Source: The Guardian
By Ed Husain
Today’s fanatics are blind to the compassion and care in the prophet’s life. Their ignorance must be tackled head on.
The killing of journalists in Paris on Wednesday was not only an attack on France but also an assault on Islam and the very freedoms that allow 30 million Muslims to prosper in the west.
Free speech is not a western concept: it is a universal craving of the human soul. The gunmen ran away shouting that they were “avenging the prophet Muhammad”. How dare they? We cannot let the murderers define Islam.
In seventh-century Mecca, it was the prophet Muhammad who fought for free speech to proclaim one God as the creator of life and worthy of worship. The city’s pagans were his violent persecutors.
Today Muslims live freely in every European country because of the very freedoms that the terrorists struck at. Without the freedom to blaspheme and believe, Muslims would be seen as heretics and would be unable to flourish as faith communities in the west. The pogroms and wars of religion in Europe’s history bear testament to European life without freedom.
Islam and Muslims are secure in the west because of freedom of speech, conscience, press and religion. To attack those freedoms is to attack Islam’s existence. The dangerous ignorance of the extremists is not limited to their failure to understand the west. They do not know the prophet for whom they claim to kill.
It is ironic that as a knee jerk reaction to the massacre at Charlie Hebdo offices folks tend to blame Islam. There could be other hard to admit reasons for such violent behavior. The suspects in recent murders in Paris sprang from poverty stricken neighborhoods. Some of these neighborhoods were the scene of some riots to protest lack of jobs and lack of care on the part of the government. Those riots were suppressed with typical French ruthlessness, like the one that the French displayed in trying to suppress the freedom movements in their colonies.
Thanks to the French caring for their colonial subjects those countries remained backward. (That’s why I often say that the British were God’ gift wherever they went.) Now these trouble-makers mainly come from those colonies or have links with folks from those colonies. (Of course there’s a possibility that some global terror networks could have provided help.)
Now if in addition to the poverty and general mistreatment insults are hurled at religious icons, some people with a low threshold for pain are bound to get angry. This has nothing to do with religion. Some Christian blacks rioted in the US.
So, it’s a case of a reaction to mistreatment and religion has nothing to do with it. Besides Islam does not permit killing noncombatants in the manner they did kill without regard to religion. (They killed a Muslim policeman too.)