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Speaking about Muhammad, Speaking for Muslims
Author(s): Andrew F. March
Source: Critical Inquiry , Vol. 37, No. 4 (Summer 2011), pp. 806-821
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660995
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Critical Response
Speaking about Muhammad, Speaking
for Muslims
Andrew F. March
The Danish Cartoons as Moral Injury
In a recent article, Saba Mahmood has presented an intriguing account
of what was at stake morally and emotionally for a large number of Mus-
lims in the Danish cartoon controversy (Saba Mahmood, “Religious Rea-
son and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?” Critical Inquiry 35
[Summer 2009]: 836 – 62). In doing so, she offers a framework for thinking
about such instances that takes the place of accounts that portray the con-
flict as one between a liberal, secular commitment to free speech and a
religious commitment to combating blasphemy. This account instead fo-
cuses on forms of Muslim piety in which “Muhammad is regarded as a
moral exemplar whose words and deeds are understood not so much as
commandments but as ways of inhabiting the world, bodily and ethically”
(p. 846). This form of religiosity should be understood as an assimilative
“modality of attachment” or “relation . . . based on similitude or cohabi-
tation” along the lines of the Aristotelian concept of schesis, as opposed to
a communicative or representative relationship to the Prophet (p. 859).
Importantly,
the sense of moral injury that emanates from such a relationship be-
tween the ethical subject and the figure of exemplarity . . . is quite
distinct from the one that the notion of blasphemy encodes. The no-
tion of moral injury I am describing no doubt entails a sense of viola-
tion, but this violation emanates not from the judgment that the law
has been transgressed but that one’s being, grounded as it is in a rela-
tionship of dependency with the Prophet, has been shaken. For many
Muslims, the offense the cartoons committed was not against a moral
interdiction . . . but against a structure of affect, a habitus, that feels
wounded. This wound requires moral action, but the language of this
wound is neither juridical nor that of street protest because it does
not belong to an economy of blame, accountability, and reparations.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
Critical Inquiry 37 (Summer 2011)
© 2011 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/11/3704-0010$10.00. All rights reserved.
806
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The action that it requires is internal to the structure of affect, rela-
tions, and virtues that predispose one to experience an act as a viola-
tion in the first place. [Pp. 848 – 49]
Understanding this model helps us to appreciate that not all forms of
religiosity are chosen or self-conscious affirmations of beliefs or proposi-
tions (p. 852) and thus that attacks on religious icons may be experienced
as directly and irreducibly as attacks on racial groups.
Mahmood’s account is a very helpful supplement to much of the jour-
nalistic and scholarly focus on formal legal and religious normativity, rac-
ism and Islamophobia, and political manipulation. It also reflects a deeply
attractive moral sensibility grounded in empathy and humility, reminis-
cent of the late liberal theorist Judith Shklar’s sense that cruelty takes many
forms and is the summum malum of which humans are capable. It is in full
solidarity with that sensibility that I engage with Mahmood’s arguments.
Which Concept of “Moral Injury”?
Mahmood spends much of her article establishing that the cartoons
were a catalyst for a genuine sort of pain, one to which we are not always
sensitive. But is it really the case that in much of the non-Muslim reaction
to the Muslim reaction(s) was a refusal to accept that Muslims may have
felt injured or pained by the cartoons or an “inability [for the idea of moral
injury] to translate across different semiotic and ethical norms” (p. 860)?1
I think it is actually quite easy to accept the idea that Muslims felt a genuine
sense of pain at the portrayal of the Prophet in those images. In fact, if
anything, perhaps Mahmood is too cautious in outlining the many ways in
which the cartoons were a source of pain for Muslims. I would submit that
the idea of emotional pain is really no mystery here at all. We feel pain at all
kinds of things for all kinds of reasons. We attach ourselves to all kinds of
1. Mahmood quotes a number of commentators who did in fact express incredulity that
what was motivating many of the protests was genuine pain or injury. However, I wonder
whether too much is made of these quotations, all of which were reactions to the violent forms
that many of the protests to the republication of the cartoons took. Perhaps we should not take
statements of incredulity that acts of violence were purely a matter of spontaneous moral injury
as evidence that Western publics are uniformly incapable of appreciating that many Muslims
felt an authentic form of distress.
A N D R E W F . M A R C H is an associate professor in the Department of Political
Science at Yale University. He is the author of Islam and Liberal Citizenship
(2009). He is presently at work on research related to speech crimes in Islamic
legal and moral thought and the Islamic intellectual response to secularism in
twentieth- and twenty-first-century legal and theological discourses.
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2011 807
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symbols, figures, persons, and ideas in the assimilative way Mahmood
describes, as the recent furor over Ground Zero as hallowed ground dem-
onstrates.2 And, of course, there is no point in asking whether this pain is
genuine or real. Rather, I believe that there are much harder questions at
stake which Mahmood’s account doesn’t directly address but perhaps pro-
vides a provocation to thinking about.
