Charlie Hebdo massacre and the West's response

[danny la rouge]

I agree, but the CH editorial is clearly not doing that, in fact it is helping the fulfilment of that prophecy by implying, nod-and-wink style, that all Muslims are essentially the same.

It really, really, really doesn't say that. You have misread it.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

You can reckon what you like, it doesn't make it true.

You can call them puerile all you like and it won't make it true.

 

[Idris2002]

It really, really, really doesn't say that. You have misread it.

No, I have not. It clearly says this:

 

[Santino]

But the point in supporting dissenting voices within religious - or culturally paternalistic/misogynistic communities for that matter - is to encourage diversity. Reinforcing from the outside one authentic way to be Muslim (or anything else) is a self-fulfilling prophecy that propels the fundamentalist right into positions of authority they didn't have two or three decades ago. That's a key point here. We are creating uniformity by not supporting secularism.

I think you are being excessively generous in reading all these sentiments into the Charlie Hebdo editorial. Can you honestly say that you would ever have deployed the idea of a baker 'forbidding' you to eat ham in order to convey your position?

 

[Idris2002]

You can call them puerile all you like and it won't make it true.

I don't have to make it true, because it already is.

 

[danny la rouge]

I think you are being excessively generous in reading all these sentiments into the Charlie Hebdo editorial. Can you honestly say that you would ever have deployed the idea of a baker 'forbidding' you to eat ham in order to convey your position?

Can you honestly say you've read my posts?

I'm sorry, but I've been repeating myself for days. People could just read what I've said.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Can you honestly say you've read my posts?

I'm sorry, but I've been repeating myself for days. People could just read what I've said.

Either you must support everything they say or you must condemn everything they say, it appears.

 

[Santino]

Can you honestly say you've read my posts?

I'm sorry, but I've been repeating myself for days. People could just read what I've said.

What specifically did I get wrong in my last post? You're a reasonable man, danny, I'm not internet arguing with you.

 

[Sue]

What we need to do is show that those couragous voices within those communities feel that they have permission to be Muslim and unveiled, Muslim and LGBT, Muslim and a feminist, to be an ex-Muslim if they wish, and so on. Because at the moment what we're doing is reinforcing the ultra-orthodix as the only way to be "authentically" Muslim. We are forcing women etc into accepting the fundamentalist demands on them. We should not force individuals not to wear the veil: absolutely. But currently we are reinforcing the opposite. Eiynah makes the very important piont that her grandmother's generation in Pakistan felt quite able to be Muslim and unveiled if they wished. In Pakistan. She points out that her own generation does not. That is the problem.

When I lived in Paris, the number of young women of North African origin wearing the headscarf when their mothers/grandmothers didn't was quite noticeable. The reasons seem complicated -- rebellion against their families, expectations imposed by young men in their neighbourhoods (if you wanted to be left in peace, you wore a headscarf), a way of saying 'fuck you' to the French state that they felt discriminated against them. I knew one young woman (Algerian origin) who wore the headscarf in France but stopped wearing it when she moved to the UK because it didn't make the same kind of statement about identity here that it did there.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

When I lived in Paris, the number of young women of North African origin wearing the headscarf when their mothers/grandmothers didn't was quite noticeable. The reasons seem complicated -- rebellion against their families, expectations imposed by young men in their neighbourhoods (if you wanted to be left in peace, you wore a headscarf), a way of saying 'fuck you' to the French state that they felt discriminated against them. I knew one young woman (Algerian origin) who wore the headscarf in France but stopped wearing it when she moved to the UK because it didn't make the same kind of statement about identity here that it did there.

A highly disturbing reason, that one.

 

[Sue]

A highly disturbing reason, that one.

Ni Putes Ni Soumises - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[danny la rouge]

What specifically did I get wrong in my last post? You're a reasonable man, danny, I'm not internet arguing with you.

I laid out in reasonable detail what I disagreed with about that particular passage. But my not agreeing with something doesn't imply that I think it's racist or shouldn't be said.

 

[Santino]

I laid out in reasonable detail what I disagreed with about that particular passage. But my not agreeing with something doesn't imply that I think it's racist or shouldn't be said.

For me it's not just that passage. The whole thing is crude and making a terrible argument. Maybe they mean us to understand something different, but the plain text (of the English version) is perfectly clear.

 

[danny la rouge]

For me it's not just that passage. The whole thing is crude and making a terrible argument. Maybe they mean us to understand something different, but the plain text (of the English version) is perfectly clear.

I think it's perfectly clear too. But some people seem to be seeing something completely different to what I read.

 

[emanymton]

It really, really, really doesn't say that. You have misread it.

Considering the number of people who are misreading it (including me) it rather looks like the problem is with the article not the people misreading it. I think this post from Vintage Paw, oddly enough from the force Awakens thread, is pretty spot on. That is assuming of course that it is being misread, I am far from convinced on that.

That's the problem with this kind of thing. The intent and even the final message of a thing doesn't necessarily matter if how you get there is handled badly.

My rule of thumb seems to have evolved into "do I have to search for the 'good meaning'" and/or "does the 'good meaning' have to be explained at length because it's obfuscated by a lot of crap that reinforces the opposite"?

If the answer is yes to either or both of those, it's not doing its job well enough, if indeed it claims to be all about that 'good meaning' in the first place.

See also Sucker Punch, since it keeps getting brought up.

If it takes people with a lot of experience interpreting texts to do all the explaining about what something really means, when people without that experience (or, frankly, inclination - which is fine) would take it on face value - then that face value is how we should judge it in the first instance.

 

[danny la rouge]

Considering the number of people who are misreading it (including me) it rather looks like the problem is with the article not the people misreading it.

I personally think the problem is the distorting lens of 3 decades of top-down multiculturalism.

 

[CNT36]

Considering the number of people who are misreading it (including me) it rather looks like the problem is with the article not the people misreading it. I think this post from Vintage Paw, oddly enough from the force Awakens thread, is pretty spot on. That is assuming of course that it is being misread, I am far from convinced on that.

I thought of this thread when I read that and she wrote something similar a few pages back.

 

[Santino]

I personally think the problem is the distorting lens of 3 decades of top-down multiculturalism.

But people who agree with you about multiculturalism are reading it the way I have.

 

[IC3D]

I think as socialism has collapsed worldwide muslim youth are embracing neo Islamism. It's pretty obvious just a lot of people don't want to condemn it

 

[emanymton]

I personally think the problem is the distorting lens of 3 decades of top-down multiculturalism.

To try and drag this debate down to the simplest possible level (i.e. my level).

There are two possible concerns regarding women wearing the vail (well two I am going to mention)
A) That it is an overtly religious symbol, and symbolises and increaseing religious commitment amongst some sections of society
B) That the women wearing it may be subjected to harassment and abuse as a result of wearing it.

I am more concerned by B than A, I get the impression the writer of the article is more concerned by A.

Thinking about it, this results from what I think is my real issue with the article, which is that it is devoiced from material reality.

I sometimes pretend to be a Marxist*, therefor I belive that the ideas in people's heads are formed by the material conditions in which they find themselves, the increaseing strength of Islam is not therefore a result of an insufficiently secular society and a reluctance to challenge religious ideas, but is a result of the material circumstance in which young Muslims find themselves.

Which for many is one of poverty, alienation and hopelessness. And frankly one of racisim, one in which being Muslim shapes that life experiences and disadvantage them, weather that want it to or not.

To suggest as the article does that the experience of Muslims in Western Europe is one of tolerance and acceptance is nonscence, it is increasingly one of hostility, suspicion and oppression. One where they are treat as the other and suffer materialy because of it. In those circumstances, it is no wonder that some choose to embrace their otherness, to imbrace their religion.

CH are a couple of centuries too late to the party, religion is not the enermy, capital is. There may have been a time when the key progressive battle to be won was against religion, but that time has long gone in my opinion.

To give the last word to Marx.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.

.

Not quite the last word. Sorry Danny I didn't really say anything about the post I quoted.

*In general me calling myself a Marxist is a bit like some bloke who passes a ball around his back garden with his 8 year old son calling himself a footballer.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I think as socialism has collapsed worldwide muslim youth are embracing neo Islamism. It's pretty obvious just a lot of people don't want to condemn it

If you'd inserted "a minority of" after "worldwide", you might have had a point, but given as we haven't had a massive Islamism-based insurgency worldwide, you haven't.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

There are two possible concerns regarding women wearing the vail (well two I am going to mention)
A) That it is an overtly religious symbol, and symbolises and increaseing religious commitment amongst some sections of society
B) That the women wearing it may be subjected to harassment and abuse as a result of wearing it.

I am more concerned by B than A, I get the impression the writer of the article is more concerned by A.

.

There is another concern, which has been touched on, namely C) that women not wearing it may be subjected to harassment and abuse as a result of not wearing it.

I think you're right that the writer of the article pays little attention to B), but others, such as Tariq Ramadan, who is referenced by the article, pay little attention to C).

To relate that to your analysis, there can be the pretence that religious dress for women is everything to do with religious freedom and nothing to do with an extreme version of patriarchy and control. It clearly has something to do with patriarchy and control.

 

[IC3D]

The views of Muslims in europe are as are articulate as any Westerner of any background but they are guided by muslim majority societies in other countries that are in the main after the failure of democratic socialist movements becoming Islamic. Muslims in the UK on the whole are far more politically articulate IMO but the drawback is extremism CH is wise and brave enough to highlight this. It is the vacuum left by socialism that has created this as much as the success of capitol disinfrachise the losers

 

[damnNAFTA]

If you'd inserted "a minority of" after "worldwide", you might have had a point, but given as we haven't had a massive Islamism-based insurgency worldwide, you haven't.

For those that haven't read the Samir Amin article I quoted and shared earlier (Political Islam in the Service of Imperialism). It does a good job at dispelling what seems to be the prevailing notion (among both left and right) that middle eastern countries are uniquely religious or whatever.

The image of bearded men bowed low and groups of veiled women give rise to hasty conclusions about the intensity of religious adherence among individuals. Western “culturalist” friends who call for respect for the diversity of beliefs rarely find out about the procedures implemented by the authorities to present an image that is convenient for them. There are certainly those who are “crazy for God” (fous de Dieu). Are they proportionally more numerous than the Spanish Catholics who march on Easter? Or the vast crowds who listen to televangelists in the United States?

In any case, the region has not always projected this image of itself. Beyond the differences from country to country, a large region can be identified that runs from Morocco to Afghanistan, including all the Arab peoples (with the exception of those in the Arabian peninsula), the Turks, Iranians, Afghans, and peoples of the former Soviet Central Asian republics, in which the possibilities for the development of secularism are far from negligible. The situation is different among other neighboring peoples, the Arabs of the peninsula or the Pakistanis.

In this larger region, political traditions have been strongly marked by the radical currents of modernity: the ideas of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the communism of the Third International were present in the minds of everyone and were much more important than the parliamentarianism of Westminster, for example. These dominant currents inspired the major models for political transformation implemented by the ruling classes, which could be described, in some of their aspects, as forms of enlightened despotism.

This was certainly the case in the Egypt of Mohammed Ali or Khedive Ismail. Kemalism in Turkey and modernization in Iran were similar. The national populism of more recent stages of history belongs to the same family of modernist political projects. The variants of the model were numerous (the Algerian National Liberation Front, Tunisian Bourguibism, Egyptian Nasserism, the Baathism of Syria and Iraq), but the direction of movement was analogous. Apparently extreme experiences—the so-called communist regimes in Afghanistan and South Yemen—were really not very different. All these regimes accomplished much and, for this reason, had very wide popular support. This is why, even though they were not truly democratic, they opened the way to a possible development in this direction. In certain circumstances, such as those in Egypt from 1920 to 1950, an experiment in electoral democracy was attempted, supported by the moderate anti-imperialist center (the Wafd party), opposed by the dominant imperialist power (Great Britain) and its local allies (the monarchy). Secularism, implemented in moderate versions, to be sure, was not “refused” by the people. On the contrary, it was religious people who were regarded as obscurantists by general public opinion, and most of them were.
The modernist experiments, from enlightened despotism to radical national populism, were not products of chance. Powerful movements that were dominant in the middle classes created them. In this way, these classes expressed their will to be viewed as fully-fledged partners in modern globalization. These projects, which can be described as national bourgeois, were modernist, secularizing and potential carriers of democratic developments. But precisely because these projects conflicted with the interests of dominant imperialism, the latter fought them relentlessly and systematically mobilized declining obscurantist forces for this purpose.

 

[IC3D]

Many countries appear different but they still function as identical capitalist entities

 

[emanymton]

Edit this is a reply to LBJ's post a few above, don't know where the quote went.

You are right, I almost had that as part of A when I was writing, but is it is a concern on its own. But I think the issue of the vail is best challenged by Muslims, from within Islam, not forced on them from the outside. And it is challenged, I remember hearing the head teacher of a Muslim girls school on the radio once saying it was a misogynist cultural practice and nothing to do with Islam.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Edit this is a reply to LBJ's post a few above, don't know where the quote went.

You are right, I almost had that as part of A when I was writing, but is it is a concern on its own. But I think the issue of the vail is best challenged by Muslims, from within Islam, not forced on them from the outside. And it is challenged, I remember hearing the head teacher of a Muslim girls school on the radio once saying it was a misogynist cultural practice and nothing to do with Islam.

Yes, I think that's the kind of thing danny's been getting at with his criticisms of 'official' multiculturalism - it in fact empowers the misogynists to impose their views and clamp down on challenges from within. Top-down imposition will never work, imo - it will squeeze down and force a lot of ugliness out sideways. However, sideways pressure in the form of various kinds of solidarity (by, for example, not submitting to the idea that certain 'communities' should be allowed to set their own, separate standards, which are no business of outsiders) are also the right approach, surely, and a counter to the official multiculturalism that created the situation in the first place.

 

[Vintage Paw]

I thought of this thread when I read that and she wrote something similar a few pages back.

I admit to having this issue partly in mind when I wrote that post.

 

[Vintage Paw]

There is another concern, which has been touched on, namely C) that women not wearing it may be subjected to harassment and abuse as a result of not wearing it.

I think you're right that the writer of the article pays little attention to B), but others, such as Tariq Ramadan, who is referenced by the article, pay little attention to C).

To relate that to your analysis, there can be the pretence that religious dress for women is everything to do with religious freedom and nothing to do with an extreme version of patriarchy and control. It clearly has something to do with patriarchy and control.

I'm being flippant, but we are so concerned with women being controlled through their clothing that we will free them by dictating what they can and cannot wear.

 

[Vintage Paw]

It strikes me that our calls for secular homogeneity rely on 'them' becoming like 'us' - where 'us' is secular in the white Christian tradition.