NO MUHAMMAD CARTOONS
Giles Udy’s review of my book Godless Utopia; Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda (Books, December) says that it contains cartoons of Muhammad, along with its Soviet-era caricatures of other religious figures. In fact, there aren’t any Muhammad cartoons in the book.
All of the images pertaining to Islam are either of mullahs, foolish believers, or, in some early instances, of a figure wearing a halo labelled “Allah”, who is depicted along with others wearing halos labelled “Jehovah” or “God the Father”. In one 1922 advertisement for the magazine Godless, similar halos are shown hanging on a wall, suggesting that they are really components of the holy disguises worn by the agents of capital.
While I can’t say categorically that there is no such thing as a Soviet Muhammad cartoon, I never encountered any in my many weeks scouring decades’ worth of anti-religious magazines in Russian libraries. It seems to me that not depicting Muhammad could well have been a Soviet policy.
If I had found any cartoons of Muhammad, I’d have had to have a heavy discussion with my collaborators at FUEL Publishing as to the pros and potentially-terrifying cons of including them. Roland Elliott Brown
London, N8
I’m sorry that, in his review of Roland Elliott Brown’s Godless Utopia, Giles Udy is so dismayed by the publishers’ decision to invite me to write the foreword. A lot of this seems to arise from the fact that I’m a cartoonist for the
Guardian and a fairly public atheist. In 2018 I also produced a comic book adaptation of The Communist Manifesto which features a visual appendix clearly denouncing Leninist Sovietism (though maybe Udy has only read the article I wrote about it in — forgive me — the
Guardian rather than the book itself).
He can, however, claw back some comfort if he reflects that I wrote the foreword not as a Guardian cartoonist but as a cartoonist on The Critic. Likewise, I learned most of my atheism (and was proposed as an honorary associate of the National Secular Society) by The Critic’s star atheist columnist Jonathan Meades. Martin Rowson
London SE13