The Image of History: From Denmark to Paris (SemioticAnalysis of Islamic Caricatures)

Islamic fundamentalism is the product of political modernity in the Middle East. This formation is due to the orientalist representation of the Islamic world. In the center of the West’s Representation policies, the political Islam and its embodied violence have been saw as the essential of Islam and considered as the collective spirit of Muslims. The outcome of this process is de-historicizing of Islamic world and myth-making out of it. One of the means of myth-making in the Islamic world is media reflection. The West has a widespread hegemony over publishing media images, one of the main media focuses of Islam and Muslims and consequently proliferating Islamophobia policies is publishing caricatures related to the Islam Prophet in recent years. Barthe’s mythology provides us with a critical outlook by means of which we can decode myth in the present time and decipher the basci ideology of it. This study, by taking into account the presupposition that images have social-historical implications, tries to semioticize the caricatures of the Prophet in the light of a mythological system. Finally, the latent myths in these caricatures have been revealed and their social-historical implications have been decoded. Islamic terrorism, the clash of civilizations and the end of history are myths propagated by these caricatures and naturalize the political Islam. The aim behind these myths is to defamiliarize the process of capital flow under the cover of war against terrorism and defense of expression freedom. These hegemonic images are process of systematic de-politicizing from global ravage and plunder which is guided by populist and conservative currents.