Cartoons in the Arab World

So how does the typical man (and woman) in the Arab street absorb the ideas of the Nahda? Many do it via cartoons (many, of course, read much more than that)!

As in Western history, cartoons have played a role in political life in the Arab world, too, and I’m not just talking about Danish cartoons. Arab cartoonists also contribute to the political discourses of their countries and the Arab world generally. As a result, various Arab governments have censored Arab cartoons and harassed Arab cartoonists as they currently censor other political speech and harass other political actors. Much of the content of the cartoons is critical of cosy relationships between Arab governments and the US (especially in the Bush era) and suggests US hypocrisy in its foreign relations (along with Israeli interest in hegemony in Greater Palestine).

Abu Mahjoob is the pen name of a well known Palestinian cartoonist, Emad Hajjaj whose work (some in English) can be seen at: www.mahjoob.com and in the London based Al-Quds al-‘Arabi newspaper. Here’s a recent example of his work suggesting some dissatisfaction with the current US leadership’s ‘action’ on new Israeli settlements:

He also suggests that Arabs have effectively been the meat in the sandwich in the long-running hostility between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the US culminating but not ending in the invasion and effective looting of Iraq. Here’s a comment on the Danish cartoons controversy (in English):

Sorry, I don't have any pictures of Jesus with a bomb in his robe so you'll just have to imagine them.

That concludes my series on the Nahda. For the next several posts I will be discussing how all of the Muslim and other debates I have been referring to in all the earlier posts affect the West. I begin with the question are Muslims (or are Arabs) just simply evilly 'out to get the West'? In attempting to pull together the results of the debates that attempt to answer the question, I include both Western and Arab and Muslim debates. I begin with the Arab and Muslim debates to explore what they may reveal. The Western debates are essentially historical so I end this next series with discussion of the Ottoman legacy, oil and individual modern histories of Arab and Islamic Middle Eastern polities in order to arrive at a suggested final answer.