Opinion Out Of My Mind: Hold your head high

It took some time before the Charlie Hebdo protest became a political issue.

Meghnad Desai

January 11, 2015 12:00 AM IST First published on: Jan 11, 2015 at 12:00 AM IST

charlie hebdo, charlie hebdo attack, je suis charlie

The front page of the latest issue of Charlie Hebdo. (Source: Reuters)

What is it about education, literacy, newspapers, cartoons and things creative which so upsets religious fanatics? Who is it that is ‘insulted’? It cannot be god because surely such human sentiment of being insulted cannot be attributed to god. God is above all such things. Is it not just the fanatic who feels insulted? Does he feel threatened that young girls are going to school and so shoots Malala Yousafzai? Or is it some perverse idea of revenge which inspires the fanatic to shoot 132 school children as it happened in Peshawar?

Now we have the outrage in Paris. Over cartoons which were already published in Denmark some years ago. Even then, the protests did not start immediately when they were published. It took some time before someone decided to make it a political issue. And what was the issue? The contention that the Prophet Muhammad cannot be portrayed in any pictorial form. This is a recent belief and has no sanction in the Quran. In the Quran, the Prophet speaks as god asks him to. In Judaism, as in Islam, there can be no icons or idols of god but the injunction was not extended to the Prophet. For centuries after the Prophet’s death, coins were cast in his image.

But who knows and who cares? When people are about to take offence at anything which upsets them, they will not argue. They only know the way of destruction. Sometimes the destruction is just annoying, as when Bajrang Dal disrupts the exhibition of M F Husain’s paintings. But the al-Qaeda do not do anything half way. They just kill.

They are frightened. Of knowledge, art, beauty, music, dance and the word. The West went through spasms of similar fanaticism during the Spanish Inquisition when Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for his beliefs. There were religious wars between Catholics and Protestants which wrecked Europe for centuries. Then suddenly, philosophers began questioning the basis of religion. Baruch Spinoza started the process and by the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment had arrived. Reason became the guiding principle. That in turn led to the idea of human freedom and human rights. It took two World Wars and the retreat of Empires to establish the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It is that Declaration which also informs the Indian Constitution, guaranteeing the right to free speech and expression. Those freedoms underpin all newspapers, TV and radio programmes, books, speeches, cartoons, paintings, music and dance. It has become the lifeblood of modern societies around the world. Whatever else Rama Rajya had, it did not have these freedoms. That was why Shambuka found himself on the wrong side of the king’s sword. He did not have the right to read the scriptures. Shambuka was an OBC.

Islamism has become a threat to freedoms everywhere. It is destroying Muslim societies as we can see from the way Pakistan is being tortured by al-Qaeda. It fears modernity, which celebrates equality of all, freedom to think for yourself and express your ideas as you see fit. The al-Qaeda wants all Muslim nations, indeed everyone, to go back to some medieval age before freedom was discovered. As of now, the attack is confined to Muslim majority nations, extending from Pakistan in the East to Morocco in the West and up to Chechnya in the North. This is what ISIS is doing in Iraq and Syria, killing anyone and everyone who does not conform to their beliefs about going back to the medieval ages.

Along the way, non-Muslim nations are also being caught in the crossfire. Starting with 9/11, or even before that with the Islamic revolution in Iran, a war has been raging between fanatical Islamists and the modern world. In an ugly reaction, there is the rise of Islamophobia in Europe. It is as if the Islamists are creating their enemies in their own image.

Don’t join that battle. Hold your heads high and think, speak and behave with freedom. India has earned it.