France urges end to boycott of French goods as Macron defends Muhammad cartoons
France has appealed for foreign governments to stamp out calls by what it calls a “radical minority” for a boycott of French products after Emmanuel Macron’s public backing of the Muhammad caricatures. The appeal came as anger escalated across the Islamic world over the president’s remarks at a national tribute to the murdered high-school teacher Samuel Paty last week.
For good reason the response of many Muslims to President Macron’s defense of secular values has me thinking about Carnival; not the modern New Orleans style Carnival, but medieval Carnival as described in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais.
Carnival falls just prior to the Christian season of Lent, a penitential season of fasting that leads inexorably to Good Friday, when Jesus was crucified, and Easter, when He was raised. Some Muslims have sought to draw a parallel between Carnival and Eid, in some cases even renaming Eid the “Eid Carnival” (http://www.muslimcoalitionct.org/eid-carnival.html). Eid al-Fitr is a celebration on which Muslims break the fast of Ramadan. But it is not Carnival.
In Carnival, Christians openly poke fun at Jesus, at priests, and at the whole Church hierarchy, emphasizing what is unpresentable and degrading those things that the rest of the year are honored. The biblical and theological basis for Carnival is everywhere present in sacred text, where those with wealth and honor are brought low and where the poor and lowly are raised up. So, for example, asses are outfitted in clerical wear while the local priest dons the mask of an ass. Statues of Jesus and Joseph appear in women’s clothes while Mary is adorned with a man’s tunic. All in good fun.
Of course the brutal murder of a history teacher is no laughing matter. Still it is worth wondering why there is no Islamic Carnival, no festival where overturning, undermining, and exaggerating provide comic relief; where bawdy jokes and pratfalls take center stage.
Let me propose that there is a parallel here between Islam and Protestantism (or even Calvinism). Outside of my own Anglican branch, there is no Carnival in Protestant Christianity either, one must presume because “its not funny!”
I know too little about Islam to know whether Muslims or the Holy Prophet or the Qur’an display belly-aching laughter over their faith. And if they no longer do, my suspicion is that they once did but that they do so no longer. This kind of Bakhtinian laughter seems to me a more appropriate response to lampooning than either the anger expressed by some Muslims or Macron’s appeal to secularism. Lighten up. Laugh. Because the alternative may come to nothing short of murder, which I am guessing the Holy Prophet does not endorse.