Apparently Danish-Iranian artist Firoozeh Bazrafkan didn’t
learn her lesson back in September when a Danish high court found her
guilty of racism for making anti-Islam comments. Now she has put together a bold
art gallery exhibition
that is guaranteed to further offend the hair-trigger sensibilities of European
Muslim fundamentalists and their multiculturalist abettors.
Unambiguously entitled “Blasphemy,” the exhibition in the
small town of Skanderborg in central Denmark consists of the shredded remains of a Koran piled onto an Islamic prayer
rug. “I want to continue to remind people that it’s okay to disagree,” says
Bazrafkan, who is particularly critical of Iran’s Islamic regime as well as
religion in general. “But it takes place under democratic rules” – an
undeniably reasonable position, but she’s not up against reasonable forces.
Bazrafkan has a history of such provocative – sometimes
sexually so – art installations and performance art pieces against either the
Iranian regime or Islam. At an art installation called
“Infidel” in 2007, she highlighted with a yellow marker the word “infidel” in a
Koran every time it appeared (347 by her count). She also posted a video online of herself
at the Arhus Museum on International Women’s Day in 2013, snipping and ripping
her way out of a burqa and headscarf until she stands unencumbered in Western
jeans and blouse, hair uncovered. In a new video performance,
she strips naked and covers a Koran with her clothes, while another artist
recites passages from it.
In 2010 she posted a video of herself in red
heels and short skirt, lashing an open Koran a hundred times with a cat o’ nine
tails in a protest against the Iranian regime’s flogging and stoning laws. In a
video posted in early
2011, entitled “This is How I Celebrate the Iranian Islamic Revolution,” Bazrafkan
jumps rope in high heels and halter top for a minute-and-a-half on a poster-sized
photograph of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s glowering face.
In yet another video, she stands
holding handwritten signs in English attacking the Iranian theocracy for
silencing its critics with imprisonment, torture, and execution. “They commit
murder in the name of God and hide the evidence,” one sign says. She urges her
fellow citizens that “we must not deny ourselves to reach freedom and
democracy,” “the right to live as a free human being.” In an art installation called
“Allah O Akbar,” she presented the “decapitated head” of the former Iranian president,
claiming “If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can kill people in God’s name so can I. I have
beheaded him. The work symbolizes his death.”
“I do my best to get the point out in my artwork and
installations because I want to criticize the Iranian regime my way,” she said
in an interview
with The Copenhagen Post. “If I want
to be angry, I should have the right to be angry and call the Islamic regime
anything I want. The state shouldn’t go in and take my rights.”
I am very convinced that Muslim men
around the world rape, abuse and kill their daughters. This is, according to my
understanding as a Danish-Iranian, due to a defective and inhumane culture – if
you can even call it a culture at all. But you can say, I think, that it is a
defective and inhumane religion whose textbook, the Koran, is more immoral,
deplorable and crazy than manuals of the two other global religions combined.
Bazrafkan had copied the text from an article published by
free speech activist Lars Pedersen, and made some of her own additions (Pedersen
too was convicted of racism after publishing it in an online newspaper). She
explained that:
I wrote it as an artistic manifesto
to show that we cannot say what we want and we cannot criticize Islamic
regimes. I wanted to show Lars support because, as a Danish Iranian, I know
what a big problem Islamic regimes are in both Iran and the Middle East. These
Islamic codes give men the rights to do whatever they want to women and
children and I think it’s disgusting. They also prevent people in Iran from
discussing and saying what they want. This is what I wanted to criticize.
In the Copenhagen Post
interview, she was asked, “Can you not
see why the court found your blog to be offensive?” She replied,
The court argued that what I wrote
about Muslim men was condescending and a generalization. But that’s unfair,
because there are many Islamic codes that are being used by Islamic men to
justify their actions against women and children.
It’s important to remember that I
did not write that ALL Muslim men committed horrible acts and used Islamic
codes to justify them, I wrote that Muslim men around the world can do these
things because it is allowed according to these codes. It’s not the same thing.
For example, Muslims around the world protested at the Mohammed cartoons, and
doctors around the world misdiagnose patients, but not all Muslims protested,
and not all doctors misdiagnose.
When asked if she
was “unfairly singling Islam out for critique,” Bazrafkan pointed out that she has also been
critical of Judaism and Christianity. “But I was born in Iran as a Muslim. I
have family members in Iran who don’t have the same democratic rights and
freedom to express their anger as I do.”
When asked whether
she has been threatened in response to the blog post, she replied, “One
person said he wanted to chop me up and feed me to his dogs. I reported it to
the police but they didn’t charge him because the threats weren’t threatening
enough. I also know that there are websites where the Iranian secret police
discuss wanting to kill me because I am an apostate.” Elsewhere
she has said that she receives daily threats and harassment: “There are those
who harass me and call me words like whore, ugly bitch, tell me to burn in hell
and so on, but there are also those who send me direct death threats… They
write that if they meet me, they would gladly send me to another world and that
they are ready to go to jail for it.”
As for the need for
anti-racism legislation, she asserted that it should not be used to protect
religion. “My text criticized
Muslim men, which does not constitute a race,” Bazrafkan said in a declaration
of basic logic that seems to escape many. “We should be able to discuss [religion].
My right to criticize religion is even protected by article 10 of the European
Court for Human Rights, which protects my freedom of expression and I was
disappointed the court did not protect this right.”
It remains to be seen how
much controversial attention Firoozeh Bazrafkan’s new art installation
“Blasphemy” will draw; she’s certainly not as prominent a lightning rod for
fundamentalist hatred as, say, fellow apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But as a
fearless female challenger of Islam and critic of the totalitarian Iranian
regime, she may get there.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 5/19/14)
