The incompatibility between cartoonists and Islam is inevitable. Cartoonist are very frequently irreverent about everything and resistant to censorship. Some muslims are very touchy and, I’m afraid to say, authoritarian. There’s also the fact that many strands of Islam don’t allow representative art so the whole issue of cartoons is never going to be popular in the first place.
This weekend the Washington Post and numerous other American newspapers have refused to publish their regular cartoon strip Opus. Berkeley Breathed, the writer of the strip, announced on his site that the strips had been witheld from publication but he didn’t say why. The subject of the no doubt soon-to-be controversial strip is a young American woman on a spiritual odyssey who keeps trying out crazy religions. Last week she was trying to teach nude yoga to the Amish, this week she’s a “Radical Islamist”, complete with veil. It’s August, there’s not much news about, let’s see what happens.
You can see the possibly offending strip at the excellent Salon magazine.
I used to *love* Bloom County - it had the same irreverent approach to politics. I should probably go and check out Opus, now - it will be interesting to see what happens. Odd how the media have made the decision that it’s okay to poke fun at the Amish though - I wonder if that would still have been okay if they had a suicide bombing arm?