THE brutal murders in Paris on Jan 7 at the office of the weekly Charlie Hebdo received universal and deserved condemnation. They have fanned Islamophobia which was on the rise in Europe.

People recalled the Madrid train bombings in 2004, the London bomb blasts, the siege at a cafe in Sydney, the attack on a Jewish museum in Brussels and a gunman’s shooting spree in the parliament building in Ottawa.

Also read: Price of free speech

What do these crimes signify and portend for the future? The weekly’s record was also recalled without minimising the gravity of the crimes. In 2006 it republished the offensive cartoons printed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands–Posten.

Even The Economist called them “frankly insulting, particularly those that pictured the … Prophet [PBUH]…”.

Moderates on both sides must engage in an honest dialogue.

In 2011, the French weekly brought out an issue which it renamed as ‘Charia Hebdo’ in a reference to the Sharia and featured controversial images. Its top editor Stephane Charbonnier said that his cartoonists would keep drawing such cartoons until Muslim beliefs were “just as banal as Catholicism”.

Now, for many, its kind of writings will acquire respectability as exercises of the right to free speech. Muslim outrage will also grow with consequences hard to predict. Both can and must be arrested, but that can be accomplished only by moderates on both sides of the divide engaging in an honest dialogue.

An American cartoonist Jacob Canfield holds that the weekly’s “white editorial staff” members were not simply free-speech martyrs but deliberate peddlers of “a certain, virulently racist brand of French xenophobia”.

He warned: “In the wake of a really horrible attack on free speech, it is important that we don’t blindly disseminate super-racist material.”

Fortunately, there are Muslim scholars in Europe and in the US who, while denouncing the crimes committed in the name of Islam, establish that they do not represent Islam or the Muslims. One of them is Prof Mouhanad Khorchide at the University of Munster in Germany. According to the New York Times, “his courses are intended to groom some of the thousands of teachers needed as Germany’s 16 states gradually shift to teaching Islam in primary and eventually secondary schools…”.

His thesis is akin to Iqbal’s about the closure of the gates of ijtehad. “Since the ninth century the spirit of the Muslim world has been restrictive.” He boldly states the challenge Muslims face in confronting the so-called jihadists. “It is too simple to say ‘No, no, that has nothing to do with Islam’.” He is hopeful of change. “More and more Muslims are being enlightened about their own faith. I think that will lead to a changed picture of Islam.”

This very task was begun by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan in our subcontinent and, even more boldly, by his colleague Maulvi Chiragh Ali with his seminal but still neglected work A Critical Exposition of the Popular ‘Jihad’ (1885). But, as Iqbal wrote to Akbar Shah Mujibabadi the Khilafat movement arrested the liberal trend. He had to withhold his essay on ijtehad. “In these days, particularly in India, one must move with great circumspection.”

The situation did not improve after independence. The works of liberal scholars like the South African Farid Esack, the Tunisian Mohamed Cherfi and such are little known; at least in India.

What Iqbal called the “reconstruction of religious thought in Islam” is a task which must be urgently addressed. No one has a right to kill in the name of one who came to this world as a “mercy unto mankind”. This concerns the Muslim world.

Two other tasks face it in a dialogue with the West. The latter needs to be educated about the unique status of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in the Muslim psyche.

The late rector of Al Azhar University in Cairo, Sheikh Mustafa al-Maraghi, once told a bishop in Egypt, that “the commonest cause of offence, generally unwitting offence, given by Christians to Muslims, arose from their complete failure to understand the very high regard all Muslims have for the person of their Prophet”.

Annemarie Schimmel remarks that the sheikh’s plaint “hits the mark precisely. Misunderstanding of the role of the Prophet has been, and still is, one of the greatest obstacles to Christians’ appreciation of the Muslim interpretation of Islamic history and culture”.

French law was amended to give groups stronger protection against racist speech. An amendment in July 1972 to the Law of the Press of 1881 prohibits incitement to discrimination, hatred, or violence with regard to any person or group on account of race, nationality, or religion; it also makes group defamation on racial and religious grounds a crime.

There is no absolute right to free speech in France or in any other democracy. Attacks on the Prophet were intended to humiliate Muslims and violate the law. But violence is no answer to this; dialogue alone is.

The writer is an author and a lawyer in Mumbai.

Published in Dawn, January 17th, 2015

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