Sir – Mr Surman (Letters, March 19) challenges my use of the word ‘pornographic’ to describe the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.

Well, when I go to the ‘Google Images’ search engine on the internet and type in ‘Charlie Hebdo Cartoons’, the first one to appear depicts Mohammed (‘Mahomet’) bending over with his rear end pointing towards us, his genitals exposed, a star covering his anus, with the caption ‘Mahomet: a star is born’. Many other cartoons of Mohamed are similar. Mr Surman is clearly an intelligent and thoughtful person, and finds Holocaust denial disgusting. My only point is that in France Holocaust denial is illegal (the Gayssot Act), and yet the gratuitous humiliation of Muslims is not. This is a double standard, ethnocentric and hypocritical. In John Milton’s words: “License they mean when they cry liberty.”

I don’t pretend to be an expert, but like many I have lived and worked in different parts of the world, and had relationships with people from a range of different cultures.

This taught me how much I take for granted my own cultural viewpoint. We all have our own ways of looking at the world, and we should never automatically dismiss how another conceptualises and symbolises reality. And if you want weird, you don’t need to delve into the multifarious deities and rituals of the world’s religions. Quantum physics is getting exceedingly strange, some would say even spiritual…

Daniel Emlyn-Jones
Oxford