Mani Shankar Aiyar on Charlie Hebdon

Courtesy NDTV.com

I was as horrified as you to hear of 12 lives being lost in the armed assault on a Paris satirical weekly for their repeatedly sneering at the Prophet of Islam (PBUH) and running cartoons denigrating him and the religion he has brought to hundreds of millions of families the world over. That such horror at terrorism was not just my reaction as a non-Muslim to the Paris outrage, but widely shared by Muslims too was brought home to me by a statement issued by a collegium of Imams and preachers of Bahrain who said: "Violence and extremism have always been - and still are - the biggest enemies of Islam, and contravene its teachings, tolerance and genuine precepts. All countries should take unified stances against terrorism. We call for the need to devise a unified international strategy to combat its forms and manifestation everywhere." 

That precisely reflects the position taken by the Dar-ul-Uloom. It precisely reflects my own personal position. To go by the Congress President's reaction, it also reflects my party's position: "The Congress President, Smt Sonia Gandhi, has condemned the cowardly and dastardly terror attack on Media in Paris. Shocked at the audacity of the gruesome act, Smt Gandhi said that extremism and intolerance will never be able to curb freedom of expression and will only result in perpetuation of violence."
 
What then is the controversy about? It is about my describing the incident as a "backlash" to the War on Terrorism. That is not a justification of terrorism. It is an explanation. The distinction is important. I condemn terrorism. I do not commend it. If, however, war is declared on terrorists, it is stupid to imagine that the terrorists will take it lying down; inevitably they will hit back - that is a consequence we have to be prepared for. 

Charlie Hebdo, the satirical weekly, was so obviously on the hit list that it was virtually inviting a reaction week after week. The threat to the Editor was so palpable that he had been personally provided with just about the highest level of security that France could offer. Why the magazine's office was not protected with an adequate posse of armed security is being investigated.  But it also reflects the mind-set that thinks the West can mount a war and get away with little or no loss to themselves. The West is so militarily powerful and so technologically superior that it is able to unleash an unequal war in which their resources in money and machines cannot be matched even remotely by those whom they are combating.
 
Therefore, terrorists resort to an asymmetrical response. They target non-combatants by way of avenging themselves on those whose war machines kill - daily - scores, hundreds, even thousands of the non-combatants in whose midst the terrorists live and shield themselves.
 
A dead innocent is a dead innocent. Terrorists deliberately target the innocent. The War on Terrorism does not target innocents. It kills them indiscriminately by way of what is delicately called "collateral damage". But the loved ones and the community are equally affected - whether the killing is deliberate or incidental. The rage is the same. The urge to revenge is the same. For, as Gandhi said - and I quoted him to the TV agency - "Violence begets violence".
 
The West is near perfecting the art of killing their enemies (plus "collateral damage") without risking their own lives. When eight American body bags returned from Somalia, Bill Clinton immediately called off the operation "Black Hawk Down". When eight Pathan bodies of helpless mothers, hapless children, and innocent by-standers lie in the midst of the carnage wrought by a Drone attack, the wailing families do not react differently. They seek justice, each in his or her own way. The Drone wins out because even if it is downed, as it is unmanned, no American family is left with a tear in its eye. When terrorists attack, they know they are going to be killed - or kill themselves. They take the vicious consequences of their vicious action. The Drone just flies away - to come back another day.
 
Till even the First World War, war was fought on the terrain of war - the battle-field. Those who died or got injured were soldiers. 

Civilians only accidentally got in the way. That changed when the Germans started assassinating mayors of towns where snipers shot at German soldiers. It horrified the world and contributed more to Britain coming in against Germany than perhaps any other single action. Not even into the Thirties had men been desensitized to the atrocity of civilian beings killed in armed attack. Picasso earned eternal fame because his painting captured and symbolized the horror experienced by all civilized people at the aerial bombing of the Spanish village of Guernica.
 
But by the Second World War, these niceties were abandoned. The terror opened by the Nazis through their Blitzkrieg on England, followed by their merciless genocide of Jews in the East European countries they occupied, started the process of desensitizing the hitherto-unknown horror of innocents being mown to death. 

Stalingrad finally dulled sensitivities to the point where Churchill could order the bombing of Dresden and kill more innocents in a single night than all the terrorist attacks since 9/11 and after. 
Truman's atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki removed the final constraints on sparing non-combatants the terrible fate of the battle-field. Since then, it has been open house for those with the military means to do so.
 
