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YALE LAW SCHOOL

Research Paper #226

Speaking about Muhammad, Speaking for Muslims
by
Andrew March

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Research Network Paper Collection at:
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1
Speaking about Muhammad, Speaking for Muslims
Andrew F. March, Yale University

(Forthcoming, Critical Inquiry (Spring 2011)

The Danish Cartoons as Moral Injury
In a recent article, Saba Mahmood has elaborated an intriguing account of what was at
stake morally and emotionally for a large number of Muslims in the Danish cartoon
controversy.
1
In doing so, she seeks to offer a framework for thinking about such
instances in place of accounts which portray the conflict as one between a liberal-secular
commitment to free speech and a religious commitment to combating blasphemy. This
account instead focuses on forms of Muslim piety where Muhammad is regarded as a
moral exemplar whose words and deeds are understood not so much as commandments
but as ways of inhabiting the world, bodily and ethically. (846) This form of religiosity
should be understood as an assimilative modality of attachment or relation based on
similitude or cohabitation (859) along the lines of the Aristotelian concept of schesis, as
opposed to a communicative or representative relationship to the Prophet. Importantly,
the sense of moral injury that emanates from such a relationship between the ethical
subject and the figure of exemplarity is quite distinct from the one that the notion of
blasphemy encodes. The notion of moral injury I am describing no doubt entails a sense
of violation, but this violation emanates not from the judgment that the law has been
transgressed but that ones being, grounded as it is in a relationship of dependency with
the Prophet, has been shaken. For many Muslims, the offense the cartoons committed
was not against a moral interdiction but against a structure of affect, a habitus, that feels
wounded. This wound requires moral action, but the language of this wound is neither
juridical nor that of street protest because it does not belong to an economy of blame,
accountability, and reparations. The action that it requires is internal to the structure of
affect, relations, and virtues that predispose one to experience an act as a violation in the
first place. (848-9)


1
Saba Mahmood, Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide? Critical Inquiry
35 (Summer 2009), pp. 836-862.
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Understanding this model helps us to appreciate that not all forms of religiosity are
chosen or self-conscious affirmations of beliefs or propositions (852) and thus that
attacks on religious icons may be as experienced as directly and irreducibly as attacks on
racial groups.
Mahmoods account is a very helpful supplement to much of the journalistic and
scholarly focus on formal legal and religious normativity, racism and Islamophobia, or
political manipulation. It also reflects a deeply attractive moral sensibility grounded in
empathy and humility, reminiscent of the late liberal theorist Judith Shklars sense that
cruelty takes many forms and is the summum malum of which humans are capable. It is in
full solidarity with that sensibility that I engage with Mahmoods arguments.
Which Concept of Moral Injury?

Mahmood spends much of her article establishing an account that the cartoons were a
catalyst for a genuine sort of pain, one to which we are not always sensitive. But is it
really the case that in much of the non-Muslim reaction to the Muslim reaction(s) was a
refusal to accept that Muslims may have felt injured or pained by the cartoons or an
inability [for the idea of moral injury] to translate across different semiotic and ethical
norms (860)?
2
I think it is actually quite easy to accept the idea that Muslims felt a
genuine sense of pain at the portrayal of the Prophet in those images. In fact, if anything,
perhaps Mahmood is too cautious in outlining the many ways in which the cartoons were
a source of pain for Muslims. I would submit that the idea of emotional pain is really no

2
Mahmood quotes a number of commentators who did in fact express incredulity that what was motivating
many of the protests was genuine pain or injury. However, I wonder whether too much is made of these
quotations, all of which were reactions to the violent forms which many of the protests to the republication
of the cartoons took. Perhaps we should not take statements of incredulity that acts of violence were purely
a matter of spontaneous moral injury as evidence that Western publics are uniformly incapable of
appreciating that many Muslims felt an authentic form of distress.
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mystery here at all. We feel pain at all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons. We attach
ourselves to all kinds of symbols, figures, persons and ideas in the assimilative way
Mahmood describes, as the recent furor over Ground Zero as hallowed ground
demonstrates.
3
And, of course, there is no point in asking whether this pain is genuine
or real. Rather, I believe that there are much harder questions at stake which
Mahmoods account doesnt directly address, but perhaps provides a provocation to
thinking about.
Firstly, I am curious whether Mahmood is insisting on this one single account of
the moral injury involved in the cartoon incident. Some might puzzle over her use of
Aristotelian concepts to account for certain Muslim attitudes towards the Prophet, or her
reading out of abstract and formal intellectual traditions in Islam,
4
but I find her account

