Charlie Hebdo Drops a Bomb

After a 2015 filled with near constant polemics on the subject, I had hoped to retire from discussing Charlie Hebdo, at least in English. But on Sunday the French magazine posted on its website an evidently non-satirical editorial, in English, seeming to make explicit the Islamophobic convictions that had motivated the cartoons that provoked the murder of its principal contributors on January 7, 2015. The anti-Charlie forces in Anglophone social media immediately crowed that they had told us so, that this was just the latest proof of what we should have seen all along.

The editorial is feeble. It runs together three stock figures of the Muslim minority in France, and treats them all as symptoms of one and the same social problem. These are, to wit, the nominally Muslim teenagers who are radicalised and coaxed into blowing themselves up; the pious Muslim man who seeks to integrate into French society economically while remaining, in his soul and on his knees, oriented toward Mecca; and, finally, the subjugated Muslim woman forced by her patriarchal community to wear a veil.

Each of these figures, obviously, deserves independent consideration, and it is only the crudest straw-man fantasy about some monolithic Islam that would run them together.

The teenagers, for one thing, probably could have been drawn into a different sort of death cult that told them a different sort of fairy tale, if they had been born in a different time and place. The anxiety about losing the freedom to select pork products at the local sandwicherie, in turn, is an expression of a distinctly French parochialism, and one that in many of its expressions is positively adored by the Anglo-American left. All our effusion over the French perfection of the good life through slow and artisanal food, through rejection of GMOs, fails to grasp that the value placed on these things in French culture is the expression of a world-view that is always a hair’s breadth away from chauvinism. It says: our way of life is the best in the world, it grows right up out of the soil; don’t tread on us. It is only when this traditionalism bumps up against the traditionalism of halal dietary customs that it makes us uncomfortable.

I have no patience for either of these. The ethnic cuisine of my people comes pre-packaged and microwave-ready, and I find this freedom from concerns about terroir and authenticity in my eating habits well-suited to my cosmopolitan politics. I do think ham should be outlawed in France and everywhere else, but out of respect for the creature it comes from, not fear of it. The fact that the never-ending hecatomb of meat production can come up as a tangential issue in the course of discussing another, supposedly more serious issue might serve as a reminder of how much of our political life is really just a matter of picking and choosing.

But I don’t really want to discuss the argument of the editorial itself. I want to try to make sense, one more time, of the cultural role of Charlie Hebdo, and of what the Anglo commentariat might be missing about it. A first point, one that should be obvious, is that most of the luminaries among the magazine’s contributors are dead now, so we can't really talk about a continuity of identity between the operation to which the assassinations were a response, and what Charlie Hebdo is coming up with now. This editorial seems to reflect most of all the spirit of Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier), rather than the other victims of January 7. Charb was in his forties, and was not one of the senior cohort, such as Cabu and Wolinski, whose outlook was forged in the 1960s and whose principal preoccupation seems to have been the corruption of the French power elite, the cravenness of the Catholic church, the horrible spectre of the rise of the National Front.

Charb was significantly less committed to satire as a mode of engagement with the world than the others, and wanted to offer straightforward arguments, often about what he saw as the threats arising from mass Muslim migration to Europe. Quite apart from any consideration of his politics, Charb’s approach was never what Charlie Hebdo did best. As a cartoon by Luz of September 2015 didactically explains, satire is not only a way of making critical points about society or politics, as one might do in an Op-Ed piece; it is its own discursive mode, in which different rules and different standards of evaluation apply. I think Charlie Hebdo is at its best when it remains in this mode.

A second point has to do with the role of laïcité in French society. I was struck recently watching the Soviet silent-film director Dziga Vertov's 1934 Three Songs for Lenin for what it reveals about the longer history of 'the question of the veil'. The first 'song' features, just a few minutes in, the bold intertitle, 'My face was in a dark prison', followed by a sequence of images meant to show that the arrival of Marxist-Leninism would free the people of Muslim Central Asia from their backward and superstitious ways. Now you might suppose that this is just a strong-armed Stalin-era perversion of the nominal ideology of the Soviet Union, but in fact we find substantially the same view in Marx himself, as in an 1851 newspaper article in which he argues that the introduction of industrial weaving by the British in Bengal is the best thing that ever happened there, as it broke up the traditional village economies that were also the foundation of patriarchal despotism.

