Though living in France, I occasionally follow debates on Daily Kos, and it seems to me that Charlie Hebdo's controversial cartooning style when it comes to religion is not completely understood abroad. Its offensiveness has been pointed out, lately in a Joe Sacco page here. The page was retweeted approvingly by Ta-Nehisi Coates, whom I respect enormously otherwise —but I believe in this case there is some misunderstanding.
Sacco asks, for instance, why Charlie Hebdo sacked one of its own cartoonists for being antisemite, while allowing others to draw what a lot of people would consider offensively anti-Muslim cartoon. Isn't this a case of hypocrisy? Not really, as I explain below the fold.
Actually, "offensively anti-Muslim" is a completely wrong description of Charlie Hebdo's cartoons, at least from the point of view of the people who drew them. As a rule, the cartoonists did not attack Muslims as Muslims (whereas the sacked cartoonist did attack Jews as Jews, hence the sacking), and they did not even attack Islam per se. Rather, they attacked Islam as one element of a larger set of revealed religion, all equally hateful. They expressed a deep hatred of organized religious institutions, first and foremost, and for most of them (but not all) a rejection of all religious thinking. This is what their work was all about: attacking religious authorities and sometimes religion in general, and this blanket attack grew straight from the French revolt against an extremely oppressive Catholic Church in the 18th century.
The visual and intellectual equipment of both anticlericalism (attacking religious institutions) and antireligion (attacking religion in general) was consolidated around 1900. Anticlericalism was at the heart of the secularization of all public spaces (including schools) which took place in France between 1880 and 1910. But Jules Ferry, one of the leaders of the secularizing movement, took pains to explain that what had to be destroyed was not religion in itself, but the political and institutional power of religion (for anybody reading French, here is his "Letter to schoolteachers" which is a perfect presentation of what the original version of French laïcité was really all about).
A second, more virulent strain of secularizers did think that religious beliefs in and of themselves were medieval superstitions to be rooted out, that reason and enlightenment would eventually lead humanity on the road to complete atheism. For these "free-thinkers" (as they styled themselves), New Age types from Boulder would be just as bad as Fundamentalist Christians from the Bible Belt, or Islamists for that matter; all would be denounced as benighted brains clutching at shadows.
Charlie Hebdo's cartoonists were generally both anticlerical and antireligious, though some of them would probably have been agnostics, and merely anticlerical. But it's important to keep in mind that in both traditions, Islam held no special position at all; and also that in practice, anticlericalism was much more important than antireligion.
Read the various images being published now. A first, large group of anticlerical drawings took aim at imams as part of a larger set generally including a rabbi or a bishop, or both. Charb's "Untouchables" describes a rabbi pushing an imam seated in a wheelchair, both saying "It's forbidden to make fun [of us]". The caption, "Untouchables 2", refers to a feel-good movie about handicap, and manages to be offensive to several constituencies at once. Another cover by Cabu depicts a rabbi, a bishop and an imam, all three muscular and advancing threateningly on the reader while shouting "Charlie must be put under veil", i.e. censored.
A second group of cartoons came also straight from the 18th century anticlerical fighters' handbook, and would have been eagerly endorsed by Voltaire or Diderot, and probably Ferry and many IIIrd Republic secularizers as well (as far as contents were concerned only of course; the raunchy 21st century presentation would have shocked!). These cartoons took aim at the distance between the actual teachings of various religious leaders, primarily Muhammad and Jesus, and the behavior of their followers. The following covers illustrate this (and contain representations of Muhammad, so, for those who don't want to see that, don't click!). In one, Cabu's Muhammad, seated on a cloud, has his head in his hands, weeping and saying "It's tough to be loved by a--holes". This cover by Charb, captioned "If Muhammad came back..." shows a kneeling Prophet about to have his throat slit by a Jihadi fighter, with the following dialogue: -"I am the Prophet, stupid!" / "Shut up, you infidel!".
Both covers assert that Fundamentalist Islam is deeply, even violently, opposed to the teachings of the Prophet. But again this line of criticism was never specific to Islam in Charlie Hebdo. Charb explicitely made the point that the same opposition between teachings and reality held true for both Jesus and Muhammad. On the cover linked here, Jesus on the cross carries with his outstretched arms two suitcases full of money. The page is captioned "Revelations on Opus Dei finances", the Opus Dei being an extreme-right wing and extremely wealthy lobby within the Catholic Church, and Jesus exclaims, "It's tough to be financed by a--holes", a direct quote of the cover by Cabu described earlier.
This particular set of cartoons, by the way, show that Charlie Hebdo was and is much more anticlerical than antireligious. All three covers depicted Muhammad and Jesus in a positive light, and implied that one could be a "good" religious person, something true antireligious militant would have denied.
