Dear Editor,
There has been an inevitable response to the events in Paris involving the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and the murders that occurred when its offices were attacked. Commentary continues in the local newspapers and in the international press as in the electronic media and on the net.
I read in Friday’s SN that a collective called Guyana Secular Association makes remarks on the recent letter on the Harris cartoon from the Indian Arrival Committe and notes in its script that “freedom of expression is under threat by Muslim extremists across the world.” While the idea of a secular association is good, we need to understand the definition of ‘secular’ with which they work. We need to report that the terrorist has metamorphosed greatly over the last fifty years, both in ethnic terms and in relation to the perceived and real injustice and ideology that fuels the person or movement. Some of us are old enough to recall when religious extremism/terrorism was the IRA in Great Britain, or some sects in the USA, and political terrorism would have been anarchists or the Baader Meinhof gang of Germany and other leftist groups from the sixties to the eighties, long before the Palestinians and other nations involved in territorial problems. While we, like all Muslims, condemn and express condolences in relation to the incident in France, we need to bear in mind that the situation, as is often the case, is analysed beyond the headlines and initial emotionalism.
The pretence is kept up by some that the issue is one of “freedom of expression.” And, depending on the viewpoint and depth of the commentator, nuance is read and evoked or simple knee-jerk
reactions are noted, and the expected
conclusions are rolled out.
In fact, the entire argument posing as a defence of the magazine’s right to publish what it wants, is hypocritical and flies in the face of the group’s recent history.
Charlie Hebdo emerged from a publication called Hara Kiri, that the French authorities did not fail to suppress and destroy once it had dared offend the idealised commmunity image of a figure revered by the French as “Liberator” – the late general Charles de Gaulle of whom a cartoon had been made by Hara Kiri. It was written by one commentator that it is also known that Hara Kiri had done an offending portrait of another religious figure respected by the Catholic-culture French, the Virgin Mary, and therefore had to be put down. The point is that reactions and attitudes change with the target and our social and cultural proximity to the subject of caricature. And that it would be the act of profanation of a sacred or respected figure in one’s own faith or culture that triggers certain defences and sentiments of being offended. It just has to be someone else’s culture for it to become a simple case of freedom of speech. Cultures construct the ideas and myths of their dominant ideology with care to protect and preserve some of the self-identity and their own sacred spaces and ideas. So, finally and firstly, it just depends on whose sacred figure it turns out to be. The very people pietising about freedom of speech today, are quite inflexible about defending their own sacred figures when the occasion arises.
Then, Charle Hebdo having been created by the remnants of Hara Kiri, continues to lick out at this or that group but staying clear of French heroes or Catholic saints. A lesson had been learnt. But to give another recent lesson, a cartoonist called Séné, ridiculed, mildly, the Jewish community. He was quickly thrown overboard and even started his own rival
mini-publication claiming that he had been a victim of censorship in favour of an ethnic group. The point made was clear, the list of untouchables stretches from the icons of the ethnic group, the powerful and protected of the allied ethnic groups, and no question of freedom of expression even arises when the things sacralised by the dominant discourse are touched.
The lesson from the event is that the Muslim and the Arab are among the few remaining safe targets in the repertoire of Western enmities.
Dr Giles Fraser is priest-in-charge of a centre in the UK, and the former canon chancellor of St Paul’s cathedral. Which is to say he is neither Muslim nor secularist. He makes the point, concerning Charlie Hebdo’s iconoclasm and anti-clericalism, in his Guardian column “There is a huge difference between targeting grand bishops in Rome and a beleaguered, economically fragile Muslim community. The glorious triumph of atheistic rationality over the dangerous totalitarian obscurantism of the Catholic Church is one of the great foundation myths of republican France. And coded within this mythology is the message that liberty, equality, fraternity can flourish only when religion is suppressed from the public sphere. It is worth remembering what this ideological space-clearing involved. And the reason publications such as Charlie Hebdo persist with their crass anti-clerical clichés… is that a powerful strain of French self-understanding actually requires a sense of external religious threat against which to frame itself.” I agree. It is the anti-clericalism and an antiquated islamophobia that has made of Muslims and the prophet Muhammad (on whom be peace) facile targets for much of Europe.
The entire pretence of freedom of expression in Western culture has to be understood from the point that Giles Fraser makes about foundation myths. The USA, one of the freest societies in history, has another range of foundation myths, featuring freedom loving Pilgrims and other religious parties fleeing to the New World to preserve their faith. The McCarthy anti-communist years with the silencing and banning of intellectuals, actors and academics sympathetic to Marxism prove and demonstrate the limits to criticising what the USA considered sacred doctrine, what we may call “the inviolability of the idea of the capitalist system” destined to win the eternal and global ideological war.
So, if we are making the point that those in Europe and in the USA who insist, like the current Pope, that freedom of expression has limits, are supported by recent and past history, it would be to refer to the attitude we Muslims are commanded to adopt when it comes to other men’s Gods and sacred figures. The Quran commands us to refrain from ridiculing or anathematising the sometimes quite quaint divinities men adore. Gods and prophets in religions have spanned the range from the sublime and exalted and just, to the simple minded ethnic bigot, the transsexual, buffoons of all sorts, rapists.
The pantheon of the human species is ranging in character and power, yet the prophet Muhammad as the Quran itself says not to laugh at or curse these people’s Gods, lest they dare reciprocate and run afoul of the wrath of the Most High. It is therefore unknown in Muslim culture to find someone’s saint or godlet the object of ridicule. It is however a constant in European culture to find depictions of the prophet Muhammad that are caricatures. The historical contact with Islam also led to conflict that expressed itself in the usual distortions of the image of the enemy. One also has to read works like Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough to appreciate the flavour and content of the discourse the Old Contionent generated as it came into contact with foreign peoples during its period of expansion, and the attitude to pre-Christain Greece and Rome to which it had an ancestral relationship.
As I read from a local columnist writing on the issue, we are, in Guyana, a community accustomed to religious diversity, are usually quite correct in our respect and tolerance. It gives work to the secular association, however, to deal with the unsparing anglo-Christianity of all our legal codes and much of our public life. As another columnist said, our children are singing hymns in school assemblies, but never qaseeda or bhajan. This is something the IAC needs to write and militate about.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