I was posted as a young diplomat to Hanoi in the middle of the US-Vietnam war. Day after day, twice a day, US Air Force planes would pound the city without regard to civilian habitation or military target, shooting to death and severely injuring any living being - man, woman or child - they could fit into their sights. Uncounted millions died. Many were non-combatant civilians. A young British colleague said to me that American U-2s flying at such speed that they could cross the country in 10 minutes at a height of 60,000 feet could take a photograph of the saucer I held in my hand that would be more accurate than my naked eye could see. "How," he asked, "do you think these guys on bicycles will ever drive them out?" The bicyclists did; they won. But only after millions of civilians had been slaughtered. 
 
I condemn what happened in Paris with all the strength in my voice. It was dreadful. But I regard all forms of terrorism, especially by armed force that takes the lives of non-combatants as equally - perhaps even more -  terrible. That is why my heart bleeds when 1,500 Palestinians are killed in their homes by bombs rained on them from the skies because they have the temerity to ask for the right to return to their homeland. The Modi government had little or nothing to say about that outrage. It is this lack of balance in the BJP's approach to terrorism that fills me with dread and despair.
 
Most of us Indians, except the fringe lunatics of the BJP-RSS-Sangh Parivar, have learned millennia ago to live with diversity, indeed to celebrate our diversity, for out of it is forged our unity as a nation. 

For the West, however, diversity is a totally new experience. They have been compelled for economic reasons to import millions of Third World labourers, and since an arc of Arab countries lies immediately south of France on the other littoral of the Mediterranean, most of France's imported labour comprises Muslims from the Maghreb. France wants them to become Frenchmen as if the Arabs had fostered 1789 and never been subjected to colonial rule. The Arab Muslims wish to remain themselves, notwithstanding their having emigrated to France for the same economic reasons that have led to France and other Western countries importing them in such large numbers. Hence, stupid measures like insisting that no Muslim schoolchild in France may wear the hijab that her sisters wear in their home countries will result in a backlash.

Speaking power to satirical truth

Rajgopal Saikumar in The Hindu

A joke or laughter from a position of superiority over other people is unworthy of moral support, although it may obtain legal protection

Charlie Hebdo was brutally attacked for its dark sketches of humour; for apparently talking ‘satire to power.’ French President Francois Hollande called the attacks an assault on “the expression of freedom,” and liberal democracies globally have shown their support to protectthis freedom. Cartoonists in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo sketched the incongruity of a pencil and a gun. But what explains this incongruity? What is it about satirical humour that can invite such anger or can justify its protection, even through so-called “legitimate” state violence?

Novelist Salman Rushdie, a victim/perpetrator of such violence, calls this “art of satire” a “force of liberty against tyranny.” Spanish painter Francisco Goya was at odds with Fernando VII for the cartoons that he sketched, and it was Honore Daumier’s caricatures of King Louise-Philippe and the French legislature that landed him in prison. Before I continue, here are two disclaimers: first, interrogating the value of humour or satire does not in any way imply justifying the attack and the killings, for these are separate categories. Second, several of the anti-Islamic cartoons of Charlie Hebdo are not really ‘satires’ in the strict sense, for they seem to lack the complexity and the nuances implicit in the genre.

A shared world

Understanding a joke presupposes a common social world; a shared intersubjective community. There need not be an agreement about the worth of the joke itself, but it presupposes the fact that a sense of humour requires a shared lifeworld and not an individualistic, solipsistic and atomised world. Humour is, therefore, highly local; it throws light on our situation, it tells us something about who we are, it brings back to consciousness the hidden and it familiarises the unspoken. Umberto Eco wrote an illuminating essay on something as trivial as eating peas with a fork in airline food — transforming the real and everyday into something surreal and unfamiliar. R.K. Laxman’s political cartoons, ‘The Common Man,’ used domestic, everyday images of a middle-class family to challenge mainstream politics. Although he mounts a successful challenge to politics, his portrayals of domesticity unknowingly reveal gendered relations within Indian homes, for instance, between the husband and wife. In a similar analogy, as the Marxist commentator Richard Seymour suggests, Charlie Hebdo may be mocking the extremists, but that mocking itself reveals a certain racist undertone.