This presumption remains a real factor in much of the thinking of the Arab and European left on questions of culture and the limits of toleration. Something close to it is what guides Hafid Melhay, the owner of Libre Ère, the finest bookstore in Ménilmontant. Hafid is originally from Tunisia, and his shop specializes in Palestinian poetry, histories of the 20th-century non-aligned movement, scripts for plays like Kwame N'goran's Rosa Luxemburg. His humble shop, dare I say, has rather more useful resources for making sense of the present situation than the Librairie Essalam a few doors down from it on the Boulevard de Belleville, an Islamic bookstore featuring in its window French translations of the infamous Harun Yahya's screed against the theory of evolution, and some self-help manuals with tips on how to become happier through a deepening of piety. Back at Libre Ère, Hafid volunteers his services as a scribe and translator for recent immigrants from the Arabic-speaking world, and keeps posted in the store's entryway, inserted among so many classic works of socialist theory, of Arab and African nationalism, of postcolonial criticism, a classic Charlie Hebdo cover. If you're a North African socialist in Ménilmontant this combination of cultural products makes quite a bit more sense than if you are an American social-media activist desperate, above all, to be seen as taking the right side on the issue of the day, which means above all refusing to acknowledge that some questions have complicated histories and there might be no right side to take.

One of the things organised religions excel at is the control and subordination of women. This is, as American academics like to say, 'problematic', and in a way that we are all perfectly prepared to acknowledge when it comes, for example, to the restriction of abortion rights in the United States by the Christian right. Addressing this problem, when it is manifested in minority communities such as the Muslim population of France, can exacerbate their persecution and strengthen the hand of reactionary forces like the party of Marine Le Pen. But the distastefulness of this consequence does not make religious patriarchalism go away. As far as I can tell, the claim of most of the contributors to Charlie Hebdo, to be defenders of secularism who do not have a particular hostility to Islam, is, by their own lights, sincere. This sincerity may involve a failure to recognise the ways in which they are abetting the far right in France, but it may also be rooted in a sharper attunement to the concerns and challenges of people such as those who frequent Libre Ère. They are keeping alive a real, significant strand of the genetic legacy of the left, one which can only be cut out with significant reconceptualisation of what the left's core desiderata are. 

Social-media activists of the Anglophone soi-disant left have discarded the element of their political legacy that equated progress and liberation with the throwing off of the shackles of tradition, and have adopted as an article of faith the view that each community has its own internal standards by which alone it can be judged. Many of my acquaintances on the Anglophone left like to pretend to be neo-Bolsheviks, and often display that striking propaganda poster from the golden age of Soviet graphic design that says "A woman is also a person." But they are picking and choosing too. The refusal to acknowledge as oppressive anything that is done in the name of Islam is in real contradiction with certain other commitments they have, such as economic parity and full legal equality between men and women. Acknowledging this contradiction is not in itself a failure, and it need in no way be an incitement to persecution of marginalised minority groups. The only real failure is pretending things are simpler than they are. To do so is certainly much more likely to abet those politicians, such as Le Pen or Trump, whose success relies on simplistic formulae. And it is also to betray those countless millions of people from the Muslim world who are themselves wary of the claims of tradition, and of the forms of oppression that are so often excused in its name.

I do not believe the state has any business banning articles of clothing. This flows from a more general commitment to the principle that the state has no business intervening in cultural matters at all, whether culture is conceptualised in terms of 'religion' or not. For one thing, to allow the state to do this sort of thing sets government officials up as ethnographers, art critics, and other sub-species of hermeneuticist. I can't help but notice when in the Balkans that there are many Christian women with their heads covered as well. This is supposed to be an expression of 'culture', and not religion, but in the end, if pressed for explanation, somewhere down the line God is going to come up as the ground and rationale of the prohibition on exposed hair. Yet no Bulgarian grandmother would be told by any conceivable future French state that she must remove her head scarf in order to visit this secular country. I don't know what counts as religion, in other words, and I am a relatively subtle interpreter of culture, so I don't really see how a state bureaucracy could know.

Patriarchy can be perpetuated through women's headgear, in the Christian Balkans as in Muslim Anatolia or the Maghreb, even if not all women's religious attire is experienced by its wearers as oppressive. There is a real danger, if the state sets itself up to fight patriarchy by intervening in matters of attire, that this will only in fact create a further pressure, a new possibility for oppression, of the most marginalised and least powerful members of society. So we are left with a true dilemma.

