Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

Today is regarded in various circles as Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. This is in response to a South Park-fueled controversy from a month or so back. More details, if you require them, can be found here.

Detractors of this notion have been saying that it will only encourage Islamophobia, and has no artistic or political merit. If the posts and images on the Facebook group that's unofficially spearheading the movement (which I am deliberately not linking to) are any indication, the former is disgustingly true. The latter, however, I respectfully disagree with.

First of all, the usual Free Speech argument applies - nobody wants to suppress what people say when it's resonable and popular. The First Amendment exists almost exclusively to protect assholes. If American citizens can make pissy and threatening statements about Trey Parker and Matt Stone and be protected, then to try to stop non-Muslims from offending the most archaic of Muslim sensibilities is absurd - it's like being opposed to Everybody Don't Behead Your Errant Wife Day.

What's more interesting to me, though, is the way things like this probe the semantics of what is fundamentally a silly and ill-thought-out rule. South Park did a great job of this - everybody talks about the bear suit, but when you actually watch the episode, you realize that at no point do they actually show Mohammed at all. He was never in the bear suit, and when he is present within the narrative, he's censored. So South Park managed to offend people and earn severe censoring not by breaking the no-depictions rule, but merely by addressing it. By poking it with a stick to see what would happen.

That's kind of what I was going for in my own version - if the object of the image is only potentially Mohammed, is it still sinful? Is it only sinful if the depiction looks like Mohammed, or can a mere stick figure cross the line? Is it worse because I put a turban on him? What if I drew a plain stick figure on a piece of paper, decided to myself, "that's Mohammed", then left it on a bus? Would a Muslim who came upon the paper later on know to be offended?

I'm not interested in offending Muslims - if some of them want to believe that this strip is sinful, I don't mind. I'm just curious about the fine print.

Back to comics next week, I promise.