Charlie-Hebdo Cartoonists And Their Benign View Of Muhammad

I don’t know what the to-be-published-posthumously Vie de Mahomet, written and illustrated by the murdered cartoonists of Charlie-Hebdo, will show from the life of Muhammad. Will we have depicted little Aisha, first espied by Muhammad when she was six, and then married to him when she was nine? Will we see them in flagrante, for example? And will the famous beheadings, like those of the 600-900 members of the Jewish tribe of the Banu Qurayza, be shown? Will the raid on the inoffensive Jewish farmers of the Khaybar Oasis be shown, the killing of all the men, and the seizure of all their women and property, with the most beautiful of the woman becoming, that very night, after her father, her brothers, her husband had been killed by Muhammad, becoming his sex slave, or concubine? Will the story of Asma bint Marwan, the female poet murdered for mocking Muhammad in verse, be shown? What about the 120-year-old Jewish poet Abu ‘Akaf, murdered for the same reason? What about Ka’b bin al-Ashraf, murdered for the same reason? What did the cartoonists of Charlie-Hebdo depict?

Far from being devastating in their criticism of Muhammad, the Charlie-Hebdo cartoonists, closer to the Harvard Lampoon and The Onion than to the relentless analysis of Bat Ye’or or Ibn Warraq or Wafa Sultan or Ayaan Hirsi Ali,  inadvertently defended him, exempted him, his life, from being at the heart of the problem of violence in Islam, and the totalitarian shutting off of all criticism. In the view of the cartoonists, or at least in what their cartoons of Muhammad expressed, it was not he, never he, but only his misguided followers, those crazed fundamentalists, who didn’t understand. I don’t think those cartoonists could have meant it, but that’s what their cartoons showed.  They depicted poor Muhammad as being horrified by the “integristes” (“fundamentalists”): Il est dur d’etre aime par les cons” (It’s hard to be loved by jerks). And the issue that is out today shows Muhammad, with a single tear rolling down his cheek: he’s sad, Muhammad, sad that so much violence is done by those who claim to act in his name, or rather, to revenge his name. That makes sense, of course, only if you ignore the stories about Asma bint Marwan, Abu ‘Akaf, Ka’b bin Al-Ashraf, and much, much more. Meanwhile, the unforgiving Muhammad is saying to Charlie-Hebdo, or is it Charlie-Hebdo’s surviving staff that is saying it to those who murdered twelve of their colleagues: Tout Est Pardonne.

No, nothing is pardoned, nothing is forgiven, not by those who commit these and so many other acts of Muslim violence, today, yesterday, tomorrow. And the most useful reaction to the murders would be not a sentimental charlie-hebdocover, but something much more important: for non-Muslims everywhere to learn exactly what is in the Qur’an and the Hadith and Sira, to find out what explains the observable behavior of Muslims over 1400 years of Muslim conquest of non-Muslim lands, and then the subjugation, and mass killings or mass conversions or mass enslavement, of so many different non-Muslim peoples, leading in many cases to their disappearance, and the disappearance too, of so much of the physical evidence (churchees, synagogues, Hindu and Buddhist temples, art of all kinds) of their pre-Islamic past.