Blasphemy and critical evaluation of Mohammed’s character have always been forbidden, and have been a highly sensitive issue throughout the history of Islam.
Blasphemy and critical evaluation of Mohammed’s character have always been forbidden, and have been a highly sensitive issue throughout the history of Islam
It is quite appalling to see how some western media figures have responded to the Paris attacks.
Some have blamed the cartoonists for provoking Muslims and inciting religious hatred, while others like Robert Fisk have blamed historic western policies for the murders.
Fisk claimed that the disenfranchisement of youth, economic deprivation, and past atrocities experienced by Algerians led to the Paris events.
Others on the far left like the inveterate anti-American journalist Glenn Greenwald started with Soviet style whataboutism and connected the Paris events with Israel, while the annoying Assange, still languishing in the Ecuador embassy, tweeted some five-year-old Telegraph report to obfuscate the Paris shooting issue.
It’s beyond absurd to blame French occupation of Algeria for the shootings. This is the kind of apologism that facilitates radical Islam. This strategy only results in appeasement of puritanical radical Islamic ideology and only offers one solution: ‘the West is evil’.
If past grievances and atrocities are considered to be the reasons behind these attacks then by this logic all Indians living in the UK would be retaliating to avenge the suffering their ancestors faced during British Colonialism. Bangladeshis would carry out attacks against Pakistan since they once ruthlessly persecuted Bengalis, killing more than a million of them and raping 200,000 of their women.
If Fisk were right, Vietnam and Japan would not be some of the most pro-American countries in the world today.
However the most pathetic and dismal response that came from the western press was from those who castigated Charlie Hebdo and blamed the cartoonists for provoking Muslims.
If one follows this flawed narrative then all liberal Muslims struggling against radical Islam on a daily basis in their own Muslim majority countries should only have themselves to blame whenever they are brutally attacked by extremist clerics and their zealot followers.
The Saudi writer and activist Raif Badawi who is currently being publicly flogged by repressive Saudia Arabia should be denounced for criticising the rabid misogynist clerics of the Wahabbi sect. All Pakistani liberals fighting against draconian blasphemy laws should also be condemned for inciting the wrath of terrorists.
Even a cursory examination of blasphemy killings in Pakistan can tell us that the real reasons why the cartoonists were attacked were not because of Western foreign policy, the Iraq War, or colonialism, but because of an ideology that has always been fanatical and dogmatic in nature and that is responsible for the misery of thousands of people, particularly in Pakistan.
This ideology has the power of igniting vigilante justice and provoking mobs into indulging in violence and vandalism. It’s the same ideology which sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade, and that burnt 37 people to death after a mob set fire to a hotel building in Turkey.
It’s the same ideology that killed prominent Pakistani politician Salman Taseer after he questioned the concept of the country’s brutal blasphemy laws.
According to this ideology, any person who doubts the origins of Islam, draws caricatures of Prophet Mohammad or satirises revered Islamic figures is liable to be punished by death. The basis for this blasphemy belief is not the Quran but the Hadith, the second main source of Islam.
Many sects within Islam have varied views in relation to the blasphemy issue but almost all sects believe in the prohibition on images of Mohammed.
Apart from images, many sects of Islam also consider even questioning or doubting the origins of Mohammed as blasphemous. British Historian Tom Holland had his academic documentary on the origins of Islam cancelled by Channel 4 after he and his family received death threats and over 1200 complaints were received by Ofcom and Channel 4.
To blame this ideology on recent western policies is nothing short of the murder of history. Blasphemy and critical evaluation of Mohammed’s character has always been forbidden and a highly sensitive issue among Muslims in the history of Islam. It is not a new issue.
In 1929, Ilm-ud-din, a Muslim living in British India, took offence at a book published about Prophet Mohammed. He killed the publisher and was sentenced to death by the Indian Penal Code.
Consequently he was considered a martyr; 200,000 people attended his funeral and he was praised by the ideological founder of Pakistan Allama Iqbal. Even today in Pakistan, Ilm-ud-din is used as an inspiration for those who would kill in the name of Islam.
As Douglas Murray said on BBC Big Questions, the attack on 7 January was an attempt to introduce blasphemy laws in Paris.
In the aftermath of this attack, the western media has two options. The first is to reprint these cartoons and continue the unflinching quest of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, as a way of paying tribute to their legacy. The second option is to take a step back and not criticise Islam or Mohammed, to accord Islam different treatment to other religions.
