Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? (How) can Muslim humor be humorous?!
Visual desecuritization moves on Swedish speaking Muslim blogs1
ABSTRACT
The focus of this paper is on audio-visual material such as satirical cartoons, contemporary movie trailers and
parodic video clips contained within several blogs maintained by Swedish speaking bloggers who identify
themselves as Muslim. The selected material reflects a series of events which are simultaneously understood as
geopolitical and/or everyday life-experience which challenge particular representations of normativity and
boundary creation by means of satire, parody, irony and sarcasm. I argue that the production and/or circulation
of these visuals constitute both a form of assessment vis à vis the presumptive secularism of critique advanced in
the Swedish media in the aftermath of the Danish Muhammed cartoons and its Swedish counterpart, and a way
of destabilizing some of the stereotypes of Muslims existing in various social and political sectors (immigration
policies, foreign policies, etc.). These visuals could also be read as desecuritization moves on the part of the
bloggers, especially when a certain type of humor gains social influence and is actively promoted by state. I also
attempt to address some methodological questions regarding the fragmented nature of the internet and the study
of qualitatively different visuals together rather than separately.
1
I started to think about various strategies for selecting the blogs in January 2010 when I started to look for the blogs
through the dominated blogportals at that time (knuff.se, blogger.se, bloggkartan.se, bloggportalen.se, intressant.se,
nyligen.se.1 The portals are Internet platforms that offer various blog services financed by advertising on which users may
register their blogs, and are then indexed by criteria such as name, topic, and location in Sweden. On these portals I used
combination search of key words or phrases including ‘ex-‘, ‘cultural’, ‘atheist’, ‘secular’, ‘believing’, ‘practicing’, ‘convert’
+ ‘Muslim’ or ‘my name is’ + ‘Mohammed’, ‘Khadija’, ‘Fatima’ and other Muslim sounding names which are the most
popular Muslim names in Sweden, according to SCB, the Swedish Official Statistics, or ‘I’, ‘my parents’, ‘my family’, ‘my
relatives’ + ‘from’ + ‘Iraq’, ‘Somalia’, ‘Turkey’, ‘Jordan’, ‘Iran’, ‘Palestine’, ‘Kurdistan’ based on secondary literature and
available statistics regarding the country of origin of the largest groups of immigrants. The searches led me to various figures
at different times with ranges between 250-300 blogs found between January-February 2010. The bloggers had ages between
15 and 55, but I decided to include at that time only young bloggers who explicitly state their Muslim identity, with ages
between 18 and 35. I opted for a broader understanding of youth since the Swedish Security Police (SÄPO) uses this range
when Muslims at risk of radicalization are profiled, which was relevant for my research questions. The remainder of that year
(2010) constituted firstly an orientation phase in which I surveyed these original 300 blogs in order to obtain a general feel
about the nature of the postings, the types of comments that might be encountered, the common topics and “self-labeled”
categories used, as well as various and ideational, spatial/temporal and ethical articulations of identity. In order to be able to
manage the amount of data I gathered in this orientation phase ( over 6,000 A4s!) I have decided to include only those topics
which were of direct relevance for my research question, and thus drastically reduce the number of blogs to 20 (10 males and
10 females). I had to exclude one blog as it ceased to exist prior to my archival of the posts (http://bouhamza.blogspot.se). In
the orientation phase I discovered certain patterns which confirm the available statistics on various branches within Islam
existent in Sweden (Sunnhi, Shia or Sufi-orders). What I found counterintuitive in the early phase of the thesis was the fact
that no blogger identified herself as Ahmadyya Muslim, although the oldest and the first proper Mosque built in Sweden is
the Ahmadyya Mosque in Gothenburg built in 1975. This made me search for Ahmadyya bloggers to no avail. Convert
females to Sunnhi Islam were overrepresented in the original sample and I decided to keep 3 converts in the final sample. I
could not find a single male convert who blogged at the time of the search. Instead of a quantitative analysis including more
blogs and a much shorter time-span (6 months as initially planned), I decided to make an in-depth qualitative analysis and see
how bloggers articulate relationships between concepts and how identity gets constructed. This step was necessary because it
was not clear what the actual content of categories such as “politics” and “religion” used by bloggers actually included, or
how the “borders” that logically operate when separate categories are used actually get articulated or played out in chains of
blind spots and /or overlappings. An in-depth, more interpretative analysis was therefore needed, and I decided to observe a
longer time period (i.e. with the first blog posted in 2006 -2010 and up to the 1st of January 2012) as the research questions
begun to crystalize. Having a longer time interval to focus on, allowed me to identify recurrent patterns in the discussion
styles, the topics discussed, and the articulations they made with regard to “the religious”, “the secular” and the “Muslim
self”, and thus reach theoretical saturation. I encountered some difficulties while archiving and encoding the data from these
19 blogs. Especially the visuals were comic, ambiguous and apparently not much connected to my initial research questions.
I coded them initially as “ambivalent pics/audios”. Since the aim of my larger dissertation was to study the various ways in
which Muslim bloggers create the twin categories of “religion” and “the secular” in their identity construction as Muslims in
a predominantly secular context, I decided to address the “ambiguous pics/audios” at a later stage, as this would have
required more of me in terms of theorizing on visuality, the scopic regimes, or the way in which visuals are different from the
written texts and the way humor is staged and used by people who perceive themselves as being situated in marginal
positions. This article is an adapted version of a paper presented in 2011 at the International Studies Association –conference
in Montréal.
1 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? Introduction
Terror attacks executed by radical Islamists on Swedish soil on the 11th of December 2010;
the continuous debate on the wearing of the Islamic headscarf (hijab) in public institutions,
shifting configurations of the relationship between state and church/religion in an increasingly
plural religious landscape, the re-emergence of religious articulations making claims on the
public sphere, and the partial refutation of classical secularisation theories (Berger 1967)
means that the relationship between the late modern state, civil society and religion are in the
process of reformulation across Europe (Koenig 2008). The past and future of secularisms in
European contexts have major implications for religious freedoms or human rights. How
secularism is (re) defined, understood and addressed in European societies in coming years
will have profound implications for the prospects of “preserving secularism’s virtues without
clinging to its vices” (Asad 2001: 147), and for the prospect of making people feel at home in
a “modern, secular, liberal society in which many customs and values, and indeed, collective
memories, clash with their own” (Buruma 2006: 244).
The plurality of modern beliefs and identities is often argued to be held together only through
a formal separation between religious belonging and political status and through the allocation
of the former into the private realm (Hurd 2008). To take fully part in a democratic society,
citizens of various (non)religious convictions must share values, which the argument goes,
enable a common political/public life: “without shared values there is no integration, without
integration no political stability, without some measure of stability no justice, no freedom, and
no tolerance. Secularism provides the framework for realizing all these things” (de Vries and
Sullivan 2006, 494). Such a tolerant-sounding understanding projects secularism into the
“definition of Europe itself”, and belittles Muslims into a minority “unlike other minorities”,
either to be tolerated (liberal argument), or restricted (nationalist orientation) since they alone
are unwilling or unable to conform to the modern agenda (Connolly 1999, 2006). Tolerance,
however, is not always a positive value to be cultivated, but could also be read as a technique
of governmentality, with exclusionary effects (Brown 2008).
The secular reading of Islam can lead to a series of dichotomies contributing to ongoing
“culture talks” with detrimental effects for immigration policies across Europe. However,
from the point of view of Muslim reformist thinking, Tariq Ramadan, Abdullahi Ahmed anNa‘im, Abdolkarim Soroush or Nurcolish Madjid, among others, have argued for a
contemporary compatibility between Muslims’ historical experiences and modern forms of
secularism on Islamic grounds (Ramadan 2004, an-Na‘im 2008, Soroush in Dahlén 2001,
Nurcolish in Hamid 2012). Islam has, nevertheless come to represent ‘the stranger within’
(Asad 2007: 495) or the ‘other of secularism’ (Hurd 2008: 8). European secularists, believers
and non-believers alike, insist that the problem of ‘Islamic faith’ inside and outside Europe
consists of the failure of its adherents to recognize and accept the division between the
freedom of private faith/belief and participation as abstract citizens in the governance of the
state.2 In this context, “de-essentialising Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the
assimilation of non-Europeans to European civilization” (Asad 2003:28).
2
The secular as the organizing frame refers to the manner in which all positions relate somehow to the issue of the secular
and the proper role of religion (Casanova 2010). According to Gutowski, Western governments have sought to justify their
security actions based on the assumption that liberal, Christian-influenced but secular values are universally accepted, natural
good, and that these “shared values”, “way of life” are at risk (Gutowski 2011). Moderate Muslims have at times questioned
2 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? To some extent, the othering of Islam and of Muslims in the contemporary European context
might be seen as reflective of an increasing securitization of secularism in European societies
and public spheres, a process in which secular modes of being and acting in the world are
often conflated with ‘irreligiousity’ among secular absolutists, evangelical Christians and
conservative and/or Islamist Muslims alike.3 At the same time, the ideal of secularism is
becoming more dominant in many European countries (Bunzl 2005: 502). Secularism as an ism, can be seen as a doctrine of the secular designating various institutional arrangements for
how society ought to be designed and varies across the world.4 Religion and politics ought to
be separated – and be protected against one another in order to ensure freedom of religion as
well as religion-free politics. Ultimately: to ensure peace. For – the argument goes – faith is,
naturally, a matter of just faith, i.e. not rationally determinable. And if fighting is permitted
over such questions, we will never have peace, because there is no rational way to reach
agreement on matters pertaining to faith (Hobbes 1965:270 [1651]).
