By Prasenjit Biswas
19 November
2020
Faith Needs To Be
Negotiated With Empathy For The Marginalised And The Culturally-Different By
Breaking Through The Glass Ceiling Of Europeanism And Replacing It With
Cosmopolitanism
Sigmund
Freud’s diagnostic work, entitled Civilization
and its Discontents, explains how civilisations spawn neurotic responses.
The French principle of laïcité (secularism) places the huge demand of strict
separation between State and religion. Freud’s theory of neurotic response
arises from the inability to follow such difficult and hard commands of
civilisations.
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Essentially
it means that France, as a State, has no other way but to respond with angst to
the terrorist act of killing of a teacher, which precisely is an act of
Freudian discontent, may be even neurosis. The subject of neurosis is
necessarily misplaced or displaced. France’s specific problem with its
principle of laïcité is that it finds the core values of Islam incongruent with
the French national ethos. If freedom of expression in secularism involves the
right to offend symbols of other religions by calling them antithetical to
French national culture, it marks the effacement of a minority religion like Islam
in the public space. This is how France
cannot uphold a true laïcité by overriding the faith of erstwhile colonised
Arabs from the Maghreb and other minorities, who comprise a diverse Muslim
populace. So laïcité takes the form of political secularism that creates a
hierarchy in which it decides which religious faith is acceptable and which one
is not. Secularism, then, acts as a rule of the majority over minority faiths.
This creates an apparent conflict between the majority world view and minority religions.
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Placing the
burden of tolerance on a particular religion after offending its symbols is
certainly unwarranted in a secular State. This is a failure to establish
equality between religions as well as a failure to ensure freedom of
conscience. This also justifies reactive violence on a populace for their
failure to come to terms with the offence committed on their faith. The French
version of secularism, placing the demand on the State to remain strictly
separated from religion, cannot heal the wounds of history of the erstwhile
colonised.
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Also Read:
Blasphemy, Islam and Free Speech
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The long
history of colonisation of Black Africans and Arabs by France impacts the
present shape of French secularism to create marginality and radical Islam
together in the people from erstwhile French colonies. Political secularism
lives through such contrarian moments of extremism and radical religious
politics arising from a history of colonisation. Here, one needs to draw a
distinction between “political secularism” and “secularism of values.”
Secularism of values differs from political secularism as it promotes an
attitude of “neither pro, nor anti-religion.” Political secularism polarises
this secularism of values into something that is anti or against some practices
of a particular religious group.
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An attitude
of neutrality towards religion does not stop the French State from turning
against it, or turning selectively in favour of a religion. This brings into
picture the logic of uniformity of symbols in public space that does not allow
a difference of religious symbols. Political secularism relegates religions to
the private, or at most to community spaces.
If the
freedom of every religion in France is taken literally in laïcité, why is it so
very hard for Muslims to follow their symbols or to ensure their faith?
Derogation of the Prophet in any way cannot be considered as consistent with
the practice of hard secularist neutrality. Secular neutrality of “neither for
nor against” is supposed to remain neutral to the way a religion practises its
belief. Instead of such a principled stance, what the French laïcité does is to
allow the way a religion is reflected in the mirror of French State or public.
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In effect,
exercise of legal indemnity towards a distortion of symbols or image of a faith
is a licence to undermine the specific character and practices of a particular
faith or religion. This is projecting a wrong image of a religion in the public
space. Taken to its extreme, French secularism posits religious identities into
an adversary by allowing an underlying “war on religion” or by allowing a
derogation of religious symbols. Such an outcome cannot be fully legit in a
pluralist democracy. Seemingly France tweaks its legal, political and juridical
concepts attached to secularism to legitimise constraints upon those religions
that are considered as outliers. Hence the law of secularism is no guarantee
for religious freedom, it rather is a way of tweaking and moderating religious
expressions within limits of French neutrality.
Are certain
identities, then, to be treated as antithetical to the principles of laïcité?
