Offending Muslims: a right or an obligation?

It’s an old sport. Forcing Muslims to conform to the culture and standards of the non-Muslim countries of Europe. 

Christian imagery among the Muslim arches
of the Cordoba Mosque

I live in Spain these days, and there was a long tradition of that kind of behaviour in this country, perhaps best symbolised in the construction of a (small) Cathedral inside the great Mosque at Cordoba. That was a particularly dramatic desecration, because that Mosque, as well as being a place of worship, was also a centre of learning, where Muslims, Christians and Jew could meet and mingle and any of them could start lecturing anyone who cared to listen about any subject that took their fancy, just as long as they weren’t challenging the their rulers (who were Arabs) or attempting to convert Muslims.

Cordoba was for a time a major focus for European learning and, in my view, the starting point of the humanism that fuelled the renaissance. One of the greatest Christian intellectuals of the time, Saint Thomas Aquinas, would later say that the master of thought was Aristotle and the commentator on him was the great Arab, Muslim thinker from Cordoba, whom we call Averroes. 

Given that Aristotle’s philosophy would drive the initial changes which eventually produced the Renaissance and then the Scientific Revolution in Europe, that’s a pretty important role to assign to a Muslim philosopher.

So driving out the Muslims from Spain and planting a church in one of their major Mosques was a powerful way of saying, “don’t talk to me about what you’ve done for us, we don’t want you here anyway, and we’re taking over what you’ve got”.

Over half a millennium later, we’re still playing this fine, time-honoured game. Because a tiny number of wild Islamists are pretty foul, many of us in Europe or North America, tend to think of all Muslims as equally ghastly. Ironically, according to the Department of Homeland Security in the US, the biggest terrorist threats to that country at the moment are domestic:

Among DVEs [Domestic Violent Extremists], racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists—specifically white supremacist extremists (WSEs)—will remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland.

No one, however, talks about these threats as ‘Christian terrorists’. Of course, avoiding the term means that not all supposedly ‘Christian’ Americans are tarred with the same brush. However, referring to terrorism inspired by Islamic extremism as ‘Muslim’ does tar all Muslims.

An even greater irony occurs in France, where the opposition to Islam has been given the form of an onslaught against religious influence over daily life. France has set up the ideal of laïcité – secularism – as fundamental to what it is to be French. There is no established church, and all public services are religiously neutral. 

Now I’m not against that. My mother, who was Jewish, complained to the end of her life that her school persisted in holding religious ceremonies, which meant that girls like her would be sent away from the body of the school and kept in a separate room while the ceremony was taking place. That might have spared them some boring moments, but it certainly made it clear that they were ‘other’.

Keeping state education independent of religion is an excellent principle. 

But here’s the problem. What do we do if secularism itself becomes a state religion?

That seems to be happening in France today, with rules and obligations of laïcité as rigid as in any religion. You may remember the pictures of armed French police telling a woman in a burqini on a Southern French beach to – incredibly – wear fewer clothes. The burqini was an illegal public statement of faith.

Wear fewer clothes...

They don’t know what they want, do they? I remember women in my youth being told to wear more clothes on beaches. The common factor is that it’s men telling women what to wear.

And, of course, in this case the target is Islam.

The other apparent obligation of the secularist religion, at least in France, is to publish cartoons of Muhammad. Like many non-Muslims, such cartoons are a matter of complete indifference to me. But I know they are deeply offensive to most Muslims, whose religion bans such depictions of their principal prophet. I would, therefore, carefully avoid using any such cartoons unless circumstances absolutely required it. I can’t think what those circumstances would be, but I’m clear that I have the right, and should have the right, to publish those cartoons if I wanted.

I simply choose not to exercise the right, because I see little point in causing such offence, and I see no good in doing so. I’m offensive about Trump or Johnson, but that’s because I hope that if even a few people are swayed by criticism of those men to vote against them, I have done some good. I see no such good from distributing cartoons of Muhammad.

President Macron, on the other hand, claims that France will not “renounce the caricatures”. Clearly, he feels that Frenchmen have not only a right to publish them, but an obligation to do so. I suppose he feels that not exercising the right might lead to its withering away.

As for the offence, it seems that he and rather a lot of Frenchmen, don’t care a great deal. Offending Muslims? Perhaps it doesn’t matter much to them.

But then, after all, causing such offence has been a long tradition in Europe. Look at the Cathedral in the middle of the Cordoba Mosque. What’s happening in France seems to show that we honour such traditions.

But are they really honourable?