The mechanism of humour, caricatures and satires is to distance us from the local and the familiar and transform it to the unfamiliar. This “distancing” helps us to better see the absurdity in our social conditions. English philosopher Simon Critchley uses religious metaphors to suggest that laughter has a “messianic” and a “redemptive power” because it can reveal a situation and also indicate how it might have changed. But the flip side of jokes and satires being highly context-specific and localised is that humour can often also be parochial, ridiculing outsiders and foreigners. Watching “Monty Python” now, three decades since it was made, I realise the parochial stereotyping that the film indulges in.

Is humour and this “art of satire” — in itself and inherently — worthy of protection as several are claiming it to be? Not necessarily. A joke or laughter from a position of superiority over other people considered inferior is unworthy of moral support, although it may obtain legal protection. The philosopher Jason Stanley pointed out that there is a difference in France between mocking the Pope and mocking Prophet Muhammad. “The Pope is the representative of the dominant traditional religion of the majority of French citizens. Prophet Muhammad is the revered figure of an oppressed minority. To mock the Pope is to thumb one’s nose at a genuine authority, an authority of majority. To mock Prophet Muhammad is to add insult to abuse.” This argument by Mr. Stanley is an instance of humour where the power relation is already precarious — embedded in a culture of white, Western supremacy. So the cartoon may not be speaking resistance to power, but may itself be embodied in power, ridiculing the powerless.

To be clear, India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Prime Minister Narendra Modi may show their support to France, but the Indian legal framework would most likely never tolerate such cartoons. Be it the Hicklin test in Ranjit Udeshi (1964) or the Community Standards test in Aveek Sarkar (2014), there is little doubt that the images would be held obscene under Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code by the Supreme Court (“…a book, pamphlet, paper, writing, drawing, painting, representation, figure or any other object, shall be deemed to be obscene if it is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest or if its effect…”). The threat of public disorder is etched deep in our judicial psyche, and the probability that Charlie Hebdo-styled art would receive protections under Article 19 of the Constitution (freedom of expression) is almost close to impossible. Does that mean India is less of a liberal democracy by doing this? The debate is fast becoming a “liberal democracy” versus “religious extremism” rupture, but it is not clear whether liberty has such a clear moral victory over these offended subjects of humour.

There is absolutely no justification for the brutal attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and solidarity with the publication is unconditional. The attempt here is to merely nuance the debates on the second aspect of this issue: the rhetoric of liberal, democratic free speech.

The notion of “power” is being ignored in our thinking about free speech in liberal democracies. Liberalism may encourage liberty and autonomy in speech and expression, but we are not abstract individuals freely expressing our thoughts in an ideal society. We are thrown into a shared and coexistent world where power relations obscure the suspicious neatness of liberalism.

Far too many Western Muslims speak of freedom as a sin whilst Muslims who have never known real freedom yearn – and die – for human rights

YASMIN ALIBHAI BROWN in The Independent

Sunday 11 January 2015

Ill with flu last week, I watched the events unfolding in Paris with dread, rage and disbelief – feelings that surge every time there is an Islamicist atrocity. To kill so many over line drawings or as an expression of religious zeal? What drives these fanatics? In normal circumstances, I would have been on TV and radio channels providing immediate responses, soundbite explanations. Bedbound, I had time to reflect more deeply on this carnage and the question of freedom: what it means, how precious it is and how fragile. That fundamental human impulse and right has now become one of the most volatile and divisive concepts in the world today.

Yes, we, the fortunate inhabitants of the West, are more free than those who live and die in the South and East, but some of the claims made by our absolutists are hypocritical as well as outlandish. Public discourse is expected to be within the bounds of decency and respect; language matters and the wrong word can incite high emotion.

Internalised caution in normal life is a good thing. Not good is the way the powerful control our right to know or speak. People are prosecuted for thought crimes; the BBC films on the monarchy have allegedly been blocked by the royal family; the Chilcot report on the Iraq war is still withheld and when it is finally released the full truth will be censored. I don’t see Index on Censorship kicking up a fuss about these serious attacks on free expression. State power in Europe and North America overrides the citizen’s right to know or speak. These things are never simply black and white or about them and us.

Things get even more complex when you think about freedom and Muslims. Muslims living in the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan, North Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia or Turkey have no freedom to say what they think about the political system or the faith. Turkey imprisons more journalists than any other nation. Iran is the second-worst country for journalists and bloggers. In Pakistan people are tortured for blasphemy – often false charges trumped up to keep people in line.

