It is generally understood that Muslims are incapable of being undogmatic, free from compulsion, and unable to hold their beliefs at arm’s length to make room for satire and self-criticism. The possibility of a culture of freedom is to see humour, and joke about things in life while still upholding the values of whatever your faith is.
Forget Middle Eastern Muslims, even European Muslims find it difficult. For Indian Muslims, it goes a few steps ahead. They generally can make fun of gods and goddesses of other faiths, but when it comes to their own, out come the swords and stones.
Lampooning gods and goddesses are not alien to the majority culture of Hinduism in India, among Buddhists (laughing roly-poly Buddha souvenirs in all gift shops in any Asian country) or in Sikhism. Only Muslims keep satire away from their text, Prophet, Caliphs and events following the edicts in the Hadith.
That is not to say Muslims do not have a sense of humour. It is just certain areas they have kept taboo, but feel free to indulge when it comes to the faith of other communities. Hence, Muslim stand-up comedians are lionised because of this one-way satire, but Muslim humourists who venture into taboo territories are damned, cursed, issued death threats and even assassinated.
I chanced upon Aziz Nesin’s profile while researching controversial Muslim figures. The Great Turkish Contrarian stands tall in the satire scene, and he was also the Turkish translator of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1993. A fierce critic of the state and a committed enemy of conservatism, he regularly got on people’s nerves, be they Islamists, secularists, or liberals, and this cost him his freedom many times. An attempt to murder him was unsuccessful when a hotel where he was gathered with other secularists was burned down for inciting hatred by publishing excerpts from Rushdie’s book.
Now to recall, Turkey is fiercely secular due to Kemalism (Ataturk’s abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate and his iron will to get Turkey modernised). So as a satirical writer he was celebrated in intellectual circles, a gallery showcasing his legacy in Istanbul’s most passionately conservative neighbourhood of all places – Tophane. But the future generations will hardly know about his legacy; an incident of paint vandalism on the gallery hoarding proved how much he was misunderstood in Erdogan’s Turkey.
Europe is not free of this outrage and ‘sensitivity’ from Muslims; the Charlie Hebdo massacre is not far in memory, and neither is the beheading of Samuel Paty. Comedians, writers, painters, cartoonists, satirists, and actors continue to avoid Islam’s taboo subjects, preferring to focus on Jews, Hindus, Americans, Europeans, and the occasional Sikh.
The history of satire in European culture is the history of emancipation from the divine rule – that is, Enlightenment. Where Voltaire was a giant among men of letters in the Age of Enlightenment, its values too were not spared by Jonathan Swift in his Gulliver’s Travels enriching civilised discourse of publishing counter arguments, rebuttals, rejoinders to opinions, satire, enacting plays leading to the great Western culture of resisting authority, keeping it in check if it gets tyrannical.
People forget Rushdie’s book did not get a fatwa just because it satirised the Prophet and his wives but because Khomeini was ridiculed in it too and with authoritarian figures and totalitarian regimes suppressing dissent is a tradition and habit.
For centuries, the Islamic world kept itself isolated from the rest of humankind, gazing at its shadows, like Plato’s allegory of the cave; convinced that no wider world existed beyond its borders – only to have the more advanced “other” show up, violently throwing the cave open – Napoleon Bonaparte’s fleet landing at Alexandria in 1798, for example.
Instead of accepting that a technologically superior power defeated a locked standstill civilisation, the instinct was to turn towards Islam and identity politics; always a perfect opportunity for orthodox religious zealots to cash in when there was a geopolitical crisis. Feeding the collective fears of Muslims, invoking the memory of the Prophet’s time the orthodoxy pursued their religious mission turning people’s shame into fear – a useful weapon to keep the masses under control.
What the outrage industry does further exploits this fear of people using the rise of right-wing political parties, conservative politicians and sentiments as fodder to prove their narrative of the Oppression Olympics of Muslims worldwide. Muslim and non-Muslim communities demanding answers for Arab expansionism, invasions, conquests, Turkic-Mongol pillage and plunder in history, put the outrage industry in a corner so they build this ecosystem of ABCEs (abroad-based conflict entrepreneurs) funded by the military-industrial complex always looking for a war and disgruntled billionaires like Soros wanting to be key players in geopolitics.
The Muslim world never having self-introspected for centuries lap up the narrative of oppression and turn on the critics of Islam’s regressive practices, literally terming them as traitors who have declared war and tried to shut them down with the constructed and misleading term “Islamophobia”.
In India the ‘Khan Market’ outrage brigade of elite Muslim liberals has made it common to label every dissenter within the Muslim community as a ‘house nigger’ and non-Muslim as a “Sanghi” or “bhakt” (used derogatively to manipulate and malign issues such as CAA, the NRC, Triple Talaq, Uniform Civil Code, Article 370, Agniveer scheme, farming laws, etc). The more the outrage industry puts perimeters around the Indian Muslim minds, the more they rely on left-leaning, anti-Hindu, anti-India portals such as The Wire, Quint, News Laundry, Scroll, etc – publications invested in breaking India up.
In return, the 18 crores 90 lakh Muslims (2011 census) firmly believe in the majority of Hindus’ hostility, thus enforcing a moral code on its own Muslims strictly, pressurising them to show loyalty to the community (Ummah) rather than the nation (India).
The outrage cabal practises psychological and intellectual self-deceit by amplifying incidents against Muslims ferociously feeding into the global narrative of Indian Muslims targeted by Hindus and the global agenda of keeping India embroiled in its fault lines. Simultaneously, the Indian Muslim mind entangled in the victimhood narrative censors crimes of their own Muslims against Hindus or even Muslims feigning ignorance.
Anyone trying to objectively create a bridge between the two mistrusting communities due to this lopsided media shenanigans is loathed and termed a traitor to the Muslim cause (Darul Islam). Because of the advent of technology and millions of Muslim households now picking up smartphones and having access to the Internet, the influence of the outside world is increasingly forcing many to rethink, relearn, unlearn, and criticise what is fed to them.
The outrage industry closes ranks and punishes those who step out of the line – Islamic reformists have paid dearly time and again with their lives too for attempting to herald in change.
It will require tremendous rethinking, and some out-of-the-box strategies to come up with to cope and stay many steps ahead of this psy-ops war in the 21st century.