First I am curious whether Mahmood is insisting on this one single
account of the moral injury involved in the cartoon incident. Some might
puzzle over her use of Aristotelian concepts to account for certain Muslim
attitudes towards the Prophet or her reading out of abstract and formal
intellectual traditions in Islam,3 but I find her account perfectly plausible.
2. Another good example is an incident that emerged at Michigan State University in Fall
2005, where I was then teaching. A cartoon published in the student newspaper on Veteran’s
Day portrayed two soldiers: an octogenarian World War II veteran and a soldier in the
American army presently occupying Iraq. The veteran was dressed in commemorative garb,
whereas the active soldier was covered in blood and wielding a medieval-style cudgel. The
dialogue had the veteran saying, “I liberated a torture camp” and the active soldier saying, “I
work in one.” This cartoon was published in the wake of the revelations of atrocities carried out
by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib and, ironically, at the beginning of the Danish cartoon affair. Of
course, certain conservative student groups protested outside the newspaper demanding an
apology and the firing of the cartoonist, invoking much of the same sentiment of “moral
injury” described by Mahmood. For these students, American flags and soldiers were symbols
of identity and moral attachment inappropriate for use in this way to make a political
argument.
3. Ironically, the urge to downplay abstract or formal intellectual reflection about belief
and doctrine in Islamic religiosity has a tradition in Western Orientalist approaches to Islam
that have tended to avoid serious study of Islamic theology.
In part this flowed from the persistence of nineteenth-century assumptions about the mar-
ginality of abstract intellectual life in Islam, and about the greater intrinsic interest and orig-
inality of Muslim law and mysticism. It was also commonly thought that where formal
metaphysics was cultivated in Islamic civilisation, this was done seriously only in the con-
text of Arabic philosophy (falsafa), where it was not obstructed by futile scriptural controls,
and where it could perform its most significant function, which was believed to be the
transmission of Greek thought to Europe. However, a steady process of scholarly advance
over the past two decades, coupled with the publication of critical editions of important
early texts, has turned the study of Muslim theology into a dynamic and ever more intrigu-
ing discipline. Old assumptions about Muslim theology as either a narrow apologetic exer-
cise or an essentially foreign import into Islam have been successfully challenged. [Tim
Winter, “Introduction” to The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology, ed.
Winter (Cambridge, 2008), p. 1]
In raising this I do not mean to insinuate that Mahmood’s approach to Muslim religiosity
(based on a focus on the daily lived practices of disciplining the body) inadvertently resurrects
old Orientalist attitudes about Muslims’ lack of intellectual sophistication in matters of
theology, ethics, law, or politics and their more bodily and sensuous habitus. However, what I
do intend to deflate is the sense that this attitude towards Muslim religiosity evidenced in
Mahmood’s outstanding scholarly contribution is in itself complete without approaches that
examine more formal Islamic intellectual attitudes towards normativity. The formal, public
contestation of Islamic norms is no less a lived practice for believing Muslims than the practices
808 Andrew F. March / Critical Response
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(In fact, it is somewhat obvious; Muslims really love the Prophet and hate
for him to be mocked or disdained.) My concern is whether it has to be the
sole account or is even an account distinct from others. Mahmood con-
cedes that there were certainly many sources of Muslim anger over the
cartoons, with many kinds of political motivation at stake (p. 842). How-
ever, she occasionally slips into speaking of “the kind of religiosity at stake
in Muslim reactions to the Danish cartoons” (pp. 852–53, my emphasis).
The force of Mahmood’s account, on my reading, is its subtlety and sen-
sitivity to the varieties of religious sensibilities and practices amongst Mus-
lims. It would be a shame if appreciation for practices of piety that are not
reducible to political ideology or to Islamic juridical modalities itself be-
comes a kind of academic orthodoxy whereby we see belief as a Protestant
concern, thus leading us to assume that authentic Muslim and other relig-
iosities must lie primarily in the sensorium.
Mahmood’s focus on moral injury derived from an assimilative model
of relating to the exemplar of the Prophet is an important corrective, a
crucial part of the entire landscape, just as both formal secular jurispru-
dence and popular Western attitudes towards Muslims are crucial pieces
of the puzzle on the non-Muslim side. But this schesis model is still just one
approach, important as it is. Unfortunately, confusing a certain refined
academic theory of how to speak about Muslim piety with the full range of
actual Muslim moral commitments has some bizarre consequences, as
when Mahmood counsels European Muslims not to look to European
human rights law to suppress blasphemous speech about the Prophet.
I fully agree with Mahmood that coercive laws should not be deployed
to suppress injurious speech and fully agree that looking to secular Euro-
pean law to protect Islamic religious sentiments contains a whole set of
paradoxes and dangers. (For that matter, so does the codification of Is-
lamic law in the positive legal systems of Muslim majority states.) How-
ever, Mahmood’s account of that paradox is misleading and potentially
patronizing. She writes that Muslims in Europe were only attracted to the
legal option because they were “committed to preserving an imaginary in
which their relation to the Prophet is based on similitude and cohabita-
tion” (p. 859). Well, who says? Muslims have given a wide range of argu-
of schesis/habitus which Mahmood so sensitively depicts, and we ought to be wary of
genealogies of subject-formation through discourse and habitus that reduce Muslim politics
and ethical life to predetermined outcomes.
