A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by Bruce A. Dixon
In the European “wars of religion,” the losers were often hanged. This is Jacques Callot’s represenation in the 1630s. (Wikipedia)
That means you don’t ask smug, Eurocentric, self-congratulatory Bill Maher questions like “Why are they so touchy? How come those backward Muslims separate their religion from politics?” If you actually want to understand why some fraction of Muslims saw gratuitous insult instead of satire when the French magazine Charlie Hebdo depicted the prophet Muhammad doing things you wouldn’t want your own small children to see, or pregnant Muslims as “Boko Haram sex slaves” howling for welfare checks, all you’ve got to do is look at is two bits of history. Philosopher Karen Armstrong, in her latest book Religion and the History of Political Violence, goes a long way to break it down.
The first bit of history Armstrong explains, is that the notion of religion as a set of practices and beliefs about the diety you can perform on Sundays separate from how you put together political and economic life is an exclusively Western concept that nobody on earth before 17th and 18th century Europeans would recognize at all. The Sanskrit, Jewish, Arabic and other old terms for “religion” all mean something that recognizes no separation between politics, economics and morality and moral life.
Bill Maher (Via DonkeyHotey, flickr)
It took more than a century of warfare in the 1600s and 1700s at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives to establish a kind of religion in Europe which could be separated from politics and economics. That way Europeans could have slavery and capitalism. European ruling elites could exterminate tens of millions in history’s greatest genocide colonizing the New World and still call themselves Christians. Non-European Muslims are being allowed only a generation or two and fortunately a lot less bloodshed to make that kind of transition, which brings us to Armstrong’s second bit of relevant history.
She reminds us that the 20th century’s so-called modernizers in the Muslim world mostly didn’t do it with friendly and democratic persuasion. Under the approving eyes of the West, they did it forcibly, with secret police, torture, discriminatory laws, kangaroo courts and especially in Iran sponsored by Britain and the US, with bullets fired into crowds of often nonviolent protestors. In addition to needed reforms like curtailing shariah law, Turkey’s Mufasta Kemal Atatürk, the Pahlevis in Iran and Egypt’s Gamel Adbul Nasser each locked up thousands of religious opponents, and purged them from the civil service and political life.
This ain’t exactly how you train people to engage in a friendly, respectful and civil discussion of religious and political differences. It IS how you make lasting enemies, ever suspicious and vengeful, alert for the next slight or insult. But this is the real and relevant history Americans have trained themselves not to know.
Add to this the wave of armed US and European interventions in Muslim lands, our puppet governments, our occupations, torture campaigns and drone strikes, and factor in that even while cruise missile liberals like Bill Maher and US presidents say we just don’t DO religious war, US military personnel “at the tip of the spear” call their enemies “hajis” and police departments in the US and Europe surveil Muslim communities wholesale and incarcerate Muslims disproportionately.
In this context, unlike jokes exposing the foibles of the powerful, which are real satire, Charlie Hebdo, which is now subsidized by the French government is engaged in something much like war propaganda. And Bill Maher is just another cruise missile liberal, a bully.
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web each week at www.blackagendareport.com.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the GA Green Party. Contact him via this site’s contact page or via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
