79. OFFENSIVE IMAGES - An Ethic of Kindness

As I write this a teacher in West Yorkshire has been suspended for showing students controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons depicting the Islamic Prophet, Muhammad in an RE lesson. As an RE teacher myself, who covers the Charlie Hebdo issue in class too, and who used to cover the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy too, along with the fatwa put out on author, Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satantic Verses, back when we taught the old OCR GCSE spec section on Religion and the Media, the story bothered me for a number of reasons.

The first thing I wondered was - did I ever show students those cartoons myself? I know that I have definitely seen them, and that I had Googled the Dutch cartoons them while preparing for those initial lessons on Religion and the Media, and the Charlie Hebdo ones in the immediate aftermath of the brutal massacre enacted by extremists in response to their publication. Had I ever brought them into the classroom as artefacts to unpack? After all, there is a lot discussed and analysed in the RE classroom which may bristle the pious in any religion. Certainly there has never been a problem looking at a passage of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, or philosophical examinations of the Problem of Evil, dissecting unsatisfactory theodicies or proposing potential flaws in seemingly solid arguments for the existence of God. For many, even questioning God’s existence - as such lessons often do - is an act of heresy or blasphemy worthy of at least protest if not damnation to hell for all eternity, yet those lessons are often the bread and butter of an RE department and tackle important issues in theology. And as David Hume once said “In matters of religion whatever is different is contrary…every miracle, therefore pretended to have been wrought in any of these religions…destroys the credit of these miracles.“ From some faith perspectives simply teaching the accepted wisdoms of one holy book is a direct attack on the central claims of another. If Christianity is true and Jesus really is the Messiah, then Judaism is undone. Both faiths, however, are undone if Islam is correct and those previous messages passed down through Tenakh and Gospel on which they are based can be rejected as corrupted and replaced with the infallible Qur’an. But the entire Abrahamic conception of God is at odds with that far older conception given to us by Hinduism. A conception itself undermined, or arguably dissolved, by the teachings of the Buddha. Meanwhile Sikhism’s Guru Nanak reminds us “there is neither Hindu nor Muslim” - a message given to him after his own meeting with the Divine long after Muhammad was supposed to be the “seal of the prophets”. To discuss the pluralism of beliefs and non-beliefs central to the lives of those living in contemporary British society is to accept that one person’s heresy is another person’s guiding principle. The Muslim who believes alcohol to be haram has to accept the role of wine in the Christian Eucharist or Jewish festival of Purim, and while the Hindu or Buddhist vegetarian may be pleased by the Jewish and Islamic prohibition of certain meats, they may not be too happy with the open menu for other animal flesh considered kosher or halal - or the diets of their non-vegetarian fellow Hindus and Buddhists who exclude edible animals from the principle of ahimsa. RE is a safe space to discuss and explore such differences, including the belief system of the atheist who dismisses the whole thing as superstition and cultural propaganda.

But I haven’t brought the Charlie Hebdo cartoons into the classroom for the same reason I have not forced a Christian observing Lent to eat the thing they have chosen to give up for 40 days or made a faithful member of the Sikh Khalsa take off their turban. Because while discussion and debate about different beliefs and ideas is our bread and butter in Religious Education, such discussion always needs to be done with the recognition that the views being discussed are deeply held and life-shaping beliefs for all parties and that, while an intellectual kick-around is always a healthy way to check our ideas, or even test our faith, the aim is not to purposefully upset or offend. Nor is it to coerce students into doing things which go against their most fundamental beliefs.

So while it might be true that the following argument holds:

1. Some* Muslims believe the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad to be a great sin in itself and hold the related belief that seeing such an image is transgressing bounds established in their religion about shirk and idolatry.

2. However, if you are not a Muslim and do not believe (1), or are a Muslim who does not believe (1)* then a depiction of the Prophet Muhammad is just a drawing like any other. You are therefore free to draw the Prophet as much as you like and look at your own, and other people’s, depictions of Muhammad without any spiritual consequence.

3. Therefore it is not wrong in itself for a non-Muslim, or Muslim who believes it is not a sin, to depict or see depictions of the Prophet Muhammad and they are therefore free to do so, and Muslims who do think that it is wrong are free to ignore or otherwise not look at any depictions which may exist.

