The reasons for being Charlie are varying to a great deal and it is
not at all my intent to condemn all of them. The terrorist attacks in
Paris have been a huge and ghastly crime, for which there is no
excuse and only condemnation and this is the motive for many people,
to suddenly discover that they are Charlie. However, there is a
tendency in the recent "Je suis Charlie" discourse which I
find worrying and which I want to briefly address in this post.
The slogan "Je suis Charlie" is often waved as a kind of
symbolic banner for freedom of speech. "We Westerners will never
give up our freedom of speech, those damn muslims will never make us
silent and stop us from doing caricatures of Mohammed or whoever. Now
more than ever it is our duty to print as many caricatures of
Mohammed to show that we are not giving in to fear and terror. We
will defend our long fought for right for free speech and
express-ability, our gem of occidental culture" seems to be the
outline of this kind of thinking.
Following this train of thought, newspapers headline with "satire
is allowed to do anything" and urge for a fight against
muslim terror and for our values, which we are allegedly defending
with posting more caricatures of Mohammed. This leads to conclusions
like calling it a "victory of
fear" when the New York Times decides to not print all of
Charlie Hebdo's latest post-assault edition.
But why should this decision of one
of the world's leading newspapers be one of fear? It could just as
well be one of decency - decency and sensibility towards the feelings
of others. Because what we seem to be forgetting in all this heated
debate is that only because we are in theory allowed
to say everything, we are not urged to do it. For example: we do not
make fun of homosexuals. Neither do we make fun of handicapped
people, of people with scars in the faces or with other
disfigurement. We do not laugh out at a person who is especially
small or tall, who has a weird voice or some other things which we
might be in theory be
able to make a joke about, neither have I ever seen a caricature of a
person in a wheelchair that is unable to enter a bus or descend a
staircase. Why is that?
Because there are things that hurt people and its a part of basic
human decency and respect that we do not make fun of things that hurt
other people. It is a fact that it hurts most muslim people if we
make fun or produce a caricature of Mohammed, but in this matter we
seem to have a blind spot in our decency. When it comes to
caricatures of Mohammed we seem to see it as an integral part of the
pillars of our Western Enlightenment, that we may print as many of
them as possible and celebrate those who have produced some as some
sort of semi-heros.
It seems to me that the West - and especially Europe - has some
problem in accepting that a) secularism, freedom of speech and
laicism is a cultural product of the West, and not a universal
achievement of humanity and b) that other cultures have different
ways of dealing with religion.
b) Western - especially European -
culture has lost most of religiousness in the last 500 years. For
about two centuries it is more and more normal to be an atheist /
agnostic and to insult and fight the church, the Vatican and
christianity in general with all means of provocation at hand. It is
worth remembering that most other cultures have never developed such
a strong notion of anti-religiousness and atheism as the former
Christian one. For example: there is hardly no radical critique of
Islam within the muslim world. The huge majority of Muslim reformers
do not reject Islam entirely, but seek reform within
Islam (like historical reading of the Qur’an and so on). What has
always deeply fascinated me, when I was in a Muslim country like
Morocco or Indonesia is to see, how one religion can actually work.
Despite all the personal problems I might
have with the religion, I still couldn't stop feeling awe about how
religion can unite a people - how it is a common denominator for one
society, holding it together in some completely alien way for a
modern Westerner like me. Although I am not at all for any religious
hegemony and am happy that Christianity's collapsed in Europe, it was
very interesting to me to see, how religion can still me some kind of
master narration.
a) Secularism has come into existence in a culture which has
witnessed the death of god and is linked with Christian metaphysics
of emancipation, which are not universal but something very
occidental. So if we claim that secularism and freedom of speech
should be applicable throughout the world, we act - in a very weird
way - in the same manner as Christian imperialists have acted
centuries ago: we think that our world view and its internal value
are something universal for all humanity and that it is our duty to
bring it to all of the world. In acting so we are still more
Christian than we would like to think: we still have the same notion
of universality which has led Columbus and his successors to enslave
the most of the non-European world. We mistake our local
perspectivism for a global universalism and demand it to be applied
all over the world. We demand our right to do a caricature of whoever
because it is a part of our right, which we have long fought for.
This wrong notion of universality
makes us blind and insensitive towards general decency and respect
for the feelings of others. Especially when it comes to a culture
like the Muslim one, which we find a bit weird, for it has a
religious system, which seems to be working - for no reason that our
Western understanding can fathom. Just because it is normal for us to
make fun of Christian religion and say whatever we want to about it,
we must not apply the same standards to the one of Islam - for it has
not developed the same degree of internal criticism as Christianity
did.
Added to this, it bears a weird cynicism if we indulge into this
special liking in making fun of Islam, for it is - within our context
- the religion the oppressed. Not only has "the West"
systematically oppressed, exploited and repeatedly fucked over many Muslim countries (like Algeria, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan to
just name a few of the more popular examples), but also within the
West is the percentage of Muslim people in the lower class
significantly high. So if we insult muslim people, we do not target a
rich Bourgeoisie like we might have done with Christianity a century
ago, but we frequently hit the ones we already oppress. This dark
cynicism leads to feelings of hatred which become - from this
perspective - more understandable and also remind of us the fact,
that the entire Parisian assault is not an offspring of a religious
problem, but of a social and historical one (
very well outlines by Al-Jazeera here). Surprisingly it didn't get much coverage that even
the leader of Hezbollah - a Muslim grouping which you really can't
call moderate - said
that assaults like the Parisian one and Muslim extremism in general hurt Islam much more than any caricature of Mohammed would ever do.
To summarize: What is primarily at
stake in this entire debate is not the West's freedom of speech, but
its ability for cultural empathy, understanding and decency. We are
taking the completely wrong steps if we think, that we are now urged
to print Mohammed caricatures more than ever before - this panic
reaction makes us insensitive towards the real problem and would
result in an hardening of fronts, which will even increase the
tensions which already have caused the terrible assaults.
Paradoxically, those wrong steps
actually lead us to scarifying our freedom of speech ourselves, since
the discussion about increased surveillance has already started (let
us please not forget this: all the three shooters of the
Parisian assaults have been on the terrorist's surveillance list of
almost every Western secret service. So: the surveillance DID already
work sufficiently revealing at the same time how inefficient it
actually is). I am not the first to say that exactly this reaction
gives in to terrorism by allowing it to work internally within our
system, by spreading fear and potentially causing a real damage to
our democratic, secular world and its freedom of speech.
So instead of fighting for
freedom of speech and Western values, let's focus on the values
themselves and become more decent, more understanding, more open
minded. Let's not give in to terrorism and self-sacrifice our values,
but lets be stronger than those and lets build up resistance to the
inner mechanisms of terror.
