By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo
Attorney and Counselor at Law
The Charlie Hebdo killings have been roundly condemned worldwide; but what is troubling is the fact that many of those that condemned this terrorist attack engaged in political double-speak. This is because these people recognized the heinous nature of the attack while qualifying it with the fact that one is not allowed to make fun of one’s religious beliefs. So we have one or two sentences devoted to a total condemnation of the terrorists while we have several paragraphs devoted to lambasting those who choose to make fun or criticize other people’s religious faith.
The first of these category of double speakers was the pope himself. While soundly condemning any act that enables others to kill in the name of their god, this pope opined that it was fundamentally wrong for people to ridicule the faith of others. He equated this act to insulting one’s mother and boasted that in his younger days, such an insult always elicited a punch.
When we were at the university of Cape Coast, many intelligent albeit religious students would give you a pass in many things you said against them but would openly declare that nobody could insult their religion. One time, I was on Atlantic FM debating a respected student leader on the topic “The Role of Female Education in the Socio-Economic Development of the Country”. At a certain point in the debate, I could see clearly that I was losing badly….until I declared in some sonorous voice, “Why is my brother speaking against the notion of promoting female education? Because he belongs to a socio-cultural and religious demographic that spurns on the rights of the female other!!!” That was it! In unprecedented rage, my interlocutor rose up and yelled that I had no right to insult his religion. He was so angry that the debate came to an abrupt end, and I was considered the virtual winner. But what I remember very well is a note passed by a sympathetic listener to this person. The note read: Do not allow yourself to be easily defeated by those who provoke you in order to defeat you”. I am not sure that this piece of advice is sufficiently popular with many devotees who choose to speak on the Charlie Hebdo massacre.....
Quite recently, one respected Ghanaian top journalist, Manasseh Azure, joined in the double-speak of those who find the means to shed crocodile tears for those who died at Charlie Hebdo, while tacitly blaming them for the tragedy. In a single short paragraph, Mr. Azure tersely condemned the attack. However, he ended up calling the deceased “martyrs of stupidity”. He explained copiously in many paragraphs why these Charlie Hebdo victims brought the deaths upon themselves. It is interesting to note that he had no similar choice designation for the attackers who perpetrated this dastardly attack, nor the one who killed the innocents in the Kosha shop.
Nobody can stop anybody from making fun of anything. The very foundation of world literature, science and civilization is built upon lampooning earlier and even current ideas, whether religious or cultural or even economic. Medieval thinking did not tolerate any criticism of faith: it merely acted by burning non-conformists at the stake and concocting a nomenclature of vocabulary to punish those who asked too many questions or made fun of established religion. Thus apostasy, heresy, blasphemy and other words featured prominently in the lexicon of the inquisition and justified punishments like burnings at the stake, stoning, pressing and drowning. That time is long gone. We are children of the enlightenment which is supposed to take us away from the darkness of proscription and inquisition to the eternal questioning of ideas and their criticism no matter how presumptively sacred. This is how we become smarter: There is no way to guarantee intellectual stimulation and human advancement unless we allow for untrammeled discourse and criticism of every idea no matter its shape or color. And this is as it should be because if we were to proscribe free speech hinging on religious satire, we will return to the era of Jahiliyya.
Jahiliyya (Arabic: ??????? ??hiliyyah/j?hil?yah "ignorance") is an Islamic concept signifying "Days of Ignorance”) and referring to the condition in which Arabs found themselves in pre- Islamic Arabia, i.e. prior to the revelation of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. In this era of Jahiliyya, revenge killings, terrorism, and uninhibited lawlessness were the scourge of the society in Arabia, until the holy prophet came to restore law, order and civilization. When he began his mission, he was the butt of scathing satire and poetic mockery in Mecca, but he took extreme patience to explain his beliefs to his adversaries until he won the sceptics to his cause. Where it was impossible for him to do so, he only turned his back upon his adversaries, and admonished his followers to do the same. The only times when he commanded retaliation were when he and his followers were openly under siege. And this was understandable because he was not going to sit idle for him and his followers to be obliterated by nincompoops. Whenever the prophet commanded aggression, it was for self-defense and in proportion to similar aggressions perpetrated on him by his detractors. Wherever there were excesses, the blame should be placed on his zealous followers.
The prophet himself had extreme humility, and was vehemently against the idea that anybody should make an image of himself for any purpose, fearing that after his death, many might find it alluring to worship him as a god as had happened within the Christian theology. His edict against self-aggrandizement was out of his own exemplary modesty, and not because he wanted to be any separate and exceptional. The prophet never inferred that he was the last prophet at any time, and if he were alive today, he would not urge his followers to go kill others because they dared to portray him in order to make fun of him. That was never the way of the prophet. He did not raise himself above anybody! It was his followers that raised him above everybody else, as is usual among all followers of the various prophets. It is his followers who are now engaging in acts reminiscent of the era of Jahiliyya which the prophet ironically came to abolish.
