When 'Everybody Draws Muhammad,' Balancing Free Speech and Religious Respect

On May 9th, a student group called Secular Humanists for Inquiry and Free Thought (SHIFT) chalked stick figure drawings of the Prophet Muhammad across Northwestern University's campus. In a statement issued later that day on their blog, they explained that their intention was to spark a dialogue about political correctness and free speech. They also aimed to undermine the power of Islamic groups who claim that depictions of Muhammad violate a tenet of Islam and mock a founding principle of their faith.

A series of 12 political cartoons, first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, caused a global outcry when publications throughout Europe and the Middle East began reprinting the depictions of the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist. Two Chicago-based extremists were detained at O'Hare Airport after threatening to kill the cartoonist and his editor. Other threats of violence made by Islamic fundamentalists to those depicting Muhammad have been met with censorship and fear.

SHIFT's drawings received public disapproval from the dean of students, the vice president of student affairs and the university chaplain, who released a statement condemning the protest as uncivil and disrespectful of others' beliefs. The drawings' impact was amplified by the coincidence that students from Northwestern's satellite program in Doha, Qatar (NU-Q) were visiting campus that day.

NU SHIFT was inspired to chalk images of the prophet by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Atheists, Agnostics and Freethinkers (AAF) and Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics (AHA) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, two university groups with which NU SHIFT has formed a coalition called the Secular Student Alliance. The drawings were considered similarly polarizing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where the Muslim Students Association altered AHA's depictions with boxing gloves, re-labeling the drawings "Muhammad Ali."

SHIFT's actions also aligned with "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" on May 20, which came about after the airing of an episode on the Comedy Central show South Park. On April 14, the show celebrated its 200th episode with a particularly incendiary focus-satirizing 200 celebrities and public figures, including Muhammad. Following the episode's airing, the website RevolutionMuslim.com threatened Stone and Parker with an image of Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker who was shot and stabbed to death by an extremist after depicting Muhammad on his show, and posted the address of Comedy Central's New York Office and Stone and Parker's California production office. When the show was set to air again on April 21, the network actively censored the episode's content, bleeping dialogue and blacking out the images of the prophet. The network had previously censored a South Park show responding to the 2005 Danish cartoon controversy.

SHIFT president Cassy Byrne said that the many instances of censorship following attempts to depict Muhammad caused the act of drawing the prophet to take on a symbolic significance in the name of free speech.

"[The purpose of drawing Muhammad] is to raise awareness about this potential threat to your free speech," Byrne said. "Also, to sort of contest the societal norm, the taboo that we shouldn't do something because we've been told we shouldn't or else."

Byrne also said that the loudest opposition to SHIFT's protest was from non-Muslims offended on behalf of Northwestern's Muslim community and the NU-Q students.

Susan Xu, a Northwestern junior who identifies as an atheist, was one such student. In a letter to the editor of an on-campus magazine, she expressed her concerns about the disrespectful nature of the drawings.

"I've had Muslim friends explain to me that an image of Muhammad is sacred and that any representation of him was sacrilegious as both God and the prophet were too sacred for human representation," Xu said. "So I try to imagine how it would feel if someone took our holiest image and made it into a figure of fun, and had us watch as people trampled on it."

But Byrne says the Muslim-cultural Students Association and the NU-Q students were tolerant of the protest and supportive of the group's goal to spark a dialogue.

"They reached out to us immediately and said 'let's have a talk about this, because a lot of the NU-Q students are really interested in talking to you about why you did this,'" Byrne said. Yet few Northwestern students attended the open forum discussion that was advertised alongside the chalk drawings.

The confusion surrounding the intentions of "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" turned many of the event's initial proponents against the protest. Molly Norris, the cartoonist whose satirical poster inspired the event, said she did not support the fight her drawing inspired. And John Wellington, creator of the Facebook group that hosted the event, also pulled his support, shocked by the outcry the page inspired and by the offensive nature of much of the user-submitted images and content.

But for participants in the SHIFT event at Northwestern, the response to the drawings, including varied interpretations of the movement and strong opposition, furthered their goal of undermining efforts to repress this form of speech.

"We wanted to raise awareness about the fact that government censorship isn't the only type of censorship and that this [censorship motivated by fear] can get out of control too," SHIFT publicity chair Angela Potter said. "This engaged students who would never have been involved in the issue otherwise, which is what we wanted to accomplish."