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2011 809
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ments for both voluntary and coercive restraints on injurious speech in
Europe at least since the Salman Rushdie affair, and to reduce their reli-
gious imaginary to nothing other than this specific desire to preserve “an
imaginary in which their relation to the Prophet is based on similitude and
cohabitation” sounds contrived to say the least, particularly when speak-
ing about a religious community that has such a long tradition of seeing
law in all of its forms—not just pure forms of sharı�‘a as articulated by
jurists but also imperfect simulacra of this ideal advanced by imperfect
secular rulers—as a crucial component of what believers should expect
and strive for in this world. I believe that Muslims open themselves up to
awkward interferences in religious matters by secular states in both Mus-
lim and non-Muslim societies when they seek legal protections from blas-
phemy; but I don’t think they are irrational or suffering from false
consciousness when they think they want the legal protections per se. Both
Islamic law and the law of modern Muslim states have always insisted on
such legal protections; it makes perfect sense from a religious standpoint
that this is one thing Muslims might try to achieve in the West.
However, I would suggest further that even the idea of moral injury is
compatible with many kinds of religiosities, in addition to the schesis
model Mahmood advances. In fact, Mahmood does not give a clear defi-
nition of what she means by “moral injury” and specifically what the mod-
ifier moral is adding to the concept of injury. How does moral injury differ
conceptually from any kind of emotional pain inflicted by the criticism
and mockery of others? How does it differ from the kind of emotional pain
or discomfort inflicted by having to suffer the disapproved actions of oth-
ers in public? However, in addition to the obvious normative problems
with endorsing a concept like moral injury for political and moral guid-
ance in diverse societies (the logic of this concept is precisely that invoked
by those opposed to even bare tolerance for homosexuality, the legality of
burning the American flag, or, indeed, equality for minority religious
groups such as Muslims),4 it is not clear how this concept provides for the
kinds of distinctions Mahmood wishes to draw between “violation emanat-
[ing] from the judgment that the law has been transgressed [and the feeling]
that one’s being, grounded as it is in a relationship of dependency with the
Prophet, has been shaken.” It seems to me that the idea of moral injury is
equally at stake in judgments that the law has been transgressed as it is with the
feeling that one’s being has been shaken. In fact, it is hard to understand ex-
actly what the objection to the violation of the moral law is, unless it is some
4. As we have seen ad nauseam throughout the summer and fall of 2010 in the United States.
810 Andrew F. March / Critical Response
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kind of moral injury to the community—which is precisely how “God’s
rights” (huquq Allah) are often characterized in Islamic legal theory.
Furthermore, it is far from clear to me why Mahmood needs to erect
this unnecessary kind of binary between speech that immediately disrupts
a subject’s structure of ethical affect and speech that would be character-
ized by that subject as blasphemy or as a violation of a moral law. Are these
two distinct kinds of injury for the religious subject, or is she saying that the
vast majority of pious Muslims simply don’t think in terms of blasphemy
or violations of a moral code at all? (The latter seems unlikely to say the
least.) In failing to tell a more complete story of how speech is constructed
as injurious, this account thus erects a series of artificial and false binaries
between speech that immediately disrupts a subject’s structure of ethical
affect and speech that would be characterized by that subject as blasphemy,
between the immediate sense of injury because of the kind of subject the
religious subject is and the conscious political decision to protest or endure
speech in this or that instance, and between belief-centered religiosity and
habitus-centered religiosity. Mahmood’s account thus seems to have in-
advertently flattened the rich landscape of religious subjectivity.
For the sake of argument, let us take a quick look at the logic of com-
bating blasphemy in Islamic juridical discourses. A good source for this
kind of thinking is the Islamic legal literature on the “objectives of the Law”
(maqa� �sid al-sharı�‘a). This literature is popular amongst Islamic legal re-
formers because of the way in which it replaces more formalist, language-
based methods with morally substantive, purposive ones. However, it is
also an excellent source for juridical and theological reflections across the
ideological spectrum on the deeper meanings and purposes of long-
standing legal norms. Reflections on the laws against blasphemy and her-
esy are frequently treated as belonging to the sharı�‘a “objective” (maq�sad)
of “preserving religion” ( �hif �z al-dı�n), one of the five “necessary objectives”
( �daru� riyya�t) of the Law according to virtually all scholars.
