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When life intimidates art

Fear of reprisal by religious fanatics raises questions about freedom of expression

JUSTIN DAVIDSON

October 16, 2006

These are tough times for iconoclasts. Criticizing religion, a favorite artistic gambit of the past 250 years, has become potentially lethal. If creative types are unwilling to pay the price, argument will be muffled at the point of a gun.

Not so long ago, scorn for religion was a relatively safe form of dissidence. Artists, like children, like to test the limits of tolerance, and the public had grown accustomed to behaving like indulgent parents - expressing fitful disapproval, but mostly ignoring the behavior. The bourgeoisie long ago became easy to bore but virtually impossible to shock.

When dignitaries got outraged over antireligious art - as Sen. Jesse Helms did in the 1980s over Andres Serrano's crucifix submerged in urine, and as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani did in 1999 over Chris Ofili's Madonna festooned with cutouts from porn magazines - they brandished the only legal weapon they had: cuts in public funding.

These days, artists of defiance have found a different public all too willing to be provoked: Muslim radicals who react not with acerbic comments or cold shoulders, but with outright violence.

That shift began in 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran responded to Salman Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses" by issuing a fatwa calling for his assassination. Rushdie went into hiding. His Japanese translator was stabbed to death; his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher were seriously wounded. A mob set fire to the hotel where his Turkish translator was staying, and 37 people died in the flames.

Rushdie has since emerged from hiding to enjoy his status as a New York celebrity, but he still has a $2.8-million bounty on his head.

The fatwas kept coming. In 1998, Terrence McNally's play "Corpus Christi," in which a group of gay men adopt the roles of Jesus and his apostles, earned the playwright death threats from self-appointed Christian crusaders and a sentence of capital punishment from an Islamic group in Britain.

It is impossible to distinguish between bluster and real menace. In 2004, Theo van Gogh, an epithet-spewing Dutch film director and TV personality, was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam by a Muslim fanatic. He had directed a short film called "Submission," conceived by Somali-born activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in which Koranic verses were projected onto naked female bodies to protest the treatment of women in Islamic societies. Hirsi Ali eventually found the Netherlands too dangerous, and moved to the United States.

One could choose to see van Gogh's murder as the act of an addled loner. The killer, Mohammad Bouyeri, differed in creed but not in kind from Eric Rudolph, the fundamentalist Christian who bombed an abortion clinic, or Baruch Goldstein, the Brooklyn-born Israeli who sprayed a mosque in Hebron with machine-gun fire, murdering 29 Muslims.

Now Muslim fanatics have grown sufficiently organized and numerous to try to force the world to conform to their interpretation of religious law. Last year, a series of Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed triggered violence that resulted in 50 deaths.

When Pope Benedict XVI, quoting a medieval source, recently intimated that Islam was a violent religion, Muslims contradicted him - by erupting in violence. In an opinion piece in the French daily Le Figaro, a schoolteacher agreed forcefully with the pope, then took the ensuing death threats seriously enough to go into hiding.

This censorship by intimidation explains why Berlin's Deutsche Oper recently canceled the revival of a 2003 production of Mozart's 225-year-old opera "Idomeneo." For reasons that have nothing to do with Mozart, director Hans Neuenfels had the title character carry onstage an ecumenical selection of severed heads: of Jesus, Buddha, Poseidon and Mohammed.

The opera company's general manager, Kirsten Harms, evidently discounted the potential threat from sensitive Christians, Buddhists and pagans. She focused solely on the prospect of Muslim revenge. She came under immediate attack from cultural figures and politicians who accused her of self-censorship. She backtracked, suggesting that "Idomeneo" could go on if Berlin authorities took security measures.

This reversal should not be confused with taking a stand in favor of free speech, however. Having canceled the opera under imagined duress, Harms might reinstate it, this time knuckling under to politicians who control her budget.

Art's ability to trigger violence has led to other instances of caution followed by accusations of self-censorship. That's what happened with the play "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," adapted from the writings of a young American activist from Olympia, Wash., who was killed in 2003 by the Israeli bulldozer she was trying to prevent from destroying a home in Gaza.

The London production was scheduled to transfer last spring to the New York Theater Workshop when its artistic director, James Nicola, postponed it, saying he needed more time to "contextualize" it - meaning, to make it palatable to New York audiences likely to be offended by Corrie's pro-Palestinian stance. Theater people howled, critics scoffed and the play got a new home at the Minetta Lane Theatre, where it opened last night.

Few people will emerge from "Rachel Corrie" (or from Neuenfels' "Idomeneo") in the mood to riot. Some will see the protagonist as a callow American, others as a brilliant knight, still others as the pawn of terrorists in a game of deadly public relations.

But though the message is indeterminate, both "Rachel Corrie" and Berlin's headless-prophet controversy exposes an old ideological confusion in the West over how much intolerance to tolerate. In May 1968, Parisian students barricaded the streets and occupied the universities to the rallying cry, "Il est interdit d'interdire." (It is forbidden to forbid.) Today, the '60s generation rules the West, and it must now confront the slogan's paradox: If freedom is mandatory, how does one satisfy those people who demand less of it?

The absolutist view of tolerance has a long history in the West. Its traditional nemesis has been religious authority, which in Europe always meant the church.

"What is tolerance?" asked Voltaire, the anticlerical archtheorist of the Enlightenment, in 1741. "It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature. ... It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster."