Loading ...The Sacred of the 'Wretched of the Earth' and its Desecration
“We will have to put together the collabos’ dossiers, those of Charlie’s assassins. I will name them: they are the Indivisibles of Mrs Rokhaya Diallo who awarded the Y’a Bon Awards to Charlie Hebdo, I got it, Luc Ferry got it too, Christophe Barbier, many people, Finkielkraut, they are the Indigenous People of the Republic (PIR), there is the Nekfeu rapper who wanted to do a ‘burning by fire for these Charlie Hebdo sons of bitches,’ Guy Bedos, who we have known to be better inspired. It will require a systematic and historical report on all those who have ideologically justified the death of the twelve Charlie Hebdo journalists.” Pascal Bruckner, January 15, 2015 (28 minutes on Arte).
“What bothers us, it’s not to live with bodyguards and death threats,” it’s the other attacks, “from people who call you Islamophobic while you are anti-racist and you are fighting for freedom. The most painful are these pernicious attacks that can arm a Kalashnikov!” Caroline Fourest, January 8, 2015 (Special Envoy speaking on France 2).
I despise these people. I would almost agree that they have the right to be racist, if indeed they would assume it as does the National Front (FN). But they are too cowardly for that. I despise them because they love war and claim to love peace. They justify the West and its crimes and wear the mask of noble souls. They trample millions of corpses and lives pulverized through Civilization while they stage, lewd and obscene as they are, their feigned anger and overplayed grief. Objectively, they are the links of this infernal chain at the end of which are the Kouachi brothers. Do they know about their responsibility in the death of their fellow travelers? Regardless, they unsheathe. The culprits? The “Islamo-leftists”! I despise them because they are spineless. So small, you need a magnifying glass to see them. Irresponsible individuals already in the dustbin of history. Let’s move on.
I am over fourty years of age. During my whole indigenous life, I have never heard anyone insult our prophet. My whole life, I swear. It is neither prohibited nor taboo. This thought does not cross our minds. This thought does not exist, period. It is a relationship with the sacred that assembles the consent of more than one billion souls, including atheists, agnostics, and “free thinkers.” This happens even though a thousand contradictions traverse the Ummah and our divisions are innumerable.
Historically, we did not know this radical separation of church and State, as we did not know this type of distinction between the sacred and the profane, the public sphere and the private sphere, faith and reason [1]. It took the advent of Western capitalist modernity and its outrageous and arrogant narcissism to universalize historical processes (i.e., secularism, the Enlightenment, Cartesianism) that were geographically and historically located in Western Europe. This is a specificity that became universal through self-declaration and the power of arms and bayonets. As for other specificities that are not worthy enough to enter history, either they abdicate or they are barbarian. But it seems that, with the father figure of the prophet, French coloniality stumbled upon a bone. When Charlie Hebdo published the caricatures, some of which being racist and others obscene, I was shocked at first. I said to myself, “They will not spare us.” Racism in all its forms: contempt, paternalism, Orientalism. Discrimination in all its forms: railway sidings, police crimes, racial profiling, untimely death of our parents because of working conditions, criminalization of our struggles, clientelism, jail… Hogra (contempt) again and again. But then, a line was crossed. It was not mere insults or violence to a person. It was sacrilege.
Source: mondoweiss.net