For the last time, those cartoons

A final few words on the cartoons. Gary Younge made me come to terms with how I would feel if I was a Muslim and I had to go out on the streets of Copenhagen the day after [four months ago] a cartoon of Mohammed with a bomb for a turban was published. I wouldn’t feel good at all. I would object and demonstrate. How I would demonstrate I don’t know, because I cannot know how it feels to believe there is a one and only and true god and by believing in him I am better or at least more righteous or at least more right than the rest of humanity who do not so believe. But I might stand outside the Danish parliament (supposing that the Danes haven’t gone as far as New Labour in criminalising protest] with a placard of the cartoon in one hand and in the other a placard saying, “Look, Danes, is this really what you think of me?” [only in Danish].
So I take Gary Younge’s point - Jyllands-Posten had a right to publish the bomb cartoon, but they ought not to have.
But what about the one with the guy holding out his hands in front of a big cloud and saying, “Stop stop we ran out of virgins”? I don’t know how widespread among Muslims is the belief that so many virgins in Paradise is the reward for jihad, maybe none do, but it is a very offensive belief to a lot of non-Muslims, not all of us female or virgins, and in so far as the belief exists it deserves to be ridiculed. And if that hurts pride and wounds vanity and excites homicidal tantrums in the believers, tough shit.
The point here, the distinction between not publishing what is harmful and not publishing what is offensive, is a totally secular one, based on the morality of not damaging others in ways that you would not yourself wish to be damaged. (But even here there’s a side of me which says that I’m being over-careful. What if Christians objected to, say, a cartoon of the cross as a missile? With Bush’n’Blair at the control panel? Seems fair enough to me. If Christians objected to that I’d say, fuck off Christians. So what’s the difference with the turban as bomb?
Sometimes when I have been walking in our town when there are not many people about, and a group of Muslim men come towards me on the pavement, I have thought, if it was the other way round, if I was Muslim and this was a group of native men, who I might imagine in the failing light looked like the shaven men in shades packed close around Nick Griffin when he left court, or like IRA or UVF paramilitaries, in short pitiless, criminal, sadistic, destructive - then I would be scared witless. It is for that sort of consideration that I think it was wrong to publish the bomb cartoon. But the rest? Far and wide. Far and wide.
Finally, going back to one of my original arguments, that Islam needs to open itself up to criticism and modernity, here is the kind of question that needs to be debated. One, it is totally forbidden to make a graphic image of Mohammed. And two: “A group of ultra-conservative Danish imams set off for a tour of Saudi Arabia and Egypt with a dossier of the cartoons and several other cartoons, unrelated to the Jyllands-Posten drawings, showing Muhammad with the face of a pig and as a paedophile.”
In other words [if this story is true] these imams, when they came across these images so offensive to Mohammed and Allah, do not immediately destroy them as they are in the most sacred duty bound, but photocopy them, then draw or cause to be drawn some more very, very much viler portrayals of the Prophet, and then tootle off to the heart of Islam to pollute the sight of others in their thousands, their millions, with this filthy cargo. Come on, imams, get a grip.