3
Another good example is an incident which emerged at Michigan State University in Fall 2005, where I
was then teaching. A cartoon published in the student newspaper on Veterans Day portrayed two soldiers:
an octogenarian World War Two veteran and a soldier in the American army presently occupying Iraq. The
veteran was dressed in commemorative garb, whereas the active soldier was covered in blood and wielding
a medieval-style cudgel. The dialogue had the veteran saying I liberated a torture camp and the active
soldier saying I work in one. This cartoon was published in the wake of the revelations of atrocities
carried out by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib and, ironically, at the beginning of the Danish cartoon affair. Of
course, certain conservative student groups protested outside the newspaper demanding an apology and the
firing of the cartoonist, invoking much of the same sentiment of moral injury described by Mahmood.
For these students, American flags and soldiers were symbols of identity and moral attachment
inappropriate for use in this way to make a political argument.
4
Ironically, the urge to downplay abstract or formal intellectual reflection about belief and doctrine in
Islamic religiosity has a tradition in Western Orientalist approaches to Islam which tended to avoid serious
study of Islamic theology. In part this flowed from the persistence of nineteenth-century assumptions
about the marginality of abstract intellectual life in Islam, and about the greater intrinsic interest and
originality of Muslim law and mysticism. It was also commonly thought that where formal metaphysics
was cultivated in Islamic civilization, this was done seriously only in the context of Arabic philosophy,
where it was not obstructed by futile scriptural controls, and where it could perform its most significant
function, which was believed to be the transmission of Greek thought to Europe. However, a steady stream
of progress over the past two decades has turned the study of Muslim theology into a dynamic and ever
more intriguing discipline. Old assumptions about Muslim theology as either a narrow apologetic exercise
or an essentially foreign import into Islam have been successfully challenged. (Tim Winter, Introduction
to The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), p. 1.) In raising this I do not mean to insinuate that Mahmoods approach to Muslim
religiosity (based on a focus on the daily lived practices of disciplining the body) inadvertently resurrects
old Orientalist attitudes about Muslims lack of intellectual sophistication in matters of theology, ethics,
law or politics and their more bodily and sensuous habitus. However, what I do intend to deflate is the
sense that this attitude towards Muslim religiosity evidenced in Mahmoods outstanding scholarly
4
perfectly plausible. (In fact, it is somewhat obvious: Muslims really love the Prophet and
hate for him to be mocked or disdained.) My concern is whether it has to be the sole
account or is even an account distinct from others. Mahmood concedes that there were
certainly many sources of Muslim anger over the cartoons, with many kinds of political
motivation at stake. (842) However, she occasionally slips into speaking of the kind of
religiosity at stake in Muslim reactions to the Danish cartoons. (852-3) The force of
Mahmoods account, on my reading, is its subtlety and sensitivity to the varieties of
religious sensibilities and practices amongst Muslims. It would be a shame if appreciation
for practices of piety which are not reducible to political ideology or Islamic juridical
modalities itself becomes a kind of academic orthodoxy whereby we see belief as a
protestant concern and thus assume that authentic Muslim and other religiosities must
lie primarily in the sensorium.
Mahmoods focus on moral injury derived from an assimilative model of relating
to the exemplar of the Prophet is an important corrective, a crucial part of the entire
landscape, just as both formal secular jurisprudence and popular Western attitudes
towards Muslims are crucial pieces of the puzzle on the non-Muslim side. But this
schesis-model is still just one approach, important as it is. Unfortunately, confusing a
certain refined academic theory of how to speak about Muslim piety with the full range
of actual Muslim moral commitments has some bizarre consequences, as when Mahmood
counsels European Muslims not to look to European human rights law to suppress
blasphemous speech about the Prophet. I fully agree with Mahmood that coercive laws

