The aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo: An age-old war for hearts and minds
IN THE aftermath of the multiple murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, thousands of French people assembled in a special location in Paris — Place de la République, wherein stands the statue of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic.
The large numbers who gathered there were manifesting their support for freedom of expression, a pillar of democracy.
These are defining characteristics of a republic, along with freedom of religion. But what a republic also does is ensure its legislature (to quote the US constitution) “shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion”.
In other words, the state pointedly does not endow any religion with privileged status. Real difficulties arise whenever a privileged status is claimed for a religious text, book, or religious leader, especially in secular societies.
This becomes especially problematic when adherents of a faith, members of a Church, or followers of a religious leader insist on privileged status for them, above all others.
When the privilege being claimed is inflated to such an extent as to confer authority and certain immunities on a religion or its leader, then conditions of conflict are created.
Such a privileged claim was made in 1870 when the First Vatican Council declared the pope to be infallible — a move that caused alarm and consternation in some European capitals where statesmen became concerned that a Church with an infallible leader might compromise the authority of the civil powers.
In London, for instance, WE Gladstone, who had become British prime minister in 1868 (and who disestablished the Church of Ireland in 1869), published a pamphlet entitled A Threat to the Integrity of Civil Allegiance, stating: “England is entitled to ask, and to know, in what way the obedience required by the pope and the Council of the Vatican is to be reconciled with the integrity of civil allegiance?”
Gladstone was writing about a Pope — Pius IX — who, in December 1864, had published an encyclical entitled Quanta Cura, to which a “Syllabus of Errors” was attached that denounced freedom of the press, free speech, and freedom of conscience.
The document also rejected the view that the pope “can or should reconcile himself to, or agree with, progress, liberalism, and modern civilisation”.
This was a pope speaking in the middle of the 19th century, but the syllabus he published could in many respects stand today as an Islamic mission statement, just by substituting the word “Islam” for “Pope”, given that mainstream Islam resolutely rejects the notion that it can or should reconcile itself to, or agree with, progress, liberalism, and modern civilisation.
Islam is deeply rooted in the 7th century when its holy book, the Quran, was directly revealed by Allah (God) to his prophet Muhammad, the latter coming to be regarded as the last Prophet. The Quran, it is believed by Muslims, is the literal word of God. The scriptures are not merely inspired but revealed by Allah to the Prophet Muhammad.
So Islam of its very nature is closed off from any modernising process. Indeed, modernity itself is widely perceived throughout the Islamic world as an “enemy”, something deeply troubling and hostile to its beliefs and precepts.
Gladstone may have been justifiably alarmed at the anti-liberalism of Pius IX, but had he lived he would no doubt have welcomed the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), and especially its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World and its Declaration on Religious Liberty, with their endorsement of freedom of conscience and freedom of expression.
The council was committed by Pope John XXIII to a process of aggiornamento — “a bringing up to date”. Islam has never had any such updating, and never will. It’s a closed system. That’s the problem. It has never experienced a Reformation or a Second Vatican Council. It can never initiate a process of aggiornamento.
And it is a system that has no place for the concept of the separation of church and state, the separation of religion and politics. The notion that Islam should accommodate itself to the modern world is entirely alien to its tradition. And this is not just true of Islamist extremists; it is central to mainstream Islam.
The problem of the relationship between religion and the State is a very old one, and predates Christianity.
But at least it was recognised in the West that there were two separate spheres. Christ himself recognised this (though he did not settle the issue clearly) when he admonished the Pharisees to “Render to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s”.
In recognising the separate claims of Church and state, it is of course also recognised that, inevitably from time to time, these two spheres could come into conflict. In the Islamic world, no such conflict arises.
In countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Qatar, and Pakistan, ultimate authority resides in the Quran. There is no separate sphere in which Caesar can operate.
At a time when some scholars are urging the development of a “European Islam”, it is clear that insurmountable obstacles are presented by the fact of the three great monotheistic faiths, Islam alone admits to no separation between religion and politics. “Islam aims to control the state without being a subject of the state,” according to Roger Scruton, former professor of philosophy at Boston University and author of The West and the Rest.
In the aftermath of the murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the French daily Le Figaro said in an editorial that “this is war, but not a war with soldiers but with assassins of the dark”. It is a war that will not end anytime soon.
It will go on; the outrages in Paris will, sadly, not be the last, because this war is really a clash of cultures.
This is a war for hearts and minds. It has manifested itself in a very bloody way, especially since September 11, 2001, as a war against the West, with fanatical hatred directed by Islamist extremists against the West’s traditions, particularly since the Enlightenment, of democracy, modernity, freedom of expression, secularism, tolerance, and cultural and religious pluralism.
The West itself, it should be said, has contributed to that hatred. According to Jason Burke, author of al-Qaeda — The True Story of Radical Islam, a belief that the West has mounted a cultural assault against the Islamic world is a key external cause of Islamic extremism.
“The perception that a belligerent West is set on the humiliation, division and eventual conquest of the Islamic world is as much a root cause of Muslim violence as relative poverty or government repression.”
The ruinous military misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, a terrible legacy of Bush and Blair, have bolstered that perception. Another source of festering grievance throughout the Arab world is the failure of the West to support the creation of a viable Palestinian state.
The war for hearts and minds is a war that cannot be won by B-52 bombers, tanks, and battalions of infantry. On Saturday, the main front-page headline in this newspaper said ‘AL-QAEDA’S REVENGE’. The story informed readers that al-Qaeda had directed the attack against Charlie Hebdo “as revenge for the honour of Islam’s Prophet”.
The problem for mainstream Islam is that the perpetrators of this outage claim the Quran as authority for their evil deeds. The real jihad (“struggle”) will be within Islam between the extremists (and their rich backers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar) and those (the overwhelming majority of Muslims across the globe) who insist the extremists’ ideology is a perversion of Islam.
Meanwhile, the idea that in a modern democracy, Islam — and Islam alone — should be off-limits to satire is preposterous. It must now be hoped that, with a referendum promised later this year on same-sex marriage, the Government will move to also hold a referendum with this to remove blasphemy from the Constitution.
It is a medieval concept and should no longer have any legally binding status.
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