LAUSR

ABSTRACT In the improvised Paris memorials to the murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in 2015, Jewishness was largely occluded, Christianity was naturalized (and denigrated in so far as it overlapped with ‘religion’) and Islam functioned as the icon of acute religious sensitivity and zealotry: the religion that cannot tolerate blasphemy, specifically the Muhammad cartoons, for which the martyrs of free speech were killed. In this study Sherwood looks at the Paris memorials (blasphemy ACH = after Charlie Hebdo) alongside two far less well-known cases of blasphemous cartoons from the period that I term BSV (=before The Satanic Verses). The latter include Bible cartoons from the 1880s, for which the freethinker George Foote was prosecuted for blasphemy, and the (as far as I know) first accidentally blasphemous Muhammad cartoon in Europe from 1925. In both cases, the spectral figures of ‘the Jew’ and ‘the Muslim’ are differently tangential, and are used to divert controversy away from the Christian. The deeper history of blasphemy controversies BSV helps us to articulate a darker history of the ‘secular’, secular freedoms and religion/race. Islam and Judaism continue to suffer from the old symbolic disabilities, and the disabilities of minority, whereas a certain deference to Christianity, and an ongoing use of Christian structures, is assumed.