contribution is in itself complete, without approaches which examine more formal Islamic intellectual
attitudes towards normativity. The formal, public contestation of Islamic norms is no less a lived practice
for believing Muslims than the practices of schesis/habitus which Mahmood so sensitively depicts and we
ought to be wary of genealogies of subject-formation through discourse and habitus which reduce Muslim
politics and ethical life to pre-determined outcomes.
5
should not be deployed to suppress injurious speech, and fully agree that looking to
secular European law to protect Islamic religious sentiments contains a whole set of
paradoxes and dangers. (As, for that matter, does the codification of Islamic law in the
positive legal systems of Muslim majority states.) However, Mahmoods account of that
paradox is misleading and potentially patronizing. She writes that that Muslims in Europe
were only attracted to the legal option because they were committed to preserving an
imaginary in which their relation to the Prophet based on similitude and cohabitation.
(859) Well, who says? Muslims have given a wide range of arguments for both voluntary
and coercive restraints on injurious speech in Europe at least since the Rushdie affair, and
to reduce their religious imaginary to nothing other than this specific desire to preserve
an imaginary in which their relation to the Prophet based on similitude and cohabitation
rings contrived to say the least, particularly in speaking about a religious community
which has such a long tradition of seeing law in all of its forms (not just pure forms of
shara as articulated by jurists, but also imperfect simulacra of this ideal advanced by
imperfect secular rulers) as a crucial component of what believers should expect and
strive for in this world. I believe that Muslims open themselves up to awkward
interferences in religious matters by secular states (in both Muslim and non-Muslim
societies) when they seek legal protections from blasphemy; but I dont think they are
irrational or suffering from false consciousness when they think they want the legal
protections per se. Both Islamic law and the law of modern Muslim states have always
insisted on such legal protections; it makes perfect sense from a religious standpoint that
this is one thing Muslims might try to achieve in the West.
6
However, I would suggest further that even the idea of moral injury is compatible
with many kinds of religiosities, in addition to the schesis model Mahmood advances. In
fact, Mahmood does not give a clear definition of what she means by moral injury, and
specifically what the modifier moral is adding to the concept of injury. How does
moral injury differ conceptually from any kind of emotional pain inflicted by the
criticism and mockery of others? How does it differ from the kind of emotional pain or
discomfort inflicted by having to suffer the disapproved actions of others in public?
However, in addition to the obvious normative problems with endorsing a concept like
moral injury for political and moral guidance in diverse societies (the logic of this
concept is precisely that invoked by those opposed to even bare tolerance for
homosexuality, the legality of burning the American flag or, indeed, equality for minority
religious groups such as Muslims
5
), it is not clear how this concept provides for the kinds
of distinctions Mahmood wishes to draw between violation emanat[ing] from the
judgment that the law has been transgressed [and the feeling] that ones being, grounded
as it is in a relationship of dependency with the Prophet, has been shaken. It seems to me
that the idea of moral injury is equally at stake in judgments that the law has been
transgressed as it is with the feeling that ones being has been shaken. In fact, it is hard to
understand exactly what the objection to the violation of the moral law is, unless it is
some kind of moral injury to the community which is precisely how Gods rights
(huquq Allah) are often characterized in Islamic legal theory.
Furthermore, it is far from clear to me why Mahmood needs to erect this
unnecessary kind of binary between speech which immediately disrupts a subjects
structure of ethical affect and speech which would characterized by that subject as

5
As we have seen, literally, ad nauseam throughout the Summer and Fall of 2010 in the United States.
7
blasphemy or as a violation of a moral law. Are these two distinct kinds of injury for
the religious subject, or is she saying that the vast majority of pious Muslims simply
dont think in terms of blasphemy or violations of a moral code at all? (The latter
seems unlikely to say the least.) In failing to tell a more complete story of how speech is
constructed as injurious, this account thus erects a series of artificial and false binaries:
between speech which immediately disrupts a subjects structure of ethical affect and
speech which would characterized by that subject as blasphemy; between the
immediate sense of injury because of the kind of subject the religious subject is and the
conscious political decision to protest or endure speech in this or that instance; and
between belief-centered religiosity and habitus-centered religiosity. Mahmoods account
thus seems to have the inadvertent effect of flattening the rich landscape of religious
subjectivity.
For the sake of argument, let us take a quick look at the logic of combating
blasphemy in Islamic juridical discourses. A good source for this kind of thinking is the
Islamic legal literature on the objectives of the Law (maqid al-shara). This
literature is popular amongst Islamic legal reformers because of the way in which it
replaces more formalist, language-based methods with morally substantive, purposive
ones. However, it is also an excellent source for juridical and theological reflections
across the ideological spectrum on the deeper meanings and purposes of long-standing
legal norms. Reflections on the laws against blasphemy and heresy are frequently treated
as belonging to the shara objective (maqad) of preserving religion (ifz al-dn),
one of the five necessary objectives (arriyyt) of the Law according to virtually all
scholars.
8
First of all, this juridical discourse complicates slightly Mahmoods picture of an
assimilative, habitus-based relationship with the Prophet set against a communicative,
proposition-based one. The jurists are interested in both. From a short manual on the
maqid al-shara designed for popular consumption: Religion consists of divine rules
which God has revealed through prophets to guide mankind to truth in matters of belief
and to good in matters of behavior and social relations. Religion constrains mankind by
these rules and brings them into submission to their commands and prohibitions so that
they may attain the happiness of this world and the next. Complete, perfect religion is
composed of four elements: faith (mn), external submission (islm), belief in right
doctrines (itiqd) and works (amal).
6
There is no reason, then, to see the pietistic
conception of assimilation to exemplars through daily habits as something which
necessarily gives us a different understanding of the meaning of the Prophet from more
formal juridical conceptions. Each rests on the other and they interact in complex and
variable ways for different believers at different times.
Let us consider, then, how this kind of legal discourse treats slanderous speech
about the Prophet. First, what is blasphemy? In the Islamic juridical tradition, the crime
in question is sabb (or shatm) al-nab the reviling or slandering of the Prophet. Thus,
implicit in the very language of how jurists speak about what is commonly referred to in
English as blasphemy is the idea of moral harm and injury (as, of course, it is in the
word blasphemy, often thought to derive from the Greek for hurtful or harmful
speech). Furthermore, jurists do not uniformly adopt a formalist, deontological,
legalistic (if I may) understanding of the danger of allowing the Law to be violated. Their