   *Historically there have been depictions of Muhammad made by Muslims (there is one, for instance, in the British Museum) and scholars suggest the current dominant belief in its prohibition is a more recent historical phenomenon from the last 2-300 years or so, based more in cultural tradition than in scriptural command.

   It is also the case that the following is also true:

4. Muslims who believe (1) will believe any depiction of the Prophet Muhammad to be offensive, disrespectful, and potentially personally damaging to their eternal afterlife. Therefore while a non-believer may maintain the right to draw and see whatever they like they must be aware of the potential to upset others with the images they draw and, if they want to be kind, be sensitive to that. For example, by ensuring the image comes with a warning that prepares the potential viewer or ensuring it is not shown without consent to those who may not wish to see it.

Note - I am not saying a person has to be sensitive to the potential offence their image may cause, only that if they want to be kind they ought to be. It is an ethical choice: do you care about the impact of your actions on the feelings of others or not? Sometimes, the answer may be a resounding “no”! Coming myself from a background in punk and all of its associated shock tactics, sometimes there may be a good reason to stick a safety-pin through a venerated image (such as the face of the Queen) to make a political point. Certainly there are young Muslim punks who have intentionally shocked the older guardians of their faith by doing things deemed shocking which they want to see transformed, such a Tesnim Sayar’s mohawked hijab as a response to demands for female “modesty” in Islam, or Sena Hussain, bravely fronting her band, Secret Trial Five, at a convention of the Islamic Society of North America despite their ban on female lead singers (they subsequently had the plug pulled on her performance). Indeed, were the same Muslim students offended by the inclusion of these images in their RE lessons not also likely to be of the belief that depiction of any living thing is haram it might have been a funny response to the offending lesson to plaster the school with unflattering caricatures of the teacher who upset them the very next day.

But there seems to me to be a very big difference here between, say, a group of Muslims who decide it should be OK to depict images of the Prophet Muhammad protesting the contested religious restriction by drawing forbidden, yet flattering, images of Muhammad, and an RE teacher showing Muslims images specifically drawn by cartoonists to poke fun at a figure of high esteem in their community to intentionally shock their students. A teacher showing the historical Islamic depictions of Muhammad to students to start a conversation about the very idea of such drawings being forbidden within Islam (and with a warning beforehand, and opportunity for students who don’t want to see the image to look away) would be a different matter entirely. Indeed, in my own lessons on Religion in the Media back in the day, we used to give students a link on our virtual learning environment to a very good documentary on the Dutch cartoon controversy for those who wanted to research further (albeit, again, with a very clear warning that the doc did contain the offensive images, there was no requirement that they watched it, and advising students who would be offended by it not to watch), just as we would provide extra resources and further learning materials on any subject where we could broaden understanding beyond the meagre 50 minutes we had to cover issues in the classroom. Context and intention are everything. In fact, for some sixth form students for whom I used to run an enrichment philosophy class, in a lesson on freedom of speech, I remember we discussed the Charlie Hebdo cartoons each year and then I asked the class “I will now show you the cartoons on the next slide of the PowerPoint - who thinks that would be appropriate? After all, we have been talking about free speech…” There was, of course, no next slide and no cartoons, but the idea of it generated the desired discussion about why there might still be limits on what we do in practice even if in the abstract we believe we have the freedom to do anything. I did not include the images because I knew doing so would upset many of my students.

