Fifteen years must have gone by since I wrote that in a few decades Europe would become a continent of mixed races, but that the process would cost blood and tears. I wasn’t a prophet, just someone with common sense who often looks at history, convinced that by learning about what took place in the past we can often understand what might happen in the future. Terrorist attacks aside, I need only see what’s on people’s minds these days. A schoolteacher in France writes critically of Islam and runs the risk of being killed. In Berlin a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo is canceled because it shows the decapitated heads not only of Jesus and Buddha but also of Muhammad. I won’t dwell on the words of Pope Benedict, who at his age ought to have known that there’s quite a difference between a university lecture given by a professor and a pontiff’s speech broadcast by every television station, and that perhaps he should have been a little more cautious. Yet those who have used a historical reference as a pretext for attempting to stir up a new religious war are certainly not the kind I’d like to have dinner with.
Bernard-Henri Lévy has written a fine article about the case of the French schoolteacher: we may totally disagree with what he thinks, but we have to defend his right to express a free opinion on questions of religion. Sergio Romano has written about the case of Idomeneo in Corriere della Sera, which I’ll try to sum up in my own words: if a director desperate for novelty stages an opera by Mozart and introduces the decapitated heads of religious founders, when such an idea had never crossed Mozart’s mind, the least we can do is give him a good thrashing, but for aesthetic and philological reasons, in the same way directors who stage Oedipus Rex with characters in double-breasted pinstripe suits should be flogged. Yet on the same day, in La Repubblica, a musician as illustrious as Daniel Barenboim, though wisely asking whether it really was in the spirit of Mozart to attempt such a production, claims that it’s the prerogative of art.
I think my friend Daniel would regret the tendency years ago to condemn, or ban, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. It’s a play inspired by an anti-Semitism common at the time and even earlier, from Chaucer onward, but shows Shylock in a human and poignant light. Yet this is what we are faced with: the fear of speaking out. We must remember that these taboos cannot all be traced back to Muslim fundamentalists, who can be rather touchy, but started with political correctness, inspired by a spirit of respect toward others, and which now makes it impossible, at least in America, to tell jokes not only about Jews, Muslims, and disabled people, but also about Scottish, Genoese, Belgians, policemen, firemen, garbage collectors, and Eskimos, who shouldn’t be called that, but if you call them as they’d like to be called, then no one would understand whom you’re talking about.
Twenty years ago I was teaching in New York, and to demonstrate how to analyze a text, I chose, almost at random, a story in which, on a single line, a foulmouthed sailor described the vulva of a prostitute as “large as the mercy of . . .”—and here I put dots in place of the name of a divinity. At the end of the class I was approached by a student, evidently Muslim, who respectfully reproached me for lack of respect for his religion. I of course replied that I was only quoting someone else’s vulgarity, but that in any case I apologized. The following day, I introduced into my discussion a not very respectful, though playful, reference to an illustrious figure in the Christian pantheon. Everyone laughed, and the Muslim student joined in the general hilarity. At the end of the lesson I took him under the arm and asked why he had showed a lack of respect for my religion. Then I sought to explain the difference between making a witty remark, taking God’s name in vain, and swearing, and I invited him to be more tolerant. He apologized, and I feel sure he understood. What he may not have properly understood is the extreme tolerance of the Catholic world. In a “culture” of swearing, in which a God-fearing believer can describe the Supreme Being using adjectives that do not bear repeating, then who could be scandalized any longer by anything?
Not all educational relationships, however, can be as peaceful and civilized as the one I had with my student. In other circumstances it is better to keep quiet. But what will happen in a culture in which, for fear of making a gaffe, not even academics will dare refer to an Arab philosopher? It would cause a damnatio memoriae, the elimination of a diverse and worthy culture through silence. And it would not be good for mutual knowledge and understanding.
2006