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[A thread] If we can just pause the rhetorical clash of civilisations for a moment. The beheadings are horrific and are an assault on our common humanity, so please move beyond the need of holding me or other Muslims accountable for such actions.
That said, these events cannot be understood outside of the context of increased Islamophobic comments from the french political elite over the past few months, exceeding the institutionalised racism which is the norm in French public discourse.
The prevalence of discourses of “Islamo-fascism”, “Islamic Terrorism” serves to draw frontiers of “us” versus “them”, which exacerbate the already strongly felt exclusion and injury experiences by Muslim’s in France and Europe more widely.
French universalism is not a neutral space of legal citizenship, but a culturally coded space which is exclusionary of those who do not share the secularised forms of religious belief which are hegemonic in the doctrine of laïcité.
Much of the discourse around these recent events in France has centred on a perceived failure of integration, asking of young Muslims: ‘has Europe not given you everything you could dream of, so why do this?’.
Such a framing, serves to absolve the political institutions and the wider racist culture of any responsibility in the hatred and anger it fuels.
The nature of the injury in question turns on the ways in which French culture fails to understand the character of Muslim’s religious devotion, and the role of imagery and iconography, not as a symbolic representation of the Prophet, or God ...
... but as a direct connection to the teachings and Truth of Islam, as an embodied & affective connection to God. For Muslim’s pictures are not simply pictures, & any attack on the image of the prophet is felt as an attack on the Muslim body which emulates & worships the Prophet.
What this understanding reveals is the deeply injurious and damaging effect of the constant bombardment of anti-muslim rhetoric, “satire”, and ridicule on the bodies of France’s Muslim population.
But this is not a matter of choosing between democracy versus fighting extremism through a racialised grammar, this is a false choice.
How we engage with communities who had beliefs different to our own, must resist the political logics of the far-right which seek to cultivate “culture wars” and an “us” versus “them” politics.