First of all, this juridical discourse complicates slightly Mahmood’s pic-
ture of an assimilative, habitus-based relationship with the Prophet set
against a communicative, proposition-based one. The jurists are inter-
ested in both. From a short manual on the maqa� �sid al-sharı�‘a designed for
popular consumption: “Religion consists of divine rules that God has re-
vealed through prophets to guide mankind to truth in matters of belief and
to good in matters of behavior and social relations. Religion constrains
mankind by these rules and brings them into submission to their commands
and prohibitions so that they may attain the happiness of this world and the
next. . . . Complete, perfect religion is composed of four elements: faith (ı�ma�n),
external submission (isla�m), belief in right doctrines (i‘tiqa�d), and works
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2011 811
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(‘amal).”5 There is no reason, then, to see the pietistic conception of assimila-
tion to exemplars through daily habits as something that necessarily gives us a
different understanding of the meaning of the Prophet from more formal
juridical conceptions. Each rests on the other, and they interact in complex
and variable ways for different believers at different times.
Let us consider, then, how this kind of legal discourse treats slanderous
speech about the Prophet. First, what is blasphemy? In the Islamic juridical
tradition, the crime in question is sabb (or shatm) al-nabı� —the reviling or
slandering of the Prophet. Thus, implicit in the very language of how
jurists speak about what is commonly referred to in English as blasphemy is
the idea of moral harm and injury (as, of course, it is in the word blas-
phemy, often thought to derive from the Greek for “hurtful” or “harmful
speech”). Furthermore, jurists do not uniformly adopt a formalist, deon-
tological, legalistic understanding of the danger of allowing the Law to be
violated. Their understanding is shot through with not only substantive
moral and political objectives but also a conception of the multiple kinds
of moral harms involved. A particularly expansive, yet succinct, account is
provided by a contemporary scholar seeking to appropriate for today
views of the jurist-theologian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). According to this
scholar, blasphemy is punished and the honor of the Prophet is protected
because
when the honor of the Prophet is violated then respect for and ag-
grandizement of the Prophet’s mission collapses, and thus so col-
lapses everything which he achieved. . . . The collapse of the honor
and glorification of the Prophet is the collapse of religion itself. This
demands vindication through the killing of the blasphemer. . . . He
who blasphemes against the Prophet and attacks his honor [yasubb
al-rasu� l wa yaqa‘ fı� ‘irdihi] is trying to corrupt people’s religion and
by means of that to also corrupt their worldly existence. Whether or
not they succeed, the person trying to corrupt another’s religion is
therefore seeking to “sow corruption on Earth.”6 Defaming religion
and casting ugly aspersions on the Prophet so that people will have an
aversion towards him is amongst the greatest of corruptions. Further-
more, blasphemy is a form of sacrilege against the Prophet and an
5. ‘Abd Alla�h Mu �hammad al-Amı�n al-Na‘ı�m and Yu� suf al-Bashı�r Mu �hammad, Maqa� �sid
al-sharı�‘a al-Isla�miyya (Khartoum, 1995), p. 26.
6. This phrase “fasa�d fi‘l-ar �d. . .” is taken from a verse in the Qur’an often used to establish
capital punishment for those who rebel against the state or provoke such rebellion through
propaganda or incitement. It has served as a very flexible and supple legal tool in the hands of
Islamic governments, including most recently the Islamic Republic of Iran, to justify charges of
treason against political and ideological dissenters.
812 Andrew F. March / Critical Response
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affront7 to God, His Prophet and His believers. It is an attempt on the
part of infidels to subvert the Islamic order, to humiliate believers, to
remove the glory of religion and debase the word of God . . . all of
which are amongst the most grievous forms of “corruption on
Earth.”8
If that seems a bit too academic or rehearsed, consider a letter to the editor
of the New Haven Register applauding Yale University Press’s decision not
to reprint the cartoons: “The cartoons portray outright lies and distor-
tions. . . . When it comes to God and his divine wisdom in appointing
prophets there are boundaries that cannot be crossed. . . . For Muslims,
Muhammad was a mercy sent by God to the entire world. To portray him
as less than that is blasphemy and it is incumbent upon those who have
intelligence to direct the majority away from such contemptuous acts.”9
Surely such statements are as relevant as that of the young British Muslim
Mahmood quotes (p. 846), and while Mahmood may then interpret such
an utterance not primarily as a belief-statement but rather as a kind of
discursive practice by which Rasheed cultivates a certain ethical subjectiv-
ity or state of affect this might be news to Rasheed.
My point here is absolutely not to suggest that all Muslims wounded by
the cartoons share and endorse all of these more absolutist politico-legal
views. Rather, my concern is with the concept of moral injury as a herme-
neutic for helping us to understand the particular way in which pious
Muslims not necessarily attracted to juridical methods were injured by the
Danish cartoons. For the jurists, scandalous and mocking speech about the
Prophet is nothing other than a moral injury, for it is an attempt to corrupt
the entire social, psychological, and affective edifice on which morality
rests. Thus, it remains to be shown just how Mahmood’s account moves us
beyond a blasphemy model for understanding what was at stake in the
cartoon controversy.