Managing religion in secular contexts such as the Swedish one expresses a paradox, derived
from two assumptions: 1) the religious identity seen as a matter of the “unconscious” and thus
always potentially dangerous (matters pertaining to identity have always something irrational,
feverish, overwhelming, private/ in the mind of the individual, thus inaccessible and
threatening) and 2) the view that “true” religion represents moderation characterized by nonviolence, purity of doctrine (i.e.undistorted interpretation of the scriptures and traditions) and
benign sentimentality (gives meaning to the individual, comfort, a sense of community) which
can and have to be coopted in managing the danger posed by those labeled as “untrue” or
“distorted”.5 Collaborating and engaging practitioners around Europe who work with
radicalisation and preventing terrorist ideology, such as European experts on terrorism and
religious violence6 social workers, religious leaders, inter-faith organisations, youth workers,
police officers, teachers, and parents of individuals at risk are thus part of the ISS in Action
and the Awareness of Radicalisation Network created in September 2011, by the European
the secular assumptions which inhibit a proper understanding of the dynamics within the Muslim world and radical Islamists
challenge the decadence of the secular West and the secularized Muslim states and legitimize their actions as a defensive
fight (Gutowski 2010).The mainstream secular imaginary often leads to misconceived foreign policy when Islam is the focus
of this policy (Gutovski 2012, Hurd 2008).
3
There is a great deal of conceptual confusion over secularism, secularity, secularization Berlinerblau equates secularists
with the ‘non-religious’ or ‘non-believers’ (Berlinerblau 2005). – and is thereby forced to create a separate conceptual
category for religious individuals who have reached a pragmatic accommodation with secularity, namely the ‘secularly
religious.’ Liberal-reformist varieties of Islam seeking an accommodation or rapprochment with Western liberal and secular
traditions are today not often investigated beyond characterisation of them as a product of Western ‘neo-imperialism’ and
taken as a proof for the hegemony of the secular thinking (cf. Mahmood in Bangstad, 2011) or as the results of critical
failures to think beyond the framework of the nation-state (cf. Asad 2003, 2007). I follow Taylor at this point, who argues
that ideas such as secularism do travel, “are modified, reinterpreted, given a new spin and meaning in each transfer” (Taylor
2009:1143), thus problematizing the assumption that only “authentic, native ideas” can meaningfully counter the hegemony
of liberal secularism. Moreover I find very problematic genealogies of secularism that do not address the encounters between
the colonial powers and the colonized, naturalizing secularism as an exclusive inter-Christian affair within the “Westphalian
straitjacket” (i.e.mainstream narrative on secularism). According to Gutovski in the case of the UK, the 1857 Mutiny in India,
the state responded with a discourse of tolerance for Religious Others in India (Gutovski 2010). It is within this larger
context that the increasing tolerance towards Catholicism should be seen, and not a secularism invented at Westphalia which
simply developed by its own genetic code).
4
For various examples on varieties on secularism within Europe see Waver and Sheikh 2012.
5
The last assumption implies a “Muslim problems=Muslim solutions” way of reasoning, but under the benign supervision of
the pastor (see Michel Foucault 2007, 1981).
6
http://www.ec-ener.eu/index.php
3 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? Commission and part of the current EU strategy for countering radicalisation and
recruitment.7
Engaging Muslim communities in Europe locally and beyond Europe in dialogue has been
however in place already from 2005.8 Bringing Muslim population into partnership in the war
of ideas evolved into resisting/countering the extremist “single narrative” and developed in
parallel with another discourse (and practices) of community capacity building and
development materialized in state support to Muslim seminars, Muslim associations and
Muslim organisations, etc. The “shared values” (“värdegrunden” in Swedish) implied in
various chains of positive equivalents (democracy-HR- gender equality- within the secular
framework) become thus simultaneously depicted as being both threatened by the deviated
single-narrative of the Islamist extremists and the instruments through which to secure the
very same values. The responsabilisation of entire Muslim communities in preventing
radicalization by transmitting shared values and countering distorted interpretations of Islam
is the concern of governments and part of the common EU strategy. Individual Muslims can
become potential terrorists/suicide bombers, and the community, i.e., the vast majority of
moderate Muslims, constructed as national but with transnational loyalties, has to be
“responsiblised” and charged to preventing this from happening. In supporting moderate
Muslim expressions, governments exercise a form of pastoral influence, which appears to be
a non-authoritarian style of power (Gutovski 2010, Foucault 2007: 137, Foucault 1981).) and
is embroiled by a discourse of generosity, good will, compassion, pacifism and the
construction of Islam as peace.
In anthropology Talal Asad (2003, 2007) and Saba Mahmood (2005) have advocated shifting
our attention away from the definition of secularism as a political doctrine regulating the
relationship between the state and religion toward secularism as an embodied practice and
mode of being. Asad sees the secular as being neither continuous with nor a break with the
religious, and points out that the ‘religious’ or the ‘secular’ are not essentially fixed categories
(Asad 2003: 25). Some formulations of secularism have also veered towards positing
secularism as a ‘way of life’ (Taylor 2007 and Mahmood 2005 in particular) and thereby
positing the existence of an hitherto undefined secular ‘subject’ if not a secular ‘affect’
defined in opposition or at least in counter-distinction to supposedly religious subjects
(Mahmood 2009, Warner 2008, Larrimore 2009). In the context of the now (in)famous
Danish and Swedish Cartoon Controversies, the secular self has been constructed discursively
as capable of distancing itself from religious claims and religious feelings by means of humor.
This discursive move constructs the Muslim subject as either lacking such humor, or being in
need to learn to become humorous while leaving in a secular context, humor becoming thus
an instrument for handling religious pluralism.
It is within this context in which being Muslim is imbued with certain meaning, that young
Swedish speaking Muslim bloggers create their identity as Muslims. Why is the blogosphere
an important site for research? Partly because the web 2.0 has been targeted by governments
as an arena where radicalization takes place, on the assumption that youth at risk get exposed
to extremist propaganda, and they either self-radicalise or get recruited to various terror
organisations, a process which, the argument goes is being facilitated by the horizontal,
7
8
http://register.consilium.eu.int/pdf/en/05/st14/st14781-re01.en05.pdf
http://register.consilium.eu.int/pdf/en/05/st14/st14781-re01.en05.pdf
4 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? fragmented, network-like character of the internet.9 This line of reasoning is present in various
countries’ national campaigns/policies of countering “the single narrative” of Islamist
extremists through specialised bodies such as the Digital Outretch Team DoS, in the USA or
the Sakinah Campaign in Saudi Arabia (Kessels 2010:46-57). As part and parcel of a shift
from the “war-of-ideas” to “winning hearts and minds” of the youth at risk the emphasis on
allegedly threatened “shared values” becomes a weapon to secure the very same values and
engage with “distortions” of Islam on the web 2.0, which is highlighted as a strategic forum of
communication and reaching out to undecided young people. The bloggers then are relevant
here because they act as always already responsible subjects who challenge the secular
assumption that Muslim subjects are humorless and are interested in defending “Islam” from
what they understand to be distorted interpretations coming from believers and non-believers
alike.10 The focus of this article is on the day-to-day construction of identity through blogging
in which various humoristic genres (satire, parody, irony) are employed in order to challenge
the assumptions of the (secular) humor discourse and deconstruct its main assumptions (i.e.
Islam as a violent religion and its adherents as dangerous humorless subjects). The humorous
visuals employed on these blogs constitute ongoing conversations between the bloggers
themselves on matters which for them are simultaneously every-day lived experience and
global events and discourses. Before describing the visuals employed by the bloggers, a short
description regarding the organization and the main arguments of the article will be necessary.
Disposition
The article will proceed as follows: I will first present the way in which the pedagogical
virtues of (secular) humor get articulated within the wider discourse following the Danish and
the Swedish (in)famous Cartoon controversies. Following Lene Hansen I will argue that the
discourse on humor is focused on the centrality of visuals which were part of a visual
securitization process through which images have come to have political implications in their
own right. Securitization refers to process identified by Copenhagen School’s security
theorists and refers to the process through which an issue becomes a security issue. According
to Copenhagen School theorists securitized issues can be however de-securitized, ideally
taken back from the “security” logic to the political level, and not forgotten or ignored. I
suggest that in line of Lene Hansens framework on de-securitization, the visual genres
employed by the bloggers constitute desecuritization moves in that they deconstruct Muslim
9
Especially efter 9/11 a special attention has been given to the study of Islam oriented activism, radicalism and terrorism
(Halldén 2006, Sheikh and Waever 2005; Wiktorowicz 2005; Weimann 2006; Bunt 2003, 2009). The focus on young Muslim
bloggers is motivated by various reasons. It is often assumed by media, politicians and academics all over the world that
young Muslims are somehow victims of extremist religious argumentation and more prone to radicalisation and recruitment
to religious terrorism (Herrera and Bayat 2010) Peter Mandaville or Phillip Lewis argue that young Muslim chose radical
interpretations of Islam because this is what attracts more attention in an act of rebellion and suggest that the radicalisation
could only be transitory, as part of a youth culture (Mandaville 2001, 2007, Larsson 2003, Bendixsen 2008). There is also a
burgeoning literature on the content of various radical islamists on-line forums and websites sharing an implicit assumption
that the Internet has led young people or to engage in the construction of a “de-territorialised”, global Islam (Roy 2004, 2007)
and constitutes also an arena for religious extremism indoctrination and self-radicalization. The study of Islam and the
Internet has been at the centre of academic interest for long time. Suffice to mention Göran Larsson’s critical assessment of
alternative voices in the Swedish cyberspace (Larsson 2005) and the islamophobic tendencies within the virtual encyclopedia
of wikiIslam (Larsson 2007).This article does not argue that such research is sensationalist, not useful or damaging, or that
the media attention such literature receives is disproportionate. However, the exclusive focus on this literature misses some
other interesting phenomena in place on the blogs which pose a different set of questions. 10
The fact that Swedish Muslims mobilize in their turn to monitor and combat Islamophobia by using information and
communication technologies among other things , is confirmed by Larsson 2007.
