Myriam Francois-Cerrah: The magazine drifts into racist caricatures

I've never really been a fan of Charlie Hebdo – its humour was often too bawdy for my taste and I agree with one of their former employees, Olivier Cyran, that in recent years it has often drifted into racist caricatures, reinforcing an already toxic environment for French Muslims.

For an allegedly anti-establishment magazine, it failed to challenge, and often buttressed, the state's well-documented increasing restrictions on the basic freedoms of Muslims. It also used the sorts of racial stereotypes in its imagery which foster precisely the sorts of racist attitudes they purported to be challenging. At some point, one's claim to be anti-racist has to be diminished if the subjects of racism – minorities themselves – tell you you're being racist. Ignoring their voice is arguably a dubious form of anti-racism.

My kind of satire is the type that punches up, the type that holds the powerful to account and mocks authority – there is a huge difference between mocking the clerical class that used to rule France through privileged access to power and mocking the faith of the descendants of immigrants largely locked out of power and experiencing acute levels of prejudice.

Today's front cover bothers me only in one regard and that is in the racial stereotypes employed in the depiction of the prophet Muhammad, a shorthand here for Arabs and Muslims more broadly. We (thankfully!) wouldn't accept an image of a hooked-nose Jew, so it is unclear to me why images of hooked-nose Arabs – because forget who the prophet Muhammad is to Muslims, he is an Arab man being depicted in racially stereotypical terms – isn't more disturbing to others. One of my favourite caricatures by Charlie Hebdo was one featuring the prophet Muhammad being beheaded by an extremist. That image perfectly captures the hijacking of the faith by radicals and the truth that Muslims are the primary victims of terrorism and the main target of retaliatory violence.

• Myriam Francois-Cerrah is a British writer and journalist

Timothy Garton Ash: We must not allow the assassin's veto

Timothy Garton Ash

Last Wednesday, Charlie Hebdo's leading journalists were brutally murdered simply for having published satirical images of the prophet Muhammad on the magazine's cover, as well as equally offensive images of Jews, the pope and president Francois Hollande.

I think the surviving Charlie Hebdo journalists really had no alternative but to show some image of Muhammad on this week's cover, to show that such violent intimidation would not prevail. It is surely what their murdered colleagues would have wanted. And incidentally, by the standards of Charlie Hebdo cartoons, this one is gentle, almost demure.

No Muslim should feel that this is directed against Muslims or Islam. It is in defence of the freedom of expression from which Muslims also benefit hugely in free countries, unlike Christians and atheists in many Islamic states. Above all, it is in the vital cause of defeating what I call the assassin's veto.

No one must ever be allowed to get away with saying "if you say that, or draw that, we will kill you". Responding to free expression with murder is unacceptable in all circumstances, whatever the cause on behalf of which you are taking offence. This is a cardinal principle of free speech. It would apply as strongly if the assassins had been offended by images of Jesus, Moses, Trotsky, the pope or Charlie Brown.

The Guardian is also right to reproduce the cover in a news article, for there is a clear public interest in knowing what all the fuss is about, and it's right to add a warning at the top saying that the article contains an image "which some may find offensive". This cannot be said too often: nobody needs to go and look if they don't want to. Nobody had to read Charlie Hebdo. The assassins made a wilful choice to take violent offence, and the result of their actions is that far more people will see these images than ever would have otherwise. They alone are to blame for that, and nobody else.

• Timothy Garton Ash leads the Oxford University project freespeechdebate.com and is writing a book about free speech

Nabila Ramdani: This shows how muddled the debate has become

France's most godless magazine was displaying remarkably Christian values today. The first edition of Charlie Hebdo since nine members of staff were murdered by terrorist gunmen last week appears to turn the other cheek. Its cover – released ahead of the full magazine tomorrow – carries a depiction of the crying prophet Muhammad under the strapline "All is forgiven".

Interpretations of what this actually means will vary, but it is certainly more maudlin – schmaltzy even – than it is funny. We've seen the caricature a thousand times before: it is dated and tired, and the character's little sign reading "Je suis Charlie" is woefully dull and predictable.

The sense of cliche evokes President John F Kennedy's melodramatic "Ich bin ein Berliner" one-liner, which is now more than half a century old. Millions of people took to the streets of Paris on Sunday to rally under the Charlie slogan but that was all about conformist defiance in the face of terrorist horror. On the cover of what is meant to be an anti-establishment magazine, this just symbolises – at best – egalitarian bigotry.

Surely a satirical magazine is meant to defy the herd; to cause outrage through biting wit and originality? Not to vaguely insult one of the most revered figures in Islam, while actually suggesting that he might not be such a bad chap after all – some kind of hyper-sensitive liberal who can take monstrous violence on the chin and move on with his eternal life.

There is no such thing as being a "little bit blasphemous", of course, and Muslims are already reacting with predictable sadness and indeed anger to the cover. Feelings will run even higher when three million copies of the magazine are distributed across the world. Charlie lives, and will be lauded by many as a symbol of free speech and democracy, but to me this cover is just a hugely provocative reminder of how muddled the debate around these atrocities has become.

• Nabila Ramdani is a Paris-born freelance journalist and academic of Algerian descent

Padraig Reidy: It manages to be both respectful and irreverent

The very fact that Charlie Hebdo is publishing an issue this week is cause for deep admiration. The fact that the magazine has produced a cover that manages somehow to be respectful and irreverent at the same time is a wonder.

