One morning during the week, the entire world rose to shocking news that France had suffered the worst terrorist attack there in a generation. It was an attack on a satirical magazine that has for years refused to be silenced by hardliners and fundamentalists from all walks of life; including and especially the religious bigots. Charlie Hebdo had refused to observe artificial boundaries that sought to dictate who could be lampooned and who could not.
On a number of occasions the offices of Charlie Hebdo were attacked and the magazine’s journalists threatened with death. On Wednesday twelve people including two police officers were killed. As they made it out of the crime scenes, the killers were heard shouting in Arabic. One of them said they had avenged Prophet Mohommed. By any account the killers were warped fundamentalists who because they could not engage the Magazine on a civilised and courteous debate resorted to murder as an instrument of fear and intimidation. Because they could not engage the Magazine, they thought the best way was to silence it by way of death.
While the killers sought to kills the journalists, our view is that the real victim was free press often associated with democracies of the West, including France. That is very unfortunate indeed, especially given the liberal nature of France, which has by far the biggest Muslim population estimated at over five million. In the attack the Magazine lost some of its most senior executives including the Editor in Chief and some of the most well known cartoonists who for many years had survived on the narrow, steadfastly refusing to be silenced much less give in to radicals whose rules of faith keep changing. It is important to point out that that while religion was by far the favorite topic for the magazine’s cartoon strips, it was by no means the only topic.
Politicians and indeed other leaders were subjected to the same treatment by Charlie Hebdo which admittedly was defiant and in many ways provocative. Quite rightly, the Magazine refused to accept that there were any holy cows or topics that were for any reasons out of bounds.
Christianity was treated the same way as was Islam and indeed other religions. Yet of all the groups it was the Muslim fundamentalists who thought it worthy of their religion to spill blood as a way of avenging the Prophet. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last a few hot heads have elected to tarnish the Islamic religion and in so doing render almost all the other followers of that religion as impotent as to be irrelevant. Islam should not allow itself to be at the mercy of bloodletting. Early in the week, the leader of Egypt, who we want to point out is not among our heroes said something that we have no choice but to agree with.
Field Marshall al-Sissi called the Imams and other leaders of the religion in his country to claim back Islam from the clutch of hooligans that are giving it a bad including by killing its own adherents. Muslims the world over, especially the moderate ones should take responsibility of allowing their faith to be defined and stereotyped by a few radicals who kill in its name.
In taking such responsibility they must distance themselves from the radicals by telling those outside their faith just what their religion stands for in the face of such slaughter committed in its name. It is important that a distinction is drawn between the different strands of Islam, but the best people to do it are the Muslims themselves. In Botswana for example the Muslim leaders have done pretty little to mix with indigenous Batswana as a way of teaching Batswana just what Islam is all about. The only time Batswana get to hear about Islam is when some mad radical has blown himself or herself up somewhere. This creates an unnecessary and totally avoidable air of suspicion that often borders on contempt and even subtle animosity.
Moderate Muslims should take responsibility and become the true defenders of their religion. Keeping quite does not only create an air of suspicion and hypocrisy, in the eyes of many it also even creates a perception of tolerance if not outright complicity in what is happening.
