Mocking Muhammad

My like-minded colleague Mahmood stated in his last post that mocking the Prophet Muhammad is "univerally [sic] offensive to all Muslims and entirely lacking in any substantive goal besides causing such offense." That's a hard statement to disagree with or to disprove.

But I'll try anyway. Any responsible newspaper would never consciously try to offend a segment of its readership. In the case of Jyllands-Posten in late 2005, the goal of printing cartoons featuring Muhammad was clearly to test how offensive to Muslims they could be and still get away with it. But what about a television show whose entire purpose is to mock, ridicule, and disturb -- relentlessly and indiscriminately? Can the Prophet claim immunity against equal-opportunity offending?

Of course, the show is South Park. But for all the press about last year's two-part episode that was intentionally designed to test the limits of Comedy Central's censors, there's been a key oversight. A well-known episode of the show five years ago prominently featured Muhammad and not a peep was heard, from religious groups or otherwise. There's a great interview with Matt Parker & Trey Stone in Reason magazine a few months ago, and it's worth quoting at length:

Trey Parker: ... This is what happened. I was on my honeymoon in Disney World. I turned on the television, and there were thousands of rioting Muslims, and the caption said, "Muslims enraged over cartoon." And I said, "Oh, shit. What did we do?"

We actually did an episode five years ago with Muhammad in it. It was an episode called "Super Best Friends," and Muhammad had super powers and turned himself into a beaver and then killed Abraham Lincoln. I thought, "They finally just saw it, and they're all pissed off." But no, it was those other cartoons that they were mad about.

So Matt and I were like, "This is great; we have our first episode." Comedy Central kept saying, "We're not going to broadcast a Muhammad episode." And we said, "You totally have the right, it's your network, but we're going to make one, and it's going to be one of the seven you pay for."

Given some of the details from the Danish cartoon conflagration, of course, this isn't all that surprising. It was months after the cartoons were first published that opportunistic leaders in the Middle East finally decided to use them to incite violence -- months during which no institution in Denmark, government, press or otherwise, listened to any of the legitimate Muslim grievances from groups within the country.

And a Wikipedia-inspired glance through history shows that there are several schools of thought on this issue; Muhammad has been depicted in Muslim art before, and different people have different standards as to what should be acceptable.

But Parker's quote above highlights a key distinction we need to make: between mocking Muhammad or just plain depicting Muhammad. During the cartoon controversy, we were told endlessly that depicting Muhammad was absolutely offensive to Muslims, and that this was different from mocking Jesus or other religious figures (last year's South Park made this point by juxtaposing a censored image of Muhammad and a defecating Jesus Christ).

Obviously, mocking any religious figure is intended to offend adherents to that religion. If done in the context of a series that offends both for its own sake and to make larger points about society, I don't see the big deal. In the context of a newspaper intended to serve the public good, the argument against it is obvious. But again, both of these scenarios are different from a prohibition on merely depicting Muhammad -- something any liberal society should reject.

Mahmood, in his post, referred only to "mocking." My guess is that he believes depictions of the Prophet in other contexts are fine, since he did introduce me to the "Super Best Friends" episode some years ago. Your move, sire.