A tribute at the Place de la
République, in Paris, to victims killed during the attack at Charlie Hebdo.
The
murders in Paris are not a result of France’s failure to assimilate two
generations of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies. They’re not about
French military action against the Islamic State in the Middle East, or the
American invasion of Iraq before that. They’re not part of some general wave of
nihilistic violence in the economically depressed, socially atomized, morally
hollow West—the Paris version of Newtown or Oslo. Least of all should they be
“understood” as reactions to disrespect for religion on the part of
irresponsible cartoonists.
They are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to
achieve power through terror for decades. It’s the same ideology that sent
Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a death sentence for writing a
novel, then killed his Japanese translator and tried to kill his Italian
translator and Norwegian publisher. The ideology that murdered three thousand
people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The one that butchered Theo van Gogh in
the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for making a film. The one that has brought
mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq. That
massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in
Peshawar last month. That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young
ones, that hardly anyone pays attention.
Because the
ideology is the product of a major world religion, a lot of painstaking pretzel
logic goes into trying to explain what the violence does, or doesn’t, have to
do with Islam. Some well-meaning people tiptoe around the Islamic connection,
claiming that the carnage has nothing to do with faith, or that Islam is a
religion of peace, or that, at most, the violence represents a “distortion” of
a great religion. (After suicide bombings in Baghdad, I grew used to hearing
Iraqis say, “No Muslim would do this.”) Others want to lay the blame entirely
on the theological content of Islam, as if other religions are more inherently
peaceful—a notion belied by history as well as scripture.
A religion is
not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents.
Islam today includes a substantial minority of believers who countenance, if
they don’t actually carry out, a degree of violence in the application of their
convictions that is currently unique. Charlie Hebdo had been
nondenominational in its satire, sticking its finger into the sensitivities of
Jews and Christians, too—but only Muslims responded with threats and acts of
terrorism. For some believers, the violence serves a will to absolute power in
the name of God, which is a form of totalitarianism called Islamism—politics as
religion, religion as politics. “Allahu Akbar!” the killers shouted in
the street outside Charlie Hebdo. They, at any rate, know what they’re
about.
These thoughts
don’t offer a guide to mitigating the astonishing surge in Islamist killing
around the world. Rage and condemnation don’t do the job, nor is it helpful to
alienate the millions of Muslims who dislike what’s being done in the name of
their religion. Many of them immediately condemned the attack on Charlie
Hebdo, in tones of anguish particular to those whose deepest beliefs have
been tainted. The answer always has to be careful, thoughtful, and tailored to
particular circumstances. In France, it will need to include a renewed debate
about how the republic can prevent more of its young Muslim citizens from
giving up their minds to a murderous ideology—how more of them might come to
consider Mustapha Ourrad, a Charlie Hebdo copy editor of Algerian
descent who was among the victims, a hero. In other places, the responses have
to be different, with higher levels of counter-violence.
But the murders
in Paris were so specific and so brazen as to make their meaning quite clear.
The cartoonists died for an idea. The killers are soldiers in a war against
freedom of thought and speech, against tolerance, pluralism, and the right to
offend—against everything decent in a democratic society. So we must all try to
be Charlie, not just today but every day.
The
New Yorker
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