Muslim Women Know How To Challenge The Dominant Islamic Discourse To Confront It With Political Islam - Cartoons? The Hell With Them
By Rajaa Natour
09.11.2020
Abdoullakh
Anzorov and Samuel Paty were destined to meet from the moment the Chechen
immigrant set foot on French soil: immigrant and native-born, religious and
secular, foreigner and Frenchman. It’s just that the encounter wasn’t supposed
to be so fatal and suicidal. On October 16, the 18-year-old Anzorov, who had
heard about a class where the teacher showed his students cartoons of the
Prophet Mohammed, beheaded Paty with a knife.
A protester wearing a face mask outside the French embassy in London,
Friday, Oct. 30, 2020, to protest against French President Macron. Credit:
Frank Augstein,AP
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And sadly,
this murder was so expected, not only because of the circumstances that led up
to it – the cartoons that the 47-year-old civics and history teacher showed his
class. The conflict between Paty and Anzorov is a long-standing,
intergenerational and intercultural conflict. It’s not just the clash between
the immigrants and the native-born French, or between Islam on one side and
secularism and the values of democracy on the other.
This is a
principled and focused conflict that raises its violent head when Islam is
confronted with questions, challenges and moral dilemmas involving values and
principles for which there is no solution at the moment.
Accordingly,
it is important to state: The claim that Islam and Muslims are two distinct
entities is perhaps partly true, but it’s
hollow because it does not deal with any challenge of morality and
values with which Islam is grappling. And it does not provide adequate answers
to complex traditional religious issues.
Moreover,
this claim must be rejected because it minimizes the role, power and influence
of the Koranic-legal texts and their interpretation. It also absolves the
religious thinkers of the responsibility that accompanies their interpretations
of the Koran.
A protester carrying a
defaced poster of Emmanuel Macron after the French president vowed not to
"give up cartoons" depicting the Prophet Mohammed, Baghdad, October
26, 2020.
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The murder
Anzorov committed, the October 29 killings in Nice and the murders that
continue to rage in the name of Islam leave no room between the perpetrators’
identities and the Koranic texts because these deeds rest on religious
discourse or legal interpretations that have provided direct or indirect
legitimacy.
Both Acts The Same Value
The
reaction by the elite Islamic center of learning in Cairo, Al-Azhar, was the
classic example of a supreme religious institution narrowing the gap between
religious law’s texts and the people behind them – that is, male Muslims.
Al-Azhar, the religious-male mouthpiece, deplored the murder, of course, but in
the same document and same breath noted that the showing of the cartoons was an
insult to Islam.
Al-Azhar
gave both acts the same value despite the huge difference, from the
perspectives of criminality and morality, between showing a cartoon and
beheading an innocent man. Al-Azhar thus indirectly legitimized murder and in a
sense authorized future murders.
If we look
closely at this murder and others, like the Charlie Hebdo killings in 2015,
we’ll find that not only was there a punishment, there was a total physical
destruction of the source of the threat. In this sense, the representatives of
Islam and its spokespeople in the West have one answer to criticism and
dilemmas of morality and values – death.
French lawmakers observing a
minute of silence to pay tribute to slain teacher Samuel Paty, Paris, October
20, 2020.
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The message
that Paty’s murder sent the Western world was that Islam is resistant to any
criticism, and any trespass will exact a steep price. The murders that raged
for around a week in a number of French cities, in part on the heels of
President Emmanuel Macron’s statements, clearly show that the dominant Islamic
discourse and many of its defenders are panicking and hysterical. And this
discourse is playing the victim and defensive.
Playing the
victim leads to defensiveness, and the defensiveness leads to one single
“Islamic” reaction. The danger lies not only in Islam’s playing the victim and
the violent reactions that are disproportionate to the allegedly anti-Islam
acts. The message is that Islam is trying to preserve itself and maintain its
borders, and has no interest in negative Western influences.
Islam aims
to exist in the West in its original conservative version, with no interaction
with the West's institutions, mechanisms and values. And, from Muslims who live
in the West, it demands total loyalty, one that takes precedence over Muslims’
civic identity.
Thus,
Al-Azhar’s controversial stance has left a religious and social vacuum into
which have flocked second-rate clerics, all kinds of inciters, influencers and
ordinary people who have been dragged along by the language of incitement that
demands an immediate response to the insult to the religion.
Hostility Led By Men
The
legitimation of the murder took place on social media as the followers and
responders saw fit, without any basis in religious law. Meanwhile, they made
populist use of the hadiths, the interpretations of traditions relating to the
Prophet Mohammed. Paty’s murder was a natural continuation of the incitement,
but to many it was also the appropriate religious response to the insult to
Islam.
Paty’s
murder suited the image of punishment that existed in the collective
consciousness of everyone insulted by his actions. Those in the Arab-Muslim
world who have justified Paty’s murder are the same group that will attack and
incite when criticism is expressed of its male national poets, exalted authors
and clerics.
This
hostility is led by men who have decided on their own and out of religious
considerations that cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed constitute an attack on
Islam and the Muslims. They’re the ones who initiated a viral campaign on
social media in many Arab countries, as well as a campaign to boycott
French-made products, and who have swept up Muslims throughout the Arab world.
Was this
insult to Muslim men also an insult to Arab women? Are the cartoons and the
discourse surrounding them of interest to Muslim women? Are these issues
keeping Muslim women in the Arab world awake at night? Is this how Muslim women
resolve religious conflicts linked to values?
I am sad to
disappoint the majority of Muslim men, but many amazing Muslim women in the
Arab world are studying complex issues of religion and values such as polygamy
and its implications, martyrdom, jihad and laws of personal status and
inheritance. Many Muslim women, at all levels, are fighting distortions of
religious law that have been forced upon them and their daughters, so the
cartoons of the Prophet are a marginal issue for them.
Many Muslim
women will neither join nor collaborate with this hollow discourse that diverts
religious and social discussion from the most important issues to the most
trivial. Muslim women know exactly what is challenging and how to challenge the
dominant Islamic discourse, to confront it with political Islam while ensuring
the presence of progressive streams in Islam.
Cartoons?
The hell with them.
Original Headline: Let Muslim Women Deal With
Prophet Cartoons
Source: The Haaretz
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-west/muslim-women-know-how-challenge/d/123666
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