Macron Is Discrediting The Enlightenment In The Eyes Of Muslims And Strengthening The Islamists He Vows To Defeat
By Mustafa Akyol
November
20, 2020,
“Islam is a
religion that is in crisis all over the world today.” That is what the French
President Emmanuel Macron said on Oct. 2, while announcing his “anti-radicalism
plan.” Just two weeks later, on Oct. 16, a devotee of that radicalism killed
and beheaded a high-school teacher, Samuel Paty, in a Paris suburb, merely for
showing the infamous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in his classroom. And
soon after, three worshippers at a church in Nice were savagely murdered by
another terrorist who seemed to have the same motivation: to punish blasphemy
against the prophet of Islam.
Activists of the Pakistani
Sunni Tehreek organization burn a poster of French President Emmanuel Macron
during an anti-French protest in Lahore on Nov. 1, 2020. ARIF ALI/AFP VIA GETTY
IMAGES
------
In return,
the French authorities initiated a crackdown on anything they deemed to be
Islamism, and also projected the controversial cartoons of Prophet Muhammad on
government buildings in France—only to provoke mass protests in various parts
of the Muslim world.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All these
events have initiated an ongoing debate about France, Islam, and freedom. Some
in the West now see France as the beacon of Enlightenment values against the
dark forces of religious fanaticism. Others argue that the main problem is
Islamophobia, racism and the colonial arrogance of France in a world
where—except for a handful of extremists—Muslims are the real victims.
As a Muslim
who has been writing about these issues for about two decades, let me offer a
more nuanced view: First, France—like any target of terrorism—deserves sympathy
for its fallen and solidarity against the threat. Moreover, Macron is largely
correct that Islam is facing a “crisis”—not “all over world,” but certainly in
some parts of the world—and we Muslims need an honest conversation about that.
Unfortunately, Macron is doing little to resolve this crisis and could actually
be inflaming it, because the sort of freedom he claims to defend is full of
painful shortcomings and cynical double standards.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also Read: In the Wake of Killings in France, Some Questions to Fellow Muslims
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many
Muslims would find any talk of Islam facing a crisis unacceptable, if not
heretical, for they think of Islam as a divinely ordained, perfect, and eternal
truth. Yet one can well believe in the divine core of Islam, as I do, while
being critical of the many layers of human interpretation built on top of that.
It is this human interpretation that gave us much of the Islamic fiqh, or
jurisprudence, which has some harsh verdicts that conflict with what the modern
world calls human rights and civil liberties—the notions that people should be
free to believe or disbelieve in a religion, and free to evangelize or
criticize it.
Let’s take
the burning issue at hand: What should Muslims do in the face of blasphemy
against the Prophet—or Sabb Al-Rasul,
as medieval jurists called it. They all agreed it should be severely punished.
According to mainline Shafi and Maliki jurists, the blasphemer would be
executed immediately, unless he or she repented. According to the stricter Hanbalis,
the blasphemer would be executed even if he or she repented. And according to
the milder Hanafis, there was no clear ground for execution, but the blasphemer
could be jailed and beaten with sticks.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also Read:
Muslims In Europe Should Reshape Their Approach Towards The People Of The
Book
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
None of
these verdicts had any basis in the Quran—like most similar verdicts in Islamic
jurisprudence—but jurists inferred them from some targeted killings that
reportedly took place during the Prophet’s battles with the polytheists of his
time.
What is
less noticed is that medieval Muslim jurists reasoned according to the norms of
their time, where the concept of free speech simply didn’t exist. Indeed, their
Christian contemporaries weren’t any more lenient to blasphemers or heretics.
The Byzantine Empire, under the Justinian Laws of the 6th century, declared,
“Men shall not … blaspheme God,” and gave the death penalty for those who did.
Later, in Europe, the Catholic Inquisition took blasphemy law a step further by
making this capital punishment just more painful with new techniques like
auto-da-fé, or burning people alive at the stake.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yet
Christianity has changed immensely in the past four centuries—first with the
lessons taken from the horrific Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), and then new ideas
of tolerance advocated by Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke. Debates on
freedom among Catholics continued well into the 20th century, but ultimately
all mainline Christians gave up coercive power in the name of their faith.