Last Friday in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Raif Badawi was dragged out of prison in shackles, brought in front of the mosque and flogged 50 times for “insulting Islam”. Imagine the scene: worshippers who had just finished praying to a merciful God then watched the merciless punishment. This will happen every week until he has been lashed a 1,000 times. He will also spend 10 long years in a Saudi prison. His body and mind will thus be shredded. Badawi, an activist, had started a website, the Liberal Saudi Network, and shared some of his perfectly reasonable views. For that he had to be punished so severely that no one would ever try to do the same again.

In Pakistan, Afghanistan, most central Asian states, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Libya, even “liberated” Iraq, people know they must not say what they think about their rulers or their imams, not even to neighbours or friends. The only choice is to conform and live, keep your boiling thoughts locked in your own head. Imagine the psychological consequences.

When, in 2010, the Arab Spring unexpectedly arrived, Muslims rejoiced, and thought they could at last speak freely and get proper democracies. I was in the Middle East in the most optimistic months. Spring turned to winter and even harsher restrictions were imposed everywhere. Now thousands of Muslims try to flee every day, to get to places where they can earn a living, be safe, most of all be liberated from oppression. Those people on boats who turn up on Europe’s shores want what the brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly had before they blasted it all away.  

Large numbers of Western Muslims are disturbed by the rights and liberties they have inherited and sometimes reject them. Meanwhile Muslims who have never known real freedom yearn for, indeed die to get those same liberties and human rights. That gap between Muslims who have and don’t want and those who crave and can’t have grows bigger all the time. For too many British Muslims, familiarity breeds contempt for freedom. They talk about it not as a priceless entitlement but a peril, out-of-control hedonism and lasciviousness – as a sin. I find that deplorable.

After my book Refusing the Veil came out last year, some female Muslim acquaintances organised a soiree for me to read from it and discuss its contents. These were reasonable, educated women. Here are some of the comments made:

“Why did you have to write this; who gave you permission?”

“Even to think these thoughts is wrong, and you go and publish them? If you were in a Muslim country you would be in jail.”

“If your mother was alive she would have slapped you for writing this.”

When I replied that my mother refused the veil when she was 22, the woman came back: “Then I feel sorry for you. She was the sinner and she made you one too.”

“OK I have not read the book because it will dirty my pure thoughts, but if you are a Muslim, you follow Islamic rules without question. Are you even a Muslim?”

Only two out of 14 women defended my right to write the book. But then said they could never challenge Islamic practices so openly.

What has led to this lethal closing of the Muslim mind? Third-generation Western Muslims are less liberated than were my mother’s generation in the Forties and Fifties. White women who convert are even more rule-bound and obedient. It just shows human history is not a straight road towards enlightenment.

Those of us who value freedom need to understand better what it means. Especially in a world which is both coalescing and splitting apart, where technology has unleashed hope and possibilities as well as limitless hate, where political and religious control is tightening. To seek to be free is a big responsibility. Too big and scary for some people, Western Muslims in particular. This is the debate that needs to open up now within Islam. Will it? No. And that’s our tragedy. 

French Have My Condolences, Not My Apology

By Rana Ayyub in ndtv.com

This is not an angry letter, and if you insist it is, feel free to say that, for we seem to have a global consensus on free speech in a long time.

A  friend remarked in good humor hours after the firing at the French satirical newspaper "Why yaar, you Muslims kill all the time?" It was a remark made in good humour, she suggested, just as my friends in Class 5 would ask me, presumably in similar fun ribbing spirit, before an Indo- Pak cricket match "So Pakistan today, na?"

For the longest time, I have evaded questions on Islam on official fora.

My faith is a personal matter and sacrosanct. Having said that, I consider myself a proud Muslim. I have taken the most bigoted comments on my work in my stride though most of my investigations seen through the prism of religion, judging by the comments posted on my pieces and the reactions I provoke in person from people who discuss my work.

My reportage on fake encounters has been dissected with clinical precision, generating fury and an interrogation of my credentials, while my investigations on tribals and Dalits, for which I have received prestigious awards, have largely gone unnoticed by my critics and friends alike. 

As and when ignorant assumptions about my faith have been raised, I have, with the little knowledge of Islam imparted to me, mostly by my father, tried to clarify the misconceptions. 

My father belonged to the progressive writers' movement. While his Communist friends would cherish their whisky and cigar at mushairas or get-togethers in the 70s, he would sneak into a room with dimmed lights, offer his namaaz and then return to the soiree to exchange his qalaam (couplet).

For him, his namaaz was a private and personal affair, just like his decision to kindly refuse the alcohol served at such mehfils.