A third family of cartoons took aim at Islamic Fundamentalists, again not merely because they were Muslims, but because they practiced a warped version of religion and indulged in violence. And again in the anticlerical tradition, Charlie Hebdo's cartoonists often took pains to make clear that in this respect Islam was neither worse nor better that the other two major religions under attack, Christianity and Judaism, as in this cartoon by Cabu, which did not make the cover. The caption reads "One God, two suspects", and presents a bearded Islamic Fundamentalist, and an extreme-right wing, crew-cut French officer, brandishing two books with the respective titles "Fundamentalist Coran" and "Fundamentalist Bible". Again the implication is that there are other possible versions and uses of the two books, and while Cabu was often bordering on the antireligious, to my knowledge he never lampooned in his cartoons a group of believers just because they believed. The issue for him was always that a particular form of belief would include elements he found repellent —traditionalism, violence, political oppression, etc.
A last family of cartoon was more specifically antireligious, rather than merely anticlerical. Luz, who escaped the massacre, was much more representative of this school than either Cabu or Charb. I will not link his drawings here, not because I think the drawings should not circulate (this is a discussion on drawings, so it would be hard to have it without seeing them!), but because the littl I know of U.S. law makes me think that Kos would run a serious legal risk of being condemned for distributing obscene material. There is a way around, though: type "Luz Vingt-Trois Charlie" in Google images, and you will find a cover of God sodomized by Jesus, himself sodomized by the Holy Spirit, with the caption "Monsignore Vingt-Trois [Catholic archbishop of Paris] has three fathers: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit". This is blasphemy pure and simple, and again, straight out of the more antireligious strands of pamphleteers from the 18th and 19th century, the goal being to boast of one's complete lack of respect for revealed religion, considered bad per se.
Why this longish analysis? In my view, when people take Charlie Hebdo to task for "gratuitously offending" religion, or when Sacco draws a racist cartoon and an antisemitic cartoon to make the same point, a larger point is missed. Sacco's racist cartoons do not contain a political message except for a possible call for extermination, in the Nazi tradition, which is why such expressions of racism are banned in France. Charlie Hebdo's cartoons do contain a political message, to be replaced in the context of a plurisecular French political movement against various forms of religious power in society, and in part against religion itself. Even Luz' simple-minded antireligiosity has to be understood as a campaign to convince people to give up on religious beliefs. The goal is not to offend, but to denounce, which is different. We may disagree with Charlie Hebdo's efforts both on the substance and on the form, but we should recognize them for what they are.
Another post would be needed to explain why, in the French context, this blanket anticlerical/antireligious position ended up squarely in the crosshairs of local Muslim Fundamentalists. There were local reasons, growing out of the Algerian war of decolonization, which is as important for French politics as segregation is for U.S. politics. And there was the more obvious issue of the peculiar religious strictures on depicting Muhammad, a point specific to Islam and the importance of which totally escaped Charlie Hebdo's cartoonists.
The propriety of Charlie Hebdo's antireligious campaign could also be discussed. This campaign did not take place in a vacuum, but in a country in which up to a third of the population votes for extreme-right wing candidates, and where nasty and widespread forms of xenophobia of racism are specifically tageting both Arabs and Muslims. And the cartoonists could be accused of not being as even-handed as they thought they were, if only because of the very different situations in which the various raligions they attack find themselves today.
But none of this justifies shooting cartoonists who, beyond their apparent offensiveness, were actually political militants for a cause. Their execution was a political assassination, a point which risks being lost both because their politics are little known outside France, and because the entire French establishment has rallied to depoliticize their death. While most politicians are mercifully ready to rise in defense of the freedom of speech and opinion, French leaders would rather not be reminded that they are doing so now on behalf of heirs of the French radical antireligion movement, belonging mostly to its ultra-left, even anarchist wing; and Marine Le Pen did not insist on National Front participation to tomorrow's demonstration, and no wonder since part of her base is made up of Fundamentalist Catholics.
This last point is one more proof, if need be, that whatever political meaning the cartoons took once published, and in spite of the damage they did to the Left in my view, they were not stemming from a xenophobic and racist campaign, as some have claimed. Also, Joe Sacco should be reminded that, even for the worst racist or antisemitic cartoons, the death penalty as a punishment is utterly unacceptable.
12:00 PM PT: PS: As I was writing this, Denise Oliver Velez intervened, and I want to be specific on the fact that the present diary bears exclusively on religion, and emphatically not on race (or rather "race", as we like to put it in France -after all it's a social construct). As far as race is concerned, Charlie Hebdo's position is much more complicated to analyze, because it's both much less consciously constructed and much more dependent on the interplay between text and cartoons, ideas and images. The topic here was religion, and religion only.