5 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? subjects as dangerous and humorless. Bruno Latour’s concept of iconoclash will be useful
when discussing desecuritization in the context of the visuals employed by some of the
bloggers, since the iconoclash reinscribes polysemy of the visual while refraining from
destroying the (offensive) image. This first section will thus set the theoretical stage on which
my main argument is based: that bloggers engage in visual conversations that are challenging
the link between humor, democracy and security. These conversations are nevertheless also
humorous, and the type of humor employed by the bloggers cannot be analysed without some
theoretical discussion on the functions of humor. Secondly, I will use Meyers ideas about
humor and Joanne Gilberts theorization around performativity of marginal humor. Thirdly, I
will show how Swedish speaking Muslim bloggers engage with humor on their own terms,
and construct themselves as humorous subjects. Last but not least, the article will address the
questions of what is actually being achieved by this construction, what type of humor
becomes popular, and what do these visuals demand from us. It will be argued that selfdeprecatory marginal humor is the form of humor that gets promoted and encouraged by the
Swedish state. The author will also suggest a possible reading of the meaning of the visuals–
they constitute a desecuritizations move in the sense of Lene Hansen, in which agency and
speech are differently combined. The audio-visuals seek to engage the viewer or at least make
her complacent in the construal of an iconoclah and the (de)construction “Muslimness” as
lacking humor.
I.
The Cartoon Controversies as humor learning?!
The Danish Cartoon controversy from December 2005-2006 had a Swedish counterpart
during the summer of 2007 when the conceptual artist Lars Vilks drew the Prophet
Mohammad as a roundabout dog11. It was only after the Swedish security police (SÄPO)
together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at that time pressured the internet provider
Levonline to shut down the right-wing populist Swedish Democrats Party´s online newspaper
webpage thus censoring the publication of the Danish Cartoons for security reasons that Lars
Vilks tried to show his sketches at the “Dog in Art” exhibition in Värmland, Sweden,
displaying a roundabaout dog with bearded human face and a turban, entitled Muhammad as a
roundabout dog.12 It is worth mentioning that the roundabout dog is a form of street
installation in Sweden, usually made of planks, sticks, old rags and boxes, and painted to look
like dogs and they bear resemblance to Milton Keynes concrete cows, but with a friendlier
11
The most thorough study on how the Danish Cartoons begun and ultimately ended up as the crisis in January-February
2006, is to my knowledge, Hansens article from 2011. Hansen claims that the 12 Cartoons were by no means predestined to
become so when they were first published in September 2005 in Jyllands Posten , as a result of inviting 42 editorial and
political cartoonists to draw the Prophet Muhammad, since some of them were quite critical to “Danish” arrogance,
ignorance and lack of tolerance. The background to the invitation was the alleged inability of the author of a children’s book
on the life of Muhammad, Kåre Bluitgen, to fins illustrators, which was considered to be a sign of a widespread intimidation
of artists and self-censorship, across Western Europe, in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair, according to Bluitgen and
Jyllands Posten. Hansen shows how the securitization of Kurt Westergaard’s infamous Bomb Cartoon, depicting a bearded
Middle Easterner with thick eyebrows and aquiline nose, pretty much in the tradition of European anti-Semitic cartoons, with
a bomb in his turban, meant practically that the “crisis” revolved around one single cartoon, which implies a homogenization
of the meaning allegedly conveyed by the cartoons as a whole while translated and circulated in other contexts than the
Danish one. The second “cartoon crisis” took place in 2008 when 16 Danish newspapers and many others in Europe decided
to republish the cartoons as the Danish Security and Intelligence services announced that a plot to kill Westergaard had been
foiled.
12
http://www.justitiekanslern.se/arkiv/1319-06.pdf
6 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? touch.13 Vilks contribution was excluded from the exhibition on security grounds. On August
19, 2007 a local Swedish newspaper in Örebro, Nerikes Allehanda published one of Vilks’s
drawings, accompanied by an editorial warning against self-censorship vis-à-vis Islam in the
public sphere, a well-rehearsed trope across Europe and often employed in the Swedish
debates on the allegedly dangerous presence of publicly expressed religious affects (Ströman
2007). The underlying grammar of defending freedom of speech is in this case being equated
with keeping the public sphere free of religiously motivated censorship, and in line with the
neutrality clause found in the doctrine of secularism. This series of events meant, nevertheless
the beginning of Sweden’s own Muhammad cartoons controversy.
In terms of the reception of the drawings it can be said that these cannot be understood as
constituting a mere repetition of the Danish example, since the Swedish controversy did not
escalate into an international dispute on the same proportions or at least not as rapidly as the
Danish one. Three years later, however, some flag burnings did take place in Kuala Lumpur
and Sweden witnessed her first suicide terrorist attack in December, 11, 2010. Taimur
Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, an Iraqi-born Swede, adressed in emails sent to the TT Swedish news
agency and the security police (SÄPO) both local and global issues. His motives refer to Lars
Vilks, whose drawing “offended the Prophet and the followers of Islam”, and to Sweden's 500
soldiers in Afghanistan: “'Now your children, daughters and sisters shall die like our brothers
and sisters and children are dying”, his emails warned.14
Lars Vilks has been life-threatened several times by other individuals who declared violence
to be a legitimate mean to rectify the humiliations to which Islam and its adherents have been
exposed to through these drawings. Perhaps the most (in)famous case is that of Colleen
LaRose, a.k.a. Jihade Jane. LaRose is an American citizen, convert to Islam, who was being
watched by the FBI after posting online videos in which she vowed to kill or die for the
jihadist cause in June 2008. LaRose was arrested in 2009 after returning to the United States
from Ireland, where authorities said she travelled after agreeing to marry an online contact
from South Asia and become a martyr. Charged with terrorism-related crimes, including
conspiracy to murdering Vilks, recruitment to terrorism and providing material support to
terrorists, she was taken into custody in October 2009, and her arrest was made public on
March 9, 2010, when seven of her alleged co-conspirators were arrested in Ireland (five were
later released by the Irish authorities but then arrested by U.S. authorities and charged as a codefendant with LaRose in a superseding indictment).15 La Rose was arraigned and initially
pleaded not guilty on March 18.16 She faced a maximum penalty of life in prison, and a $1
million fine. On February 1, 2011 she pleaded guilty to all charges against her. Among
American citizens recruited by LaRose is the now 18 years old, Mohammad Hassan Khalid,
who has pleaded guilty to terror charges in the US in May 2012 after pledging to forward
money for the Irish-based terror cell and faces now a 15yrs jail sentence.17
13
http://www.thelocal.se/5389/20061102/?PHPSESSID=9f695787
The emails were opened by the police several hours after the bombing http://www.channel4.com/news/swedish-cops-sawsuicide-bomber-email-hours-after-attacks, retrieved 2012-03-22. Al-Abdaly was part of a larger network in Luton, UK and an
active participant on the Islamist website Shumukh al Islam www.shamikh1.info/vb, accessed 2012-06-04
15
http://media.nbcphiladelphia.com/documents/JihadJane.pdf retrieved 2012-05-18.
16
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/us/19jane.html?_r=1 retrieved 2012-01-29.
17
http://www.herald.ie/news/jihad-jane-teen-facing-15-years-jail-3101209.html retrieved 2012-05-05.
14
7 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? Ten years after the terror attacks on World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Swedish
police, informed by SÄPO, arrested three individuals armed with knives at the Central Station
in Gothenburg on the night of September 11, 2011. The police suspected that a murder
attempt on Lars Vilks was planned in minute detail and that the plans would be implemented
during the inauguration of the Art Biennial at the Red Stone in Gothenburg. Previously, Vilks
wrote on his blog that he would be there, but changed his mind and instead traveled to
Stockholm to participate in the Swedish National Televisions’ programs on the tenth
anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States.
In an article published in 2009, two years before the terrorist plots and the suicide bombing
whose authors refer Vilks explicitly, Göran Larsson and Lasse Lindekilde claimed that there
were clear differences in the outcomes generated by the Danish Cartoon crise as compared to
its Swedish counterpart, with the Swedish one allegedly not escalating into an international
global conflict (Larsson and Lindekilde 2009). They explain this aspect alongside the
differences they noticed in the level and form of the local Muslim claim-making differences
by analyzing what they call distant contextual characteristics such as dominant elite
discourses about Islam/Muslims, different styles of the institutionalization of Islam in the two
countries, and more situational circumstances of how the publications were initially framed by
the relevant newspapers, the contingent choices of action by the political elites and crosscontext lesson drawing. Their conclusions were certainly valid provided that one is not
interested to study how events unfolded after 2009. Starting with 2010, however, one could
legitimately claim that the tension escalated in the Swedish case too, and that on December
11, 2010, Sweden was put on “the terrorist map” after having experienced its first suicide
bombing, and that the reception of this controversial drawing by a minority, but very assertive
group of Muslims, had changed dramatically, with radicals being actively involved in
securitized claim-makings.
As mentioned earlier, the roundabout dog is a form of street installation in Sweden. In 2006
there were popping up roundabout dogs made of wood across Sweden as the latest “guerilla
art fashion”, vandalized by non-Muslim locals this time. It seems therefore appropriate to
notice that the passionate reactions against this aesthetic form, considered to be illegitimate
and ugly are shared regardless of the religious belonging. Swedes of various persuasions have
been engaged in iconoclastic gestures aiming at destroying images (Jönsson, 2012).18
Iconoclastic gestures seem however equivocal, since as W. J. T. Mitchell argues, images do
not “speak”, and in what they show, they are very ambiguous (Mitchell 2005). The same
applies to Lars Vilks drawing. One cannot be sure about the meaning of the drawing, since the
image enters a chain of intervisualities and distal contexts that go beyond the stated intentions
of its maker. Roundabout dogs have been destroyed before and Lars Vilks image can,
nevertheless, be also understood as a commentary to any effacement or destruction of art in
general (“scandals” or art crimes refered to by Hansen 2010, Mitchell 2005; Latour, 2002, or
Jönsson for the Swedish context) or as a commentary to the iconoclasm of the Second
Commendment common to the three Abrahamitic religions, but interpreted in many
contradicting ways within each tradition.19 The artist, who declares himself to be
18
http://www.thelocal.se/5389/20061102/?PHPSESSID=9f695787 retrieved on 2011-12-22
The debate over images is as old as Christian art. Each party could find arguments in the writings of the early
Church. Iconodules defended the icons with the argument that they are legitimate based on the doctrine of the
Incarnation, a position ably defended by saint John of Damascus in the eighth century AC (Ware 2003).
