While condemning the killers in Paris, we must resist the tendency to simplify and become fundamentalists of a sort ourselves.
As events unfolded in Paris, I was reminded of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. The transformation of protagonist Saladin Chamcha from an Indian British-educated voice-actor to a creature resembling Satan who has to be hidden in London attics and cellars can be easily read as an analogy to the perception and life of an illegal and racialized immigrant in the West – scared and marked, fleeing and in hiding.
If fundamentalists would read this book, they’d probably have a lot to identify with. Yet fundamentalists of any kind do not read these sorts of unholy books and like interpretations to be clear and simple. However, issues are rarely clear and simple. We must resist the tendency to simplify and become fundamentalists of a sort ourselves, and we must start doing so with the Paris attack.
The attack on Charlie Hebdo was a terrible reminder of how divided the world is, and how those divisions are being reinforced as we hide behind our trenches. The word “terrible” lacks the necessary depth to describe the shock that went through people around the world — we must not forget that the threat from the ideology behind this attack remains global. Kosovars, too, feel partly affected by this threat, as the country is predominantly Muslim and there is a noticeable rise in the organization of Muslim communities that are perceived as “fundamentalist” or “radical”.
Although I, too, condemn the murders and was glued to my computer as the tragedy unfolded, I did not want to use the hashtag “Je suis Charlie” because, as many rightly noted, we are not all Charlie. Unlike the media worldwide, the Kosovar media did not discuss in great length what Charlie Hebdo actually does. Besides depicting the prophet, in the past the magazine has posted racist and anti-Semitic cartoons. In 2009, one of its staff was fired for producing anti-Semitic content. Yet, it was not deemed necessary (especially so after the magazine office was bombed in 2011) to hold anyone accountable for offending Muslim sensibilities. As others have noted, satire’s strength stems from its capacity to mock the powerful, not to reaffirm racialized stereotypes of the oppressed. Yet, to criticize Charlie Hebdo is not to blame its staff for their death, or justify this tragedy. Unfortunately, there are no issues that can or should be framed as “either/or” – one is not either Charlie or against it.
President Atifete Jahjaga and the Foreign Minister, Hashim Thaci, joined the unity rally in Paris, while the Islamic communities in Kosovo and Albania were quick to condemn the attacks, drawing a distinction between the terrorists and the “real Islam”.
One exception to this interpretation of events came from the Islamic Youth Forum, which released a statement blaming the French state for oppressing its minorities and asking the French embassy in Kosovo to “democratize France.”
The media frenzy incited an emotional response from some Kosovar people who were completely nonchalant, just a few weeks back, when an alleged terrorist attack was prevented in Prishtina on Christmas Eve. Buying into the prevalent discourse of the “war on terror”, people were quick to align themselves with the French and to blame the Muslims (whoever, and wherever they are), reaffirming a discourse that insists on reducing the interpretation of the matter into a symptom of ‘‘a clash of civilizations”. That Albanians themselves are proof that such a binary division between the Western and Eastern civilizations is impossible, nay, simply erroneous, escapes most Albanians. That they themselves are Muslims, practicing, or non-practicing, and as such are proof that Islam comes in various shapes and that its believers can even be pro-American and freedom-loving, seems lost on those who comment.
It is also ironic that these Albanians, be they Muslim or simply bear Muslim names and as a consequence randomly discriminated against because post-9/11 rhetoric has labelled all Muslims as a possible threat, seem to be unable to stop themselves from the futile attempt to prove to the world that we, too, are “European” and share their values (which is impossible in itself since a European identity does not exist).
The futility of this exercise is irrelevant, since even though the message does not reach the French, or “the West”, it does speak volumes to the people in Kosovo. To these people, the message is twofold: it affirms Kosovo’s aspirations to be “fully European”, democratic and secular; but it also signals to practicing Muslims that their position is precarious and their rights negligible.
French President Francois Hollande welcomes Kosovo’s President Atifete Jahjaga, center, and Kosovo’s Foreign Minister Hashim Thaci, left, at the Elysee Palace, Paris, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2015. A rally of defiance and sorrow, protected by an unparalleled level of security, on Sunday will honor the 17 victims of three days of bloodshed in Paris that left France on alert for more violence. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)
There is a war on terror in Kosovo, as former Prime Minister Thaci made clear in a comment published in the UK Guardian last year. Yet, as a society we never discussed this war on terror and who it targets, and we accepted at face value that America’s war on terror, which was used to justify the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, seems to be our own. Yet, unlike in the US and even France, where public dissent with such wars is possible to express, to question the war on terror in Kosovo is impossible. It is impossible to argue against racist descriptions of Muslims or their actual discrimination without being branded as a fundamentalist (as Vetevendosje found out).
If we do have a fundamentalist problem in Kosovo, it seems to be unresponsive to “provocations” since neither the translation of The Satanic Verses or of Dawkins’ The God Delusion, sparked riots or book-burnings, let alone killings.
There is a discrepancy between the importance given to the perceived Islamic threat, and other possible threats to national security. This is a result of various political agendas, but also because it is easier to join the A-Team against “the Axis of Evil”. This is also a side effect of orientalist discourse regurgitated all over the world, which enforces the idea of a common, foreign enemy – radical Islam. That the war on terror has had a Hydra-like effect, creating many violent factions that are at odds with each other, is not a simplistic narrative and as such, is inconvenient.
Even President Obama does not distinguish between Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, although the two are in a power struggle for dominion of “the holy war.” The two terrorist groups differ: Al Qaeda relies on high-profile attacks in the West, such as the Paris attack, while the Islamic State has established a caliphate in Iraq through brutal means. Both recruit in the West but the Islamic State has been aggressively recruiting people all over Europe to fight in its holy war. Dozens of Kosovars have already left to fight in Syria, and they are in the good company of other Europeans, making Europe an exporter of terrorists, rather than the other way round. These people cannot be seen as outliers but as products of these societies, including ours, and it becomes our duty to inspect their appearance.
Before we round up imams and radical Islamists (and then quickly release them, because there was no evidence to arrest them in the first place) and before we “mark” a minority community of Muslims as dangerous, we need to have a talk. That talk will and should be uncomfortable, because before we disenfranchise fundamentalist Muslims from our secular society and disown all those who are fighting in Syria, we should analyze how this came to be. Whether the answer is the economy, global jihad, or something else, is irrelevant, as long as that question is actually, for once, asked.