Is Islam Really Against Free Speech - And Does France Really Suffer From Islamist Separatism?
By Asma Barlas
11 Nov 2020
The
decision of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo to reprint the cartoons of
Prophet Muhammad in September incited another wave of violence in France, a
repetition of what happened when these images were originally published in
2015. This time, the government responded to the attacks by projecting the
cartoons on public buildings, while President Emmanuel Macron declared Islam is
“in crisis” and promised to stamp out “Islamist separatism” in France.
A Palestinian woman walks
past an anti-French President Emmanuel Macron mural painted by an artist to
protest against the publications of a cartoon of Prophet Mohammad in France and
Macron's comments, in Gaza City, October 28, 2020. [Mohammed Salem/Reuters]
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Earlier in
September, I had argued in an op-ed that it should be possible to condemn
Muslims who kill people over the caricatures of the prophet, while also
recognising they are meant to display epistemic mastery over Muslims, an
already vulnerable minority in France and in Europe. I had also questioned that
the insatiable need to keep on recycling such images is indeed an exercise in
free speech.
Some
critics read my essay as condoning murder by Muslims and condemning or failing
to understand the concept of free speech. So, in the following lines, I will
address two interrelated issues: How Muslims come to a defence of free speech
and Macron’s deceitful reference to “Islamic separatism”.
Free speech
is predicated on the principle that people have the right to profess their
ideas and beliefs without fear of retribution. However, while the concept of
free speech is clearly secular, modern, and Western, this principle itself is
not. The Quran also affirms people’s right to believe in and to profess
different truths without forcing them on others. It also cautions restraint in
the face of abuse, unbelief, and verbal attacks, and forbids scorning another
religion’s deity. The Quran comes to these positions because it promotes
religious and racial diversity.
The
revelation describes diversity as a sign of divine grace. Some verses say that
among God’s “wonders is … the diversity of your tongues and colours: for in
this, behold, there are messages indeed for all who are possessed of [innate]
knowledge” (30:22). Other verses clarify that “to each among [us, God has]
prescribed a Law and an open way. If God had so willed [God] would have made
you a single people” (5:48). Instead, even though God created us from the same self
(nafs), God also made us into different “nations and tribes, so that [we] might
come to know one another”. The best among us, the Quran says, is not a specific
group but “the one who is most deeply conscious of [God]” (49:13).
Of course,
differences can only enable mutual understanding if people are willing to be
civil and forbearing in dealing with others. To this end, the Quran repeatedly
warns Muslims not to argue with critics other than “in the most kindly manner”,
and to respond to attacks “only to the extent of the attack levelled against
[us]” and “to bear yourselves with patience is indeed far better” (16:125-128).
It also
forbids Muslims to mock other people’s gods lest they retaliate by mocking
ours. But, if they do, the Quran does not authorise us to harm them, nor does
it proscribe punishments for disbelief, apostasy or blasphemy. In fact, the
Arabic word for blasphemy, tajdif, is missing from the Quran. It is important
to note here that blasphemy laws in some Muslim countries were imported from
Europe during or after colonialism.
If Muslims
enter into discussions with “followers of earlier revelation” – Jews and
Christians – the Quran advises us to assure them that we believe in what “has
been bestowed from on high upon us, as well as that which has been bestowed
upon you: for our God and your God is one and the same” (29:46).
And if
non-believers pressure or attack us, we could follow the Quran’s advice to the
prophet: “Say: ‘O ye that reject faith, I worship not that which ye worship.
And, I will not worship that which ye have been wont to worship. Nor will ye
worship that which I worship. To you be your Way, and to me mine’” (109: 1-6).
Regrettably,
though, such teachings are not in evidence among Muslims and there are many
complex reasons for why people read scriptures the way they do. One is that the
practice of Islam itself has become politicised. This is especially so in
Europe where Muslim minorities feel besieged and where, as a consequence,
practising Islam has been reduced to a defensive political and/or military
stance against Europeans. Muslims, of course, have been in Europe since they
conquered Spain in the eighth century but their conquest never bred this “type
of Islam”.
Paradoxically,
the biggest casualty of this reduction of the religion to politics of
resistance has been Islam itself, in particular, the Quran’s ethics of
forbearance, acceptance and mutuality. The historical context for this form of
politicisation is European colonialism, which also accounts for the presence of
Muslims from Europe’s former colonies in the “home” country these days.
If, for
instance, Algerians are in France today, it is because France was once in
Algeria. Not just that, but France was/is also responsible for the deaths of
more than one million Algerians during its rule. And this is just its record in
one former Muslim-majority colony.
However,
since the French seems to have buried this sordid and criminal history, one
cannot point out that France is continuing to victimise people whom it has
already victimised in the past, without being accused of condoning violence by
Muslims.
Hatred for
Islam in the country does not seem to be just a right-wing phenomenon. It is
underwritten by its exceptional and intractably fundamentalist form of
secularism, laïcité. Other secular countries provide for the freedom of
religious expression by remaining neutral to religion. But, not France, whose
brand of secularism is quintessentially ethnonationalistic and hostile to
Islam; it even mandates how Muslim women should dress in public, just like some
Muslim states do.
This
institutionalised bias against Muslims has ghettoised them, which is why, for
Muslims, and Black people, France is very much an apartheid colonial state.
Thus, when a French Muslim commits a crime, the state treats the individual not
as a citizen but as an “Islamist”, an epithet that signifies collective guilt
and justifies collective punishment. To be a French Muslim today is, therefore,
to bear the “mark of the plural”, to quote Jewish Tunisian intellectual Albert
Memmi, who observed the tendency of the French colonisers to view the Tunisians
as a faceless and “anonymous collectivity”.
If it is
separatism Macron worries about, he could start by dismantling the
laïcité/state-created apartheid. Instead, he behaves like the old French
colonisers, about whom Memmi wrote: “The eulogizing of oneself and one’s
fellows, the repeated, even earnest, affirmation of the excellence of one’s
ways and institutions, one’s cultural and technical superiority do not erase the
fundamental condemnation which every colonialist carries in his heart.”
If there is
one lesson Macron could learn from France’s colonialist past, it is that “if
colonization destroys the colonized, it also rots the colonizer.”
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Asma Barlas is a retired professor of politics
in New York.
Original Headline: On freedom of speech and
‘Islamist separatism’
Source: The Al-Jazeera
URL: https://newageislam.com/islamic-ideology/is-islam-really-free-speech/d/123449
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