The cover illustration is sober and sad, but defiant. It is a challenge to those who in the past week, after throat-clearing on the horrendous murder of Charlie's staff and their protectors, have attempted to switch the focus to the magazine's supposed Islamophobia.

While acknowledging the "Je suis Charlie" support, it also confirms that this struggle, and this pain, is primarily Charlie Hebdo's.

Do they have a right to publish this cartoon? Of course. Only the most craven would suggest otherwise.

Should they have published a new cartoon of the prophet Muhammad? In the circumstances, it is hard to see how they could not.

It may seem the most dreadful cliche to suggest that we must not let the terrorists win, but in this case it is true. For Charlie not to have continued as it has always done would have been to give in to censorship by psychopaths, to admit that the right to free speech withered when faced with a Kalashnikov.

No one would have blamed the staff of Charlie Hebdo for packing up and going home after what happened to their colleagues. They have not, and that is to be lauded.

Other publications and outlets can debate their own stance. While it was interesting to see the BBC show the cover and other cartoons in separate programmes on Monday evening, that is a different and broader issue.

What is important now is that Charlie Hebdo has not allowed itself to be subdued by an act far more gratuitous and obscene than even the most scurrilous satirist could possibly imagine.

• Padraig Reidy is editorial director of campaigns consultancy 89up

Joseph Harker: This smashes a moment of genuine hope

Millions of French people took to the streets at the weekend to express their unity against terror attacks, but it has taken just 48 hours to undo this spirit. Because that's exactly what the new cover of Charlie Hebdo magazine risks doing. In depicting the prophet Muhammad it is deliberately offending the vast majority of Muslims around the world. And in caricaturing him holding a "Je suis Charlie" placard, they are adding insult to injury by claiming the prophet would support the values of the magazine, which for years has been widely criticised for targeting Muslims, in particular, under the cover of free speech.

Yes, of course Charlie Hebdo has the right to do this; but why would they want to, given the symbolism of Sunday's gatherings across France? Surely now is the time to move forward, to isolate the extremist murderers and bring the nation together; not to trumpet your rights by trampling over others' sensitivities, losing friends in the process.

At its core is the common misunderstanding in the west – that because all Muslim extremists hate depictions of the prophet, therefore all people who hate such depictions are Muslim extremists. The vast majority of Muslims object to these depictions but despise the terror attacks even more. So to retaliate against two terrorists by lashing out at potentially 1.6 billion people simply doesn't make sense.

This confusion is apparent on another level. Above Charlie Hebdo's drawing of the "prophet" it says "All is forgiven" (Tout est pardonné). But who is being forgiven? Is this aimed at the killers – which would be strange because they barely deserve this after their acts of terror, and they are not referenced in the drawing?

More likely, given the image of the prophet, it's aimed at Muslims in general. But why do Muslims need to be forgiven? They have done nothing wrong. In claiming to be about forgiveness the cover therefore achieves the opposite, spreading guilt by association.

In affirming its "right" to free speech, Charlie Hebdo has used a blunt instrument to smash apart a genuine moment of hope and togetherness. France will be the poorer for it.

• Joseph Harker is assistant editor, Comment, at the Guardian

Jonathan Jones: It's a life-affirming work of art



Jonathan Jones

Charlie Hebdo's new cover depicting the prophet Muhammad holding a Je suis Charlie placard with a tear coming from his eye is a life-affirming work of art. For a brief moment, it will turn Paris into the art capital of Europe, which of course would come as no surprise to Manet, Picasso or the cartoonist Daumier who went to prison in 1835 for portraying the king as a pear. Luz has drawn Muhammad in his customary abbreviated manner, simple and sketchy with thick rapid lines. It is this quick, almost dismissive style of drawing that communicates his universal disrespect. He'd draw you or me like this and he draws Muhammad like this too. Yet in the aftermath of the mass murder of his colleagues this lack of reverence declared in every line of the drawing becomes a truly sublime declaration of freedom.

This cover is not just a work of art because it's drawn well. It's a work of art in the way it is challenging world media to republish it and thus join Charlie Hebdo's gentle, sniggering army of freedom. I do mean sniggering. It is laughter that came under attack last week. Funny people were killed for being funny. This new cover is the only possible response – a response that makes you laugh. Denying the comic power of this cover would be another way to censor it, smothering the joke with anxieties. The comic humanist Rabelais, in the 16th century, put intelligent laughter at the heart of French culture. If you can laugh you can think. If you can see something as funny you can stand back from it and consider it in a more rounded, healthy, human way.

The slain staff and contributors to Charlie Hebdo were killed because of the exact images and words used by Charlie Hebdo, but well-meaning support for the magazine has until now foundered on the fear of republishing those supposedly offensive creations. If they were not republished, what did all the handwringing mean?

Now the magazine has taken matters into its own hands and saved its archive from some kind of pious oblivion. This cover cannot be ignored. Above all, take a close look at this drawing – whatever your faith or lack of faith. What, in the eyes of humanity as opposed to ideology or dogma, can really be offensive about it? There is nothing to see here except good humour and reason and the love of life.

• Jonathan Jones writes on art for the Guardian