From Zombie at Pajamas Media
The television network Comedy Central has once again this month shown its cowardice and hypocrisy by censoring all images of Mohammed from Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s cartoon “South Park.”
For those with short memories, the “once again” part of that sentence refers to the previous time — back in 2006 — Stone and Parker tried to depict Mohammed on “South Park,” and had the episode censored by network executives afraid of Muslim violence.
Which only goes to show that terrorism works. Because Mohammed had already appeared, with no controversy, on a “South Park” episode called “Super Best Friends” back on on July 4, 2001. Note the exact date carefully. If that episode has been scheduled to appear three months later, it almost certainly would have been canceled or censored too. Tellingly, that original 2001 “Super Best Friends” episode has itself now been removed from Comedy Central’s site and is no longer available for reruns.
he difference between July, 2001 and now is that these days, Muslim extremists threaten to kill anyone who draws or displays an image of Mohammed. Actually, that’s not true: Muslims have for centuries threatened to kill anyone who draws Mohammed; it’s only that now, since 9/11, we in the West are aware of the threats. Before, the warnings and prohibitions were distant bleats which didn’t scare those few artists who even heard them. But with 9/11, the murder of Theo van Gogh, the fatwas against and attempted murders of the Danish cartoonists, and global riots over the mildest of caricatures, the atmosphere has changed: Suddenly, the threats by Muslims are widely publicized and feel quite real indeed.
What mystifies me is the Islamic fundamentalists’ unaccountable obsession with television and newspapers: It is only when Mohammed appears on a TV screen or is printed in a newspaper that the extremists go berserk. But when he appears elsewhere, such as in museums, books, or the Internet — all of which feature innumerable portraits of Mohammed on essentially a permanent basis — there is a general silence. But why? Why does it cause a cultural explosion when a simplistic drawing of Mohammed appears on a TV screen, when anybody can walk into a museum, or open a book, or simply turn on a computer, and see hundreds upon hundreds of Mohammed portraits whenever they want?
I think the answer is simple: Neither the Islamic extremists nor the general public are aware of just how commonplace and numerous Mohammed depictions really are.
Back in September of 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten started the recent wave of controversy by publishing 12 (mostly innocuous) Mohammed cartoons as a commentary on the absurd dilemma endured by a Danish author who was having difficulty finding any artist willing to illustrate his upcoming book about Mohammed. To everyone’s astonishment, the publication of the cartoons sparked worldwide outrage on the part of Muslims, who apparently thought that there were no images of Mohammed in existence, and thus these 12 Danish cartoons were breaking some kind of taboo.
Within hours of that story hitting the American media nearly five years ago, I began (out of curiosity) to poke around the Internet looking for other pictures of Mohammed, aside from the Danish cartoons. It didn’t take long before I found one, then two, five, ten, forty! On a whim, I downloaded them all and quickly posted a page on my site zombietime which I ambitiously titled: “The Mohammed Image Archive.”
And at that moment my life changed.
The page was an instant hit in the blogosphere, and by day’s end was linked far and wide. And I discovered that I was not the only one curiously poking around the Internet looking for Mohammed pictures: My in-box was quickly flooded with submissions from readers who had discovered this or that unusual Mohammed portait in some forgotten corner of the Web.
So I updated my page. And then updated it again. And again. And then I had to split it into two pages. Then three. Before long the Archive had 13 different themed sections, ranging from respectful and scholarly Islamic Depictions of Mohammed in Full to the outrageously blasphemous Extreme Mohammed, and everything in between. Updating the Archive practically became full-time job — unpaid, needless to say, since I have no ads or other income-generating widgets on my site. The page design was (and still is) minimalistic; my excuse is that the simple design helps the pictures load quickly, but the real reason is that my HTML skills are rudimentary at best.
