The 2015 caricature depiction of a revered Muslim ethnic character became a cornerstone for conflicts in France. Secular artistic work of prophet Muhammad on the cover of Charlie Hebdo satire magazine highlighted the French values of free speech and laïcité. Overall leaving to painstakingly contemplate the essence of caricature and social cartoons within society.

The publication of the prophet Muhammad on the font cover of the French satire magazine received infamous resonance since a mass shooting undertaken by Islamic ideology entrenched Muslims of Algerian decent. The Charlie Hebdo shooting came along with three additional acts of violence – all together known as the 2015 Ile-de-France region attacks – namely Fontenay-aux-Roses and Montrouge shootings, Dammartin-en-Goele hostage crisis, and Hypercacher Kosher Supermarket siege. In response “Je suis Charlie” spilled to the streets and social media accounts across the world to signify freedom of speech and freedom of the press, but ultimately as a message of resistance and resilience to terror on European soil.

Prophet Muhammad is a revered Muslim ethnic character known not only as a religious figure, but founder and leader of the Muslim people. Notable mentions can be made of the non-uniform nature of the Muslim people. For examples, the Persians from Iran end up simultaneously Muslim and sharing distinct heritage not veiled into a neat narrative of the Islamic lineage and ethnographic statements. To the perplexing surprise the Persian Iranians quite soundly and clearly pronounce their Muslim belonging, association, and affiliation since once placed side by side with the United Emirates Arabs or the Turks become a culturally odd figure in the Muslim socialscape. Beyond the accustomed discussion of the sectarian variations of Suni, Shi’a, Salafi, Sufi, and other Muslim denominations, the ethnic diversity of the Muslim socialscape is as striking as the Christian diversity since Christianity sometimes comes across as primarily Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, or Evangelical. Beyond the religious denominators lays an ethnic foundation that comes with own historic culture, narratives and their embodiment, socioeconomic divides, political complications imposed by state and non-state actors.

While al-Qaeda is an Islamic ideology rooted militant organisation, the Islamic Caliphate that is the most known in relation to ISIS can be best described as an attempt at the historically anachronistic model of nation building with notable complications. Historically the first out of four Caliphates or Kingdoms was the Rashidun Caliphate that became established in 632 CE, after the death of the prophet Muhammad – the revered leader of the ulama of the learned and the community of the faithful who altogether became known as Muslims. History is usually narrated in relation to the religious groups, in this context the Sunni and Shi’a Islamists. To understand the social complexities and political differences, while Sunni Islam would preserve the memory and knowledge of the first caliphs, Shi’a would not and avoid the legitimisation of the first three caliphs who alternatively can be referred to as rulers. Throughout history conquests are not only not an uncommon occurrence, but a normality of civilizational experience until the recent changes in the nation building and leadership visions with peacemaking seen as a more viable model. The Prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia in 571 CE and considered in Muslim tradition as the Seal of all prophets who came to the peoples in form of Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and others making them 25 prophets in total. The customary and ethnic presentation of Muhammad is with the face veiled and not visible to the audiences or hidden in a flame, and artistically the focus falls upon calligraphic depictions and the Word brought by the prophet Muhammad to the people. Upon receiving a revelation from angel Jibrīl – known in English as Gabriel – Muhammad would transmit the found guidance and knowledge to the people much resembling the Christian history of transmission of a message to create resistance against the oppression in the land. While the initial transmission was oral, later preservation of the efforts became embedded in the written form. Facilitated by the social structural formation began to arise and shape the Islamic Caliphate.

The separation of the State and the Church or of an actual religion from the general rulership is another contemporary worldview and approach to the world. Religion was not always conceptualised, so as the lack of thereof. Religion is a complex and multifaceted ethnic component that can as much pertain to a simple livelihood, to historic consciousness of an ethnic identity of a group of people, to facilitation of social relations and relationships, and more. Ethnic components inform identity, culture, sustainability, and livelihood of the people. Ethnic diversity contributes to understanding the multidimensional experience of the human conditions. Destruction of ethnic identities and components that inform them leads to dismantling of robust mechanisms accumulated over generations for the substance and wellbeing of an ethnic group. Likewise, ethnic identities are multigenerational accumulations of reflections upon the world. Destruction leads to losses comparable to the irreversible changes to an ecosystem. In fact, far-right use of ecological systems maybe of the counternarratives to the ideas of biodiversity, but also tropes of social and ethnic thinking that create an ideology to encourage ethnic discrimination and ethnocide.

