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Insult and Civil Discourse
September 9, 2009
by Charles Hill

Charles Hill, a State Department expert on the Middle East during the Reagan administration, is on the faculty of the “Grand Strategy” seminar at Yale and is a senior lecturer at the university in International Studies.

Yale has been roundly condemned for Yale University Press’s decision not to reprint the Danish cartoons and other images of Muhammad. Yale is charged with failing to defend the principle of freedom of speech because it feared the possibility of violent retaliation, a “panel of experts” having advised that publication of the cartoons would incite such a dangerous reaction.

Yale need not have bothered with such a group, not least because any collection of lawyers, area specialists, and bureaucrats predictably will seek to cover themselves by coming up with the safest conclusion. Entirely apart from the pros and cons of the danger argument, there are strong reasons why Yale’s decision was correct. The Danish cartoons were deliberately designed and published to insult and inflame Muslims. They do not deserve inclusion in a catalogue of “Cartoons That Shook the World.” This was not a case of a cartoonist who had hit upon some heretofore unexpressed truth that the world needed to recognize in order to shake it up. It was simply an “up yours” thing. And the Muslim demonstrations also were deliberately incited and organized to further heighten the animosity. In this context there is a strong case to be made that the cartoons should not be reprinted because they would only perpetuate a vicious and ugly conflict which has nothing intelligent or enlightening about it.

There is in addition the long-standing effort by the United States, across presidential administrations, to get Arab newspapers to cease publishing just this kind of cartoon, images which do not make a policy point or offer a fresh angle of vision, just depict Jews as grotesque monsters in order to arouse hatred. Americans long ago recognized our own wrongful excesses in this regard in the graphic racist depictions of the Japanese during World War II.

There is as well a “civil discourse” argument. It is uniquely offensive to Muslims to depict the Prophet’s face. Just being basically respectful might be a good reason to hold off on this. The 1987 “Piss Christ” controversy, and a decade later the “Holy Virgin Mary” decorated with elephant dung on display in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, brought this issue to the fore. In the latter case Mayor Rudy Giuliani declared that such statements should not be censored but neither should they without question be put on display with taxpayers' money. Similarly, Yale University Press is not obligated to put Yale’s imprimatur on an item of no intellectual merit and a considerable potential for social harm. There is a difference between defending the freedom of even vile speech and putting the legitimacy and reputation of your institution--which represents a universe of peoples and ideas--behind it.

As for the other images of Muhammad, it depends. There have been many of them across history and in many cases Muslims have not particularly complained. Volume 1 of Marshall Hodgson’s great opus The Venture of Islam has a rather cartoonish sixteenth-century painting, owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of “The Prophet Preaching” with a veil over his face; it’s both powerful and charming. William McNeill’s long best-selling history The Rise of the West has not only Muhammad, but also Allah depicted in cartoons twice, portrayed respectfully, but nonetheless cartoons, with no protests about it recorded. There have been lots of other visual portrayals of Muhammad over the centuries, but the ones dropped from the YUP book don't sound like they warrant the category of “shook the world,” e.g., Gustave Dore’s illustration for Dante’s Inferno. For all these reasons, I think Yale’s decision has merit.  

Related

“Yale University Press and the Danish Cartoons” (9/9/09)

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