Tariq Ali: War between fundamentalisms

01/11/2015 - 02h00

It was a horrific event. It was condemned in most parts of the world and most poignantly by many cartoonists in the Arab world and elsewhere. The CEO's behind the atrocity chose their targets carefully. They knew well that such an act would create the maximum horror. It was quality, not quantity they were after. The response will neither have surprised nor displeased them.

They don't care a damn for the world of unbelievers. Like Kirilov in Dosteyevsky's The Possessed, they think that 'If God did not exist, everything would be allowed.' Unlike the medieval inquisitors of the Sorbonne they do not have the legal and theological authority to harass booksellers or printers, ban books and torture authors, so they go one step beyond. Executions via suicide terrorists or the other kind.

What of the foot-soldiers? The circumstances that attract young men and women to these groups are not chosen by themselves but by the Western world that they inhabit, itself a result of long years of colonial rule when the countries of their forebears were brutalised and occupied.

The three young terrorists who carried out the massacre of the "Charlie Hebdo" cartoonists in Paris last week were chanting 'God is Great.' I have no idea whether they believe they are in God's embrace or commanded by him but as we now know is that the two Parisian brothers—-Cherif and Saiddi Kouachi—-were once long-haired inhalers of marijuana and other substances till (like the July 7 bombers in this country) they saw footage of the Iraq war in 2003 and, in particular, the tortures taking place in Abu Ghraib as well as the cold-blooded killings of Iraqi citizens in Fallujah.

They sought comfort in the mosque. Here they were recruited and radicalised by the waiting Islamist hardliners for whom the West's 'war on terror' had become a golden opportunity to recruit and hegemonise the young, both in the Muslim world and in the ghettoes and dives of Europe and North America. Sent first to Iraq to kill Americans and more recently to Syria (with the connivance of the French state?) to topple Assad, they were taught the effective use of weaponry.

Back home they deployed it against those who they believed were tormenting them in difficult conditions. They were the persecuted. The magazine represented their persecutors. To let the horror blind us to this reality would be short-sighted. The brothers wanted to die and did so with machine guns blazing. But the situation in France remains bad.

"Charlie Hebdo" had made no secret of the fact that it would carry on provoking all believing Muslims by targeting their Prophet. Most Muslims were angry but ignored the insult.

They had started the process by reprinting the Danish daily Jylands-Posten's cartoons of Muhammad (that depicted him as a Pakistan immigrant). That newspaper admitted that it would never publish anything like that concerning Moses or Jews. Perhaps it had already done so when it supported the Third Reich and Danish collaborators during the occupation (as did many French newspapers, writers, cartoonists, publishers and intellectuals under Vichy).

For "Charlie Hebdo" it was a defence of republican secular values against all religions. It occasionally attacked Catholicism, hardly, if ever, Judaism (though Israel's numerous assaults on Palestinians offered many opportunities) but concentrated its wrath on Islam.

French secularism today essentially means anything that is not Islamic. The denunciations of Islam have been relentless with Michel Houellebecq's latest novel 'Sousmision' (Islam in French) as the latest salvo, predicting the French Muslim Brotherhood winning the 2020 elections, etc. "Charlie Hebdo", we should not forget, attacked him as well.

Defending their right to publish whatever they wish, regardless of consequences, is one thing, but sacralising a satirical paper that regularly targets those who are already victims of a rampant Islamophobia in the US/EU is, to my mind, almost as a foolish as justifying the acts of terror against it. Each feeds on the other. 'There is no document of civilization', Walter Benjamin once wrote, 'that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.'

France has laws designed to restrain freedoms if it is thought that they could cause unrest or violence. Till now they have been used to forbid the public appearances of the comedian Dieudonne for anti-semitic jokes and to ban pro-Palestinian demonstrations (the only country in the West to do so). That this is not seen as problematic by a majority of French people speaks volumes. There is no such thing as abstract freedom.

The Western elites know this better than most and have demonstrated as much in practice before and since 9/11.

There were no torchlight vigils or mass assemblies all over Europe when it was revealed some months ago that torture was widely used against renditioned Muslim prisoners handed over happily by many an EU country (with the plucky Poles and Labour Britain in the forefront) to be tortured by the CIA. There is a bit more at stake here than satire. What we are witnessing is a clash between rival fundamentalisms, each masked in different ideologies.

The smugness of secular liberals who talk of defending freedom to the death is matched by liberal Muslims waffling endlessly of how what happened had nothing to do with Islam. There are different types of freedoms and different versions of Islam (the occupation of Iraq was used to deliberately trigger the Sunni-Shia wars that helped give birth to ISIS) so speaking in the name of a 'real' Islam means virtually nothing.

The history of Islam and from its very beginnings is replete with inner-party struggles between factions striving for power. Fundamentalist currents within Islam as well as external invasions were responsible for wiping out many cultural and scientific advances of its civilization in the late medieval period. That has remained a constant. Bin Laden's exegesis of the Koran was as, if not more scholarly, than that of Tariq Ramadan. On its own it gets you nowhere. It is the politics that matter.

Europe's own political economy is in a mess and in the absence of any real alternative to capitalism (not just neo-liberalism) the political vacuum will grow and new forces emerge that struggle for power. The far-right is on the rise in France and Marine Le Pen is in the forefront, topping the polls for the next President, and linking the recent events to the uncontrolled immigration of which she had always warned. What a pity that Pontecorvo's classic 60's movie Battle of Algiers has yet to be seen in Marseilles. Some freedoms are clearly more precious than others.

TARIQ ALI, 71, Pakistani writer, he is the author of many books, including "Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity", "The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power" and the five novels that composes The Islam Quintet. He is also a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review