The history and story of the Prophet Muhammad became the foundation for many literary works, one of them notably being Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet written by Karen Armstrong, British expert on comparative religion. As much as Muhammad is an eloquent ethnic and historical narrative, he is a figure embedded in religious component of the ethnic Muslim consciousness. Religion is distinctly separate from the broader consideration of culture, but simultaneously read as an integral part of culture. Overall culture is a term applied to the characteristics of an organisational structure. Culture can be anthropological or sociological, or even philological map of a private or public sector, educational institution, corporation, sport, etc. Anything that does not contain relation to the belonging of a social group to a nation or bound by criteria pertaining to ethnicity. For example, study of the Hypercacher Kosher Supermarket for its management-employee relations is a potential anthropological research of a corporate culture. As soon as the store becomes endowed with such characteristics as French or Jewish the study would become an ethnographic inquiry.

The 2020 trial became marked by the Charlie Hebdo republishing of the prophet Muhammad content in French spirit of defiance and resistance to terror. Republication became greeted with a knife attack near a former Charlie Hebdo office by a supposedly Pakistani Muslim attacker. Consequently, another incident followed as a development springing from schoolteacher’s initiative to discuss the freedom of speech with the students showcasing the Charlie Hebdo content. The schoolteacher became stalked and decapitated by a Russian-Chechen Muslim. Among tensions an Eiffel Tower attack on two Algerian Muslim women wearing Islamic head covering that is protected by the human rights to equality, freedom from discrimination, and freedom of belief and exercise of religion. Another knife attack took place shortly after, this time at a church in Nice and was carried out by a supposedly Tunisian Muslim attacker. Unlike the 2015 Ile-de-France attacks the 2020 violence carried a less organised, more scattered, and spontaneous nature.

The Charlie Hebdo is a cultural paradigm defended not only for the national secularity, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, but for the ethnic cultural identity embodied by this French publication. Caricature is secular, non-religious form of art. The word “caricature” is of Italian origin and arises with the exaggeration portrait sketches of the 1950’s Italian Annibale Carracci. The stylistics however can be safely said to have been around as early as of 15th – 16th century. Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo preoccupied himself with creation of portraits of Emperors and Kings in this not at all classical approach. Unlike a cartoon caricature depicts not necessarily fictional characters, and rather preoccupies itself with the depiction of real characters. As most artworks, such works as comics, cartoons, and caricatures are forms of storytelling. Caricatures are contrary to the academic, natural representations aimed at the perfection of likeness to the drawn that is characteristic to the Western European art history that contradicts everything initially envisioned by the Oriental art traditions of the Eastern or Asian people. Caricature in its own way itself contradicts the traditional art of the Western society, the stylistic dissembled it, brought a sense of certain abstraction before abstract art came as a broader art scene. While notable for such, it can hardly be stated that satire, morality or contemplation of immorality, and depictions of social complexities are reserved exclusively to the genre of caricature. Those traits can very well be found in works of more classical Western European and Western Europe aligned characters. Similar is discussed in the works of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio or Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Potentially questionable are also the works of Viktor Vasnetsov that are more ethnically highlighting rather than communicating a story of moral teaching or aimed to discuss the social complexities, showcasing the relative understanding of abstraction and non-abstraction when it comes to depiction and operation within a characteristic ethnic framework. Speaking of art in its perhaps anthropological and ethnographic terms, caricature as a form of art seems quite interesting transformation deviating from the classic Western European artistic, academic work. Not only caricature embeds itself in the history of artistic expression of the West Europe as a whole, but it also makes its debut in France as highlighted by the 19th century Honore Daumier’s political cartoons. Honore Daumier began with explicitly political caricatures as an anti-monarchy supporter. He received 6 months in prison for his critique of King Louis Phillipe. In 1835 France banned seditious art and political caricatures turned into social cartoons. Honore Daumier then accurately became not solely a caricaturist, but a political cartoonist exploring the mental state of his character in relation to some physical defect. Art became weaponised to serve political and social means of its beholders. Caricatures and social cartoons are notably no longer exclusively non-fictional or fictional, but a vague interlacement. The description of exaggeration and bringing attention to physical features of the character who arrived at the artist’s pen can be observed as an oversimplification. For example, Charlie Hebdo’s works clearly tempt the audience with their complex storylines, shocking in some instances and questionable as majority outlet’s critique of the minority group within the French society that the publication serves. Should the mental state of the Muslims be caricatured and socially cartooned into the character of Muhammad whom Muslims fail to secularise resulting in a societal physical defect raises questions of the permissibility of such ethnic critique. The critique does not seem of a social servant to the better of any people, but rather a ridicule of the ethnic Muslims highlighting their sacred symbolisms, ethnicity, and culture as out of place within cultural schema of France.