If the media follows the latter option, it will be a victory for the attackers and their ideology of blasphemy, and will set a dangerous precedent. I hope that the steps we take and our future course of action will not defer to this ideology. But as the responses so far have shown, not everyone is ready to stand up to it.
Anas Abbas is an accountant and investigative Counter Terrorism analyst. Follow him on Twitter or read his blog
145 Responses to “Why it’s wrong to blame western policies for the Paris attacks”
SimonNorwich
We have to remember why we mock Islam in the first place.
It’s due to the fact that 99% of “Muslims” are people who were told as infants that they are Muslims and brought up to understand that they may never leave their religion without severe consequences, either in this life or the next. Filling someone’s mind with such repressive ideas is TRULY offensive. That’s not to mention all the other atrocities that are commonplace throughout the Islamic world that stem from this indoctrination.
If it were only 1 child that had ever had her life ruined by indoctrination in Islam, that would be a million times more offensive to human dignity than all the cartoons that have ever been published.
Just Visiting
> There is a consensus among experts and scholars on Islam on a great variety of topics.
Yes, like the 57 Muslim nations, Shia and Sunni: have together agreed a legal document (cairo convention) that says that women and non-Muslims are less human than male Muslims.
That’s exactly why democratic liberals are cautious about Islam.
Just Visiting
Yes, there seems to have been lots of killings instigated by Mohammed:
http://wikiislam.net/wiki/List_of_Killings_Ordered_or_Supported_by_Muhammad
Whereas other religious founders – say Jesus: not so much.
SabraNott
Link or it didn’t happen.
Richard Seymour
What, exactly, is an “investigative Counter Terrorism analyst”? It sounds like a made up qualification, on a par with “nutritionist”, “holistic healer” or “aromatherapeutician”. It sounds every bit as made up as the author’s name, actually. But what is the evidence that this writer has any actual qualification to write on this subject?
First of all, reading this article, it’s quite obvious that the author has no idea what s/he is talking about. Essentially, it boils down to “Muslims are a bunch of nutters”. There is no attempt to explain how a jihadi network embeds itself in a poor Parisian arrondisement traditionally known for being a leftist stronghold. There is no attempt to explain how two second generation French Algerians would be attracted to Salafist ideology, what that ideology could seem to plausibly explain to them, and why its solutions and forms of organisation would appeal to them. There is no attempt to explain what sort of groups are involved, and why *this* type of ‘home-grown’ jihadism is happening now. The only answer it has is that Muslims are a bit barmy and believe any sort of dogmatic shit you shove at them. (Looking at his blog, I see that this ‘analyst’ has a particularly thick, bigoted view of most Muslims and has a certain partisanship to the likes of racists such as Sam Harris, so one is not surprised.)
Second of all, the entire premise of the article is flawed. It may be wrong to ‘blame western policies’ for the attack, but you can hardly leave this out of the picture. Where do you think these guys went shortly after being recruited in 2003, and trained until 2005? They went to fight a guerilla war in Iraq against US troops who were engaging in a war that included the Stalingrad-like decimation of cities such as Fallujah and Tal Afar, the deployment of torture so severe that the UN considered it worse than under Hussein, and a death toll so high that it was likely hundreds of thousands and possibly over a million in excess of what the twin despotisms of Saddam and sanctions achieved. How do you propose to explain their recruitment and ‘radicalisation’ if you don’t acknowledge this part of the picture? The war made vicious sociopaths out of loads of US soldiers, as testimony after testimony revealed. So how do you think that can possibly not be relevant to the hardening and brutalisation of these two killers? You’re living in a fucking puerile, masturbatory ‘counterterrorism’ fantasy land.
Third, the only kernel of truth in the article is that it rightly rebukes certain reductionist types of explanation or non-explanation, but then screws it up by offering its own reductionism. It’s all because of blasphemy. Well, that won’t wash. If it’s just because of blasphemy, there were dozens of other targets they could have picked aside from Charlie Hebdo. If it was just because of blasphemy, they wouldn’t have decided to go and murder a bunch of Jewish citizens in a supermarket. If it was just because of blasphemy, the perpetrators would not have had to go through the process of being indoctrinated into a jihadi group, trained to fight, participate in a terrifying and brutal war, serve time and only after a series of largely failed fights alight on the psychotic (and seemingly strategically desperate from their pov) suicidal mission against Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket.
Christ, how does an article such as the above pass as serious thought? How does such neoconservative banality get reproduced on a ‘left’ website?