I prefer to take the horn of it, as of many dilemmas in politics, that minimises state encroachment on individual freedom, as well as on the self-determination of sub-state communities. But in this I see myself as decisively breaking with anything that deserves to be called 'the left', in favour of something much closer to anarchism. Yet I am inclined to see the position of Charlie Hebdo, with which I disagree, as representing, again, a sincere and legitimate stance on a real social problem. This is the stance of the traditional left, and it cannot be reduced to simple Islamophobia, any more than Marx's argument for the assimilation of Jews into German society, and thus willy-nilly the eradication of Judaism, can be conflated with Hitlerism. Of course these are different stances. The new, social-media-based Anglophone left, to the extent that it dismisses French secularism as xenophobia tout court, is simply neglecting a significant part of its own legacy, and is misunderstanding much of what is at stake in the current French debate. 

Comments

[Rufo Quintavalle]

Great post - one of the few nuanced discussions of the issue I have seen.

I think some of the older French feminists are upset (and at times overreacting) because they see things as slipping backwards, i.e. if a Balkan woman arrives in France with her headscarf so be it but if someone brought up in France starts wearing a veil this is seen as a retrograde move that undermines the progress the feminists fought for.

For me the crux of the matter is that people on the French Left are confusing a symbol for the underlying issue. French citizens of Muslim origin who did not practice their faith have been targeted by proselytizing Islamic groups for decades. The fact that some French women from these communities are now wearing veils is a symptom of this process rather than a problem in itself. If you are opposed to fundamentalist beliefs - I am since I believe they hinder the full expression of human potential - then it is the proselytizing itself which is the problem not the visible consequences of it. So one needs to do a better job counter-proselytizing (which has never been pluralism's strongest point).

And yes there is a certain irony in American commentators defending fundamentalism in Islam and simultaneously feeling terrified at the prospect of a Ted Cruz presidency.

[Jeet Heer]

I'm sorry but from this side of the cultural divide, it seems to me that you are engaged in strawman arguments against anglophone left. Nobody says fundamentalism shouldn't be challenged and that fundamentalist encroachments on the law shouldn't be resisted. The point is that voluntary and individual manifestations of religious piety that don't harm others (wearing the veil, not offering ham at the deli) should be permitted. Secularism is something to be argued for in the public sphere, not imposed by state dictate. it would help if you actually engaged some of the the anglophone theorists of multiculturalism like Charles Taylor and Will Kymlica rather than arguing with imaginary foes that only exist in your own mind.

[Justin E. H. Smith]

Hi Jeet, Thanks for these comments. I'll talk about Taylor and Kymlicka in a follow-up post. Just to be clear, I certainly agree that secularism is something to be argued for in the public sphere, not imposed by state dictate. This is not however what the Bolsheviks thought, or Atatürk for that matter. It is in the same spirit and the same historical crucible that French laïcité laws emerged. Our friends on the Anglo-social-media left at least need to face up to and account for their departure into a multiculturalism that has no place in left thought prior to the past few decades, and that in fact has a very clear non-left or anti-left pedigree. Again, also, it is not unreasonable to distinguish between the case of ham and the case of the veil. At issue is who is taken as the agent: if it is the woman wearing the veil, she is not harming anyone of course; if it is the men in her life exerting pressure to limit her sartorial choices, then the relevant agents are harming someone (just not us). Again, again, I do not think it is the state's business to make any determinations on this question (finding the relevant agent), but it is very striking that in the culture of Anglo social-media activism we so often see demands that boys and girls brought up in our culture not be given separate treatment of any sort on the basis of gender (e.g., different toys, pink-vs.-blue attire), coupled with an equally strong insistence that the gender-sorting work that is done with religious headgear is either none of our business or is in fact something positive. This looks to me like at least a curious double standard. I am for cultural self-determination, even where it might trump individual self-expression, when the only other choice is state intervention. But I am also for talking about double standards and trying to make sense out of the historical legacies of political positions with which I disagree.

[Ján Tiliki]

I was hoping you’d post something about this, although I was also hoping it would decisively clarify things for me and it hasn’t.

My attention was brought to Charlie’s bomb via a Facebook post by Teju Cole that came across my feed. Teju wrote that:

“Now, the people of Charlie—who in my view were simultaneously the victims of a terrifying, unspeakable crime, and the producers of an antic and gross publication (nothing wrong with that) that was at the same time deeply prejudiced—finally step away from the mask of ‘it's satire and you don't get it’ to state clearly that Muslims, all of them, no matter how integrated, are the enemy.

