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Islamic poets wrote their own crude irreverent satire, centuries before Charlie Hebdo

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Islamic poets wrote their own crude irreverent satire, centuries before Charlie Hebdo Empty Islamic poets wrote their own crude irreverent satire, centuries before Charlie Hebdo

Post by confuzzled dude Thu Feb 05, 2015 2:01 pm

In the weeks since the Charlie Hebdo attacks, friends keep asking me why Muslims are so easily offended. They aren’t referring to the people who commit violence in the name of Islam, but rather figures like Tariq Ramadan, an Egyptian-born academic who condemns violence, but also the publication of inciting images. What it is about Islam, they wonder, that leaves people unable to take a joke?

These questions miss an important point. Intolerance of satire is not intrinsic to Islamic civilization. In fact, Islamic history bears its own tradition of irreverent writing on religious imagery. One of the most influential and lauded (though not uncontroversial) Arabic poets of all time, Abu Nuwas, regularly employed sexually graphic and borderline blasphemous imagery in his own brand of “Islamic satire” that resonates to this day.

Writing from Baghdad during the zenith of the Abbassid period — the Islamic empire that lasted from roughly the mid-8th to mid-13th centuries — Abu Nuwas drew on profane and offensive imagery as a way to subvert the authority of the caliph and mock the excesses of the court. Despite his critique of those in power, he himself was a court poet, providing him with an elite audience.

In another of his verses, two young boys fall in love, and in lieu of praying five times, they fornicate five times a day when the Muslim call to prayer. Such a perversion of the religious pillars makes Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons tame by comparison.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/02/05/islamic-poets-wrote-their-own-crude-irreverent-satire-centuries-before-charlie-hebdo/?hpid=z11

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