6
Abd Allh Muammad al-Amn al-Nam and Ysuf al-Bashr Muammad, Maqid al-shara al-
Islmiyya (Khartoum: al-Markaz al-Qawm lil-Intj al-Islm, 1995), p. 26.
9
understanding is shot through with not only substantive moral and political objectives,
but also a conception of the multiple kinds of moral harms involved. A particularly
expansive, yet succinct, account is provided by a contemporary scholar seeking to
appropriate for today views of the jurist-theologian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). According to
this scholar, blasphemy is punished and the honor of the Prophet is protected because
When the honor of the Prophet is violated then respect for and aggrandizement of the
Prophets mission collapses, and thus so collapses everything which he achieved. The
collapse of the honor and glorification of the Prophet is the collapse of religion itself.
This demands vindication through the killing of the blasphemer. He who blasphemes
against the Prophet and attacks his honor [yasubb al-rasl wa yaqa f irihi] is trying to
corrupt peoples religion and by means of that to also corrupt their worldly existence.
Whether or not they succeed, the person trying to corrupt anothers religion is therefore
seeking to sow corruption on Earth.
7
Defaming religion and casting ugly aspersions on
the Prophet so that people will have an aversion towards him is amongst the greatest of
corruptions. Furthermore, blasphemy is a form of sacrilege against the Prophet and an
affront
8
to God, His Prophet and His believers. It is an attempt on the part of infidels to
subvert the Islamic order, to humiliate believers, to remove the glory of religion and
debase the word of God all of which are amongst the most grievous forms of
corruption on Earth.
9


If that seems a bit too academic or rehearsed, consider a letter to the editor of the New
Haven Register applauding Yale University Presss decision not to reprint the cartoons:
The cartoons portray outright lies and distortions When it comes to God and his
divine wisdom in appointing prophets there are boundaries that cannot be crossed. For
Muslims, Muhammad was a mercy sent by God to the entire world. To portray him as
less than that is blasphemy and it is incumbent upon those who have intelligence to direct

7
This phrase fasd fil-ar is taken from a verse in the Quran often used to establish capital punishment
for those who rebel against the state or provoke such rebellion through propaganda or incitement. It has
served as a very flexible and supple legal tool in the hands of Islamic governments, including most recently
the Islamic Republic of Iran, to justify charges of treason against political and ideological dissenters.
8
dh is more commonly used for harm or injury but out of concern for the theological complexities
arising from the idea that God could be harmed or injured by human actions I will translate it as an affront
to.
9
Ysuf Amad Muammad al-Badaw, Maqid al-shara ind Ibn Taymiyya (Amman, Jordan: Dar al-
Nafais, 2000), pp. 455-6.
10
the majority away from such contemptuous acts.
10
Surely such statements are as relevant
as that of the young British Muslim Mahmood quotes (846), and while Mahmood may
then interpret such an utterance not primarily as a belief-statement but rather as a kind of
discursive practice by which Rasheed cultivates a certain ethical subjectivity or state of
affect, this might be news to Rasheed.
My point here is absolutely not to suggest that all Muslims wounded by the
cartoons share and endorse all of these more absolutist politico-legal views. Rather, my
concern is with the concept of moral injury as a hermeneutic for helping us to
understand the particular way in which pious Muslims not necessarily attracted to
juridical methods were injured by the Danish cartoons. For the jurists, scandalous and
mocking speech about the Prophet is nothing other than a moral injury, for it is an
attempt to corrupt the entire social, psychological and affective edifice on which morality
rests. Thus, it remains to be shown just how Mahmoods account moves us beyond a
blasphemy model for understanding what was at stake in the cartoon controversy.
There is another account of the reaction to the cartoons which is also perfectly
compatible with the idea of moral injury. It is found in a concise way in Slavoj ieks
remarks on the cartoon controversy:
The Muslim crowds did not react to the Muhammad caricatures as such. They reacted to
the complex figure or image of the West that was perceived as the attitude behind the
caricatures. Those who proposed the term Occidentalism as the counterpart to Edward
Saids Orientalism were up to a point right: what we get in Muslim countries is a
certain ideological image of the West which distorts Western reality no less (although in
a different way) than the Orientalist image of the Orient. What exploded in violence was
a web of symbols, images, and attitudes, including Western imperialism, godless
materialism, hedonism, and the suffering of Palestinians, and which became attached to
Danish cartoons. This is why the hatred expanded from the caricatures to Denmark as a
country, to Scandinavia, to Europe, and to the West as a whole. A torrent of humiliations

