The Prophet and Cancel Culture

They have a bloody history in common

This post appeared in a slightly different version in my Monikards Substack. I couldn’t figure out how to crosspost it, so here is the edited version.

It began with a headline in Artnet:

A Minnesota University Is Under Fire for Dismissing an Art History Professor Who Showed Medieval Paintings of the Prophet Muhammad

The subtitle reads:

Numerous organizations have rallied in support of Professor Erika Lopez Prater, calling for the university to protect academic freedom.

The teacher, identified by the Art Newspaper as Erika Lopez Prater, is said to have displayed the images during on online lecture on October 6, 2022. There was a two-minute content warning prior to the artworks’ appearance, to allow students to opt out of viewing the potentially offensive imagery should they feel it was against their faith.

Erika Lopez Prater

Lopez Prater knew what to do, played the cancel culture game and believed she could get away. Of course, that wasn’t enough. But the outcry it generated was and is a good sign. And indeed, it wasn’t just Artnet that piled in: If you were in the newsgame, you were on this story. But then I noticed something odd: the image the magazine published under the title appeared to be defaced. I mean that literally; where the face of the Prophet should have been, this great, freedom loving publication had inserted a keyhole.

I had to look twice to realize what they were doing: while decrying cancel culture, they were engaging in it themselves. Here it is:

And just in case you think that it was a momentary lapse of reason; alas, they meant it and keep repeating it with other images throughout the article. For the full experience, here it is:

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/professor-terminated-art-history-paintings-muhammad-2238922

Such blatant hypocrisy, fuelled by the fear of ‘offending’, is all too common in our beleaguered culture. Speaking the actual Truth, freely and without fear, is something we used to take for granted. I remember those happy days. They are no more and I believe they ended with the Charlie Hebdo Murders in Paris, in 2015. The journalists, critics and satirists working there were all murdered because they dared to make fun of the Prophet. And showed caricatures of him. Not exactly subtle, but if you want to make a point, you push it. For that, they had to die. In the eyes of fundamentalist extremists, in this case Islamist extremists. These people have no sense of humour and don’t want anyone else to have it either. They rather insisted on it, with guns.

There was an outcry, of course, but we never really faced the truth that importing millions of people who dislike you and your religion is an invitation to violence. We did this with the best of intentions if you recall: Mama Merkel opened the borders of Europe to refugees from North Africa, urging everyone to pitch in and help. We can do this, she proclaimed. We could, but we did not see the eventual outcome. Giving extremists a place to flourish in Europe was the beginning of the end of freedom of thought as we had understood it until then.

Now, it is actually very dangerous to speak your mind freely; you could lose your life as well as your job. Especially if you write for a living. It’s part of a sorrowful series of events dating back to the Fatwa, slapped on the author of The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie in 1989. He spent the next decade in hiding, living with a team of security forces supplied by the British government. And then he got fed up living this way, returned to a normal existence as an international author….and got whacked by a deranged attacker who nearly killed him. Onstage. On August 12, 2022. Rushdie lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand.

Salman Rushdie in 2008

It made headlines for a while, but this story like so many others of this kind, has quietly been buried. It should have earned a mention in the Lopez Prater saga, but it didn’t, and one can speculate why. I believe they played it safe and avoided any mention of this bloody history. If you want to know how Rushdie is doing, you must Google him. Wikipedia has a detailed account of what happened, and it is worth reading:

In mid-February 1989, following a violent riot against the book in Pakistan, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran and a Shiite scholar, issued a fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie and his publishers,[18] and called for Muslims to point him out to those who can kill him if they cannot themselves. Although the British Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher gave Rushdie round-the-clock police protection, many politicians on both sides were hostile to the author. British Labour MP Keith Vaz led a march through Leicester shortly after he was elected in 1989 calling for the book to be banned, while the Conservative politician Norman Tebbit, the party's former chairman, called Rushdie an "outstanding villain" whose "public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality".[19]

Journalist Christopher Hitchens staunchly defended Rushdie and urged critics to condemn the violence of the fatwa instead of blaming the novel or the author. Hitchens considered the fatwa to be the opening shot in a cultural war on freedom.[20]

Violence, assassinations, and attempted murders[edit]

Hitoshi Igarashi, Rushdie's Japanese translator, was found by a cleaning lady, stabbed to death on 13 July 1991 on the college campus where he taught near Tokyo. Ten days prior to Igarashi's killing, Rushdie's Italian translator Ettore Capriolo was seriously injured by an attacker at his home in Milan by being stabbed multiple times on 3 July 1991.[23] William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses, was critically injured by being shot three times in the back by an assailant on 11 October 1993 in Oslo. Nygaard survived but spent months in the hospital recovering. The book's Turkish translator Aziz Nesin was the intended target of a mob of arsonists who set fire to the Madimak Hotel after Friday prayers on 2 July 1993 in Sivas, Turkey, killing 37 people, mostly Alevi scholars, poets and musicians. Nesin escaped death when the fundamentalist mob failed to recognize him early in the attack. Known as the Sivas massacre, it is remembered by Alevi Turks who gather in Sivas annually and hold silent marches, commemorations and vigils for the slain.[24]

In March 2016, the bounty for the Rushdie fatwa was raised by $600,000 (£430,000). Top Iranian media contributed this sum, adding to the existing $2.8 million already offered.[25] In response, the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize for Literature, denounced the death sentence and called it "a serious violation of free speech". This was the first time they had commented on the issue since publication.[26]

On 12 August 2022, Rushdie was attacked onstage while speaking at an event of the Chautauqua Institution. Rushdie suffered four wounds to the stomach area of his abdomen, three wounds to the right side of the front part of his neck, one wound to his right eye, one wound to his chest and one wound to his right thigh.[27] He was flown by helicopter to UPMC Hamot, a tertiary-level hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania.[28] The attacker was immediately taken into custody.[29] He was charged with attempted murder and assault, pleading not guilty, and was remanded in custody.

So, in light of all that, the magazine editors likely thought that it was in their interests to be ‘safe’ rather than sorry.

You could argue that this isn’t really so bad; after all, we’re talking about religious fundamentalism, not actual ‘cancel culture’. The trouble with that argument is that it’s disingenuous and sidesteps the very real damage we have sustained. I believe that the ongoing cancel culture madness could not have happened without the fundamentalist religious violence that preceded it. Religious freedom is one thing; separating the right to have your religion from the wider right of society to have differing opinions on it, is another. We are losing that argument.

History has lessons for us in this regard. Europe suffered through centuries of religious strife and outright war. The Thirty Years War was primarily about religious freedom. The bloody struggles for the British crown were partly about what type of Christian you were. Being Catholic in England at the time of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth the First, was a dangerous business. But until the Rushdie attacks, we believed that in the twentieth century, the expression of opinions on religious matters was without danger. We had grown up and become sophisticated on these matters. But we were wrong. Cancel Culture is a kind of warped religion, and it is every bit as crazy, dangerous and one sided as the extreme manifestations of Christianity and Islam have always been. Its rise is a clear sign that we are regressing to a previous age of extremism and oppression we thought we had overcome.

Which is why publishing an image that defaces the Prophet Muhammad for political reasons is a red flag. This is not about art. Or literature. It never was. It was always about the right to think and talk and write freely. The West is supposed to be the home, the shining city of that principle. Millions of people died defending it. The editors of this august publication have let down our side by choosing to be ‘safe’. Being safe seems to be a new Holy Writ at universities and elsewhere. Irony of ironies. All that being ‘safe’ does is transport you to the wrong side of a keyhole, peering at a culture of intellectual freedom that we are fast losing.