A young lawyer working with the London-based law firm Clifford Chance hit the news this week after he posted a 20-minute video decrying the West’s “free speech”, referring to the “kuffar” and calling secular liberal beliefs a “bankrupt ideology”.
The video – which has been described as a “rant” – worried me, because it serves to undo the effort to build bridges at local and international levels that reflect the desire of hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world by building walls through the language and ideas it employs.
It’s a rhetoric that misses its own irony: decrying free speech while using free speech methods to make it. It’s an irony that the anger at being demeaned and “othered” is expressed with words such as “kuffar”, “raping”, “pillaging” and “bankruptcy” that precisely aim to create an “other”. The irony is potent when this wider narrative talks of drones and attacks, but uses militaristic themes such as its own name – the “call of Dawah” echoing the “call of duty” – and military sounding background chants. It is so lacking in awareness of the effect of language, grand ideas and the values of tolerance and togetherness that lie within both Islam and the West’s heritage that it misses our shared humanity and the intrinsic hope of faith to avoid creating an “other”.
Instead, this entrenches the view in each of us that the “other” is less humane, less communicable and less changeable with no common ground.
To admit that between these two positions there are shades of grey of human connectivity – such as the right to condemn a wrongful killing but accept that offence, oppression and deprivation – is a challenge that is failed at every hurdle.
Killing is wrong. But more than two weeks after the horrific attacks at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket in Paris, the complexity of truth and the need to identify the causes so that we can halt any escalation can only be hinted at.
When the Pope said that cartoons cause offence, there was a pause – a powerful white man had spoken. The recently departed head of Britain’s intelligence service MI6 stated that Charlie Hebdo’s decision to publish the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed was an act of provocation, a show of disrespect for “other people’s” religion and that the backlash should have been expected. It is a message that can only be conveyed by an establishment.
Even so, it is likely to be unpalatable for many because it lays out a gruesome reality of human behaviour, rather than asserting an apparently objective moral superiority all the while using humiliation, offence and illegal wars that wreak death as tools to lead Muslims to “enlightenment”.
We must ensure that we seek to understand and accept the complex causes behind horrific attacks rather than pander to those who seek to turn this into a simplistic division of right and wrong, who use pejorative language and imagery to diminish the “other”. Let the lawyer pour out his hatred and let the cartoons be published, although they smash my hopes for living together. But let’s not pretend that such simplistic views hold the answer.
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf and blogs at www. spirit21.co.uk