10
Jamilah Rasheed, Excluding cartoons a step toward justice, New Haven Register, September 18, 2009,
p. A4.
11
and frustrations were condensed into the caricatures. This condensation, it needs to be
borne in mind, is a fact of language, of constructing and imposing a certain symbolic
field.
11


There are at least two interpretations of this account. One, in fact, I would suggest is the
same kind of schesis-based account Mahmood advances in her article. Only here, the
object of assimilation is not the Prophet, but the community of Muslims. The other
interpretation is an honor-based account. In other words, for iek the cartoons were not
an assault on the Prophets honor, but on Muslims honor. Mahmood does not deny that
such an honor-based response to the cartoons was present in much of the popular
reactions. However, what she does not address is whether such a motivation also counts
as a form of moral injury. Since she does not give a definition of moral injury, we cannot
know, but I see no reason for discounting this emotion as a legitimate form of moral
injury. How could it be otherwise if we understand the social bases of individual and
group self-respect to be moral goods? In short, I am not sure what work the concept of
moral injury does for us in her article and it would be good to hear more on this.
There are two responses available to Mahmood at this point, I think. One is to
deny that many Muslims operate with anything other than her lived relationship and
embodied piety conception of religiosity. But that is clearly invalidated by any sincere
and open-minded survey of Muslim public discourse, even in the West. The other is to
accept that these other sources of injury the juridical/blasphemy source and the
identitarian/honor source are indeed kinds of moral injury equally salient and real as the
kind she is interested in exposing, but that the latter kind is particularly worthy of our
moral concern. That is, she might argue that we should be more concerned about pious

11
Slavoj iek, Violence, p. 60.
12
Muslims for whom the cartoons represented a disruption of their attachment with the
Prophet and thus more troubled by their pain than about the pain of Muslims reacting out
of injury to a comprehensive politico-religious conception or out of communal honor.
But I simply dont see why this is the case. As a fellow citizen, I am concerned
about the pain of those for whom slandering the Prophet represents an attack on a
conception of religious objectives, and of those for whom slandering the Prophet amounts
to an inter-communal provocation. Personally, I certainly was troubled by the way in
which doctrinal Muslims and identity Muslims were pained by the cartoons. For that
matter, I am also concerned about the subjective pain felt by conservative Christians
witnessing the gradual replacement of their conception of marriage with a new, fairer one
more inclusive of all kinds of love and attachment. I was troubled by the pain felt by my
students who were outraged by the Abu Ghraib cartoon in the Michigan State student
newspaper. I disagree with them, and I dont want their views inscribed as law or
informal morality in a diverse society, but that does not mean that I cannot empathize
with the injury they feel.
In fact, in an odd paradox, is Mahmood herself not possibly reinforcing some of
the liberal secular assumptions about violence and blasphemy in advancing her
account? By diverting attention away from those Muslims who have a more
intellectualized and politicized account of what is wrong with blasphemy and mockery,
or from those Muslims offended on community honor grounds, and towards the more
sympathetic and anodyne (to a liberal secular sensibility) feelings of pious Muslims who
are not interested in an an economy of blame, accountability, and reparations, (849) is
she in fact siding with those who think that blasphemy and mockery have no claim in the
13
modern world if they are motivated by a religious doctrine or a group identity? Is she in
fact agreeing with those who suggest that religious doctrine or community honor are not
good grounds for feeling wounded, and therefore that we must instead invoke a secular
conception of subjectively-authenticated harm and pain? If not, then it would be
interesting to hear an account of how the moral injury she outlines in her article is more
troubling or worthy of concern than the moral injury felt on doctrinal-religious grounds
or community-identity grounds, and how her model of religious subjectivity raises any
serious challenges at all for liberal secularism (outside of France, that is!).
What Was the Injury in the Danish Cartoons?
A robust concept of moral injury should be able to provide an account of what the injury
at stake is. Mahmood is dismissive of two lines of argument: that it should be within the
power of pious Muslims in the modern world to ignore the doodles of a few cheeky
Danes, and that the cartoons were protected political speech because there are real
concerns about the relationship of religion and violence. The first naturalizes a certain
concept of a religious subject but also fails to attend to the affective and embodied
practices through which a subject comes to relate to a particular sign a relationship
founded on attachment and cohabitation. (841-2) The second involves seeing the
cartoons as statements of facts, i.e., as relying on a conception of Muslims as state
security threats should they get their way on the cartoon issue. (854)
How, exactly, does attend[ing] to the affective and embodied practices through
which a subject comes to relate to a particular sign a relationship founded on
attachment and cohabitation refute, however, Art Spiegelmans dismay that dopey
cartoons provoked violent demonstrations? Surely, Mahmood does not mean to suggest
14
that having a relationship of attachment and cohabitation with the Prophet is a suitable
explanation for the countless complex questions we need to answer in order to explain
various kinds of political action. Mahmood confuses here the idea that Muslims may have
objected to the cartoons in good faith, or been genuinely hurt by them prior to consulting
a proper religious authority, with the idea that their political and moral agency is entirely
predetermined by their religious subjectivity. Talal Asad seems to have made the same
error: [I]t becomes difficult for the secular liberal to understand the passion that informs
those for whom, rightly or wrongly, it is impossible to remain silent when confronted
with blasphemy, those for whom blasphemy is neither freedom of speech nor the
challenge of a new truth but something that seeks to disrupt a living relationship.
12