There is another account of the reaction to the cartoons that is also
perfectly compatible with the idea of moral injury. It is found in a concise
way in Slavoj Žižek’s remarks on the cartoon controversy:
The Muslim crowds did not react to the Muhammad caricatures as
such. They reacted to the complex figure or image of the West that
7. A� dha� is more commonly used for harm or injury but out of concern for the theological
complexities arising from the idea that God could be harmed or injured by human actions I will
translate it as an “affront to.”
8. Yu� suf A �hmad Mu �hammad al-Badawı�, Maqa� �sid al-sharı�‘a ‘ind Ibn Taymiyya (Amman,
2000), pp. 455–56.
9. Jamilah Rasheed, “Excluding Cartoons a Step toward Justice,” New Haven Register, 18
Sept. 2009, p. A4.
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2011 813
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was perceived as the attitude behind the caricatures. Those who pro-
posed the term “Occidentalism” as the counterpart to Edward Said’s
“Orientalism” are right up to a point: what we get in Muslim coun-
tries is a certain ideological vision of the West which distorts Western
reality no less, although in a different way, than the Orientalist vision
distorts the Orient. What exploded in violence was a web of symbols,
images and attitudes, including Western imperialism, godless materi-
alism, hedonism, and the suffering of Palestinians, and which became
attached to Danish cartoons. This is why the hatred expanded from
the caricatures to Denmark as a country, to Scandinavia, to Europe,
and to the West as a whole. A torrent of humiliations and frustrations
were condensed into the caricatures. This condensation, it needs to be
borne in mind, is a basic fact of language, of constructing and impos-
ing a certain symbolic field.10
There are at least two interpretations of this account. One, in fact, I would
suggest is the same kind of schesis-based account Mahmood advances in
her article. Only here, the object of assimilation is not the Prophet but the
community of Muslims. The other interpretation is an honor-based ac-
count. In other words, for Žižek the cartoons were not an assault on the
Prophet’s honor but on Muslims’ honor. Mahmood does not deny that
such an honor-based response to the cartoons was present in much of the
popular reactions. However, what she does not address is whether such a
motivation also counts as a form of moral injury. Since she does not give a
definition of moral injury, we cannot know, but I see no reason for dis-
counting this emotion as a legitimate form of moral injury. How could it
be otherwise if we understand the social bases of individual and group
self-respect to be moral goods? In short, I am not sure what work the
concept of moral injury does for us in her article.
There are two responses available to Mahmood at this point. One is to
deny that many Muslims operate with anything other than her “lived re-
lationship” and “embodied piety” conception of religiosity. But that is
clearly invalidated by any sincere and open-minded survey of Muslim
public discourse, even in the West. The other is to accept that these other
sources of injury—the juridical/blasphemy source and the identitarian/
honor source—are indeed kinds of moral injury equally salient and real as
the kind she is interested in exposing but that the latter kind is particularly
worthy of our moral concern. That is, she might argue that we should be
more concerned about pious Muslims for whom the cartoons represented a
10. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London, 2008), p. 51.
814 Andrew F. March / Critical Response
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disruption of their attachment with the Prophet and thus more troubled
by their pain than about the pain of Muslims reacting out of injury to a
comprehensive politico-religious conception or out of communal honor.
But I simply don’t see why this is the case. As a fellow citizen, I am
concerned about the pain both of those for whom slandering the Prophet
represents an attack on a conception of religious objectives and of those for
whom slandering the Prophet amounts to an intercommunal provocation.
Personally, I certainly was troubled by the way in which “doctrinal Mus-
lims” and “identity Muslims” were pained by the cartoons. For that mat-
ter, I am also concerned about the subjective pain felt by conservative
Christians witnessing the gradual replacement of their conception of mar-
riage with a new, fairer one more inclusive of all kinds of love and attach-
ment. I was troubled by the pain felt by my students who were outraged by
the Abu Ghraib cartoon in the Michigan State student newspaper. I dis-
agree with them, and I don’t want their views inscribed as law or informal
morality in a diverse society, but that does not mean that I cannot empa-
thize with the injury they feel.
In fact, in an odd paradox, is Mahmood herself not possibly reinforcing
some of the “liberal, secular” assumptions about violence and blasphemy
in advancing her account? By diverting attention away from those Mus-
lims who have a more intellectualized and politicized account of what is
wrong with blasphemy and mockery, as well as from those Muslims of-
fended on community honor grounds, towards the more sympathetic and
anodyne (to a liberal, secular sensibility) feelings of pious Muslims who are
not interested in an “an economy of blame, accountability, and repara-
tions” (p. 849), is she in fact siding with those who think that blasphemy
and mockery have no claim in the modern world if they are motivated by
a religious doctrine or a group identity? Is she in fact agreeing with those
who suggest that religious doctrine or community honor are not good
grounds for feeling wounded and therefore that we must instead invoke a
secular conception of subjectively authenticated harm and pain? If not,
then it would be interesting to hear an account of how the moral injury she
outlines in her article is more troubling or worthy of concern than the
moral injury felt on doctrinal-religious grounds or community-identity
grounds and how her model of religious subjectivity raises any serious
challenges at all for liberal secularism (outside of France, that is!).
