Contemporary violence and the role of memory
Over the course of the centuries the caliphates, sultanates, empires, kingdoms and other principalities under Muslim authority peacefully governed large populations, but also exercised violence, internally and externally, for reasons which were most often economic or political, just like all the other states of other religions (Christian, Hindu, Buddhist). This applies, for example, to the sultanate of Delhi, and to the Persian and Ottoman empires. Around the Mediterranean area and on the African and Asian continents, a change in the power balance occurred in the nineteenth century. The majority Christian European powers, (even if one of them, France, took on a secular identity), assumed an ascendency which lasted until the middle of the twentieth century. This was the period of colonisation.
Colonisation is often associated with the term “the West”, a concept clearly backed up by geopolitics, relating principally to “civilisations seen as having a common culture inherited from the Greco-Roman world, spoken of in the plural, and from which was born modern western society.” The philosopher Roger Pol-Droit suggests a definition of this term in relation to spaces: the West as a geographical region (Western Europe), a shared history (the Christian West in the Middle Ages), an economic and political grouping (European powers, the United States, and Canada), and an economic world with vast frontiers (all the rich countries, even those in Asia). He proposes, following this, to define it in relation to a power endowed with an enlightened side and a dark side. The rapid development of knowledge (especially due to the printing press), and greater and greater freedom of speech, allowed “the growth of science, and inversely, scientific progress intensified the rational examination of traditions, beliefs and norms”. This enlightened aspect of the West, however, is accompanied by a dark side: “in the history of the world, no civilisation has caused as much death as that of the West. Its conquests, in effect, have been bloody, it has practised slavery, it almost destroyed itself in two world wars and engendered Nazism and Communism. Its claim to “possess truth of value for all humanity has often taken on a barbarous face”.
Most of the majority Muslim societies freed themselves from colonial domination between the end of the 1940's (Syrian and Indonesian independence and the creation of Pakistan) and the very beginning of the 1960's (the independence of Guinea and Algeria). The new states often gave birth to oppressive regimes who practised violence against their own populations and ignored or rejected the Rule of Law. Economic inequalities persisted, or even grew, between the North and the South. The foundation of the state of Israel, which justified its existence in relation to Judaism, created a conflict which remains unresolved seventy years later; but its neighbours have never been able to agree upon a united front. For nearly half a century, the West and the Eastern blocs confronted each other, most often indirectly, including in majority Muslim societies (Afghanistan).
Since the 1980s, conflict in the name of whatever religion has become a major – but not exclusive – motive in tensions and wars. In the majority Muslim world, the memory of the early years of Islam, like that of the colonial period, is most frequently referred to in discourse. These memories serve to justify war against the “unbeliever” or the “non Muslim” by extremist groups such as Al-Qaida from the second half of the 1990s and Daesh in the 2010s, who have reprised, using more sophisticated and effective techniques, the rhetorical arguments based on this dual memory.
Symbolic and physical violence have clashed. For some citizens the two are equally serious; for other citizens, an insult (words or pictures) cannot compare with the death of a person, a humiliation with a murder. In 1988, the British writer of Indian origin, Salman Rushdie[1] , published The Satanic Verses, a novel in which he makes reference to texts in the Muslim tradition which evoke Qu'ranic verses which would have been withdrawn after being pronounced. On 14 February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini[2] issued a fatwa calling on all Muslims to kill the author, the translators, and the editors of the work. While Rushdie managed to evade attempts on his life, several people linked to the novel were killed in the following years. A quarter of a century later, in 2005-6, the affair erupted of the 'cartoons of Muhammed' published in a Danish journal and reproduced, in full or in part, in other countries (including Egypt and Jordan). These publications led to indignation and demonstrations during some of which dozens of people were killed. The murders in January 2015 of artists and writers at the satirical weekly Charlie-Hebdo were a sudden new development of this affair.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Muslim majority world is in deep crisis, as is shown by the conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. But this is also the case in societies where Muslims are in the minority, in particular in European societies where they have been established by migration during the last half century and where xenophobia and racism endure. Material, moral and psychological and symbolic violence prevails amongst the populations. Religious causes are blended with economic, social, political and ideological causes. This violence is committed by Muslims and non Muslims, and it affects Muslims and non Muslims, such as the Muslims persecuted in Burma or the Yazidis persecuted in Iraq.
One of the features of this crisis is the oscillating use of the term “terrorism”. Mohamed Chirazi poses the question of the ambiguity of this concept, given that everybody suspects everybody else of aiding or financially supporting “terrorism”. He also asks us to think about point of view: how should we describe those members of liberation movements, whether Muslim or non Muslim/nationalists, fighting for the independence of their country? Should they be considered to be terrorists? And, equally, how should we describe militants fighting against corrupt, oppressive or totalitarian regimes?
The Muslim leaders are aware of the challenges confronting them. They are trying to promote Islam as a religion of peace, brotherhood, solidarity and tolerance. To do this, they engage themselves to look at the past without fear. They denounce lies, the instrumentalisation and manipulation of weak spirits, the exploitation of the poor, of ignorance, of exclusion and of marginalisation. They denounce fear, negative perceptions and representations, selfishness and the “culture of hate”. They appeal for urgent and essential work in the field of education, in the promotion of the humanist values which can be found in religious study.