Being a teacher, we are warned a lot about the potential to abuse our power in the obvious ways - grooming children, indoctrinating them, etc. But the power to dictate the content of a lesson, and the impact of that content, should not be overlooked. It too can be abused if decisions are made to knowingly upset students without good reason. Which is not to say that sometimes, there may not be a good reason. I know plenty of homophobic or transphobic students, for example, who are made to feel uncomfortable every time I show them a same-sex couple or transgender person in an example used in a lesson. Personally I feel it is my job here to represent the diversity of people with which my students share a society - and school - and their discomfort is something which needs to be challenged just as much as I would challenge any discomfort a racist student might feel if I used a person of an ethnicity they disliked in a video clip or image. There actually are some things we need to confront and challenge our students about, whether it makes them feel uncomfortable or not. But gay, trans or ethnically diverse representation in lesson resources is not making those uncomfortable students do something which goes against their deeply held beliefs, even if it challenges them. Furthermore, it actually makes the classroom more inclusive for those students currently under-represented. However, while it might challenge my students to discuss responses to depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in cartoons (and the challenge is legitimate. After all - they share a society with people for whole depicting their Prophet is not a crime and is not a moral wrong), to make them see the cartoons is not merely to challenge them but to actively and knowingly do something to them which violates their deeply held personal commitments. Because seeing the image is the very thing they think is problematic. It is the equivalent of sneaking meat into a vegetarian’s sandwich. Again - you could do it, and some cretins actually do, but it’s not really a morally defendable action.

In my classroom, I don’t feel my free-speech is threatened, or my right as a non-Muslim to draw or see images of a Prophet I don’t believe in impeded, if I refrain from showing images to my students which I know violates their beliefs. It is an act of kindness to them, not an act of repression to me.

At the same time, I do feel deeply uncomfortable with the idea that making a different judgement should lead to a suspension or threat of losing my job. After all, outside of a repressive dictatorship, it remains no crime to show a satirical cartoon of a famous authority figure, even if that cartoon causes outrage and offence. No figure of authority should be off-limits for ridicule, not even God. My decision not to show offensive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in my classroom is not in deference to the Prophet and any potential offence shown to him, but to my students. If I knew I taught the children of Boris Johnson in my classroom, I wouldn’t show offensive satirical cartoons of the Prime Minister either. If the children of a disgraced celebrity were sat before me, I wouldn’t intentionally upset them by using the latest tabloid headlines about their parents in my lesson. The respect I am showing is not to the lampooned authority, but to the far less powerful children in my care who don’t need to come to school and feel needlessly targeted in my lesson. Ultimately though, if I do make a bad choice and end up upsetting someone (and this happens in RE quite a lot: the lesson on euthanasia we do while one of our students’ siblings is on life support; the discussion about abortion vs adoption that stirs up discomfort for an adopted student, or for the student whose historic sexual abuse has already led to an abortion; the chat about disability and karma which essentially tells the student in the wheelchair that their current circumstances are a karmic punishment…etc.) I do have to be accountable to it. But I would favour restorative conversations about what went wrong and why certain decisions were made over knee-jerk disciplinary action and calls for someone to lose their job. Accountability does not always have to mean punishment and retribution. In this case, what makes the protests so frustrating is that the offence and anger felt by those asking for the teacher to be fired and “never teach again” seems to come not from his specific actions - they do not seem interested in his motivations or the rationale behind including the images in his lesson - but rather from the very existence of the Charlie Hebdo images at all. The idea that these images exist and that someone might not find them inherently offensive - may, in fact find them so inoffensive that they include them in an RE lesson - is what has driven them to action; not the offence to students in the classroom who may have been upset, but the imagined offence to the Prophet himself. Again - there is no legal or moral wrong committed by a non-Muslim drawing, or looking at, pictures of the Prophet Muhammad for whom there is no belief that such images are forbidden. The only moral wrong is the lack of kindness shown to the children in the classroom for whom there are such beliefs and it is this moral wrong which should be the direction of any justified anger in a multicultural and pluralistic society where we understand that we do not all share the same beliefs. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the focus of the protest at all.

So I guess the story bothered me so much because - despite the media’s best efforts to frame the story as another “culture wars”/ us vs them/ pick a side/ freedom of speech vs political correctness gone mad narrative - I don’t really side with anyone. The teacher should have known better (or been trained better, as it’s basically lesson #1 of RE teacher training to recognise the potential areas our classes which could cause offence to students and minimise the potential for hurt feelings on sensitive issues) and the protestors are missing the point by asking for people to share a theological belief with them which those who do not share their faith have no requirement to believe or act upon. Meanwhile the real issue - the ethic of kindness when dealing with challenging and controversial issues of ideological dispute - has been largely ignored.

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE