities of French history.  They are asserting rights that are very specific and bounded to Western history (that of EuroAmerica) rather than the Universal Human Rights that they and other (neo) liberal players believe them to be. Such 'Universal' Rights are really, instead, imperialist, as powerful countries possessed of a seemingly benign liberalism project their very particular values across the globe.

France's and the liberal world's tendency to resort to defences of full freedom of speech are not unrelated to France's questionable colonial policy of assimilation, which granted 'French' status to colonized people so long as they deracinated and 're-cultured' themselves into supposed French values. 

In what now seems like a distant time and place (although we are talking still about France, only a few decades ago) the call for everyone within France's borders to respect 'Our Way of Life' probably didn't sound so far-fetched, as the cynical policy of assimilation saw that even those who looked very different were forced into a putative 'French' mould. 

To tell a mid-twentieth century Muslim in France to respect 'French Values' was to preach to the partially converted, to the Muslim who kept his/her religion as a personal affair.  But we live in a very different world today, of multiculturalism, of immigrants' rights to maintain their own corporate identities within 'host' countries. 

When we today ask a French Muslim to 'fully respect French freedoms of speech and to offend', and especially when we demand as 'The French' that people from foreign countries and cultures respect our ways regardless of how they impinge upon them, the 'foreign others', we are asking something downright chauvinistic and nationalistic, even while we profess our 'liberalism'. 

My own left-wing conscience in a complex world of migration and diversity makes me think that liberalism is in danger of becoming a fascistic (in the sense of conformity-insisting) ideology in a postcolonial, multicultural world that it can't understand. Liberals are the new racists, the new fundamentalist believers in monocultures while neighbourhoods change, excitingly, around them.

Why should other cultures respect the unbridled freedom of speech of, say, France, when that freedom's deliberately abused to cause offence and provoke negative responses in those it condemns as a corporate group? Why should the 'French Way of Life' dictate how Muslims either within the country or, certainly, abroad, interpret political cartoons from the French satirical tradition?  It's like asking a Jewish school student to respect and accept Shakespeare's intended treatment of Shylock. Why should they?

Liberalism is an inappropriate ideology today, in politics and in literary studies.  My view is that a new leftwing-ism based in functioning, responsible States might better communicate with and fairly contest the fundamentalism of extremists of all sorts, by dialogue rather than inflammatory condescension or only militarism.  I have no time for violent extremism, for scriptural fundamentalism, for those who'd kill us as we work or who'd wish chaos and caliphates upon us.  Consequently, I also have little time for old, discredited forms of liberalism that are themselves fundamentalist and incapable of cross-cultural discourse.

In short, I don't see why the majority of perfectly innocent 'moderate' Muslims should be confronted with the same motivated, provocative offensiveness as those few, presumably targeted  extremists which they are, by implication, lumped together with by the 'liberal' satirists who not only produce images of Mohammed (this is not the point), but caricatures that are racist and otherwise inflammatory.  Let inflammatory satirists be confronted for exacerbating the very situation that they claim to be remedying; they are not above the law, and the ability to evince hateful laughter from racist readers is hardly a noble pursuit.

Satire has always been an impotent genre; we learnt this from satirical 'Disillusionment Literature' across Africa, when that literature changed nothing; we learnt it when Moi started inviting the Reddykyulass group of performers to functions to parody him, unphased by their irreverence; we know it daily when we see the newspaper cartoon, which we smile at and swiftly 'move on' from. 

Satirical laughter was always a pompously distracting, self-satisfied laughter that was easily quashed or dismissed by power.  Now, in France, we have seen that much satire is not only toothless, but that it is also unfunny, often racist, and deadly.  It is not cowardice to give up on a failed genre once it has outlived its usefulness.  Inflammatory satire is the genre of a dying liberalism.  The pen must do better than this against the swords of contemporary extremism.