While he would never touch alcohol, there was never an attempt to influence his friends and seniors alike with his beliefs - the group included Kaifi Azmi, Ali Sardar Jafri and Ahmed Faraz amongst other liberal writers. 

His Islam and Koran began with the word "iqra" (read/recite). It was for this reason that the son of a zamindar chose to spend a good part of his career, till he retired, teaching at a government school in Mumbai, as opposed to reaping the profits of his family business. A majority of his students were non-Muslims.

We, a family of six, stayed in a one-room kitchen modest apartment in Mumbai, situated next to an RSS karyalaya, whose members chose to spend most afternoons with my abba, their 'Masterji', discussing worldly affairs.

Abba was popular as the Masterji who would get students admitted to his school, give free tuitions and make frequent visits to the shakhadespite his ideological differences with the RSS. On Guru Poornima, his was the first wrist which had the red thread tied on it by the shakhahead.

Diagonally opposite to our housing society was an Ayyappa mandir loved by my siblings and me for the jaggery prasadam. On occasions that we didn't make it there, the pujaari would send it home on a banana leaf. During the annual Ayyappa pooja, all the plants from our garden would be packed off to the mandir, and mom would help them connect their water pipes to our kitchen.

Such was the joy of being a part of a cosmopolitan country like India. 

When I write this today, every word seethes with frustration. Because, my identity today appears to have value only as a terror apologist, a Muslim who stands up to bigotry. I have to frame a politically-correct response post every terror attack, some allegedly by members of the Muslim community, and others where the perpetrators were clearly misguided Islamic fanatics who stand in absolute contradiction to everything believers like me have ever stood for.

It baffles me when I am singled out for an apology. I wonder if my Tamil friends have ever been asked to apologise for the terror acts of the LTTE, for the suicide bombings by the Tamil Tigers, including the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

It baffles me when Brahmins in the country are not singled out when a family of Dalit women is raped and murdered in broad daylight in Khairlanji, and when the upper caste commits atrocities on Dalits across the country in the name of faith.

It baffles me that never is a Christian looked at with suspicion or anger over the attacks on abortion clinics, or the seemingly placid acceptance of a white who goes on a shooting spree of innocent students, or a Jew asked to apologize over the carnage of Palestinians. Is an American asked to apologize for innocent Afghans and Iraqis killed by the US Army in collateral damage?

Why do you sit in assumption over my morals and my essential humanity when you call me and ask me, "So what do you think about that attack?"

Yes, I do not quite enjoy when a hundred school kids in Peshawar are brutally slaughtered in the name of faith. And, if you think Islam teaches this brutality, you are as misguided as them, perhaps why you and these terrorists could be in agreement over Islam.

I feel compelled - sometimes pressured - to tweet stories of the religious identity of the officer who died saving the lives of journalists in France. Why? 

Why am I forced to let everyone know that the employee of a kosher supermarket, who risked his life to save the lives of Jews from a desperate gunman, was a Muslim?

Why am I forced to post pictures of Muslims in France offering namaaz for the slain journalists?
 
Why am I forced to reiterate to my friends, "Hey, listen, the commanding officer in the final raid on the assailants was a Muslim"?

I am tired and embarrassed at having to reassert that my faith has nothing to do with the lunacy of some misguided rascals who claim to be protectors of my faith. They are as misguided as the Buddhist monks in Myanmar who are targeting Muslims in riots, the very idea being contradictory to the Buddhist faith.

Yes, I have stood against anti-Muslim bigotry and will continue to do so in the light of the events in present times and that does not translate into being a terrorist sympathizer. No, I am not a "moderate Muslim" because the term is insulting to my faith just as it would be to a Hindu or a Jew or a Sikh - any faith demands honesty and not a quantitaive assessment or degree of your belief in it.

As I write this today, I am also assured that bigotry and this mindless Islamophobia will not be allowed a free rein, and the front-runners who will defend my faith and its followers from this mindless hate will be non-Muslims.

It is heartening to see that for every Rupert Murdoch who gives voice to this pandemic bigotry, there are a hundred other journalists, activists, humanists across the globe who are fighting an unpopular battle each day to defend Muslims from this rampant prejudice.

As fellow journalist Owen Jones, from The Independent, who I greatly admire for his unrelenting journalistic crusade against bigotry, once wrote, "Those few of us with a public voice who defend Muslims from bigoted generalisations are currently fighting an unpopular battle. But it is the right thing to do, and history will absolve us."