Much has been said expounding a variety of opinions about freedom of expression and freedom of speech. My concern is the incredible cultural gap that exists between East and West in this debate. Why are Westerners so much more willing to embrace absolute freedom of speech and not a reasonable version that says people should not have the right to make fun of a religion?
I think the answer can be found in history when we look back at the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg more than 500 years ago in Germany. Subsequently, a German priest named Martin Luther used it to print essays deriding the Catholic administrators at the time for their luxurious lifestyles and gross twisting of the faith in order to accommodate this. At that time people, even the poorest of the poor would do anything to achieve the promise of paradise, including handing over their hard earned money as alms.
Martin Luther and his followers showed a great deal of courage by printing what they saw as flaws of the tyranny of religion in their country. They also did so with cartoons to show the ridiculous nature of it all. As a result, they overturned the Catholic grip on Europe and a new era of freedom and thinkers came to be. In modern times, we would say that they went viral.
Westerners are used to this kind of treatment of the ridiculous - be it politics, monarchy, or religion and in fact we expect it and revel in it. It makes us laugh and gives us a reprieve from what we consider to be outrageous behaviour by our leaders.
Most of us in the West do not attach a lot of credibility to these types of rants as we have taken a modern leap into the world of science, which we have wholeheartedly embraced to our benefits. We have tried to rise above our own history of brutal colonialism and create strong and fair constitutions and judicial systems that embrace human rights. If any of this social security is seen to be at risk, you can trust that the cartoonists and the comedians will be the first to stir it up and get the rest of us fired up to stand up for what is right and just.
Without political cartoonists and satirists we would be lost. They are the ones that give people like me the understanding that I am not alone in seeing how crazy things are out there at times!
- The reader is a Canadian based in Dubai