Iconoclasts, on the other hand cited the prohibition to visually depict God, in the Second Commandment. That
19
8 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? conceptualist on his blog, has published a very ironical handbook on How to become
contemporary artist in three days in three steps:
1. To receive attention through visibility;
2. Maintain the attention, keep being interesting;
3. Of all artists who were once noticed, only 20-50% are kept in the archive of art, and the
objective is to become one of them (Vilks and Schibli 2005).
In other words, an artist engages in and provokes iconoclast-gestures intentionally, since she
has to orient herself in social and political questions, to identify suitable objects that attract
destruction and hatred, and thus imprint the visual on people’s retina as part of the
performance around the absence-presence of the image. The visual gets amplified even when
not reproduced, but only referred to in academic papers such as this one, or traditional or
social-media and becomes part of an expanding series of intertextualities and intervisualities.
After the Jihad Jane- incident the newspaper Expressen decided to republish Vilks cartoons in
2010. Vilks’ cartoon was reinscribed in the publics’ imagination via the Musical Dogs in
which the artist participated while posing with an ax. The ax alludes to various pictures
featuring Vilks with the ax infront of his house, published on Swedish newspapers and widely
circulated on the internet alongside his declaration that he is not afraid and “prepared to
defend himself in the case of unforeseen attacks”.20 Critics of Vilks ridicule the image of the
artist with an ax as an adequate symbol for defending the freedom of expression. Last but not
least, the Alah Ho Gaybar film with naked men wearing Muhammed-masks showed as part of
an open lecture heavily protected by security personnel when delivered in Uppsala in May,
2010 – are all part of the performance around the drawing. What happens around it is what is
important, not the image per se. To come back to the role of damaging the image, I argue that
Vilks is aware that the destruction is mutual: “before you wanted to attack my flag, I did not
know I cherished it so much, but now I do” ( Taussing cited in Latour 2002:28). To go against
the mainstream is part of the mainstream already, so the question of being original, as many
of the Muslim bloggers I research seem to impute to Vilks, is uninteresting here, what is
worth mentioning instead is his belief in the pedagogical effect of the exhausting repetition as
an “excellent sign of health: offend enough and often and the offence will fade away
eventually. Without the world going under”.21
The virtue of the offence-as-joke is to some extent based on the assumption of the healthy
subject, able to employ secular jokes as a form of critique, and is often advanced when
allegedly secular, modern, democratic European values are attacked by religious,
museumized, undemocratic Islamic claims.22 The right to make “offensive jokes” has been
God is beyond representation is an argument embraced by negative theologians, who distance themselves from
both iconodules and iconoclasts. During the history of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad has been depicted
occasionally in various traditions and specific circumstances as noted by many writers. There is no specific
prohibition in the Quran, but there are several hadiths which pertain to a prohibition. On the streets of nowadays
Teheran one can, buy portraits of the Prophet (Latour 2002). Lene Hansen claimed that in the Danish
Controversy, the iconoclastic argument was not mentioned in the letter written by the 11 Muslim diplomats
requesting “an urgent meeting” with Anders Fogh Rasmussen in October 2005 (personal conversation with the
author).
20
http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/lars-vilks-jag-har-en-yxa
21
22
http://www.vilks.net/index.php?s=kr%C3%A4nkt+kr%C3%A4nktare
Both Hirshi Ali and Dilsa Demirbag Sten “defend their right to offend”, as their right to exercise their freedom
of speech. A well known figure in the Swedish debates on the role of religion, Dilsa Demirbag Sten puts it
9 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? often portrayed as a duty, if not an act of inclusion and a necessarily good thing in the service
of educating non-secular subjects towards some kind of (secular) truth (Asad et al. 2011:289,
Modood 2009:227). Such an argument is ultimately an utilitarian one, focused not so much on
the act itself, but on its beneficial consequences for the minority itself, not to mention the
general public. In this account, treating Islam on the same footing with other religions,
including Christendom heavily ridiculed, made fun at in numerous satires or parodies, is
argued to constitute a way of being inclusive, showing the Muslims they are treated as equals.
Humor in the service of integration-argument was explicitly stated as one of the main motives
behind the decision to publish the Danish Cartoons by Flemming Rose, the editor of Jyllands
Posten, who commissioned the Muhammad cartoons: “we are integrating you into the Danish
tradition of satire, because you are part of our society, not strangers. The cartoons are
including, rather than excluding” (Rose cited in Modood, 2009:227).
Rose explanatory text (“The face of Muhammad”) and the editorial published together with
the 12 cartoons (“The threat from the dark”) on September 30, 2005 in Jyllands Posten
reinscribe the clash of civilsation discourse, in which the secular West is seen as threatened by
Muslims who are “unwilling to ‘put up with scorn, mockery, and ridicule’”, something which
is considered to be a key feature of modern democracy (Hansen 2011:65). Secular mocking is
not only being equated with democratic engagement but is also characterized as “intelligent”
in the editorial, in which Muslim clerics are depicted as lacking the ability to embrace “insult
that comes with being the target of intelligent satire” (Hansen 2011:65).
I find the framing of offensive joking as pedagogical exercise more interesting than the
observation that secularists generally defend free speech as a higher, if not an absolute right
when compared to the exercise of religious freedom, in that (secular) humor becomes a
technique of governmentality (Foucault, 2007).23 The offence-joke as duty entails the
assumption that easily offended religious Muslims will be forced in this way start to reflect
upon their absurd beliefs, which would be something crucial for debate and democracy, and if
not, they have to put up with the offence, since religion has to step back when conflicting with
other rights, the freedom of expression being framed as an absolute right. More importantly,
however, the religious sensibility incapable of privatizing religion on the Protestant model is
thus deemed fanatical and unhealthy (Asad, et.al. 2009).
The Swedish media developed several discourses on the meaning of both the Danish
Cartoons, and those of Lars Vilks, linking these two events by means of chains of
equivalences and differences. The cartoonists were framed as heroes in the fight for the
freedom of expression - women rights - state neutrality against religious fanaticism requiring gender inequality- and the supremacy of particularist claims based on non-empirical reality.
Islam as beyond critique- argument was the preferred trope of many “politically incorrect”
interventions in the blogosphere as well (Larsson 2007). Interesting for this paper is the
advancement of humor as secular critique, which became the proof of the civilized, secular
self, who tolerates jokes however trivial. Numerous parallels were made with the movie Life
of Brian and a much debated art exhibition, Ecce Homo24 by Elisabeth Ohlson, who gave the
bluntly that religion has to step back when colliding with other (secular) rights, implying that the public and
collective exercise of religious freedom has to be subordinated to other (secular) rights. (SVT1, Agenda, 5th of
September 2010, the Debate she had with the Dicrimination Ombudsmanen at that time, Katri Lina).
23
Asad rightfully suggest that many post-Christians in the West subscribe to the Christian adagio”the truth will set you free”
(Asad 2011:289).
24
http://www.ohlson.se/utstallningar_ecce.htm
10 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? homosexual Christians place into the Evangely. Although these two references were made
within the Christian context, these parallels suggest that certain religious subjects deal with
secular humor better than others (i.e Muslims), and are therefore more capable in coping with
religious pluralism. Muslim bloggers, however, deploy humor in their identity construction
strategies as well. Prior to delving into their strategies, a brief description on security and
humor is needed.
II.
Securitizarion and desecuritization
Within the context of the cartoons, the secular Self has been constructed as humorous, and the
religious Other, by contrast, as humorless and dangereous, thus potentially generating
insecurity. Identity implies a binary logic of the SELF/OTHER and security is connected to
various ways of mitigating the violence of the perceived threatening difference. “Discourses
of danger” construct both the threat but also the subject and her identity – “by telling us what
to fear”, one is telling us who we are” because such discourses “fix where we are” in
relationship to what/who threatens us (Dillon 1996, Campbell 1998).25 To constitute
something as a matter of danger/threat and call it a security issue, is to make a political
intervention. This article’s understanding of the process through which an issue becomes a
security concern owes very much to Ole Waever, Barry Buzan and de Wilde’s theorizing
around security as “the move that takes politics beyond the established rules of the game and
frames the issue either as a special kinds of politics or above politics” (Buzan et.al.1998:23).26
The securitization process implies a speech act that specifies a referent object that is worthy of
protection and has a right to survive, the definition of a range of existential threats to the
referent object, and a policy recommendation which convinces a relevant audience about the
necessity to follow a certain course of action on how to best protect the referent object.
Security as speech act constructs rather than reflects reality in an intersubjective manner by
linking securitizing actors, utterances and audiences together (Buzan et.al 1998: 24). The
action implies, nevertheless, certain presuppositions about the conditions of political life
within which security is being sought. In this sense, security is understood here as a derivative
and self-referential concept, dependent for its specific content on “different underlying
understandings of the character and purpose of politics” (Booth 2007:109; 150-160, Booth
2005, Booth in Krause and Williams 1997; Walker in Krause and Williams 1997). As
theorized initially, securitization worked linguistically through speeches or written texts only.
Following Michael Williams’ plea for taking images seriously, Lene Hansen shows how the
visuals can also “speak” security, without being subordinated to the text, and yet engaging
with the discourses already in place and interacting with other texts (intertextuality) and other
visuals (intervisuality). Hansen suggests that there are three features that highlight the
specificity of the visuals that securitize as compared to linguistic securitizations:
1. The immediacy of the emotive response, which can be powerfully invoked even if the
audience to whom the securitization is directed has not seen the image in question as
25
Lene Hansen shows how visual securitizations are achieved through depiction of a non-radicalised Other as well, by
various strategies of depiction belittling, suffering, familiarization (Hansen, 2011:9). She is therefore distancing herself from
Campbell who in his 1998 book focused on the construction of the Radical Other in the American foreign policy.
26
These authors and the theory of securitization are known as the “Copenhagen School” of security studies, a term coin by
Bill McSweeny in 1999.
11 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? the image is constituted in discourse and does not enter it as a sheer ‘fact’ (an image
can be deemed authentic, even when faked, as it brings the viewer closer to the event
in real time; an image works within the grammar of face-to-face encounters, even
when faces are not depicted);
2. The circularity of the image. The material-technological conditions of the internet
contribute to the increasing speed and wide availability of visual communication. On
the web 2.0 images circulate and one has the possibility of seeing, even when refusing
to look. This holds equally for spoken or written words as well, yet images have the
potential of reaching wider publics, who make different readings of what they “see”.
