Clash Of Civilisations With Islam: Old French System Is Unsuited To Multi-Ethnic And Multi-Racial Society, Emmanuel Macron Should Realise
By Pankaj Mishra
28 October,
2020
The last
thing the world needs amid a resurgent pandemic is a clash of civilizations.
Yet this is what French President Emmanuel Macron seems intent on fomenting.
And, in many Muslim leaders, he has found willing and eager partners for his
venture.
File
photo of French President Emmanuel Macron | Jasper Juinen | Bloomberg
-----
From all
accounts, the Chechnya-born teenager who gruesomely murdered a schoolteacher in
France this month represents yet another case of online radicalization — the
same force that has fueled flash lynch mobs in India and right-wing militias in
the United States.
But Macron
chose to respond to the atrocity with an unprecedented crackdown on France’s
Muslim community, accompanied by a vociferous critique of its religion —
thereby “communalizing,” to use an Indian phrase, what is a widespread social
pathology.
Having
asserted that Islam is “in crisis all over the world today,” Macron has now
gone further by proclaiming France’s staunch support for the caricatures of the
Prophet Mohammed that originally enraged the young murderer.
To put it
soberingly: Macron has staked France’s global reputation on crude mockery of a
figure revered by more than a billion Muslims.
Self-appointed
paladins of Islam, who have lately been floundering, eagerly accepted the
lifeline thrown to them by Macron. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, both beset by multiple crises, have
ostentatiously attacked the French president.
Erdogan
even questioned Macron’s mental health, provoking France to recall its
ambassador to Turkey. The boycott of French goods demanded by Erdogan is
already being administered in Kuwait and Qatar. Mass protests against Macron
are emerging in a broad swathe of Muslim countries from Libya to Bangladesh.
In recent
days, Islamophobia has surged at all levels of French society, from the
interior minister, who accused halal food in supermarkets of fostering
separatism, to the assailants who stabbed two Muslim women in headscarves near
the Eiffel Tower.
Macron’s
own strategy seems clear: to out-manoeuvre his far-right rival Marine Le Pen.
His poor handling of the pandemic had already diminished his chances in the
2022 presidential election. Macron now hopes to bluster his way out of an
existential crisis with appeals to France’s matchless grandeur.
He has a
tradition of rousing rhetoric in this regard. Take, for instance, this
declaration from Macron’s book “Révolution” in 2016: “In the spirit of France
there is an aspiration to the universal that is at once an unceasing
indignation at injustice and oppression, and a determination to tell others
what we think of the world, here, now and on behalf of everyone.”
Macron
doesn’t seem to have considered a basic problem: Most people in the world today
do not much care what the French think of them. Assertions such as the 2007
claim by his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy that “the African has not fully
entered history,” or Macron’s own remarks in 2017 that Africa had an
intransigent “civilizational” problem, stemming from African women who breed “7
to 8 children,” have not given those people much reason to reconsider their
disdain.
Taking up
the white man’s burden abroad, Macron seems oblivious to a deepening problem at
home: The old French model, which claimed to be universal and superior to all
social systems, is disastrously unsuited to an increasingly multi-ethnic and
multi-racial society.
Nor is the
spirit of France immune to certain global trends. Social cohesion has been
endangered across the world by uneven growth and extreme inequality, and the
dwindling of trade unions, churches, local newspapers and other institutions
that once helped foster civic participation and the responsibilities of
citizenship. In almost every major country, members of a minority radicalized
on the internet periodically disrupt public life with vicious acts of violence.
France
seems particularly unprepared for these volatile realities because French
leaders can still rally broad support for an outmoded national ideology of
secularism. Such circling of wagons, however, can only further alienate
disaffected minorities and delay necessary modifications to the country’s
self-image and political, legal and educational systems.
Indeed, by
endlessly eulogizing their country’s political and intellectual traditions,
French leaders have made them as hidebound and resistant to the 21st century as
the “originalist” interpretations of the U.S. constitution fetishized by
right-wing Republicans.
Invoking
Voltaire’s maxims, and other greatest hits of the French Enlightenment, may
gratify diehard secularists. But many more people around the world are now
grappling with the long-term consequences of what Voltaire, among many other
past luminaries, said about black people (evidently, animal-like in their
stupidity) and Jews (all born fanatics).
Ignoring
France’s irrevocably diverse population and fragile security situation, as well
as a highly unstable international climate, Macron has taken to peddling an
unsustainable idea of French glory in his bid for re-election. The dangers of
his opportunism include greater polarization at home and broader, more intense
conflicts abroad. They should not be underestimated. –Bloomberg
Original Headline: Why French President
Macron’s clash of civilisations with Islam is misguided
Source: The Print
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-west/clash-civilisations-with-islam-old/d/123341
New
Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism