All or Nothing: My Belief about Depictions of the Prophet Muhammad

If you know me, you know that I have a unique brand of humor. I like to “push the envelope.” That is to say, I like to find wherever “the line” is, and then do a full-on-sprint over it. No one and no topic is safe, not even myself. I’m an equal opportunity offender, for I believe that our world could do with a little more levity, even in regards to the most sensitive of issues.

That being said, I had a conversation today with a coworker of mine who is a Muslim. He and I spar on a daily basis over a broad-range of issues, with each of us taking extreme, outlandish positions on whatever the topic for the sake of humor. For instance, he didn’t invite me to his family barbeque, so I said that I didn’t want to get caught up in a terror cell, and while I’ve been trying to improve my relationship with my manager, he uses a certain hand gesture to critique my method of ingratiating myself to him (HINT: It involves a fist and a tongue poking out of the side of his cheek). Anyway, he informed me today that there’s some event on Facebook about drawing pictures of the Prophet Muhammad which provoked a bit of a tirade on my part. Basically, I believe that either we’ve got to all agree to respect everyone’s unique religious beliefs, and refrain from making off-color or offensive remarks about them, or they’re all fair game. I absolutely understand the desire to protect and defend your religious beliefs from ridicule. And, trust me, as a Catholic, I’ve certainly had the opportunity to endure (and make) more than a few jokes at the expense of the Church and its clergy. But I would never tell anyone that they couldn’t make those jokes, and I certainly wouldn’t kill them over it. On the other hand, some Muslims (not all) seem to want to bully their way into immunity, strong-arming and making death threats towards anyone who depicts or the Prophet Muhammad or Islam. The most salient example of this thuggery is between the makers of South Park and Comedy Central, who censored two recent episodes where the name and visage of the Prophet Muhammad were depicted after receiving death threats from a group based in Manhattan named Revolutionary Islam.

The part that really bothers me is that there are non-Muslims who actually agree and advocate for this same censorship. I can at least understand someone whose religious zeal carries them into a state of irrationality and extremism; however, I simply can’t fathom how anyone who doesn’t hold these set of beliefs can believe that the topic of religion, and more specifically Islam, is somehow too taboo to poke fun at. Many of these same people, who often turn such a cynical, harsh eye towards the Church, or Christianity as a whole, seem to think that there’s something inherently different about Muhammad and Islam, making both exempt from ridicule and criticism. The hypocrisy of this line of reasoning is exposed in the same episode of South Park which depicts a strung-out Buddha snorting lines of cocaine off of a table while Jesus and a whole host of religious figures (and Aquaman) engage in other acts of chicanery. However, rather than censoring the whole episode—or the whole series for that matter—they chose to make Muhammad sacrosanct. Yet, despite their protests about “tolerance” and cries for “acceptance,” they refuse to come to grips with the honest truth that people are simply more scared of a group of angry Muslims than they are about a group of pissed off Christians. They believe that you can literally shit on the faces of Jesus and Mary—I’m referring to the controversial 1999 art exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art which featured, among other things, paintings of the Virgin Mary and Jesus that had been covered in shit, or which had been made out of tiny images of vaginas and breasts—but simply drawing a picture of Muhammad is out of line. And you know why? Because an angry Christian will fire off an angry email while an angry Muslim may put a bomb in a trash-can outside of your place of business. Or at least that’s what they believe, deep down in their hearts, in places they don’t speak about at parties or conferences or on CNN. They need to face facts, and the fact is that the hatred and bigotry that they purport to be crusading against is the very same hatred and bigotry they espouse in their hypocritical, illogical belief systems.

So, with respect to my friends who are Muslim, in an act of the very same defiance that sort of defines my whole life, I’m going to have to do what I always do—cross the line.