The fact that people claim to have no choice but to act or respond in a certain
way does not make this true. The claim that I can do no other is not a factual claim but
rather a figure of speech (I can do no other without great effort or cost to my aims) or
socialization to the point of mystification. In fact, people often do experience a certain
distance between their selves and some of their constitutive beliefs or practices the
latter change, are debated, and are replaced. How a pious Muslim must respond
(emotionally and physically) to an insult to the Prophet is not a natural fact or even one
predetermined by the discursive tradition which creates her form of religious subjectivity.
Rather, it is an evolving product of many inputs, including the ongoing discourses and
debates within the religious community.
Put differently: when secular political theorists (as well as theologians) refer to
religion as involving belief, this should not be understood tendentiously and simplistically

12
Talal Asad, Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism, in Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith
Butler and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2009), p. 46. Emphasis added.
15
as only referring to privatizable belief about theological matters which neither break
my leg nor pick my pocket (the nature of Christ, who exactly was Gods final Prophet),
but also beliefs about action in the common social world. The proposition Insults to the
Prophet Muhammad must be avenged in some way is a belief-statement, as are the range
of arguments which explain and justify it. It is no part of critical inquiry of any form or
persuasion to object to one narrative on the grounds that it naturalizes a certain concept
of the religious subject by merely offering an alternative but equally dogmatic
naturalization of the religious subject.
Similarly, it is easy to see what is meant by those who seek to defend the cartoons
as political speech. It does not mean to suggest, pace Mahmood, that anyone who
defends the cartoons as political speech is endorsing as fact what the cartoons were
supposedly stating. Rather, what is being suggested is that the Danish cartoons (like the
cartoon from the Michigan State student newspaper), were not simply gratuitous offense
akin to a noose at a multi-racial high school or, say, a picture of a pig with the name
Muhammad written on it. In both of those cases, it is clear that no valuable political
speech is being voiced beyond We hate African-Americans or We think your so-
called prophet is like the most impure animal in your religion. In other words, in
banning or even discouraging speech which might contain political commentary not in
itself a violation of human dignity, however injurious to some sensibilities that
commentary may be, there are costs, costs which we are cautious in imposing.
Besides, what were the cartoons suggesting as fact? Were they simply
suggesting that Muhammad was a terrorist plain and simple? Maybe, and it certainly
matters that many Muslims took the cartoon as suggesting this. But why is this an
16
occasion to leave all of our interpretive habits at the door? Is it even possible that the
infamous bomb-in-the-turban cartoon was a satire on jihadis, not on Islam-at-large? Is it
even possible that the cartoon may thus be read as equivalent to What Would Jesus
Bomb? bumper stickers effective mockery of outlandish political ideologies which
seek to justify their violence in the name of religious founders?
Presumably Mahmood regards as sufficiently obvious both what was injurious
about the cartoons and why they needed to be responded to. But so much more of interest
can be discussed here and she is so well-placed to contribute to that discussion that it is a
pity she did not say more on it. For her attachment-and-cohabitation-with-the-Prophet
Muslims, what exactly was so injurious? That Muhammad was portrayed visually at all?
That he was portrayed by non-Muslims? That he was portrayed in a mocking or
irreverent fashion? That he was portrayed as a terrorist? That non-Muslims were getting
away with it?
More troubling for Mahmood, I believe, is that her account seems somewhat self-
contradictory. If pious Muslims truly inhabit a closed world of attachment, assimilation
and cohabitation with the Prophet or, in Asads terms, experience a lived relationship,
then how is their being so easily shaken by outsiders? What specific actions of outsiders
have the capacity to rock ones world in this way? Importantly, accounts which focus
either on the idea of transgression of a boundary or violation of honor do no have this
problem. Here it is easy to see why the speech of others injures or enrages.
Mahmoods account, alas, is strangely apolitical and strangely context-averse. If a
jihadi website has a silhouette of the Prophet departing for battle, while that website
defends the kinds of acts insinuated by the cartoons, is that not a source of moral injury
17
for the pious Muslims Mahmood is describing? If a jihadi website proudly proclaims that
the Prophet himself engaged in the kinds of acts jihadis are trying to justify indeed that
they are also trying to emulate the Prophet and assimilate their behavior into his!
13
is
that not also a source of moral injury for politically quietist attachment-and-
cohabitation-with-the-Prophet Muslims? Why does it not seem to invoke the kind of
reaction that the Danish cartoons did?
The psychology of offense and moral injury is a complex issue, and I do not
propose any answers here. But it is clear that the internal religious attitudes of pious
Muslims toward the Prophet alone do not explain why the Danish cartoons invoked the
response that they did. There is a complex set of political and social contexts involving
the identity of the perpetrators, the geo-political moment and the visual form of the
speech-act which all need to be taken into account in addition to the apolitical and
ahistorical nature of pious assimilation and cohabitation with the Prophet. That is, there is
more to the story than Muslim piety per se. For those like Mahmood interested in using
the concept of moral injury not only for descriptive purposes but also for ethical ones, I
think something more needs to be said about this psychological dimension of offense and
injury.
What I think emerges from these reflections, is that the pain involved, the brute
injury, only partially explains what was wrong with the Danish cartoons. All kinds of acts
on the part of others are liable to cause pain. How do we know when that pain is