What Was the Injury in the Danish Cartoons?
A robust concept of moral injury should be able to provide an account
of what the injury at stake is. Mahmood is dismissive of two lines of argu-
ment: that it should be within the power of pious Muslims in the modern
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2011 815
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world to ignore the doodles of a few cheeky Danes and that the cartoons
were protected political speech because there are real concerns about the
relationship of religion and violence. The first “naturalizes a certain con-
cept of a religious subject but also fails to attend to the affective and em-
bodied practices through which a subject comes to relate to a particular
sign—a relationship founded . . . on attachment and cohabitation” (pp.
841– 42). The second involves seeing the cartoons as “statements of facts,”
that is, as relying on a conception of Muslims as state security threats
should they get their way on the cartoon issue (p. 854).
How, exactly, does “attend[ing] to the affective and embodied practices
through which a subject comes to relate to a particular sign—a relation-
ship founded . . . on . . . attachment and cohabitation” refute, however, Art
Spiegelman’s dismay that “dopey cartoons” provoked violent demonstra-
tions?11 Surely Mahmood does not mean to suggest that having a relation-
ship of attachment and cohabitation with the Prophet is a suitable
explanation for the countless complex questions we need to answer in
order to explain various kinds of political action. Mahmood confuses here
the idea that Muslims may have objected to the cartoons in good faith or
been genuinely hurt by them prior to consulting a proper religious author-
ity with the idea that their political and moral agency is entirely predeter-
mined by their religious subjectivity. Talal Asad seems to have made the
same error: “it becomes difficult for the secular liberal to understand the
passion that informs those for whom, rightly or wrongly, it is impossible to
remain silent when confronted with blasphemy, those for whom blasphemy
is neither ‘freedom of speech’ nor the challenge of a new truth but some-
thing that seeks to disrupt a living relationship.”12
The fact that people claim to have “no choice” but to act or respond in
a certain way does not make this true. The claim that “I can do no other” is
not a factual claim but rather a figure of speech (“I can do no other without
great effort or cost to my aims”) or socialization to the point of mystifica-
tion. In fact, people often do experience a certain distance between their
selves and some of their constitutive beliefs or practices; the latter change,
are debated, and are replaced. How a pious Muslim “must” respond (emo-
tionally and physically) to an insult to the Prophet is not a natural fact or
even one predetermined by the discursive tradition that creates her or his
form of religious subjectivity. Rather, it is an evolving product of many
11. Art Spiegelman, “Drawing Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of Outrage,”
Harper’s Magazine (June 2006): 47.
12. Talal Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” in Asad et al., Is Critique
Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Berkeley, 2009), p. 46.
816 Andrew F. March / Critical Response
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inputs, including the ongoing discourses and debates within the religious
community.
Put differently, when secular political theorists (as well as theologians)
refer to religion as involving belief, this should not be understood tenden-
tiously and simplistically as only referring to “privatizable” belief about
theological matters that neither break my leg nor pick my pocket (the
nature of Christ, who exactly was God’s final prophet), but also beliefs
about action in the common social world. The proposition “insults to the
Prophet Muhammad must be avenged in some way” is a belief statement,
as are the range of arguments that explain and justify it. It is no part of
critical inquiry of any form or persuasion to object to one narrative on the
grounds that it “naturalizes a certain concept of the religious subject” by
merely offering an alternative but equally dogmatic naturalization of the
religious subject.
Similarly, it is easy to see what is meant by those who seek to defend the
cartoons as political speech. It does not mean to suggest, pace Mahmood,
that anyone who defends the cartoons as political speech is endorsing as
fact what the cartoons were supposedly stating. Rather, what is being sug-
gested is that the Danish cartoons (like the cartoon from the Michigan
State student newspaper) were not simply gratuitous offenses akin to a
noose at a multiracial high school or, say, a picture of a pig with the name
“Muhammad” written on it. In both of those cases, it is clear that no
valuable political speech is being voiced beyond “we hate African-
Americans” or “we think your so-called prophet is like the most impure
animal in your religion.” In other words, in banning or even discouraging
speech that might contain political commentary not in itself a violation of
human dignity, however injurious to some sensibilities that commentary
may be, there are costs, costs that we are cautious in imposing.
Besides, what were the cartoons suggesting as fact? Were they simply
suggesting that Muhammad was a terrorist plain and simple? Maybe, and
it certainly matters that many Muslims took the cartoon as suggesting this.
But why is this an occasion to leave all of our interpretive habits at the
door? Is it even possible that the infamous bomb-in-the-turban cartoon
was a satire on jihadis, not on Islam at large? Is it even possible that the
cartoon may thus be read as equivalent to What Would Jesus Bomb? bum-
per stickers— effective mockery of outlandish political ideologies which
seek to justify their violence in the name of religious founders?