Furthermore, troubling are the earlier works of caricaturist and cartoonist journalism of the war in 1992-1995 Bosnia. Depictions of rape, a storefront titled Jouets or Toys showcases limbs of the dead under a slogan “Deja Noël en Bosnia” meaning “Christmas is already in Bosnia” with a caricatured grotesque child by one hand holding the no less grotesque parent and pointing at a penis with another proclaiming “J’en ai commande une comme ca au pere Noël” meaning “I wanted this from Santa Claus”. Another depiction is an artwork of a mass grave with sculls, beach towel and “Sous les paves, la plage” caricaturing mass grave into an idea of a Bosnian beach. As much as potentially shocking illustrations that could turn a head or two toward the grotesque or rather horrific developments in the Southeastern Europe, the illustrations reverberate in the Bosnian Muslim consciousness as utterly disgusting and insensitive publications. Discovery of such satire abroad at the time when the members of Bosnian Muslim population were amid struggle for their physical and ethnic survival raises legitimate questions and grievances. It is another blow to the victims of violent atrocity, genocidal and ethnocidal erasure, and to the people who were set for years of recovery to come should they – as they have – survive in some amount. Today the caricatures and cartoons mentioned are noted as unclear and perplexing. Moreover leaving survivors of the Bosnian crimes against humanity and other representatives of Islam, as in the cases of the Quebec City mosque shooting or New Zealand mosque shooting, with an acute concern for their subsistence, wellbeing, and treatment that would be found acceptable toward them across a range of instances from the everyday to more particular contextual cases of participation within their respective societies of residence over different times. Charlie Hebdo’s artistic works may have not remained as intensely in the minds of their audience, but they have remained now as the part of the experience of the victims of the perpetrated crimes against humanity and against particularly ethnically Turkish Muslim population. They have gone into the history of the socialscape surrounding the attempts at recovery, rebuilding, and brighter future than it is seen at this time for the Muslim Bosniaks.

Not long after Europe seen the Islamic extremist developments in France, Austria was in a pursuit of a shooter. While apparently having no reason to be seen as directly related, the individual driven by the Islamic ideology, a North Macedonian Muslim unable to succeed in his travels to Syria to unite with ISIS in battle recommitted himself in the acts of violence on the European soil. Following the attack United Kingdom raised its terrorism threat level to sever. Shortly after a news of underage suspects taken into custody – chronologically prior to the Austria terror attack – in connection with planning of another Islam ideology rooted terror attack appeared in the media as another reminder of the complex terrorism situation in Europe.

The social relations between ethnic groups have historically been complicated by the history of power dynamics that became largely known from the Christian and Muslim conquests and the Spanish Inquisition. The European identity became synonymous with the force and battle of the Christian other for the Muslims. Europe’s role during the discontinuation and transition from Ottoman Empire left complex sentiments and narratives. Overall, while with notable historical differentiation, mixed with later foreign state actors’ participations in the Middle East and the creation of complicated attitudes toward Europe and the North America. French colonial conquests added to its perception in Europe. Those grievances along with discrimination, personal struggles, susceptibility, and approaches by propaganda and recruitment made a fertile soil for the extremist and terror agenda to permeate the minds of the individuals of either Muslim ethnic decent or interested in Islam as a religion. Al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Islamic Brotherhood, and other extremist entities permeate societies shaping fractures and feeding of the fractures of the peoples. Promoting ideas and ideals supporting to their political notions and agenda, attracting and recruiting people to do the same for not necessarily – while not exclusively otherwise – material gains, but the need for belonging, search for something better, and the need for social justice. Adherents varying in their level of familiarity with the religion, history, language, belief in the cause as an ideological ideal, socioeconomic status, education, and erudition. Needless to say the finances circulating and the material substance of such entities as al-Qaeda, ISIS, or Muslim Brotherhood are financial resources accumulated through a variety of sources and in the end not always aimed at the ideological ideals, but rather the tangible management and continuity of an established terrorist entity of the less Paradise inclined and prompted few.

There is a need for non-violent negotiation, mutual extent of understanding, and facilitation to resolve the issues experienced by the Muslims and the European society. Unfortunately, the discourse legitimately highlights the response associated with some of the Muslims that by turning to violence fracture the grounds for trust between Muslims and the counterparts of the French society who belong to other ethnic backgrounds.

The 2015 caricature depiction of the prophet Muhammad reminds of the need to explore the French values of a society and their place in the world of caricature and social cartoons. Continuity and innovation are the questions faced by every society and nation on an ongoing basis. National integrity and social culture are provoked by a range of national and international social relations requesting to negotiate and renegotiate themselves respectful of the mutual values, commitments to national and international sustenance, wellbeing, and development.