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发帖数: 29846 | 1 The West must stand up for freedom—and acknowledge the link between
Islamists’ political ideology and their religious beliefs.
By
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Jan. 7, 2015 6:08 p.m. ET
After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical
magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of
useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical
Islam.
This was not an attack by a mentally deranged, lone-wolf gunman. This was
not an “un-Islamic” attack by a bunch of thugs—the perpetrators could be
heard shouting that they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad. Nor was it
spontaneous. It was planned to inflict maximum damage, during a staff
meeting, with automatic weapons and a getaway plan. It was designed to sow
terror, and in that it has worked.
The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from such a grisly episode, it is that what
we believe about Islam truly doesn’t matter. This type of violence, jihad,
is what they, the Islamists, believe.
There are numerous calls to violent jihad in the Quran. But the Quran is
hardly alone. In too much of Islam, jihad is a thoroughly modern concept.
The 20th-century jihad “bible,” and an animating work for many Islamist
groups today, is “The Quranic Concept of War,” a book written in the mid-
1970s by Pakistani Gen. S.K. Malik. He argues that because God, Allah,
himself authored every word of the Quran, the rules of war contained in the
Quran are of a higher caliber than the rules developed by mere mortals.
In Malik’s analysis of Quranic strategy, the human soul—and not any
physical battlefield—is the center of conflict. The key to victory, taught
by Allah through the military campaigns of the Prophet Muhammad, is to
strike at the soul of your enemy. And the best way to strike at your enemy’
s soul is through terror. Terror, Malik writes, is “the point where the
means and the end meet.” Terror, he adds, “is not a means of imposing
decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose.”
Those responsible for the slaughter in Paris, just like the man who killed
the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, are seeking to impose terror. And
every time we give in to their vision of justified religious violence, we
are giving them exactly what they want.
In Islam, it is a grave sin to visually depict or in any way slander the
Prophet Muhammad. Muslims are free to believe this, but why should such a
prohibition be forced on nonbelievers? In the U.S., Mormons didn’t seek to
impose the death penalty on those who wrote and produced “The Book of
Mormon,” a satirical Broadway sendup of their faith. Islam, with 1,400
years of history and some 1.6 billion adherents, should be able to withstand
a few cartoons by a French satirical magazine. But of course deadly
responses to cartoons depicting Muhammad are nothing new in the age of jihad.
Moreover, despite what the Quran may teach, not all sins can be considered
equal. The West must insist that Muslims, particularly members of the Muslim
diaspora, answer this question: What is more offensive to a believer—the
murder, torture, enslavement and acts of war and terrorism being committed
today in the name of Muhammad, or the production of drawings and films and
books designed to mock the extremists and their vision of what Muhammad
represents?
To answer the late Gen. Malik, our soul in the West lies in our belief in
freedom of conscience and freedom of expression. The freedom to express our
concerns, the freedom to worship who we want, or not to worship at all—such
freedoms are the soul of our civilization. And that is precisely where the
Islamists have attacked us. Again.
How we respond to this attack is of great consequence. If we take the
position that we are dealing with a handful of murderous thugs with no
connection to what they so vocally claim, then we are not answering them. We
have to acknowledge that today’s Islamists are driven by a political
ideology, an ideology embedded in the foundational texts of Islam. We can no
longer pretend that it is possible to divorce actions from the ideals that
inspire them.
This would be a departure for the West, which too often has responded to
jihadist violence with appeasement. We appease the Muslim heads of
government who lobby us to censor our press, our universities, our history
books, our school curricula. They appeal and we oblige. We appease leaders
of Muslim organizations in our societies. They ask us not to link acts of
violence to the religion of Islam because they tell us that theirs is a
religion of peace, and we oblige.
What do we get in return? Kalashnikovs in the heart of Paris. The more we
oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy
gets.
There can only be one answer to this hideous act of jihad against the staff
of Charlie Hebdo. It is the obligation of the Western media and Western
leaders, religious and lay, to protect the most basic rights of freedom of
expression, whether in satire on any other form. The West must not appease,
it must not be silenced. We must send a united message to the terrorists:
Your violence cannot destroy our soul.
Ms. Hirsi Ali, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, is the author of “
Infidel” (2007). Her latest book, “Heretic: The Case for a Muslim
Reformation,” will be published in April by HarperCollins. |
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