However,
the same transformation hasn’t yet fully taken place in Islam—and that lies at
the core of the crisis, that not just Macron but also critical Muslims are
talking about. Medieval Islamic jurisprudence is still there, with some violent
and coercive verdicts unrefuted by most contemporary religious scholars. Most
Muslims are not interested in these verdicts, let alone eager to implement
them, but some are. Their zealotry, in the extreme, leads to vigilante violence
and terrorism. In the mainstream, it leads to blasphemy laws that are in place
in many Muslim-majority states—Pakistan being one of the most ferocious.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A fairly
conservative but thoughtful American Muslim, Yasir Qadi, a popular preacher and
a dean at the Al-Maghrib Institute, recently admitted this problem in an
interesting post “on the French terrorist attack.” Most mainstream Muslim
authorities condemn such terrorist attacks, he noted, but “don’t directly
address the fiqh [jurisprudence] texts involved.” Especially on the issue of
blasphemy, he added, “There are texts and fiqh issues that need to be discussed
frankly—hardly anyone has done that (still!).”
Having such
frank discussions on Islamic jurisprudence—and the underlying theological
assumptions—could open Islam’s path toward its own authentic Enlightenment, the
gist of which should be giving up coercive power in the name of the faith. We
Muslims need this reform not to please Westerners, but to save our own
societies from the sectarianism, bigotry, misogyny, and oppression that is
being justified in the name of Islam, and to better reflect the true values of
our faith.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also Read:
Embrace What Is Different:
Quran and Hadith Stress on Building an Inclusive Society
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In other
words, Islam needs its own Enlightenment, but Macron is advocating the wrong
sort of Enlightenment. And that’s a problem deeply rooted in France’s own
history.
It is worth
recalling that the Enlightenment was not a monolithic movement. As the late
great historian Gertrude Himmelfarb explained in Roads to Modernity: The
British, French, and American Enlightenments, there was rather a clear
distinction between the French and the Anglo-Saxon paths: In France,
Enlightenment often implied a combat between faith and reason. In Britain and
America, it often implied a harmony of them. Therefore, the French path has
been much more assertive, anti-clerical, and also bloody. The French
Revolution, lest we forget, was an extremely violent affair, where hundreds of
priests were killed—often by beheading—and the Church’s dominance of the public
square was replaced, not by neutrality, but an alternative religion called the
Cult of Reason.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also Read:
The False Binary of the Secular versus Islamic Needs to Be
Broken
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Having
subdued Catholicism long ago with this aggressive Enlightenment, France seems
to be reviving it against Islam, especially under the banner of laïcité, its unmistakably
illiberal form of secularism.
The French
often say foreigners don’t understand laïcité. I do—because my country, Turkey,
imitated the French model for almost a century.
The main
problem of this specific form of secularism is its reliance on pre-emptive
intolerance; assuming that religion and its symbols might become oppressive if
they are visible, laïcité suppresses them in the first place. The result of
such policies is often a simmering grudge among the religious, and ultimately a
backlash, if not revenge—which is precisely how Turkey got its great Islamic
avenger, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Although
Macron says the target of laïcité is not Islam, but only “Islamism,” the latter
term is left quite vague in his rhetoric. In practice, it’s not vague at all.
In France it has long been obvious that personal Muslim practices are targeted:
For many years, Muslim women in France have been banned from wearing
headscarves in public buildings, or so-called burkinis on beaches. Last
September, a French politician from Macron’s party protested a young French
Muslim woman for merely walking into the National Assembly while wearing a
headscarf. And, in October, the French interior minister even took issue with
halal food aisles in supermarkets—and kosher ones, too, signalling a threat to
the religious freedom of just not Muslims, but other practicing believers as
well.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also Read:
Blasphemy, Islam and Free Speech
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In other
words, what France requires from its Muslims is not just accepting the freedom
of speech of blasphemers, but also giving up a part of their own freedom of
religion. This is not only wrong in principle, but also myopic and
counterproductive. It just makes it harder for practicing French Muslims to
feel respected, accepted, and therefore fully French—precisely the sort of
integration radical Islamists would like to avert.
