In 1972, my friend the renowned French cartoonist Marcel Gotlib (I'm not name-dropping) drew a strip entitled "God's Club" in L'ECHO DES SAVANES.

In it, he ridiculed Jehovah, Jesus, Buddha, Allah, Krishna and Wotan by showing them getting drunk, squabbling, telling smutty jokes, masturbating and reading porn.

L'ECHO was a best-selling magazines and I'm sure the story offended oodles of folks, within France. I know for a fact the mag got a cartload of letters.

Yet the world didn't come to an end, surprisingly. The story is still in print in RHAA LOVELY volume 2.

Despite our own brands of fanatics, Europe, for the mosdt part, has moved on.

The Arabs were once a great people who were ahead of the West in virtually every scientific area: chemistry, maths, etc. Sadly they allowed religion to turn them into a static society. I think the same thing would have happened vis à vis the Catholic Church in Western Europe had not there been the Reformation.

(Read Keith Roberts' PAVANE for a fascinating view of a dystopia where the Reformation was crushed and the Church continued to hold sway until the 20th century.)

The real conflict here, even within Islam, is between progress (for better or worse) and status quo.

Art, as always, is the flashpoint for the confrontation.