Karima Bennoune - Charlie Hebdo: "There is no way they will make us put down our pens."
Pen against Kalashnikov: courage against atrocity. People of Muslim
heritage call for combatting Islamist ideology by political means and mass
mobilisation.
We are all Charlie!
To those who attacked Charlie Hebdo yesterday shouting “Allahu Akbar,”
I would like to say that your kind of God - a God of Hate and Murder - is not
Great. Nor is that
God the God of most Muslims, but rather of your own Islamist cult - which so
many people of Muslim heritage oppose.
You are incapable of understanding satire;
you openly revile the beliefs of others but brook no criticism of the
medieval
notions you believe. You claim to
defend Islam while bringing only shame upon it. You are offended by
cartoons but not by killing. You claim to have avenged the Prophet
Mohamed but have instead defamed him with your cowardly attack on
unarmed
journalists in his name.
As a Tunisian woman wrote to me afterwards, “It is so horrible, claiming the name of God while killing these poor
people. But, about which God are they speaking?” With an ironic outrage, worthy of Charlie Hebdo itself, she
insisted the deity would be “gratified” that they are “making him a God of intolerance
and blood.” In the name of tolerance
and peace, and in memory of the tragically murdered victims in Paris, and of so
many others - even more numerous - in places like Peshawar, let us commit after
this bleak January day to make 20 15 the year we finally put an end to this
ghastly jihad.
While first information suggests the authors of the Paris attack may
have claimed affiliation with Al Qaeda in Yemen, others suspect an “Islamic
State” link. In any case, their indisputable connection is with the pernicious
ideology of international Islamism and its myriad armed manifestations. These are, to quote Algerian sociologist
Marieme Helie-Lucas, “political movements of the extreme right that… manipulate
religion to achieve their political aims.”
We must collectively denounce that ideology and do all we can to defeat
these movements. As Helie-Lucas and Maryam Namazie wrote in an online petition in
denunciation of the Charlie Hebdo attack, a statement rapidly
signed by activists from Iran to Sudan, “What is needed is straight-forward
analysis of the political nature of armed Islamists: they are an extreme-right
political force, working under the guise of religion and they aim at political
power. They should be combated by
political means and mass mobilization….”
This latest horror is but one in a long line of Muslim fundamentalist
assaults on thought. “Those who combat
us with the pen will die by the sword,” decreed the Armed Islamic
Group in Algeria in the 1990s while slaughtering intellectuals. Just this December, an Algerian Salafist
called for the public execution, possibly by crucifixion, of prominent
writer Kamel Daoud, a free-thinker who recently made waves with his rewriting
of Camus’s “The Stranger” from an Algerian perspective, and who dared to
say in a television appearance that Arabs must reflect on the role
of religion in their societies to move forward.
While I am first and foremost outraged by the Islamist ideologues who
make such threats, and the terrorists like those who perpetrated yesterday’s
massacre, I also blame some
have justified everything from the burqa to theocracy in the name of cultural
relativism – appalling many intellectuals of Muslim heritage who are determined
instead to buck extremism. Some of
these voices were heard
again in the U.S. media yesterday emphasizing the “offensiveness” of Charlie
Hebdo’s content. liberals
and left-wingers - and even human rights advocates - in the West who have for
years apologized for Islamism and Islamist ideas, painted Islamists mainly as
victims with legitimate grievances standing up to the West, or defenders of
Muslim culture, rather than extreme right wingers with guns determined on
squashing human rights.
These Western apologists have justified everything from the burqa to theocracy in the name of cultural relativism – appalling many intellectuals of Muslim heritage who are determined instead to buck extremism. Some of these voices were heard again in the U.S. media yesterday emphasizing the “offensiveness” of Charlie Hebdo’s content
These Western apologists have justified everything from the burqa to theocracy in the name of cultural relativism – appalling many intellectuals of Muslim heritage who are determined instead to buck extremism. Some of these voices were heard again in the U.S. media yesterday emphasizing the “offensiveness” of Charlie Hebdo’s content
In Western academia,
this apologia has often been a politically correct stance, what Mahnaz Afkhami decries
as “Islamic exceptionalism.” So, one way to
commemorate this terrible event and memorialize its victims is to unequivocally
defend universal human rights, including the right to freedom of expression,
and to make clear that they apply to all. We must dare to
defend even the right to blaspheme, the right that the Charlie Hebdo
staff paid with their lives for asserting.
