In the Wake of Killings in France, Some Questions to Fellow Muslims
By Arshad Alam, New Age Islam
31 October
2020
A faith
system, which has given succour to millions in the last 1400 years, is today
held hostage by a set of cartoons. In the wake of beheadings and murders in the
name of Islam, several Muslim opinions, both in the social media and in the
form of popular articles, have raised more questions than they have answered.
Some of these opinions are clearly conservative voices, but others see
themselves as moderates and liberals, and yet there is a disturbing similarity
in their articulation. It is high time that we, as Muslims, ask some questions
about our religion. This article, in teasing out certain common refrains across
Muslim articulations, is a small attempt in that direction.
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This is not
about Islam: One of the common refrains is that the beheadings and murders have
nothing to do with Islam. The onus, in this narrative, shifts to the individual
transgressor who is said to have committed an act of violence due to his own
‘motivations’ and a failure to ‘correctly’ understand Islam. We tell ourselves
that Islam is essentially a religion of peace and hence it does not sanction or
endorse such killings. This nonsense has been repeated so many times that it
has really lost any value whatsoever. And despite the routinisation of this
nonsense, our ‘religion of peace’ has failed to stop such killings in its name.
The trouble is our refusal to see that no religion, including Islam, is about
peace or war; they are fundamentally a set of commands.
All
religions have peace and conflict inherent in them. It really depends on the
followers of the religion to interpret it in such a way that it becomes a
vehicle of permanent peace. So far, there has been no effort in this direction
in Islam. As regards Islam being inherently peaceful, it flies in the face of
its own history. Islam (like many other religious ideologies) is implicated in
the killing and maiming of millions. Most of such killings have even been
glorified. We need to ask ourselves whether we can absolve Islam of such
crimes. Why should we shy away from the fact that Islam can motivate people to
kill? There is no other way of looking at the recent killings other than to
link them to an understanding of Islam which teaches its followers to avenge
any perceived insult to the Prophet.
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Blasphemy, Islam and Free Speech
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It is not
permitted in Islam to draw cartoons and ridicule the Prophet: Largely this is
true. Although in its early history, Muslims did use drawings of Muhammad as an
aid to ritual remembrance. But those drawings, which are still permitted in
Shia Islam, were not deemed offensive. So the question is not really about
drawing of cartoons but what is deemed offensive in the eyes of Muslims. The
real question is whether Islam would allow the satirizing and lampooning of its
Prophet. The unequivocal answer is no, it would not. However, we as Muslims are
making a mistake because these caricatures were not made in Muslim countries or
by Muslims. They were made in France which is certainly not a Muslim country.
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We need to
ask ourselves why a secular country will abide by the legal and moral
expectations of Islam. Do Muslim countries show any tolerance to secular points
of view? If that was the case, then why did the Saudis punish Raif Badawi and
why did the lovers of the Prophet kill secular bloggers in Bangladesh? We must
remember that France is a country with a deep history of anti-clerical
movement. Satire and the freedom to express a point of view without any
inhibition, including the critique of established religions, is so important
that it is almost the founding myth of the French republic. Giving up on
religious critique is for the French what for Muslims would be akin to giving
up their love for the Prophet. Why is it so hard for us to understand that
there are cultures in this world whose assumptions about humanity can be different
from theirs?
This is
nothing but Islamophobia: Nonsense.
Anything that is even mildly critical of Islam and its practices is being
dubbed Islamophobia. When the Runnymede Trust would have used the terminology,
it would never have thought that it would be used to silence all criticisms of
a way of thinking, parts of which do not gel with contemporary times. We, as
Muslims, will do well to remember that anyone critical of Islam is not an
Islamophobe and any criticism of Islam does not qualify as Islamophobia.
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Certainly
there is an issue of racism in Europe but then it is also an issue in much of
the Arab world. Even those who went to join the ISIS recalled that they were
deemed fit only to clean the toilets just because they were Indian Muslims.