13
The most elaborate scholarly justification of the 9/11 attacks, Shaykh Abd al-Azz al-Jarbs Al-tasl
li-mashriyyat ma asala li-Amrika min tadmr (Establishing the Legitimacy of the Destruction which
Befell America) does precisely this. He writes: There is no harm in Muslims being branded as terrorists,
since Islam has indeed commanded Muslims to terrorize their enemy, as in Q. 8:60 and 59:1. If Islam
alienates through this, then so be it; Islam does not concern itself with the bare number of its adherents, but
with the quality of their adherence.
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something which we are willing to tolerate? How do we know when the imposition of
psychological pain is a morally necessary byproduct of political action? How do we
know when the causes or catalysts of pain are morally troubling regardless of what aims
those inflicting the pain are trying to pursue in the world?
Mahmood is trying to bring our attention to a kind of pain which she feels is
excluded by liberal, secularist rationality. But is she right? We live in a society, largely
thanks to that kind of secular mentality, where people are self-authenticating sources of
knowledge about their own pain, where everyone is able to choose their harms. In fact,
Mahmoods account is, above all, a symptom of the power of this secular ethos: for she
herself brings our attention only to the subjective injury felt by persons (a thoroughly
secular consideration) and not to a radically alternative morality whereby entities such as
God, the Prophet Muhammad or a sacred text themselves have moral claims on human
action. Rather than claiming that the sacred itself ought to be an object of protection, she
chooses to remain on the moral terrain of modern secularism by directing attention to the
moral-emotional costs born by certain persons as a result of speech. Even she refuses to
slip the bars of secular ideology.
The resistance which Mahmood is encountering in the case of the Danish cartoons
is not to the idea that some pious Muslims were genuinely hurt by the cartoons (why else
would Jyllands-Posten have published them?), nor merely to the idea that Muslim pain of
any kind matters (of course, this is what many in the West have a problem with), but
rather to the idea that such pain alone without a deeper and broader account of why that
pain is in this context an injustice stands out from amongst the countless possible
sources of moral injury and emotional pain which all citizens of complex, morally
19
diverse, post-modern societies encounter when they walk out the door, turn on the
television, or open right-wing Danish newspapers. The problem is not that our liberal
secular societies cannot recognize and appreciate religious pain (if anything religion is
still assumed to be a more authentic reason for moral consideration than many secular
convictions, at least in the United States), it is that subjectively-felt religious pain is no
longer a trump card in a world which takes race, gender, ethnicity and class as equally
important sources of identity and moral motivation.
A Politics of Witnessing?
In her conclusion, Mahmood avers that for anyone interested in fostering greater
understanding across religious difference, it would be important to turn not to the law but
to the thick texture and traditions of ethical and intersubjective norms that provide the
substrate for legal arguments. Ultimately the future of the Muslim minority in
Europe depends not so much on how the law might be expanded to accommodate its
concerns but on a larger transformation of the cultural and ethical sensibilities of the
majority Judeo-Christian population that undergird the law. (860)
Certainly such understanding across religious difference should be fostered, and it
is certainly true that there is a deplorable tendency in the Euro-American public sphere to
simultaneously assert that Muslims are disingenuous in claiming injury and also that
Muslims are in urgent need of being injured so as to be disrupted from their archaic and
dangerous attachments. But what transformation of the cultural and ethical sensibilities
of the majority Judeo-Christian population do we wish to see exactly that they purify
themselves of racist attitudes towards fellow citizens of Muslim cultural backgrounds,
that they not misuse the secular license to insult religion as an alibi for creating a hostile
20
environment for fellow citizens of Muslim cultural backgrounds, or that that they actually
commit to never offending distinctly religious sensibilities held by Muslims by not
transgressing against the sacred? Mahmood may object to these kinds of distinctions on
the grounds that pious Muslims might not wish to distinguish between injury to the
Prophet and injury to the Muslim community, but for her purposes in calling for a
transformation of the Euro-American attitude towards Muslims while also exploring the
possibility of a critique of secularism, this is the precise question which I believe she
needs to answer.
In calling on European Muslims to develop the tools to better translate practices
and norms across semiotic and ethical differences even without demanding legal
remedies, I take Mahmood here to be calling for a version of what John Rawls referred to
favorably as witnessing: It may happen that some citizens feel they must express their
principled dissent from existing institutions, policies, or enacted legislation. In this
case they feel that they must not only let other citizens know the deep basis of their
strong opposition but must also bear witness to their faith by doing so.
14

