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The right to freely express
Phuong Nguyen
From the Mar 13 print edition
Updated: Today at 06:02 AM
Professor Tariq Modood was the Snider Visiting Lecturer of 2007-2008. From Feb. 25-27, he conducted a lecture on “Multiculturalism and Secularism” and was a part of a panel discussion on “The Future of Multicuturalism.” On Feb. 26, Professor Modood and Professor Triadafilopoulos conducted a student seminar which explored the issues of freedom of expression and censorship in “The Danish Cartoon Controversy.”
Why did you choose the Danish Cartoon Affair as a topic for this discussion?
Well, I think it is an important, recent controversy; and sometimes you can best discuss an issue, especially I think with students, where there are principals at stake. But instead of just talking about the principals themselves by themselves, you see them in operation in a certain political conflict. So, I thought, the cartoon controversy was a good way of capturing people’s imagination about a clash of principals that have to do with freedom, and with respect, with democracy and with protecting minorities.
How do you feel this discussion/issue is relevant to this campus, UTSC?
Having walked around, I see it as a campus that as it were, the large majority of students are obviously from minority backgrounds; in particular from non-European origins. I see a lot of East and South Asian-looking people, and I guess that certainly includes Muslims. So I imagine issues about equality and respect are pretty germane, are pretty important to this campus. But this is a university, it is a place where intellectual freedom has to be exercised and protected and so I can imagine that maybe sometimes issues can arise here where some people are saying they are exercising intellectual freedom and others say hey, “But you’re [being] disrespectful to my group.”
How did you first encounter these cartoons?
I was actually in India at the time, attending a conference in New Dehli. And I began to pick up some news stories that some cartoons had been published and some Muslims were protesting against it and that these protests were becoming international and potentially violent...Middle Eastern governments were involved and some of them were recalling their ambassadors from Denmark. I could see some big major event was happening. And then I was on the plane back to Britain, and when I got back to Britain, I realized that the story wasn’t going to go away; that it was developing further. And then, you know, I sat down to catch up on all the details. And it really relates very strongly to my work and my Muslim background. So, you know, I decided to write something about it, initially for a website, which published my piece and I sent it to various friends and colleagues including a Canadian e-mail network called Ethnicity and Democratic Governance. Some academic colleagues started to debate the issues by email, and it kind of grew and grew and in the end, we developed our thinking into short articles which we published together as a critical debate.
In your essay “The Liberal Dilemma,” you compare the way that [the public] received the violence of the Detroit and LA riots as an understanding of how people resisted the violence of the Muslims protests [against the Danish Cartoons]. Can you explain that?
Yes. This is an observation that strikes me quite often: that we often employ double standards when we judge different groups of people. When we see, for instance, African-Americans involved in an angry riot following the big one in Los Angeles, [it] followed a case of police brutality: an African-American named Rodney King was captured on video being beaten up by a number of policemen. In general, there’s quite a lot of sympathy from what someone might call center-left intellectuals, especially social science intellectuals. But when you get Muslims involved in angry protests, the opposite is the case: that the very same individuals often refuse to attend the grievance, refuse to focus on the grievance because they are so, as it were, emotionally gripped by the violence. And I think this is a real problem, and this leads to real Muslims receiving very little sympathy because the image of Muslims to secular liberal intellectuals [is that] angry Muslims are more frightening than angry poor people or angry black people, and I think we need to cultivate sympathy for Muslims. Of course, this is very difficult at a time when we have some Muslims engaged in international terrorism, but nevertheless, I think we need to not see Muslims in the shadow of that terrorism, and see Muslims in their ordinary vulnerabilities and concerns, and try to understand what moves them.
Do you see these cartoons then as a sort of war propaganda? Because I know you’ve made some comparisons to the Nazi depiction of Jews [in your essay].
I do think that they are propagandistic, yes. I think that they are demonizing Muslims. Whether the cartoonists intended on doing that or not, that’s what they are doing. It’s quite possible that the cartoonists didn’t intend on doing that in some deep way; they aren’t part of some propaganda organization, I can certainly see that. But you know, in our present time, when there’s so much fear about Muslims as violent people, as terrorists, to portray the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist is to suggest that potentially any Muslim could be a terrorist. That is very damaging.
Do you think the cartoons should have been banned?
I am not sure; I certainly think that one or two of the cartoons like the bomb-in-the-turban one are racist, and so ought not to have been printed, but of course not all racist images can be banned as opposed to censured—that would be too illiberal.
Tariq Modood is a professor of sociology at the University of Bristol’s Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship. His essay “The Liberal Dilemma: Integration of Vilification?” can be found here: http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-terrorism/liberal_dilemma_3249.jsp
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