Many people of Muslim heritage – from Saudi Arabia to Sudan, from
Afghanistan to Algeria, have been in the frontlines
of the fight against terror and extremism . But so many more of us
in the diasporas need to find the courage to speak out in support of them. After the Sydney attack and on the same day
as the Peshawar massacre, CNN featured a Muslim American blogger whining about
the fact that Muslims are expected to condemn jihadist attacks. I no longer have any patience for this sort
of view. Those of us who are proud of
our heritage, who have diverse and complex relationships with the Islam of our
forebears, can make a difference by speaking out against every single one of
these crimes whose miserable perpetrators wrongfully claim to act as agents of
the religious heritage we value. (This
is akin to suggesting that Jews can advance the cause of human rights by
criticizing the Israeli government’s violations since it claims to represent
them, even while they are in no way collectively responsible for such abuses.) We should have a Million Muslim March, or
the virtual equivalent, every single time an event like this happens.
Our community organizations should move from
reactive condemnations of terrorism post hoc, to proactive, systematic efforts
to root out Islamist ideology through awareness-raising, and humanist
education. We must also do more to
support those doing this work back home in our countries of origin. As difficult as it can be to speak out in
our highly charged contemporary environment in which the Western far right
campaigns against Islam – akin to “walking on a tightrope” as one young Arab-American
activist recently described it - it takes just a fraction of the moral courage
shown by those most at risk. Pakistani
lawyer Asma Jahangir, who has to have armed guards in her Lahore office,
implored the diaspora community to speak out about the slaughter in countries
like hers when I interviewed her.
It is especially critical not to blame the victims for the Paris
attack, however challenging some of their drawings and writings may have been
for some. That is what satirists do – push boundaries. That is their right, and indeed modern
society needs those who dare to claim that none of our emperors have any
clothes. Charlie Hebdo are equal
opportunity offenders, lampooning the Pope, Jewish orthodoxy and the Mullahs. Many people of Muslim heritage appreciate
satire. The late great Pakistani arts
promoter Faizan Peerzada told me
of the Danish cartoons that Charlie Hebdo reprinted, “if this cartoon was seen
by Mohamed, he would have had a laugh.
As simple as that.”
Meanwhile, the extreme right wing and other anti-Muslim forces in the
West cannot be allowed to overlook such defiance among people of Muslim
heritage, or to smear all of Islam or its adherents - or immigrants writ large - because of attacks
like the one in Paris. As Caroline Fourest, an expert
on fundamentalisms and former member of the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo
told me yesterday, the magazine is itself both anti-fundamentalist and secularist
- and resolutely anti-racist. “Racism
must not be an excuse for fundamentalism.
And fundamentalism must not be an excuse for racism,” she insisted. “We
have to fight both at the same time.”
She is absolutely correct, and these will both be long struggles.
After twenty years of writing about Muslim fundamentalist violence, I
am running out of synonyms for atrocity.
And for courage. During my recent research about opposition to
fundamentalism among people of Muslim heritage, I was given a copy of the
newspapers published at Press House in Algiers on the very next day after a
1996 Armed Islamic Group bombing there that killed 18 press workers and their
neighbors. I have thought about this
story a great deal in the last 24 hours.
Somehow the Algerian journalists rallied back
in 1996 and got their editions out, working to do so in the rubble of their
offices before the smoke had even cleared.
One of them, a woman named Ghania Oukazi, posed the following question
in that day’s heroic papers, a question just as relevant now. “Pen against
Kalashnikov. Is there a more unequal
struggle?” She answered it herself with
this commitment. “What is certain is
that the pen will not stop.”
Yesterday’s terror attack in Paris is a stark reminder that to defeat
all forms of fundamentalism and terror we must always honor Ghania’s
pledge. As Caroline Fourest exclaimed when telling me her surviving former colleagues were
determined to rally and get an issue of Charlie Hebdo next week: “there is no
way they will make us put down our pens.”
https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/karima-bennoune/charlie-hebdo-there-is-no-way-they-will-make-us-put-down-our-pens
Read more interviews and analysis with people
of Muslim heritage working to challenge fundamentalisms: Frontline
Voices Against Muslim Fundamentalism
NB - IN contrast to this voice of sanity here is the bloodthirsty Yakoob Qureishi of the BSP, again, hailing this event and offering to reward the killers:
<http://www.firstpost.com/
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