Satire In The Muslim World: A Centuries-Long Tradition

npr ^ | 1-10-2014 | NEDA ULABY

[Citizen Zed]

"Can't they take a joke?" That's the question that came up after the 2005 Danish cartoon controversy and now, again, after the massacre at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The suspected killers obviously reflect a tiny minority of extreme religious fanatics, but the question made us wonder: What is the role of satire in the Muslim world?

First let's establish that saying "the Muslim world" is like saying "the Christian world" or Africa: We're talking one and a half billion people all over the globe — of different races, ethnicities and languages — who believe different things. That said, Duke University religion professor Bruce Lawrence does have an answer when you ask him about Muslim traditions of satire. He says, "I've been studying the Muslim world for I guess now almost half a century, and one of my heroes has always been a ninth-century literary figure called al-Jahiz."

In a golden era for Islamic music, art and science, Jahiz studied everything from zoology to literary theory. He wrote merciless social satires, and he was also famously ugly. "He could satire himself as somebody who was very unattractive," Lawrence says, "and yet he could make fun of the rock stars of his generation in Baghdad, which was the capital city of the Muslim world in that time."

According to Lawrence, Jahiz remains a beloved figure in Islamic literature, and it's not because he recorded the glories of Islam. "He poked fun at contemporaries, at his co-religionists, at anybody who seemed to him to have too great a sense of self-importance, whatever their station in life."

[a fool in paradise]

The entire muslim world bows to the capital of the empire five times a day every single day. That capital is a segregated city with a death penalty for any non-muslim who’d dare enter.

There is a muslim world, it is united on some matters, and it is incompatible with the rest of the world.

Islamic law has a notion of “muslim territory”. Prisoners of war and “refugees” must be taken back to muslim territory before they are put into slavery.

What other “religion” sees the world this way? It’s a political system. Communism was/is united as well. The USSR and China aided North Vietnam. Cuba aides North Korea. Venezuela aligns with the other dictators.

Communists in America loved Mao, North Vietnam, North Korea (see Dalton Trumbo), Stalin, Castro, et al.