The recent Danish cartoon controversy, some say, unmasks the deep-rooted fault lines that make a conflict between the West and the Muslim world inevitable. The argument is framed as a simple clash between conflicting cultures.
The Muslim world, it is said, is sure that its way of dealing with the relationship between religions and government - namely, that Islam is government - is best. The rules of Islam are handed down by God and therefore indubitable. Government rule should reflect those laws. Those who do not believe in the rules of Islam are simply wrong.
The West, it is said, is sure that its doctrine of religious pluralism and liberal, secular government is best. According to Western ideology, the existence of multiple conflicting ways of viewing the world is inevitable, and it is each individual's right to choose for him or herself among them. A government, therefore, cannot impose any religion on its citizens. Government rule should not impose religious beliefs, nor should it privilege one religion over another.
Certain Islamic laws forbid the depiction of Mohammed. Muslims, therefore, call out Westerners who support the newspapers that printed the Jyllands-Posten cartoons for having violated Islamic law. But Western governments try to explain that they are not supposed to force their citizens to follow any religious laws. In this cartoon controversy, it is said, these two conflicting visions of the relationship between state and religion have come into conflict.
This "clash of civilizations" thesis has dramatically oversimplified a complex conflict. It is true that, in this instance, an important factor in the controversy is the disagreement about whether government should adopt and enforce religious doctrine. But this is obviously not the first time the West has depicted Mohammed in an offensive way. For example, the United States Supreme Court has had a depiction of Mohammed in its White Marble Courtroom since the 1930s. Indeed, a Muslim group asked then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist to allow it to replace the depiction of the image with quotes from Mohammed in 1997, and a small riot erupted in India when he offered a polite "No."
Why was more ire not directed against that depiction of Mohammed? Indeed, since the recent violence over the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, the representation has received new attention. But for years it went relatively unnoticed, and even when it did attract attention, that attention was only minor.
The reason for the vitriolic tenor of the recent controversy - and the lack of significant controversy surrounding the Supreme Court's Mohammed - is historical context, not some transhistorical cultural conflict. There is a lot of anti-Americanism and anti-Western sentiment floating around the Middle East, fueled by a variety of historical currents like globalization, the Iraq war, Israel and the propaganda rhetoric of "us against them" used by many Middle Eastern governments to maintain their own stability in the face of public unrest.
Different groups of people often have fundamentally opposing views of each other, the way the world works or how life ought to be lived. However, it is not merely the existence of ideological disagree-ments between the West and the Islamic world that has caused the violence over cartoons, even if this conflict is ostensibly at the center of it.
This conflict should not be simplified and cannot be understood outside of its historical context. If you ignore the influence of American support for Israel, the worldwide media coverage of the abuses at Abu Ghraib or generous American support for Pakistan following the 2005 earthquake, you lose the whole picture. The conflict between Islamic fundamentalism and religious pluralism may be as irreconcilable as the conflict between pro-life and pro-choice, or the 18th-century conflict between French Catholics and English Protestants. But the "clash of civilizations" we are seeing was not inevitable. Neither is a peaceful solution if we avoid oversimplifying the conflict.
Matthew Lawrence '06 has never seen "Titanic," and he never will.