However, one hardly comes across any criticism of Arab racism within much of
Muslim writing. Why such singular focus on Europe when these issues are rife
within the community itself?
Nemesis of
French colonialism: Really? And beheading someone is the way in which we demand
that the French confront its colonial past? Is beheading the way to tell them
that they oppressed Muslim countries like Algeria and Mali? But we have been
mostly silent over what the French recently did in Libya. We have not made any
demands that the French apologise for their excesses in Algeria.
We have not
said anything against the skewed monetary policy which the French have with
former North African colonies, designed to keep them in perpetual debt? Where
is our angst, why are there no Muslim protests over these issues? It appears
that we are really not concerned about issues which define the asymmetry of
power between the west and the Muslim world. Rather our reason for recalling
the French colonial past is just another excuse to justify such killings in the
name of Islam.
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It appears
that we are not even concerned about the plight of fellow Muslims. How do we
explain ourselves that while our so-called leaders have spoken about ‘French
madness’, they have chosen to remain silent on what the Chinese are doing to
Muslims? There is now ample documentation to prove that China is waging a war
not just on Muslims but on Islam itself. Mosques have been bulldozed, shrines
destroyed and Islam itself has been called a disease. Certainly, one can
understand why Pakistan and Imran Khan cannot utter a single condemnation of
China, dependent, as it is, on Chinese economic and strategic support. But why
are our Ulama, the real fiery red-eyed ones, silent about it? How much
influence and leverage does China have in the Muslim world that it has managed
to buy the silence of Muslim religious leaders the world over?
Large
numbers of Muslims do not support such violence in the name of Islam: We know
that the opposite is true. Granted that large numbers of Muslims are too busy
worrying about daily issues of survival. However, when we see the same large
numbers of Muslims rallying in Bangladesh and demanding that Shias be declared
as Kafirs in Pakistan, then how do we understand it? Till the time we do not
face the truth, we can never discuss such events dispassionately. And the truth
is that such acts have widespread support within Muslims. Even enlightened
‘modernists’ like Muhammad Iqbal supported such killings.
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If we
recall the Rangila Rasool
controversy in colonial India, Iqbal showered praises on Ilmuddin, the killer
of Rajpal, who had published a disparaging pamphlet on the Prophet. During his
funeral, Iqbal eulogised the murderer, arguing that his whole corpus of work is
nothing when compared to the love of Prophet displayed by the carpenter
Ilmuddin. If our intellectuals, who are supposed to chart new courses for the
community, take us back to medieval morality, then what can be expected from the
common folk? The average Muslims believe what the religious leaders tell them.
In all such demonstrations, the prime slogan is to kill those who dishonour the
Prophet. We only delude ourselves when we say that Muslims do not support such
acts.
The Prophet
would have responded differently. May be. May be not. Our own theology tells us
that on certain occasions, the Prophet did in fact sanction the killings of
those who had insulted him. It is important to reiterate that most of those
killed were poets, the intellectuals of their time. On other occasions, he is
said to have looked the other way. The way our Islamic theology has developed,
we have justified such killings in our religious texts. Stating otherwise would
simply be deceiving the wider world and ourselves that such commands are not
part of our theology. Till the time we do not question these texts and state
unequivocally that they should no longer be applicable, nothing good is going
to come by guessing what the Prophet would have done. Unfortunately, we have
created such an intolerant system for ourselves that anyone who asks for such
revision is either killed or forced to go on exile.
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Also Read:
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Broken
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As Muslims,
we must take some responsibility for the toxic system that we have created.
Blaming the Jews, the French, the British, Islamophobia or colonialism is not
going to help. Let us grant some agency to ourselves to accept that we have
brought this upon ourselves, and now it has started affecting others too. It is
only this recognition of our own complicity that will impel us to change the
system.
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Arshad Alam is a NewAgeIslam.com
columnist.
URL: https://newageislam.com/islamic-society/in-wake-killings-france,-some/d/123336
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