SHOULD ONE CONDEMN AN ARTIST?

Artistic freedom of expression is a Western value

The outrage against the Jyllands Posten newspaper in Denmark has surprised a great many people, including, I suspect, many Muslims. There have been demonstrations and violence all over the Middle East and virtually everywhere where there are populations of Muslims.

Now, there is undoubtedly a case against persons who "hit with words" and possibly with pictures. Should one therefore join the surges of fury against the cartoonist at Jyllands Posten and the other European newspapers who have published the (originally) Danish cartoons?

The clash between the majority of the Islamic 'Ummah' and the majority viewpoint of the rest of the world is fundamentally, I submit, a conflict of approaches to life. The Western way, especially in recent centuries, is to probe the unknown and to challenge orthodox assumptions. Typically, nothing is left to be assumed to be axiomatic. The Eastern way is, was and may always be to accept knowledge by revelation to be the highest form of learning and not to rock the boat - with dire consequences for those who break the rule.

The Danish newspaper says that it was testing the limits of free expression and the drawings were an exercise in that regard. The problem is that the people who were implicitly the subject matter of the test were not in favour of the experimental approach.

Do you remember the Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses crisis of the late 20th Century? That blew over in time. This will blow over too, in time.

The trouble is that the foundational difference in approach between the two cultures will remain long after this flap is consigned to history.

In an integrated world, it seems that there are some people who cannot live in such a way that they are in cognitive if not in geographical contact with vastly different human beings. That is the trouble in a nutshell and the abiding tragedy of the Danish cartoons.

THE END