Hopefully, we will someday live in a society where brute anti-Muslim prejudice is
regarded as in the same bad taste as racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and homophobia,
where self-respecting people are embarrassed to be caught voicing ignorant and hostile
statements about Muslims. I am not sure whether in such a society The Satanic Verses or
the Danish cartoons would fall afoul of this sensibility, but many far more vicious forms
of expression presently circulating in Western societies directed at Muslims certainly
would. In the meanwhile, things are getting worse, with neo-fascist, nativist groups

14
John Rawls, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, in The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999), p. 156.
21
gaining strength in Europe
15
and anti-Muslim speech (so often expressed as resistance to
creeping shariatization) becoming the go-to jingoistic gesture on the American right.
(Indeed, with incidents like the Swiss minaret ban, one burka ban after another in Europe,
and the Park 51 fiasco, we cannot say that crude anti-Muslim racism is now, if it ever
was, only freely expressed by extreme right-wing groups.) Defeating these groups is a
political project which will require a coalition of the religious and the secular.
16

I believe that this political project is in the first order about creating a political
culture which finally accepts the fact that Muslim communities are long-term
stakeholders in Europe and America and where Muslim communities see public evidence
of this attitude. For me, then, the cartoons were above all a political act potentially
harmful to the long-term project of creating a public space where Muslims feel safe,
valued and equal. Contributing to this culture will invariably require of Muslims at times
a language for expressing their interests and values which is more secular than some
might like. But that is not primarily because of the arbitrary disciplinary rationality of
modern secularism or some protestant conception of religion as only a matter of private
belief, but rather because of (in Mahmoods words) the thick texture and traditions of
ethical and intersubjective norms that provide the substrate for legal arguments presently
in circulation in Europe, i.e., because of the sensibility of Muslims fellow citizens in
Europe. However, what Mahmoods timely article reminds us is that we must leave space
for Muslims to bear witness in whatever language they wish to the ways in which those

15
See, for example, a recent BBC report on a relatively new group calling itself the English Defence
League http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8250017.stm.
16
Indeed, there are many Muslim religious intellectuals who agree with this, including Tunisian Islamist
Rashid al-Ghannushi and the Mauritanian-Saudi scholar Abd Allh Ibn Bayya. Both argue that to the
extent Western societies are hospitable to Muslims at all, this is not due to Abrahamic fraternity or residual
regard for religion, but secular humanism. It is often precisely a Rawlsian or Habermasian form of liberal
secularism that allows these religious scholars to argue that Western secularism is not a metaphysical
doctrine which conflicts with Islam.
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ethical and intersubjective norms affect them without the suspicion that every expression
of Islamic religiosity is a dagger aimed at the heart of European freedom.