In fact,
laïcité has been counterproductive for the whole Muslim world, by giving
secularism a bad name. I have seen this personally over the years among Muslim
audiences around the world. Whenever I have advocated freedom, I often received
the heated reaction: “What freedom are you talking about? The one that bans our
sisters’ hijabs in France?!” It provides the perfect excuse for whataboutism
among Islamists, and a recruiting tool for them, too.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also Read:
Islam and Free Speech: A Reply to A. Faizur Rahman
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Moreover,
the shortcomings of France are not just in freedom of religion, but also what
it claims to heroically defend: freedom of speech. It is true that in a free
society people have the right to blaspheme against any religion, and religious
believers should simply learn to look the other way—which is precisely what the
Quran commands us Muslims. (When Muslims see mockers of Islam, the Quran says,
they should just “not sit with them” —not kill or silence them.)
But the
problem is that while France glorifies blasphemy against God, it bans blasphemy
against “the Republic”—its own secular deity, so to speak. More specifically,
French laws ban “defamation against government institutions and office-holders,
as well as disrespecting the national anthem and flag.” Alas, “insulting the
President” was a crime in France until 2013, when the European Court of Human
Rights finally pushed for a legal reform. Even so, in 2018 French courts went
after protesters who burned effigies of Macron. And just last September, the
French Justice Minister proudly declared that “insulting a mayor” will also
soon be “a criminal offense.”
So, those who argue that “France is not the free-speech champion it says it is” are quite right. And the whataboutism that this double standard will fuel in the Muslim world is quite predictable. The fact that the French government appears to be flexing its muscles in an effort to curb free speech even beyond its borders—as appears to have occurred recently in the pages of the Financial Times and Politico—only makes it harder to see Macron as a great defender of the freedom of expression.
If Macron
really wants to help the crisis of Islam, instead of making it worse, what he
needs to do is to raise France’s own standards of freedom of speech and
religion, so that more Muslims can actually benefit from and appreciate these
crucial values, giving them an incentive to make a clean break from the
coercive understandings of Islam.
There is a
country in which this experiment has already taken place—and its results are
not bad. This country is, of course, the United States—the heir of the more
religion-friendly Enlightenment, and the pinnacle of the “Anglo-Saxon
liberalism” that is often disparaged in France. I am aware that the United
States’ current political crisis can make it a hard sell, but from a broader
perspective, it is a success story: It is a country with much higher levels of
freedom of speech and religion than those of France—and a much better
integrated Muslim minority, which increasingly appreciates liberal values.
This
phenomenon, noted by research institutes or American Muslims themselves, have
complex reasons, such as the United States’ lack of a long colonial history in
the Muslim world, and a more middle-class immigrant population. But even its
African-American Muslims, who have suffered racism, can feel proudly American.
The secret to this success is freedom, which allows Muslims to live in America
without giving up their personal piety and communal identity, being visible
everywhere—including in Congress—with their religious symbols, and realizing
that free speech works for them as well—in addition to economic freedom, which
allows them to compete and flourish.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In other
words, U.S. authorities are not sending secularism police to American beaches
to make sure that Muslim women are sufficiently undressed, in order to create
an “American Islam.” The latter just grows naturally. Because when people see
freedom, and understand that it is really for everyone, they tend to appreciate
it. And when they sense that freedom is only for those who look, live, and
think in a certain way, they retreat to their cultural trenches.
-----
Mustafa Akyol is a senior fellow at the Cato
Institute, focusing on Islam and modernity, and the author of the forthcoming
Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance.
Original Headline: Yes, Islam Is Facing a
Crisis. No, France Isn’t Helping Solve It.
Source: The Foreign Policy
URl: https://newageislam.com/islam-west/macron-discrediting-enlightenment-eyes-muslims/d/123546
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