3. The ambiguity of the image. As collective referent objects are articulated in the image,
depictions of individuals came to be read as standing for collectivities, without the
image providing a clear articulation for that. In contrast to linguistic securitization, the
image does not clearly specify policies to counter threats to cherished referent objects
(Hansen 2011:55-58).
Ole Waever’s advice to the security analyst to always consider de-securitizing as constitutes a
“careful preference” towards desecuritizing, i.e. the process by which things are brought back
from the realm of emergency, and the abuses associated with it, into the realm of politics and
debate (Waever 2011:469). Warning against an unqualified normative preference towards
desecuritization, different scholars claim that desecuritizing moves remain ambiguous and
always run the risk of removing things from the political agenda (Aradau 2007) or silencing
them in a typically Little Mermaid fashion, since talking security is also involved in the
production of a gendered silence (Hansen 2000, MacKenzie 2009). As desecuritization is
undertheorised in the works of the Copenhagen School scholars, the first consistent attempt at
theorizing it, comes from the poststructuralistic field of security studies. Lene Hansen has
developed a conceptual grid of political normative constellations of desecuritizations through
agency and speech, agency referring to whether there are actors actively involved in bringing
issues out of securitization, and speech to the actual expressions of that involvement (Hansen
2010:10-11) As Hansen aptly points out, agency might also contribute to silencing issues of
concern. According to her model, neither securitization nor desecuritizations need language in
their articulations, and although her insistence on “speech” can be seen as a residual
preference for language, she also admits that it is not clear yet “what pictures are and what
their relationship to language is” (Mitchell 1994:13).
Fig. 4. Constellations of desecuritizations adapted from Lene Hansen, 2010:10
SPEECH
+
-
Rearticulation
(active “unmaking” and
reframing of an issue as not
threatening)
Replacement
(belittling/familiarizing and
focusing on more real, more
serious threats
Silencing
(ignoring the issue as
irrelevant)
AGENCY
+
12 Fading
(in time it will disappear)
This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? Two types of desecuritization need further explanation: desecuritization via rearticulation,
which implies an active “unmaking” of securitization through explicit speech; and
desecuritization via replacement, which refers to the process of taking issues out of the realm
of security and simultaneously securitizing others by arguing that priorities should be remade
as there are other, more real, and more pressing threats (Hansen 2010: 10). When it comes to
social relations, desecuritizing moves require articulations aimed at “seeing others as having
something in common with us, acknowledging that they too are (complex, fractured,
contradictory) selves …like us (Couldry 2000:120). As Huyssen puts it desecuritizing implies
a process towards the construction of a culture “that no longer feels the need to homogenize
and is learning how to live pragmatically with real difference” (Huyssen quoted in Möller,
2007:193).
I would like to add a certain subtype or alternative way of understanding (de)securitizations
by means of visuality, since the Mohamed cartoons were often interpreted outside of the
Danish context as disrespect towards Muslim sensibilities who allegedly embrace the
prohibition to depict the Prophet as stated by some canonical hadiths (Asad et.al. 2009). I will
therefore make use of one particular term developed by the Actor-Network theorist, Bruno
Latour in the book that coined the term, namely Iconoclash from 2002. The book is a
catalogue exhibition which, according to the editor, was meant to document, fathom, and
overcome the conundrum whether we can or cannot do without images and human mediations
in art, science, and religion, in an effort to become “friends of interpretable objects” (Tamen
cited in Latour, 2002:15). Acknowledging the fact that the iconoclastic gesture of destroying,
defacing, transforming images also generates “fabulous populations of new images, greater
flows, more powerful ideas and stronger idols”, Latour also wonders if not something else is
being destroyed by mistake, arguing also that museums are an illustrative example in this
regard due to their care of conserving, restoring, keeping traces of what was broken, and thus
creating new images, ideas, and meanings (Latour 2002:v). According to Latour, “iconoclasm
is when we know what is happening in the act of breaking and what the motivations for what
appears as a clear project of destruction are” while “iconoclash on the other hand, is when one
does not know, without further inquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive” (Latour,
2002:14). For the proponents of iconoclash the images matter, not as tokens standing for
something else or for prototype of a “real original” existing somewhere “above, beneath or
beyond, but only because images are interwoven in an never ending cascade of intertextual
and intervisual polysemies, making possible the move to another image, equally fragile and
unstable, but different” (Latour, 2002: 32). An Iconoclash thus speaks against “freezing the
frame”, i.e. the interruption of the flow of images. Applied to the realm of security, the logic
of visual securitization revolves among other things around freezing the polysemy of the
image, homogenizing the meaning of what constitutes danger and/or provocation or “deintertextualization” as to make the image stand alone, with no mediation or contextualization
(Hansen 2011, Hansen 2010). Iconoclash, on the other hand, can constitute a fifth
desecuritization type, one which attempts to de-freezing or de-stabilizing frames, to reintertextualising images and thus reinstating ambiguity and polysemy. Iconoclashes invite us
to rethink our relationship with the image, and the visual’s conditions of existence in the
digital universe of the web 2.0. where images “cannot be destroyed, or vilified, not even
worshipped anymore, because they do not exist, or better said, they have been transformed
and morphed beyond recognition. The image is already broken, encoded in bits and bytes”
(Latour 2002:40).
13 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? The iconoclast gesture of Swedish Security Service (SÄPO) and the former Swedish Ministry
of Foreign Affairs pressuring internet provider Levonline to shut down the Swedish
Democrats´ online newspaper and thus hide the Muhammad Cartoons has generated cascades
of Pantagruellesque reproduction of these visuals.27 The interesting thing is not whether or not
one can hide images but what is the status of image, its conditions of existence in the dynamic
world of web 2.0? To desecrate or adore images loses its appeal – images end up being unique
for each user’s computer configuration. How can one destroy what is uniquely configured,
interactive, traceable bits of 1 and 0, dependent on time, place and user? To give you an
example, in order to present the audio-visual material contained in the blogs I may not only
infringe at least 10 copyrights while defending the authorship of the original composition, the
computation and code spinning of the final product, I also work collaboratively with people
who compute in variables such as who (IP-address) or how many times the “image” is
accessed to slightly modify, multiply and even make it invisible. The status of the (de)
securitized images in the digital universe of the web 2.0 is well captured by the concept of
iconoclash.
To sum up, the Danish and Swedish cartoon controversies have been framed within this larger
state security management discourse of preventing radicalisation by encouraging the entire
Muslim population to cultivate humor as sign of moderation. Within this context, the young
Swedish speaking Muslim bloggers question the links between (secular) humor, democracy,
religious pluralism or freedom of expression while producing the Muslim identity as
humorous, with the (unintended?) effect of upward mobility on the social ladder when the
state promotes certain humor. Prior to delving into the visuals circulating on the blogs, the
next sections will address humor and the medium on which humor is being produced and
circulated.
III.
Understanding Humor
What constitutes humor has intrigued many thinkers from Aristotle´s Poetics, to Henri
Bergson´s Theory of Laughter. Although there is no universally accepted definition of humor,
there is a general acceptance of the idea that humor is a relational activity, and that it has to be
accepted by the intellect only, but is also dependent upon a variety of social, cultural,
psychological, individual and momentary contexts (Rishel 2002:42). Within the field of
democratic deliberation Allison Jaggar asks, for instance, „how cultural heterogeneity may be
compatible with social stability and civic solidarity‟ (Jaggar 2000:27) and suggests that three
virtues are paramount: multicultural literacy, that is, a willingness and capacity to recognize
the experiences and self-conception of others; moral deference, which entails assuming and
weighing the credibility of others, especially if they come from subordinated groups; and
emotional reconfiguration in the sense that the pain of others is witnessed, acknowledged and
responded to. From an inter-faith dialogue perspective, Miroslav Volf comes to a similar
understanding when he identifies a need to embrace „the will to give ourselves to others and
27
In the internet parlance this effect is called the “ Barbara Streisand effect”. Barbera-Streisand effect"See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
14 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? “welcome” them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, prior to any judgment
about others, except that of identifying them in their identity‟ (Volf 1996:29). This body of
literature gives no attention for humor, on the contrary humor, together with other
„unreasonable‟ factors like anger, frustration, fear or joy, is usually considered at odds with
dialogue and deliberation (Johnson 1998), although it has been welcomed as a means to
improve a productive group atmosphere (Mansbridge et al., 2006), a sense of humor being
acknowledged as a quality of intermediaries (Abu-Nimer 2001).
Yet, when looking at the functions ascribed to humor in the humor literature there are some
aspects that are directly relevant to dialogue and deliberation. Scholars distinguish between
aggressive and affiliative humor and demonstrate that these correlate, negatively and
positively with appreciation of intercultural communication (Miczo and Welter 2006). John
Moreall claims that traditionally there have been three main explanatory theories on humor
and laughter to the “why something is funny”-question. 1. because it relaxes tensions (relief)
2. because it points to anomalies (incongruence), and 3. because it establishes a feeling of
superiority that is closely related to moral judgements as well (Morreall 1987).
The first theory describes how we laugh because we elevate ourselves above another person.
This is the oldest and perhaps the most widespread one. The second one explains laughter by
the relief of accumulated psychic energy, which gives us a sense of pleasure. The third one
deals with humor and laughter as incongruence between what we know or have expected and
what we actually see or happens (Moreall 1999). Humor based on relief from tensions,
produces identification (self-deprecating genre) between maker and audience (Morreall
2009) Incongruity as a source of humor serves to clarify positions (via play of words), but
may also differentiate audiences (contrasting oneself with an opponent often in the form of
ridicule, belittling). The enforcement of established norm is realised mainly when one is
laughing at, rather than with someone (Meyer 2000).Meyer concludes that identification and
clarification are functions of humor that are capable of uniting people, whereas differentiation
and enforcement tend to have divisive effects (Lockyer and Pickering 2005).
