Abhorrent Caricature Of Prophet Muhammad Has Led To Another Series Of Macabre Terror Attacks In France
By Najmul Hoda
November 21
2020
Abhorrent
caricature of Prophet Muhammad has led to another series of macabre terror
attacks in France. French President Emmanuel Macron attributed the grisly
violence to what he called the “crisis in Islam”, a characterisation borrowed
from the title of a book published in 2003 in the wake of 9/11, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy
Terror, by the doyen of the Western scholarship on Islam, Bernard Lewis.
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The word
‘crisis’ sparked off sharp reactions from a cross-section of Muslims, including
such leaders as Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, Turkey’s President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, and former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad. This is surprising,
because a similar word, ‘danger’ — as in the formulation, “Islam in danger” —
has been a familiar device of religio-political demagoguery that projects Islam
as besieged by a host of enemies who have been conspiring to destroy “the true
religion.”
The
‘danger’ theory has great psychological value inasmuch as it identifies the
enemy in external factors while completely ignoring the internal faults, and
thus obviating the need for introspection and self-correction; whereas ‘crisis’
points to internal decay, which calls for a course correction. The very thought
that something could be wrong with one’s religion provokes an indignant
reaction. The nuance that though there may be nothing wrong with a religion per
se, it is wrong that that many a thing that isn’t a part of it passes off as
such, is missed. Nuance, in any case, is seldom the hallmark of religious
discourse.
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Also Read: In the Wake of Killings in France, Some Questions to Fellow Muslims
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Inherent in
this crisis-danger binary is the notion of the clash of civilisations. Though
this phrase is largely credited to Samuel Huntington for his 1996 book, The
Clash of Civilisations And The Remaking of World Order, Bernard Lewis also
contributed to this, for he was the one to posit a clash between Christianity
and Islam in an article in the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly,
titled The Roots of Muslim Rage.
But much
before this post-Cold War thesis came into vogue, Islamic ideologues had been
highlighting the irreconcilable opposition between Islam and the West. From
Jamaluddin Afghani to Allama Iqbal, and from Syed Qutb to Maulanas Maududi and
Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi, every ideologue presented Islam and Maghribiyat
(Westernisation) and Jadidiyat (Modernity) as polar opposites in nearly the
same vein as “...never the twain shall meet”.
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Also Read:
Blasphemy, Islam and Free Speech
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This was a
reflection of the centuries-old struggle between Christianity and Islam which,
in the wake of colonial ingress, was paraphrased as the conflict between Islam
and (Western) modernity. It engendered a cultural attitude that can be best
described as Occidentalism, or the counter to Orientalism. Edward Said, in his
1978 masterpiece Orientalism had critiqued the Western episteme for projecting
onto the Orient their own prurience which, in turn, constructed the East as an
expendable ‘Other’ that could be subjugated and exploited without any qualms.
Occidentalism is a pastiche of the Orientalist fantasy, which sees in the West
nothing besides materialism and moral depravity. Other than Sir Syed Ahmad
Khan, almost every Muslim intellectual found a perverse pleasure in painting a
lurid picture of the West, and thus provided a rationale for denigrating and,
if possible, vanquishing them.
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Also Read:
Islam and Free Speech: A Reply to A. Faizur Rahman
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Imperialist
geopolitics has not only been the axis of the Muslim attitude towards the West,
but also an alibi for negating the need for introspection and correction in
their own thought and practice. Accordingly, Islamic terrorism is seen as a
corollary to a long series of wrongs that the Muslims have been suffering at
the hands of the West. The list includes the Crusades, colonialism, oil
politics, the Cold War, the Afghanistan War, and the support for Israel, etc.
This saga of grievance was given academic gravitas by Mahmood Mamdani’s 2004
book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror.
Such a rationalisation of terror, while partly explanatory, misses the woods
for the trees. Focussing on Western machinations in Muslim countries rather
than on the motive force behind the acts of terror, it absolves the role of
ideology in shaping a religious attitude for which violence is a rational
response to a conflict. It also ignores the fact that the imperialist forces
could weaponise an ideology, as in Afghanistan, because it already existed.
They didn’t create it, they hired it. If an ideology is up for hire, its truth
claims must be dubious.
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There is a
bigger reason for the failure to acknowledge the role of ideology in the spread
of terrorism than the exclusive emphasis on geopolitics — the inseparability of
the ideological accretions from the religious core. The idea that the Muslims,
being the followers of “the true religion”, have the divine mandate to impose
their will on the world is at the root of Islamic supremacism. It has
substantial theological resources at its back, and it is Islamic insofar as it
is done by the Muslims, in the name of Islam, with credible religious arguments
to support their claim. Thus, even though the bare act of violence might be
condemned by Muslims, it’s hard for them to denounce the ideology behind it.
So, they take recourse to such vacuous cliches as the literal meaning of the
word ‘Islam’ being peace, and such verses of the Quran as “to you your religion
and to me mine”, “there is no compulsion in religion”, and “to kill an innocent
person is as big a sin as killing the entire humanity”.
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The refusal
to own up the crime, and take corrective steps, comes from the inseparability
of the power theology from Islam, the religion. Till the time such inanities as
“...but the Prophet was also a politician. and a military commander” are not
questioned, the sacrilege of misattribution of terrorism to him will continue,
and Muslims, in turn, will consider it blasphemy. The question, however, is
whether committing acts of terror in the name of Islam, and naming terror
outfits after Prophet Muhammad are blasphemy or not? How come such names as
Lashkar-e Taiba and Jaish-e Muhammad don’t raise hackles among the Muslims?
Isn’t it because of ideological conditioning that nothing amiss is perceived if
the Prophet’s name and his teachings are used for wreaking violence? Is it even
surprising that on the flag of an important Muslim country, a sword underlays
the Islamic profession of faith? Herein lies the crisis of Islam, and the
danger to it. Unless Muslims liberate Islam from politics, no redemption is
possible, for “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves,
that we are underlings.”
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Najmul Hoda is an IPS Officer
Original Headline: Crisis of Islam
Source: The
Deccan Herald
URl: https://newageislam.com/islam-west/abhorrent-caricature-prophet-muhammad-led/d/123575
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