Presumably Mahmood regards as sufficiently obvious both what was
injurious about the cartoons and why they needed to be responded to. But
so much more of interest can be discussed here and she is so well-placed to
contribute to that discussion that it is a pity she did not say more on it. For
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2011 817
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her “attachment-and-cohabitation-with-the-Prophet” Muslims, what ex-
actly was so injurious? That Muhammad was portrayed visually at all? That
he was portrayed by non-Muslims? That he was portrayed in a mocking or
irreverent fashion? That he was portrayed as a terrorist? That non-
Muslims were getting away with it?
More troubling for Mahmood, I believe, is that her account seems
somewhat self-contradictory. If pious Muslims truly inhabit a closed
world of attachment, assimilation, and cohabitation with the Prophet or,
in Asad’s terms, experience a “lived relationship,” then how is their being
so easily shaken by outsiders? What specific actions of outsiders have the
capacity to rock one’s world in this way? Importantly, accounts that focus
either on the idea of transgression of a boundary or violation of honor do
not have this problem. Here it is easy to see why the speech of others injures
or enrages.
Mahmood’s account, alas, is strangely apolitical and strangely context-
averse. If a jihadi website has a silhouette of the Prophet departing for
battle, while that website defends the kinds of acts insinuated by the car-
toons, is that not a source of moral injury for the pious Muslims Mahmood
is describing? If a jihadi website proudly proclaims that the Prophet him-
self engaged in the kinds of acts jihadis are trying to justify—indeed that
they are also trying to emulate the Prophet and assimilate their behavior
into his!—is that not also a source of moral injury for politically quietist
“attachment-and-cohabitation-with-the-Prophet” Muslims? Why does it
not seem to invoke the kind of reaction that the Danish cartoons did?
The psychology of offense and moral injury is a complex issue, and I do
not propose any answers here. But it is clear that the internal religious
attitudes of pious Muslims toward the Prophet alone do not explain why
the Danish cartoons invoked the response that they did. There is a complex
set of political and social contexts involving the identity of the perpetra-
tors, the geopolitical moment, and the visual form of the speech act, all of
which need to be taken into account in addition to the apolitical and
ahistorical nature of pious assimilation and cohabitation with the Prophet.
That is, there is more to the story than Muslim piety per se. For those, like
Mahmood, interested in using the concept of moral injury not only for
descriptive purposes but also for ethical ones, I think something more
needs to be said about this psychological dimension of offense and injury.
What I think emerges from these reflections is that the pain involved,
the brute injury, only partially explains what was wrong with the Danish
cartoons. All kinds of acts on the part of others are liable to cause pain.
How do we know when that pain is something which we are willing to
tolerate? How do we know when the imposition of psychological pain is a
818 Andrew F. March / Critical Response
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morally necessary byproduct of political action? How do we know when
the causes or catalysts of pain are morally troubling regardless of what aims
those inflicting the pain are trying to pursue in the world?
Mahmood is trying to bring our attention to a kind of pain that she feels
is excluded by liberal, secularist rationality. But is she right? We live in a
society, largely thanks to that kind of secular mentality, where people are
self-authenticating sources of knowledge about their own pain, where ev-
eryone is able to “identify their harms.”13 In fact, Mahmood’s account is,
above all, a symptom of the power of this secular ethos; for she herself
brings our attention only to the subjective injury felt by persons (a thor-
oughly secular consideration) and not to a radically alternative morality
whereby entities such as God, the Prophet Muhammad, or a sacred text
themselves have moral claims on human action. Rather than claiming that
the sacred itself ought to be an object of protection, she chooses to remain
on the moral terrain of modern secularism by directing attention to the
moral-emotional costs born by certain persons as a result of speech. Even
she refuses to slip the bars of secular ideology.
The resistance that Mahmood is encountering in the case of the Danish
cartoons is not to the idea that some pious Muslims were genuinely hurt by
the cartoons (why else would Jyllands-Posten have published them?), or
merely to the idea that Muslim pain of any kind matters (of course, this is
what many in the West have a problem with), but rather to the idea that
such pain alone—without a deeper and broader account of why that pain
is in this context an injustice—stands out from amongst the countless
possible sources of moral injury and emotional pain that all citizens of
complex, morally diverse, postmodern societies encounter when they walk
out the door, turn on the television, or open right-wing Danish newspa-
pers. The problem is not that our liberal, secular societies cannot recognize
and appreciate religious pain (if anything religion is still assumed to be a
more authentic reason for moral consideration than many secular convic-
tions, at least in the United States), it is that subjectively felt religious pain
is no longer a trump card in a world that takes race, gender, ethnicity, and
class as equally important sources of identity and moral motivation.
A Politics of Witnessing?
In her conclusion, Mahmood avers that “for anyone interested in fos-
tering greater understanding across lines of religious difference, it would
be important to turn not to the law but to the thick texture and traditions
13. Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif.,
2003), p. 6.