Whether we laugh as a release of political, social and/or sexual tensions (MacPherson 2008)
or at the recognition of life's incongruities with its unmet expectations (Chari 2003) joking
and laughter involve, nevertheless, not only celebration but also complex relationships of
power and knowledge. Humor makes the world familiar and strange at the same time, by
challenging it, so that we can both recognize ourselves in it, but also become alienated.
Humor makes us complicit and has a social meaning as well (Bergson 1999). In Subversive
Laughter by Ron Jenkins and Satiric Impersonations by Joel Schechter, both authors evince
humor as having a subversive effect on dominant discourses and enacting a critical (self)distance (Jenkins 1994, Schechter 1994). The authors come with multiple and compelling
examples of humor as a potent weapon against oppression. Jenkins adopts an ethnographic
view of several "communities of laughter" throughout the world, from Japanese taishu engeki,
(a form of pop-culture kabuki) to Balinese troupe of sacred clowns and South African jailed
protestors who used humor as a way of resisting apartheid. It is well documented today that
during the communist regimes in central and Eastern Europe, every joke became a tiny
revolution, to paraphrase George Orwell’s famous essay on the intersection of politics and the
comic (Orwell 1945).28 Humor can also be an expression of solidarity but also exclusion
through irony (Colebrook 2004, Chari 2003).
28
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/funny/english/e_funny
15 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? In her performative take on irony and the prohibition of making jokes on bombs in airports by
the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Lauren Martin shows how
joking/irony is : a) an expression of ambiguity, which “includes and exceeds any self
conscious intention of the speaker” b) produced by subjects uncertain of their position in an
hypersecuritized environment designed for transparency, fixity and intelligibility, c) a
perturbation and an overwhelming of the interpretive strategy of TSA’s instrumental
epistemological underpinning (Martin 2010:28). Irony in this context has the effect of both
de-securitization (i.e. do not be paranoid, things are not so terrifying) but also
hypersecuritization (the instrumentalization of language and the informalization of human
interaction renders the irony’s ambivalence and ambiguity as false, because it does not
constitute true representation of an objective reality out there and ends up being read as
threats as they make impossible the straightforward identification of harmful intent, and need
to be prohibited by the TSA administrators).
A recurrent strategy of conveying humor is the so-called self-deprecating humor, which
consists in laughing at oneself, in finding oneself ridiculous. Such humor is not depressing,
but on the contrary gives us a sense of emancipation, consolation and childlike elevation
(Critchley 2004: 94-96). Joanne Gilbert shows how in stand-up comedy and especially in
what she calls marginalized humor, i.e. made from a marginalized position (women,
immigrant, Muslim, etc.) the stereotypes about these positions get objectified. In other words,
the target for the humor is made into a thing, it gets objectified. “If a human being is
comically treated he/she is denied subjectivity. “We raise ourselves up and look down at the
object… Only through and by objectifying we can laugh at people” (Gilbert 2004:154). In
other words, the subject as a subject gets temporarily bracketed; the subjectivity becomes
suspended for a while, to make possible the “recognition” of the object-stereotype, and a sort
of detachment from that position. This objectification requires a moment of suspension of
sympathy toward the subject, a temporary “anesthesia of the heart” in Bergson’s wording.
Yet, because we are familiar with and recognize some of the stereotypes, we can also identify
with the self-deprecating comedian and have sympathy for that position, and even generalize
that recognition to positions we are not familiar with. We recognize ourselves in the face of
the Other. We are all “human too human”, ridiculous and pitiful in our Sisyphean efforts to
fulfil impossible roles (self) imposed on us.29 Yet the humor both reifies stereotypes and
functions as a site of resisting and critiquing, since the suspension, argues Gillbert, can also
serve as “a self-corrector within the group rather than of the group” (Gillbert 2004: 154).
IV.
The visual desecuritization moves on the blogs
IV.i. Mohammed the teddy-bear – or what´s in a name
By posting a brown teddy, a 24 year old female blogger comments to the Cartoons and the
arrest of a British teacher in Khartoum for letting his pupils call their toys Muhammed. The
closest comment to the picture is “Muslims in real life become a better cartoon than in the
world of cartoons” which therefore becomes the caption of the picture. The proximate context
of the picture indicates a critical stance on the futile gestures of burning the flags and entering
29
I am grateful to Chrystine Sylvester and Stina Hansson for this point.
16 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? the game of destruction-creation of images vis à vis the Danish Cartoons. The picture of an
innocent teddy-bear whose name might be Mohamed suggests that children might genuinely
feel attachment to the toy, finding comfort in it when they suffer, naming it after a model to
emulated, the compassionate prophet. Even children are capable of not naively believing in
the image as coinciding with what it represents. “What’s in a name”, seems the entire post to
ask, and the answer is not a Shakespearean tragedy, but laughter, ridiculing, and a critical
stance – the aggressive Muslims are not simply ridiculed, and “caricatured”, but when asked
“how would the Prophet react to this” one can read the blogger’s intention of showing us how
many of these Muslims ARE not ALREADY being named Muhammed, i.e. living
cartoons/images themselves. We see how the teddy desecuritises by rearticulating the
meaning of the iconoclastic command and an iconoclash embracing of ambiguity. The teddy
contrasts with the mass-media representations of the aggravated Muslims all over the world,
and addresses them to pause, to suspend the hammer/lighter for a while and think, what if
something else might be destroyed or burned (http://khadidja.se/?s=nalle)? IV.ii. An image is not an image or is it? – satirical cartoons
Another strategy used by the bloggers is to link to or to embed other cartoons made by famous
and controversial editorial cartoonists. Having admitted to understand the logic of provocation
and not straightforwardly blaming the iconoclastic gestures of those outraged, one male
blogger in his early thirties (www.svaten.blogspot.com) comments: “Things are not what they
seem to be” and invites us to link to the website of TV5, where we can see a cartoon made by
Jean Plantureux, known as Plantu, one of France's most famous satirical cartoonists who
publishes regularly in Le Monde and L'Express. The cartoon was published in Le Monde
March 31, 2006 and depicts on the Leonardo da Vinci working in his studio at his famous
1512 self portrait now exposed in Torino, but travelling all over the world.
Apparently shocked to see the portrait, a Muslim man, judging from the crescent on the green
cover of his book, drops the sacred book on the floor. The text in the cartoon reads: no, this is
not blasphemy, I am telling you, this is a self-portrait, leave me alone Mouloud!”. TV5
establishes a thematic linking to another cartoon of Plantu, “I must not draw Mohammed”,
published in Le Monde the same year, depicting a hand holding a pen ending with a minaret
with the white clothed, bearded muezzin with a turban in profile supervises something with a
telescope. The nose is big and bended and the eyes are closed, yet the expression on the face
is one of suspicion, since we could guess he is frawning due to the dynamism of the lines of
the eye and the nose. What he suspects is on the left side of the cartoon, namely what the hand
is scribbling – the iconoclastic imposition against representing the Prophet. What is realized,
however it is a portrait of a man, who could be anyone, and resembles Leonardo from the
previous cartoon. This last interpretation becomes more plausible provided that one
remembers the intervisual.
Since I have not read myself the original Le Monde editorial accompanying the cartoons, I
cannot know exactly what is translated into the new context of the blog. Although I am aware
of the fact that every translation could be seen as a betrayal to a certain extent (as the Italian
adagio has it tradutore tradutori), the blogger actively contributes to the creation of a new
meaning, re-contextualising by the sheer mean of linking. The blogger does not directly refer
17 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? to the long anti-Semitic traditions of portraying Jews and Muslims in Europe,30 although he is
aware of it in other parts of his blog, but comments, more abstractly, that all religions fail to
respect the prohibition of not making idolatrous images in the folk religiosity. He concludes
that this is perhaps impossible to live up to, regardless of the conscious effort of doing so, and
opens up the possibility to the interpret the muezzin as having internalized the prohibition to a
certain extent, thus self-censoring his hand on which he has ultimately no control. One could
go further and assume that the blogger’s interpretation, given his knowledge about the
traditions of the Prophet who started the tradition of installing a blind muezzin to call to
prayer, invites the viewer to another interpretation: because the muezzin is blind, his effort to
police the “conduct of conduct” is ridiculed. Yet, the abstract level of interpretation advanced
by the blogger could also pertains to acknowledging that the visual goes beyond the mere act
of seeing with the physical eyes, and to live up to such an unreasonable command seems
impossible, yet desirable. The apparent portrait formed by the letters, alludes to the beautiful
Arabic calligraphy, which was extremely ornamental, images with no direct and
straightforward representation, but also to the fact that language evokes images, even stronger
images, a commentary to the fact that the command does not pertain to a “material”
understanding of the word image.
This is the theme of another cartoon, posted this time by an “atheist Muslim”, in his early 30
(http://nordicdervish.wordpress.com) who challenges the devout and pious in an original way.
He embeds a cartoon, the provenience of which I could not trace for sure, because in the
world of the internet, searching for the “original” is a futile exercise. The blogger simply
translates the caption, not the title of the cartoon into Swedish. We do not have other
immediate clues for his interpretation of the cartoon, neither as a comment to the cartoon
itself, nor as a dialogue with other bloggers comments. This significant silence signals a
refusal to fix the meaning of the image, an iconoclash: pose a moment before you dismiss or
destroy the image, as provocative as it might seem as first, because you might lose something
important in the act of destruction. His cartoon is divided in three horizontal registers, the one
in the middle occupying the largest space. The upper register gives the title of the cartoon: “In
the name of Muhammed, we pray that peace and blessings be upon him” and the lowest gives
us the interpretation key: “at which frame is the name of the prophet offensive – a test of piety
for Muslims”. In the middle space we see Arabic calligraphy arranged in such a manner as to
suggest a man in profile with an upset expression, probably the Prophet Muhammed. The
caption and the English title suggest, nevertheless, that the ideal viewer is a non-Arabic
speaking, thus including both Muslims and non-Muslims too, and give also the key for
interpretation – the calligraphy resembles the 99 names of God that could be found in the
home of many Muslims and mosques. Since I do not read Arabic, however, I might be wrong,
and the calligraphy might tell outrageous things instead. Even if this was the case, one can
still read these cartoons in terms of an invitation to reflect on the fact that we construct images
in multiple ways, that we read signs in everything, for some of us even nature “paints”. I
cannot help but associating it with some very ideological interpretations of natural phenomena
as supernatural by secular Turks to whom the projected shadow of a mountain in
Damal, Ardahan Province of Eastern Turkey is the portrait of The Father of The Republic,
Nation and Modernism, and thus venerated in pilgrimage with religious piety.31
30
Without mentioning a book on how Jews and Muslims have been portrayed in Sweden, largely referred at in
Swedish newspapers (Catomeris 2004).