“Historical analogy can be tiresome and too easy, but sometimes it's the sharpest thinking tool around. Reading this extraordinary editorial by Charlie, it's hard not to recall the vicious development of ‘the Jewish question’ in Europe and the horrifying persecution it resulted in. Charlie's logic is frighteningly similar: that there are no innocent Muslims, that ‘something must be done’ about these people, regardless of their likeability, their peacefulness, or their personal repudiation of violence. Such categorization of an entire community as an insidious poison is a move we have seen before.”

“Read the piece yourself—don't just react,” he urged. “Read the piece and think through who you wish to be in relation to the kinds of arguments it presents.”

So I did. I saw no clearly stated claim that “Muslims, all of them, no matter how integrated, are the enemy.” I saw no logic presented according to which “there are no innocent Muslims” and “that ‘something must be done’ about these people.”

But I wasn’t left with a clear and certain sense of what it was that the author (Riss, as I now know) was really saying. I looked for commentary, and found that others shared my lack of certainty about what’s really being said or meant with this editorial.

A blog post at “Harry’s Place” says that “[w]hile some frame it as a piece about the dangers of accommodationism others interpret it as an attack on all Muslims as potential fifth columnists.”

One commenter said: “I thought the editorial was either poorly written or poorly translated (my French is not good enough to know). An editorial should not be like poetry open to many interpretations… An editorial is an essay that is a statement of opinion. I came away from it scratching my head, and wondering what the opinion of the author was. To me, that is not good writing, or it is a bad translation.”

Another said: “Isn't it saying that none of these Muslims is personally guilty of trying to undermine French culture? They're just doing their thing, and in doing so shifting the ground.”

I'm still not sure what to think.

[Rufo Quintavalle]

"I am for cultural self-determination, even where it might trump individual self-expression, when the only other choice is state intervention."

This is quite clear: there is a hierarchy of ideal, imperfect and worst scenarios that allows the author to choose the lesser of two evils and avoid the contradictory positions of the "Anglo-social-media left".

But bear in mind that cultural self-determination (which is here presented as a half way house between genuine freedom and state control) can itself be influenced by a variety of different internal and external pressures. If a previous generation of French Muslims chose not to wear the veil it was partly because of the secular ideologies within which they were brought up in France and North Africa; not wearing the veil was part of their cultural self-determination. If a small but growing number of French Muslims are now choosing to wear the veil it is in part because of the proselytizing of the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood. So what looks like "cultural self-determination" could also be interpreted as another variant of "state intervention" - not by France this time but by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

If we frame the question as a choice between state intervention by the democratic state in which you live (and over whom you have some power as a citizen) and state intervention by a foreign state over whom neither you nor its own citizens have any power at all then we might come up with a different response.

Ultimately I believe that the pluralistic secular model is strong enough to win on its own terms - resorting to the top down approach is almost an admission of defeat. But it would have been a whole lot easier if we had started doing this a few decades ago rather than wandering down the multicultural alley.

[Vic Lanser]

Your interesting blog post certainly reaches parts many have failed to do.

However, you have what I take to be a US aversion to "state control", assuming it's the bureaucrats who instigate dress rules. It isn't, they come from elected representatives, along with, say, the prohibition of nudism etc. Politicians might well, of course, have nefarious agendas -- Valls has just advanced plans for rules to apply in unis, a "populist" move to distance himself from Hollande's evident unpopularity.

Multiculturalism might have reactionary origins in your cultural history, but to my knowledge it came from the cultural relativism deriving from studies in social anthropology, backed by a basic egalitarian, non-judgemental approach.

Transferred to complex advanced societies it has of course played out with more mixed results than the originators hoped! But ghettoisation is not peculiar to that approach -- it's one of France's biggest problems, owing to its longstanding racism.

France's "laïcité" is somewhat mythical. After the Ch Hebdo atrocities, it was not the bells of the Paris H de V which rang out, but those of Nôtre Dame. It's Catho-laïcité, but the increasingly secular society doesn't seem to care.

EXCEPT many young people of all backgrounds -- yes, I do mean "whites" too -- wanted no part of "Je Suis Charlie", seeing it as a coming together for warmth of a racist ruling élite with as many docile fodder as they could hoodwink. Some of this spirit persists in the Debout La Nuit movement right now.

I'll stop here; your blog was too long for me to remember it all, and at my age it's bedtime. Best wishes.