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2011 819
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of ethical and intersubjective norms that provide the substrate for legal
arguments. . . . Ultimately . . . the future of the Muslim minority in Europe
depends not so much on how the law might be expanded to accommodate
its concerns but on a larger transformation of the cultural and ethical
sensibilities of the majority Judeo-Christian population that undergird the
law” (p. 860).
Certainly such understanding across religious difference should be fos-
tered, and it is certainly true that there is a deplorable tendency in the
Euro-American public sphere to simultaneously assert that Muslims are
disingenuous in claiming injury and also that Muslims are in urgent need
of being injured so as to be disrupted from their archaic and dangerous
attachments. But what “transformation of the cultural and ethical sensi-
bilities of the majority Judeo-Christian population” do we wish to see
exactly—that they purify themselves of racist attitudes towards fellow cit-
izens of Muslim cultural backgrounds, that they not misuse the secular
license to insult religion as an alibi for creating a hostile environment for
fellow citizens of Muslim cultural backgrounds, or that they actually com-
mit to never offending distinctly religious sensibilities held by Muslims by
not transgressing against the sacred? Mahmood may object to these kinds
of distinctions on the grounds that pious Muslims might not wish to dis-
tinguish between injury to the Prophet and injury to the Muslim commu-
nity, but for her purposes in calling for a transformation of the Euro-
American attitude towards Muslims while also exploring the possibility of
a critique of secularism this is the precise question that I believe she needs
to answer.
In calling on European Muslims to develop the tools to better “trans-
lat[e] practices and norms across semiotic and ethical differences” even
without demanding legal remedies, I take Mahmood here to be calling for
a version of what John Rawls referred to favorably as “witnessing”: “it may
happen that some citizens feel they must express their principled dissent
from existing institutions, policies, or enacted legislation. . . . In this case
they . . . feel that they must not only let other citizens know the deep basis of
their strong opposition but must also bear witness to their faith by doing so.”14
Hopefully, we will someday live in a society where brute anti-Muslim
prejudice is regarded as in the same bad taste as racism, anti-Semitism,
sexism, and homophobia, where self-respecting people are embarrassed to
be caught voicing ignorant and hostile statements about Muslims. I am not
sure whether in such a society The Satanic Verses or the Danish cartoons
14. John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” The Law of Peoples (Cambridge,
Mass., 1999), p. 156 n. 57.
820 Andrew F. March / Critical Response
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would fall afoul of this sensibility, but many far more vicious forms of
expression presently circulating in Western societies directed at Muslims
certainly would. In the meanwhile, things are getting worse, with neofas-
cist, nativist groups gaining strength in Europe15 and anti-Muslim speech
(so often expressed as “resistance to creeping shariatization”)16 becoming
the go-to jingoistic gesture of the American Right. (Indeed, with incidents
like the Swiss minaret ban, one burka ban after another in Europe, and the
Park 51 fiasco, we cannot say that crude anti-Muslim racism is now, if it
ever was, only freely expressed by extreme right-wing groups.) Defeating
these groups is a political project that will require a coalition of the reli-
gious and the secular.17
I believe that this political project is in the first order about creating a
political culture that finally accepts the fact that Muslim communities are
long-term stakeholders in Europe and America and where Muslim com-
munities see public evidence of this attitude. For me, then, the cartoons
were above all a political act potentially harmful to the long-term project of
creating a public space where Muslims feel safe, valued, and equal. Con-
tributing to this culture will invariably require of Muslims at times a lan-
guage for expressing their interests and values that is more secular than
some might like. But that is not primarily because of the arbitrary disci-
plinary rationality of modern secularism or some “Protestant” conception
of religion as only a matter of private belief but rather because of (in
Mahmood’s words) the “thick texture and traditions of ethical and inter-
subjective norms that provide the substrate for legal arguments” presently
in circulation in Europe, that is, because of the sensibility of Muslims’
fellow citizens in Europe. However, what Mahmood’s timely article re-
minds us is that we must leave space for Muslims to bear witness in what-
ever language they wish to the ways in which those ethical and
intersubjective norms affect them without the suspicion that every expres-
sion of Islamic religiosity is a dagger aimed at the heart of European freedom.
15. See, for example, Dominic Casciani, “Who Are the English Defence League?” BBC News
Magazine, 11 Sept. 2009, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8250017.stm, a report on a
relatively new group calling itself the English Defence League.
16. See, for example, “The Islamification of England,” BNP Reform 2011, 2 Feb. 2011,
www.bnpreform2011.co.uk/?p�375
17. Indeed, there are many Muslim religious intellectuals who agree with this, including
Tunisian Islamist Rashid al-Ghannushi and the Mauritanian-Saudi scholar Abd Alla�h Ibn
Bayya. Both argue that to the extent Western societies are hospitable to Muslims at all, this is
not due to Abrahamic fraternity or residual regard for religion, but secular humanism. It is
often precisely a Rawlsian or Habermasian form of liberal secularism that allows these religious
scholars to argue that Western secularism is not a metaphysical doctrine that conflicts with
Islam.
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2011 821
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