31
http://www.1resimler.com/r-damal-resimleri-1566-damal-buyuk-kalabalik-ataturke-bakiyor-8673.html
18 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? The same blogger posts another cartoon published in Charlie Hebdo, showing a pipe in the
form of a head with a white turban with the capture “this is not the caricature of the Prophet”
below a cranium with the capture “can one represent Muhammed as he is today?”,
establishing a clear reference to René Magritte whose famous La Trahison des Images from
1948 is part of the social imaginary. This painting is somehow disconcerting in its
commonsensical simplicity – a pipe is shown realistically painted with the capture: “this is not
a pipe”, in a seemingly tension between what it is shown and what it is written. Yet,
paraphrasing Foucault, who would content that the compound effect of color, shadow and
lines above the text are a “real” pipe? People do not naively “believe” in the representation,
one might argue. This might even be more confusing since surrealists claimed to bring the
unconscious into image. However, as Peter Sloterdijk puts it, the surrealists’ “enthusiasm for
psychoanalysis was due to the fact that they confused the Freudian definition of the
unconscious with Romantic metaphysics” (in Latour 2002:357). Unending chains are revealed
here – surrealism as iconoclasm replaced other artistic currents, its linkages with Viennese
psychoanalysis and its initial success among the educated elite and some artists was not
achieved as a therapeutic method, but as a strategy for interpreting and bringing new images
into the world open to suit individual requirements. I read the cartoons as a form of selfderision, self distance, with the skull possibly suggesting that both surrealist painters and the
Prophet have been surpassed as historical subjects, and that the end of the end of the end of art
and history have been proclaimed many times already with events still unfolding and
developing. What is ultimately achieved here is a desecuritization move of the Bomb cartoon
in an attempt to free the visual and reintegrate it into the endless chains of contextualizations.
A similar insight could be derived from a digital picture entitled ACID TRIP MUHAMMED,
showing six new images referencing the Bomb Cartoon after it has been treated with various
acids, carbonite, blast waved, and x-rayed. It is posted by a female convert, in her late
twenties, who comments that by forbidding the cartoons, although well intentioned, the
Swedish state has managed to create a cascade of even more disturbing, and disgusting
images. She invites the viewer to “step out of the roundabout” and to come to the realization
that an image gets distorted, modified, morphed beyond recognition, while still seemingly
claiming resemblance. To me, the organization of the picture is always already in a chain of
relations both with the history of photography, and with Andy Warhol’s mixing of art with
commodity culture in his experimentation with the silk-screen printing from photos of
celebrities, a popular technique for mass production. His Marilyn Monroe prints probably
come first to most people’s minds.32 It is also about cult celebrity, the manner in which
information is processed, the multiple exposures that create a permanence and strength of the
image, yet going from intensity to fading away, extremely suggestive as Warhol prints came
after Monroe’s death. Without perhaps being aware of that, the blogger desecuritizes the
Bomb cartoon by suggesting that it is merely a scream for “15 minutes of glory” nothing
more, thus belittling its importance. The blogger’s de-securitization move is of the
rearticulation type, since it invites the reader to come “outside the roundabout” and to engage
into what constitutes a more urgent threat, i.e. the real challenges to the freedom of expression
(European Court’s pressure on Sweden to change its legislation regarding freedom of
expression and freedom of the press; European Commissioners, think that if one googles
32
Try the interractive exhibit of Warhol, and listen to a recording with Warhol when he explains the use of color
in his mass produced series with Monroe http://www.webexhibits.org/colorart/marilyns.html
19 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? “terror” signaling an intention to carry out a genocide, the IPRED-law based on an EU
directive from 2004, etc. (http://esbati.blogspot.com/2007/09/fatwa-om-yttrandefrihet.html).
The last cartoon I will refer to is posted by a male, whose title is a paraphrase after a recent
Bollywood production, My name is Khan and I am not a Terrorist
(http://alexanderlouhichi.wordpress.com), the post receiving many negative comments. As the
name suggests, the most violent stereotype the blogger seeks to deconstruct is that of
indiscriminately associating Muslims with terrorism. The movie itself does not belong to the
comedy genre, and has thus been excluded from my study, but it is warmly recommended by
the blogger, and what caught my attention was the intersection of two different aesthetics in
the most expensive Indian production so far (Bollywood goes Hollywood). The blogger
makes use of satire by linking to a website to which many other Muslim bloggers in my study
often link and interact by means of posting comments (www.svarten.blogspot.com) which
contains an editorial cartoon by Pulitzer Price winner Clay Bennett. The cartoon shows a
group of Muslim men aligned in rows bowing on their prayer-carpets presumably in a mosque
at the Friday sermon. The only one breaking the symmetry is a man turned opposite carrying a
rifle on his left shoulder. His rifle distracts one of his neighbors who looks at him with an
expression of fright on his face. The text of the posting reads “all” insisting on the marginality
of the phenomenon, and giving references to a study released by MI5, stating, among other
things, that it is statistically inadequate to associate suicide bombers with devout Muslims,
since it is rather those who do not attend the prayers regularly that get radicalized. The threat
gets in this way de-scaled, but the meaning of the cartoon ultimately remains ambivalent,
since it could also be read as a securitization move in its treatment of instituting silence –
although terrorists constitute a minority, standing in opposition with the pious others, a
majority of the devout simply ignore the problem, or do not recognize it as such.
svarten.bloggspot.com contains an interesting reference to Chris Morris’ Four Lions’ trailer, a
film about four wannabe-jihadists from Sheffield who plan a suicide bombing during a
marathon in London, and work undercover wearing ninja turtle outfits. Commenting on the
film, we know that The Lions have all sorts of wacky ideas: they train bomb-bearing crows
and rap death-threats on videos. They think they can turn invisible for GSM satellites by
swallowing sim-cards and trick surveillance cameras by shaking their heads. The characters
are obviously extremely clumsy, not the most clever jihadists, and lack the flexibility and
coordination that such an action demand. The sympathy they attract is an important
component in playing down the moral panic and un-demonising the people that might hide
behind the terrorist mask, thus taking the very threat they are said to embody into derision.
The four lions are paper-lions, they do not live up to the threat they are suppose to represent.
Another two bloggers, linking to svarten, comment on the December, 11 suicide bombing in
Stockholm as “clumsy like the 4 lions, all he managed to do was to blow up himself”. Such
formulation is clumsy in itself, yet the whole posting indicates that he is not deploring the lack
of success in inflicting death, but suggests that the terrorist is a human being who does not
succeed in living up to the expectations he had about his own horrific act
(http://cherinomohammed.blogg.se/2010/december/).
20 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? IV.iii. Allah made me funny – self-deprecating humor as a desecuritizing iconoclash
Allah made me funny is a comedy group consisting of three Muslim men grown up in the US:
Mohammed
Amer,
a
Houston-born
Palestinian, Preacher Moss,
an
AfricanAmerican and Azhar Usman, with Indian roots. The trio was formed two years after
the terrorist attacks in New York. The group toured in Stockholm in 2010 and attracted the
attention of many bloggers who embedded some of their YouTube videos into their blogs,
commenting on which sketches were funniest, rating them, and insisting that the group shows
that it is possible to be both Muslim and funny without having to necessarily denigrate the
Prophet (http://www.bahlool.se/2010/04/12/allah-made-me-funny-2). Bahlool, which means
stupid in Arabic, was also the name of a medieval sage, selected several clips, I will analyse
next.
In one of the clips Amer talks humorously about his family and his mother's lack of
acceptance of him as a comic: 'I never think my last son will be a loser.' He covers marriage,
cats, women, and gingerly touches upon stereotypes. When his mother exhorts him with
“don't talk politics or they'll send us back” he replies “we're Palestinians. We're stateless.
Where are they going to send us back to?”. He also fidgets around the capacious stage “this is
a lot of room for a Palestinian” and he recounts his anxiety when his nine-year-old nephew
named Osama disappeared in a mall and he “couldn't call for him” alluding to the guilt by
association many Muslims fall victims to, but also ridiculing the mysterious power invested in
Muslim names. A similar visual comment is posted by the blogger by means of a largely
circulated video-clip entitled “Is Obama Osama” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJY3VxfAXk&NR=1) showing how through photoshopping one can easily morph the two pictures
representing different persons into one. Although the video was probably posted by a
Republican in the 2008 US electoral campaign, its re-contextualized variant gives it a new
meaning: the blogger is obviously alluding to another role collision – the Nobel Peace Prize
winner is actually a menace to peace, ordered the killing of the very same while he allegedly
infringed the sovereignty of Pakistan, and is evil as Osama. It is also an indirect accusation of
ignorance on the part of fellow Muslims, given the fact that the blogger deplores the naivety
of outbursts such as: “Obama, we love you, after the speech delivered by the US President in
Cairo. The humor is also realized in the video through the background music, the famous
Orffian scenic cantata Fortuna from Carmina Burana used in many Hollywood movies such
as Excalibur 1981, Natural Born Killers 1994, Epic Movie 2007, G-Force 2009 or The Doors
1991, but also advertisements (Old Spice UK TV Adverts) setting the scene for cataclysmic,
dramatic mood, agony, heroism, masculinity. The parodical nature of this video scoffs at the
information manipulation in our digital world, and can be interpreted as a commentary on the
ontological status of image (an iconoclash). I read it as a de-securitization through
rearticulation – the real security threat is not Osama but Obama, which ultimately stands for
USA, in a metonymical relationship.