Is treating every religion in an equal manner a way of cutting it to size by
downplaying its core belief structure? In French President Emmanuel Macron’s
language, “no totem or taboo”, referring to religious symbols. Is it then, a
hard secular knock at others? Is there a secularism-inspired separation of the
self and other as part of State policy? This is a denial or acceptance of the
select values of religion, mixed with the secular cause, a certain fragmentation
of laïcité itself. Rejection of the turban or the hijab interestingly turns an
outsider’s gaze on French secularism that continuously undercuts the line of
strict separation.
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Also Read:
Islam and Free Speech: A Reply to A. Faizur Rahman
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This
creates a political issue of adjustment between a religious victim’s perception
of being denigrated and the demand placed on him/her to not show difference of
identity in the public sphere. This also turns French laïcité into a “misuse of
secularism to stigmatise people.” Clearly President Macron’s statement, “Islam
is a religion in crisis all over the world” or a highly visible crackdown on
Islam as a religion border on a near anti-Islam positioning that goes against
the grain of neutrality and freedom of conscience.
A mea culpa
anti-Islam version of French secularism has its internal victims. The French
Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) stated, “We are sometimes targets of
anti-Muslim acts but others are also victims of hostile acts. In the face of
these provocations, we must remain decent, serene and clear-sighted.” If the
public sphere is not supposed to carry the remnants of any such mea culpa
version from any side, as per French secularism, the exact opposite has
happened. Stigmatisation, racial othering and lampooning of the doctrines of
faith assume the garb of French laïcité. So what remains unresolved is this
lack of criticism against an anti-Islam stance of President Macron, often known
as “Macronism.”
This
Macronist secularism misdirected against a religion arises from the French
President’s political secularism that wrecks equality of faiths. It further
causes an emotional and grief-based solidarity that provides a fulcrum for new
laws for monitoring schools and mosques in Muslim areas of France. Acquiescence
by Saudi Arabia to the Macronist stance on Islam in terms of his
“counter-terrorism and deradicalisation” measures strengthens the pre-emptive
fixing of the guilt on Muslim immigrants in France, especially if they are of
Arab origin.
The
deficits of laïcité cannot be supplemented by such externalisation of an anti-Islam
stance. Should secularism turn Islamophobic, it brings back an image of an
anti-Semite European world view, which ultimately undermines the secularism of
values by a version of political secularism.
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Also Read:
Embrace What Is Different:
Quran and Hadith Stress on Building an Inclusive Society
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France has
to overcome the present antagonism by building more bridges with Muslims on its
soil and dispelling the image of being at war with Islam. Macron cannot afford
to become a mascot of Right-wing Islamophobes. A liberal State ultimately needs
to accommodate differences and return to unifying nationalism that promotes
love and co-belonging. Faith needs to be negotiated with a special ecumenism
and empathy for the marginalised and the culturally-different by breaking
through the glass ceiling of Europeanism and replacing it with cosmopolitanism.
Cosmopolitanism
in Europe places the demand of adopting a value-neutral position to both one’s
own religion as well as to other religions. Catholic churches of France, irked
by a certain mockery of their faith, filed cases on Charlie Hebdo, but, unlike
Islamists, never indulged in terror attacks. However, Islamists and certain
conservative clerics create an atmosphere of backlash on the slightest slight
of their religious symbols. Islamic nation States, too, are particularly
intransigent towards people of different faiths and compel them to comply with
codes of Islam in everyday life.
The
value-neutral and secular cosmopolitan European culture allows for acceptance
of symbols of religious traditions as a universal heritage of mankind. The
French version of secularism insists on the separation of the sphere of faith
from the sphere of common and shared public life, that is supposed to extol
virtues of tolerance and unconditional respect for the other. It is here that
reactions to freedom of aesthetic and artistic representation of religious
symbols and prophets is supposed to be beyond any dogmatic condemnation.
France
stands for not restricting freedom of satirisation or artistic freedom to be
unconstrained by religious dogmas. It is here that French laïcité ensures that
France will not side with any faith, be it Islam, be it Sikhism or Christianity
in allowing freedom of choice, conscience and individuality to all people.
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Prasenjit Biswas is a philosopher and political
analyst based in Shillong
Original Headline: Time for a hate-free world
Source: The Daily Pioneer
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-west/placing-burden-tolerance-islam-after/d/123510
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