The Paris attack

A complex issue requires a complex solution

They waved “Je Suise Charlie” – I am Charlie – placards. They came together in the streets of France, all 3.7 million of them. And they included more than 40 heads of states.

Humanity converged in the wake of inhumanity.

To call it a rally would be to grossly understate things. It was not just a massive show of solidarity with the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attack, but a resounding affirmation of the values those victims lost their lives for: freethinking and free expression.

Let’s be clear: France is not a Muslim country. It is not bound by Islamic law (an abstruse concept in itself). It stands on liberal values (at least in theory) — the marrow of which is free expression. For the religiously sensitive, averse to such liberal freedoms, there are other places to live in. But as the cliché goes “be careful what you wish for” may well apply here. Take Saudi Arabia – that great denier of human rights, where a 30-year-old Raif Badawi gets lashed, yes lashed, 50 times a week in a public square before cheering mobs, just like the Roman days of old. This will go on till he has received 1,000 lashes in total, if he at all survives. His jail term is a full ten years, on top of which he must pay a million riyals as further penalty for his great crime against humanity: Blogging. Yes, he blogged against the Saudi monarchy and its cruel ways. That was his crime.

It gets worse.

Badawi is not alone. There are many Badawis who are punished every day for lesser transgressions, and sometimes for no offence at all. And what’s more, Saudi Arabia isn’t the only place where this goes on. Let’s turn a gaze upon our own country, Pakistan, the place where freedom goes to die. The same place where people who ordinarily wouldn’t as much as throw trash in the public bin are miraculously driven to taking things in their own hands when it comes to blasphemy. Of late the state has been relieved of its duties by these outraged malcontents, hungry to mete out summary justice upon blaspheming wretches. Their task is made easier by the fact that most of online casino their victims are usually hapless Christians or other minorities, the bottom of the totem pole that’s just barely scraping by. Even kids with mental disorders have not escaped their wrath.

Granted, the intentions of those perpetrating these heinous crimes are rather suspect in some cases. There is the matter of expediency and using the law for ulterior motives as was apparently the case with the Christian couple that was recently burnt by one such murderous lynch mob, but is that the only narrative at play here? Was the Paris attack also executed in the service of some ulterior motives? It seems unlikely, considering the frequency of such events and the high support for blasphemy/apostasy laws across the Muslim world.

Make no mistake: denigrating the person of the Prophet (PBUH) and other articles of religious reverence as felt by millions of Muslims all over the world is a tasteless and polarising exercise. Freedom of speech defined as the freedom to offend may send orgasmic currents through some liberals, but is of questionable merit both in terms of its impact on societal cohesion and its ethical justification. France clearly recognises as much, as its strict hate speech/libel laws and its criminalisation of Holocaust and Armenian genocide — to repress acts of racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia — seem to suggest. Defenders of these laws claim that they were instituted in light of Europe’s history with Holocaust and Jewish anti-Semitism. But surely the same logic should then also apply to its France’s marginalised Muslim community that makes up 8-10 per cent of its total population and yet constitutes almost 60 per cent of its prison population. As with anti-Semitism, Europe’s relationship with the Muslim world in light of recent history is anything but cheery. Europe – and France in particular — has a rich, colourful history of Muslim colonisation, the effects of which are becoming more apparent as generations of ghettoised, identity-robbed Muslims growing up as first and second generation immigrants in these countries, desperately seek validation and acceptance, which makes them all the more vulnerable to the lure of an “Islamic Caliphate”. This partially explains the noticeable exodus of European Muslims into the inviting embrace of ISIS.

If anything, this episode should open the discussion on some important questions of our day. Is there a legal line to be drawn between free speech and hate speech? If anything, in light of the current Islamophobic climate where feverish anti-Islam rallies are being conducted in Germany, and where large bulks of the Muslim youth feel estranged and placeless, the “Muslim context” must be considered to better integrate Muslims in much the same way as the “Jewish context” is considered to tamp down anti-Semitism. The purpose here is not to draw a banal equivalence between Jewish Holocaust and Muslim subjugation, but to appeal to both the historical and current peculiarities of the Muslim predicament in first world Europe, that demand closer examination of France’s free speech laws pertaining specifically to religion.

And for mainstream Muslims, now is the time to understand that Islam is not a monolith. There are many Islams, as is unmistakably visible today, and while diversity in interpretation is certainly welcome, and perhaps inevitable, the choice has to be made in which Islam will it be? The Islam of Ahmed, the policeman who died protecting the right of those in Charlie Hebdo to exercise their free speech, or the Islam of those who ultimately killed him?