Another embedded clip features Azhar Usman, a tall man with an imposing beard and crazy
hair parted in the middle, who consciously cultivates the image of a walking cartoon terrorist:
his imposing stature contrasts with the gigs he makes. Even at the level of physical
appearance the role collision could not be greater; he is at times menacing and at times a
cuddly teddy-bear. The incongruity about our expectations based partly on racial profiling
incidents we know about and his physical appearance are part of many of his jokes: “Most of
you”, says Usman in one of the clips, looking as the incarnation of a stereotypical intimidating
21 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? mullah “have never seen somebody who looks like me smile before” from behind his thick
black beard, he grins, and the audience responds with a longer, perhaps even embarrassed
grin. He is clearly critiquing the so called lack of humor non-Muslim assigned to Muslims in
general. Such imputations circulated also on Swedish media and blogosphere in connection to
the Danish Muhammed cartoons, and its Swedish counterpart. Another reference to the
cartoons was a following line, with an obvious self-ironical criticism “Islam means peace.
And if you don't believe me, I'll kill you”. He thus objectifies himself for a moment, laughs at
himself, and makes the audience feel uplifted and identify with the “human-too-human”
inconsistencies between people’s intentions (being humorous on the scene) and what actually
happens (they are being verbally threatened). The belief in any linear causal relationship
between rhetorical devices, declarations made in affect and the actual behaviour of people is
also problematised. In those videos Humor is thus a techné for normalizing, thus desecuritizing “the Muslim threat” discourse.
Preacher Moss, a converted Muslim said about Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein “the
only funny Muslims they can put on TV right now”. Moss also comments on the 9/11 and the
articulation of the war on terrorism as based on the wrong kind of question: “Why do they
hate our freedom”. He comments: “being black I already know the answer. That's easy
because nobody else has any”. I was disconcerted with the apparent truism of the formulation:
nobody has an answer. The most convenient and unsophisticated, yet surprising element
comes from the fact that access to an obvious truism comes via skin-colour. Moss pokes fun
at a well spread fallacy across media and research – some people have mysteriously access to
“truer” knowledge by virtue of their skin-colour, or group belonging. Knowledge as valid
only through direct experience becomes a way of closing any possibility of dialogue for
people with different epistemological underpinnings. It is also self-deprecatory, he laughs at
himself as entrapped within the same fallacy. However, Moss also shows that when the same
truism is expressed from a marginal position it is not taken seriously anyhow, the normal
reaction is laughter. The audience reacting “normally” participates in the production of
marginalization. Although this comment is not a straightforward de-securitization, it is a
comment on knowledge production which is intertwined with power. However, what could be
said to be an iconoclash, is the invitation to pause and step up a little – and raise other-order
set of questions about how can we know, what are the truth regimes promoted by epistemic
communities, who is silenced and ridiculed, who has the power to interpret 911, and is that
possible in a straightforward way? It is a de-securitization move in the sense that it constitutes
an invitation to step out from the regime of immediacy, urgency, and quick-fixes associated
with the language of war and security and enter the realm of other-order dialogue and debate.
Ultimately Allah Made Me Funny normalizes Muslims by showing that they should not be
feared.
IV.iv. Feminine interventions or the (un)bearable lightness of humor
The fact that marginal humor is very popular on the blogs is confirmed by the sort of pastiche
produced on one of the most frequented blogs in Sweden (http://anagina.blogg.se/) which
caught the attention of various newspapers and the Swedish National Television in connection
22 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? with the 2010 election.33 Based on the popularity of the blog in 2010, with an average of
12 000 daily visitors, the Swedish television (SVT) offered the 19-year old blogger the
possibility of running a parallel blog on its website. SVT also offered her collaboration with
the scriptwriter for Little Al-Fadji comic program realized in connection to the electoral
campaign, in an effort to mobilize the youth to vote.34 She received the title “Funniest in the
blog-world 2010” av Veckorevyn’s readers. She hosts her own humor show now, Ana Gina
Show (http://blogg.svt.se/anagina/) and her videos are very popular on YouTube, some of
them exceeding at the moment of writing 80 000 views (over 9 million in total). The logo of
the national television, and the ending Humor, approved by state (Humor, godkänd av staten)
signalling that this type of humor is different from what one might find on non-reviewed sites.
State approved humor is marked by high quality and, law abiding, and responds to the taste of
a much broader audience, too. The popularity of the blogger increased not only as a result of
this media exposure, but also because of the death threats she experienced in connection to
her “satirical impersonations”.35
Her videos revolve around three typified characters played by the blogger herself: the single
mother “Betty” who is a non-glamorous, tired, ‘ugly’ middle aged woman, who speaks very
fast because she is always in a hurry; the teenage girl “Fippan” who represents the giggling
femininity, heavily make-up wearing party-girl, dressed in pink designer clothes, obsessed
with her looks to please the male gaze and quite stupid in her high pitched voice, showing no
interest in educating herself; “sister Khadidje”, the extremely fertile, threatening, wearing
black chador/niqab/burqa submissive Muslim woman, a shadowy silhouette who beats her
children and marries off her daughters at the age of 9 and is also oppressed by her Muslim
man. Dirawi explains her interest in producing these clips as grounded in her own position: “I
am a girl, I'm young, I am a Muslim, I have a foreign background”. She is also continuously
being positions by others:
“when I was younger I received a lot of criticism because I was Muslim, the
people in my class, the Swedish society at large, but also other Muslims
criticized me for how I was. It was like I never fit in anywhere. I was not
Muslim enough, I was not Swedish enough. So I wanted to try to show that
there is no right or wrong in how one is, I must not be in any particular way.
I just am.”
Starting from own experience and observations, she collected “prejudices people hold on each
other” and played them out herself in the characters. These characters fulfil the roles society
has ascribed them, and the humor derives mostly from the obvious exaggeration and role
collision (what is expected of them and what they actually say does not match, the characters
always failing to perfectly fulfil the roles in the end). The fact that Gina incarnates them all
with versatility, ignoring the boundaries imposed on them, suggests that people usually tend
to fulfil what is expected of them either positively or negatively, but identity is always more
than the sum of the expected roles.
33
At the moment of writing Gina Dirawi was also one of the Swedish Television’s presenter of the Eurovision
2012 contest in Baku, won by the Swedish song “Euphoria” by Loreen. The American minister of Foreign
Affairs alluded to the song when she stated that despite the cold weather in Stockholm she feels euphoric, at her
state visit in June 2012.
34
35
http://dagbladet.se/nyheter/sundsvall/1.2247807-humor-och-politik-gjorde-gina-till-svt-s-bloggare
http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/1.2310914/jag-har-blivit-mordhotad, 2011-02-16
23 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? Although not a straightforward de-securitization move, Gina’s videos are critical about the
patriarchy existing in the Swedish society in general and the double stigmatization of Muslim
women. She ridicules the liberal public/private division as the realm of necessity, which
depoliticizes women, making them variations of the femina sacra, (i.e. bare life, devoid of the
political, a creature not even worthy of sacrificing and thus easy to kill). Interestingly, since
women were and continue to score more on any measuring of religiosity than men, they are
also labelled irrational in their “sacredness”. How femina sacra is embodied in the current war
on terror, which is fought in her name (brown Muslim women as oppressed, in need for
liberation by a white Western Christian man) has been illustrated by the media exclusive
representations/narratives on Jessica Lynch (Pin-Fat and Stern 2005) and Lynndie England
(Masters 2008).
V.
Instead of conclusions
As shown in the paper, an ample set of audio-visual material contained within several blogs
run by Swedish-speaking Muslim bloggers make use of satire, irony, parody and sarcasm,
thus entering into dialogue with each other and a series of events which are simultaneously
understood as geopolitical and/or everyday life-experience confronting particular
representations of normativity and boundary creation within the Swedish secularity regime.
The visuals consists of various humorous genres such as “testimonials”, self-deprecatory
stand-up comedy which are broadly circulating on the blogs. The visuals have potential to
both unify and polarise by means of clarification/identification or differentiation/rule
enforcement. The audio-visual constitute desecuritization moves on the part of the bloggers,
which get successful especially when humor gets social influence and is actively promoted by
the state. Such an approval is indeed problematic since it might reflect both a paternalistic
attitude and a reiteration of the Good Muslim/Bad Muslim talk observed by Mahmood
Mamdani. Having said this, it is also important to emphasize that the bloggers visuals put new
images into the world, new ideas, and constitute invitations to unfreeze the frame of, at least,
some of the images we thought we knew the meaning.
It is often argued that self-deprecation present in marginal humor, tends to reinforce
traditional gender roles and the power relationships existing in society, that the subaltern
voices pay lip services to actual configurations of power rather than challenging them
radically. I will not deny that this might be the case, I am however unease with such an
interpretation because of the polysemy of the signs and the fascinating phenomenon of
multistable perception (duck-rabbit issue) especially when images are in question. Having
said this I do not mean to promote radical subjectivism, since we can agree on the recognized
shapes of such multistable images, but to stress that the practice of shifting back and forth
between different aspects and seeking to re-integrate elements recognised only from another
perspective carries a creative potential. Humor is never straightforwardly resisting “groupism”
(Özkırımlı 2010:197), neither it becomes successful in countering stereotypes or fostering
dialogue between minorities and majorities, based solely on the virtue of being made from
marginalised positions.
I would like to end with a text which appears in many of the blogs I have observed, and was
published in one of the largest Swedish newspapers, Dagens Nyheter, one week after the
December, 11, 2010 suicide bombing in Stockholm. The text is written by a famous young
Swedish play writer, Jonas Hassen Khemiri and is extremely evocative about our
commonality as imperfect, fallible, and potentially dangerous humans-too-humans:
24 This is a draft please do not cite or circulate Diana Andersson Biró, SGS, Univ. of Gothenburg, National Conf. on Peace and Conflict, June, 14, 2012 (How) Can Muslim humor be humorous? “I call my brothers and say: something sick has happened tonight. I got on the
subway and saw a very suspicious person. He had black hair and an unusually
large backpack, his face was covered in a Palestinian scarf. I call my brothers
and say: It took a fraction of a second before I realized it was my own
reflection.”36
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