Kunwar Khuldune Shahid, writing in Pakistan’s Friday Times, calls it deceitful to claim that the massacre at Charlie Hebdo and other murderous outbursts “have nothing to do with Islam or Muslims.”
The barefaced deceit gets the backing of the liberal left of the West, that gets extra brownie points for speaking up about the self-inflicted ‘marginalisation of Muslims’, most of whom continue to avoid befriending ‘Jews and Christians’ because their scripture ostensibly prohibits it.
And so when the Charlie Hebdo office was attacked in Paris last week, everything from France’s occupation of Algeria over half a century ago to the economic disparity between Muslims and non-Muslims in the country was touted as the raison d’etre. Fingers have been pointed everywhere except at the awkward truth that the majority of Muslims around the world, and their version of Islam, endorse killing ‘blasphemers’.
I don’t know if it’s actually the majority, but the number is clearly not small enough.
It is the same version that is practised, among many other Muslim countries, in Saudi Arabia, where Islam originated and where the entire Muslim world goes to offer pilgrimage. The same country, facing which all Muslims offer salat; where Raif Badawi, a liberal blogger, has been punished with 1,000 lashes for ‘insulting Islam’ – the same ‘crime’ that Charlie Hebdo’s satirists committed. The same crime that is officially punishable by death in 13 countries – all Muslim states.
If there were a worldwide survey about the punishment that Charlie Hebdo journalists deserved for drawing and promoting those cartoons, the answer of the majority of the Muslim world is common knowledge, should we prefer being honest about it. And when the majority of the Muslims and almost all of the Islamic clergy are ‘misinterpreting’ the text identically, obviously the intelligibility of the scriptures comes under scrutiny.
That’s why holy books are such poison. It’s because the belief that there is such a thing as a “holy book” is such poison.
By that logic all Muslims and their scriptures would be ‘asking to be’ attacked by orthodox Christians for refusing to acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the son of God, or for the ubiquitous bile being spewed against Hinduism, especially in Pakistan.
Would the apologists be consistent in their argument if Hindu or Christian extremists started butchering Muslims because they disrespected their God? What about the nonreligious folk – the nonbelievers that have eternal hellfire sanctioned for them by almost every religious scripture? Should they retaliate with violence after taking offence at the fact that the deity absolutely despises them?
All religions are offensive to every other religion.
And that’s why secularism is needed.
On a recent version of NPR’s Diane Rehm show, a panel of guests were ostensibly debating the issue of freedom of expression wrt religious offense. A caller to the show correctly pointed out that the space separating Christians who call for retribution against those who criticize Christianity and Muslims calling for retribution against criticism of Islam is very small, and that both sides have secularism as a common enemy. The panel didn’t even try to address the caller’s statement, apparently afraid to be seen as acknowledging an obvious truth. If every religion is the enemy of every other religion, they are still united in their desire for secularism to fail.
Agreed with most of what he says, except that in his distance from France, he’s failed to look at the specific lives of those specific individuals and note that they were deprived, isolated and vulnerable to the charismatic personality of a recruiter. Shahid wants us to blame a principle found in Islam generally, while overlooking the fact that one of the more notable aspects of these terrorist’s lives was their isolation and/or estrangement from moderate Muslims in the form of family, community or mosque (+ equal estrangement from mainstream French society).
What would help now is more critical attention to the phenomenon of the middle class kids turned jihadis. I think they are very much the product of the belief systems and life-styles of moderate western Muslim circles. Speaking for an area which has produced a few, they often have the self-confidence, sense of entitlement and ennui of western youth combined with more restricted life experiences in some ways, and I’m afraid quite a few are allowed or encouraged to develop a sense of superiority to the other people around them. I also think the interaction of that toxic mix with the content of their religious beliefs is a complex one.
Anne, do you know that they were (to use your words) “deprived, isolated and vulnerable to the charismatic personality of a recruiter”? Do you know that they were not themselves recruiting on behalf of Islamic jihad? Sure, some jihadis have been lonely, dysfunctional individuals, but why does killing other people seem to be a solution to their problems? If they really wanted to die, they could have managed that easily, without taking others along with them. The young man who shot a soldier at Canada’s War Memorial on Remembrance Day was no doubt attracted to Islam precisely because it offered him the semblance of a family and a sense of purpose. But why should the prospect of killing innocent people give killers a sense of purpose? What is it about Islam that translates into actions of this sort? And, remember, the 9/11 jihadis were not in any sense disadvantaged. Most of them were highly trained, professional people, but they bought into the Islamic death cult, just the same. And, besides, whether they were disadvantaged or long time committed jihadis waiting for a chance to make their own strike for Islam and become martyrs to the cause, it is still deceitful to say that it had nothing to do with Islam.
@1: Actually, minority religions are often very much in favour of secularism. It’s when they get a bit of power that they suddenly decide, that yes, our god does get to boss everyone else around (eg: the difference between Baptists in the US c. 1780 and their spiritual descendants of today).
In the Charlie Hebdo and Canadian cases you cite, Eric MacDonald, the people killed- employees of CH, Paris policemen, jews in the first instance, a Canadian soldier in the second- were precisely not innocent in the killers’ eyes. Indeed, there are reports of the Paris killers deliberately not killing those they considered innocent.
@3 –
Their circumstances and life-story was gone over in great detail in an article in one of the newspapers. I thought it might have been the Guardian, but I can’t find it and there is a possibility it was one of the French papers (I am French, and I was reading those as well at the time). Sorry I can’t find it again.
@4 To the degree that secularism protects them from abuse by more powerful religious groups, yes.
Eamon Knight, from what I’ve read Islam went through that transition during the prophet’s lifetime, which is why there are peace-and-love passages in the Koran.
@7: Yes, which is my point: it’s a secularism of convenience.
But since I’m posting, it must be noted that there are exceptions in both directions: fanatical fringe sects that try to impose their ways on everyone, oblivious to the fact that it will fail miserably; and basically decent people who realize that trying to coerce conscience with power always leads to a very ugly place.
@8: Indeed, and my cynical view of Judaism is that its attitude of peaceful coexistence, in which only Jews are obliged to follow the laws, is a product of 15 centuries of marginal existence on the sufferance of European Christendom. But we’ve seen (in this space) what happens eg. when the Ultra-Orthodox get a local majority in a Jerusalem neighbourhood.
This shouldn’t be that difficult. These attacks were connected to Islam in the same way terrorist attacks are often carried out in the name of other religions. It’s dumb to deny that obvious fact, and also dumb to suggest that there’s some essential element of Islam that links it to terrorism.
! Ignorant, racist, and stupid.
What rhetorical obscurantism. Alex Gabriel and others have discussed actual surveys of Muslims, but evidently they can be ignored. The shift away from the conditional in that sentence would be offensive even if I weren’t a social scientist.