Within a few months, the Archive had grown to become far and away the largest assemblage of Mohammed imagery anywhere in the world. And since that time, it has quadrupled in size, at least. I now find myself the curator of a global resource, mankind’s only repository of every known image of Mohammed, “the 7th-century founder of Islam” (as I carefully describe him with studious neutrality). This is the curse of perfectionism: once you start on a project like this, you can’t stop until you have every single Mohammed picture ever created, regardless of era, quality, style or intent. Several examples from the Archive’s massive collection are featured throughout this essay.
Detail of Mohammed riding his magical steed, from a miniature in the illuminated manuscript called The Apocalypse of Muhammad, written in 1436 in Herat, Afghanistan (now in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris).
Why do I maintain the Archive? Do I hate Islam? Am I a Muslim? Am I trying to start a war? No, no, and no. The reason is simple: The Archive is an unambiguous declaration of my devotion to the principle of free speech, and free thought. No one can tell me what I can or cannot say. The very fact that millions of people are trying to impose a ban on something is motivation enough for me to shout it from the rooftops.
I fully admit that I am no scholar. I don’t have a PhD in art history or theology. But neither am I some ignorant Internet troll. The Archive is not just a collection of gorgeous medieval Islamic paintings of Mohammed; nor is it just a compilation of the most obscene and insulting Mohammed cartoons ever drawn; nor is it just a museum of the astounding variety of both respectful and satirical Mohammed-themed images that have been created throughout the centuries; it is all those things and more. No restrictions. No censorship. That’s the whole point.
And 70% of Americans agree with me.
(I had originally planned to mention in this essay Draw Mohammed Day, an anti-censorship event dreamt up by Seattle artist Molly Norris. But after her post received massive media attention, Molly backed down and said it was all a joke, admitting her retraction was partly out of fear. Booooo! No matter. Because at the Mohammed Image Archive, every day is Draw Mohammed Day!)
The Archive’s reputation continued to grow, and links from major media portals, blogs, and other Web sites kept coming in, and I soon got what every webmaster craves: A top-ten Google search ranking for a common term. Now, if you do a Google search for the simple word “Mohammed,” the Mohammed Image Archive is the #4 result on the first page, right after Wikipedia, The Catholic Encyclopedia, and a Christian site called Bible Probe.
If you’ve ever gotten a top-five Google listing for a common word, you know what this means: A continuous uninterrupted stream of visitors, day in, day out. If you have ads, this makes you happy; if you don’t have ads, all it means is that your site is constantly burdened by excess traffic, which is one of the reasons why zombietime often is slow-loading or overwhelmed. Even on a slow-news day, people looking for Mohammed arrive by the thousands to view the Archive.
Hate Mail and Death Threats
Not all of those visitors are happy with what they encounter at the Archive. In fact, a substantial percentage of them are Muslims out looking for info about their favorite prophet, completely unaware that any pictures of Mohammed even exist, naively assuming that Islam has always banned portraits of its founder (not true), and also assuming that other societies obey Islamic laws (also not true). What happens when they first lay eyes on the Archive is a cultural collision of epic proportions that often as not causes immediate head explosion.
In the Archive I include a page called Emails From Readers on which I reprint a selection of my Archive correspondence, both pro and con. In truth, it generally runs about 10% pro and 90% con, but the page would quickly grow out of control if I posted every email I get, since I get dozens every day. And about half of those are fatwas or death threats or demands that I shut the site down immediately. It’s gotten so bad that these days I generally just hit the “Delete” button without even reading half of them; if I see a subject line that says “Remove all pictures NOW!” or “Allah throws you in hellfire,” I pretty much know what to expect. Reading death threats can get wearisome at times, I do admit.
Many people have told me, to my great surprise, that “Emails From Readers” is not just their favorite page at the Archive, but their favorite page on the entire Internet, and they re-visit it again and again because of the incongruous amalgamation of base emotions they get from reading the emails: hilarity, fear, outrage, mockery, disgust, anger, and stupefaction.
U.S. Constitutional Free Press 