Every known religion has thrived on criticism and blasphemy of prior religions for its very growth and survival. Islam itself thrived on its criticism of the numerous gods of Mecca and introduced the worship of one God as its core teaching. In the Quran, the idea that Jesus is the son of God is virtually lampooned, and his crucifixion and death questioned. And I find this Quranic account more persuasive, while for Christians, this will amount to sheer blasphemy. So can the Christians go on rampage to burn the Quran and persecute Muslims for questioning the divinity of the Christ and his death and resurrection?
Christianity also supplanted Judaism, taking substantial teachings from the Babylonian Prophet Zarathustra to lampoon the behavior of members of the established religion. Buddhism also criticized practices in Hinduism and pruned it for its own purposes. Today, the intra-religious sects and denominations inherent in the individual religions are themselves the results of the abrasive criticisms within the individual religions. Thus, every world religion, sect or denomination has evolved upon criticisms and blasphemy against the prior religions, sects and denominations, and if in doubt, consider that the Prophet Jesus Christ was himself nailed on the cross on a charge of blasphemy, having effectively made fun of those Pharisees and teachers of the Law who “strained at gnats and swallowed camels”. Thus religious philosophy evolves on the altar of blaspheming against prior religions, and those who seek to silence this blasphemy and criticism are merely working against the very nature of religious evolution.
Charlie Hebdo is not new in its satirical stance on religion. Making fun of religious beliefs and superstition has always been a strong part of the French literary tradition. Moliere’s writings in the style of Commedia Dell’Arte are examples in religious satire or iconoclastic posturing. In “Tartuffe” for example, Moliere castigated popular beliefs by his scathing attack on the character of a priest….So much was this writer’s incessant attacks on the religious establishment that when he died, the priests refused to bury him in a Christian cemetery; but at night his followers would go and dig up his body from the pagan cemetery and re-bury him in the Christian one. This back and forth burials were all part of the comedy invoked by Moliere’s criticism of established religion and beliefs. Thus the tradition of criticizing established religion or making fun of it is nothing new, but part and parcel of French traditional and literary culture that cannot be supplanted by modern religious sensibilities.
And if you support the idea that nobody should make fun of another’s belief or faith or religion, the slippery slope of your proposition is inherent in the following childish thought expressed by one immature journalist. He said, “One’s freedom of expression and association must go with responsibilities, and should never be a carte blanche to engage in stupidity, arrant provocation and downright carelessness of the interests, faiths, beliefs and views of others.” In this simple quote is impregnated the whole impossibility and stupidity of not making fun of anything. Here, Romeo Adzah Dowokpor has effectively abolished all speech. He is saying that inherent within the notion of freedom of speech is this whole responsibility to stay away from the stupidity of criticizing others’ interests, faiths, beliefs and views. If we cannot criticize others interests, faiths, beliefs and views, then what else can we criticize? So the whole proposition is an imposition of total silence and the abolition of all free speech, because at no time can one speak without offending somebody else’s interests, faith, beliefs and views.
Making fun of others’ beliefs or faith will never cease because our civilization depends on questioning and criticizing human beliefs and faiths. There are those who believe that other human beings are gods, or that a jungle priest can make them rich, or that the world is run by the acts of witches, genies, incubi, succubi, goblins and other such creations of the imagination. There are also those who have extreme faith and belief in money, power, sex and corruption so much that these are their religion. It is the duty of others to persuade these people away from their folly by criticizing and making fun of them.
In any case, you are better off not trying to make any excuses for any act of terrorism because you will get into a slippery slope. List all terrorist strikes you ever heard of and write what you can as justification for those acts, and you will find that these are not people looking for valid excuses to kill and destroy. Remember that they kill indiscriminately and kill their own brethren too.
Those terrorists are desecrating the name of Islam and characterizing the faith by their evil deeds, and unless Muslims speak out, they will be mixed up, and you cannot blame those who form the illogical connection between Islam and terrorism; they will only be making simple human associations. My disappointment in the pope and many others like him is the notion that it is possible to condemn the killings at Charlie Hebdo while at the same time rationalizing the anger of the perpetrators against the criticisms of their so-called faith. Within the context of Charlie Hebdo, it is impossible to excuse the rage of the terrorists. The terrorists must be condemned without any further equivocation or prestidigitation.
Besides, nothing has been achieved for Muslims by the Charlie Hebdo attacks or any terrorist attack except their incessant persecution, humiliation and extra-judicial executions; and the provocateurs cannot, and will not be silenced by any acts of terrorism. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the provocations against the Islamic faith started with terrorism, and continued terrorism will simply lead to further provocations against the religion.
And so it is up to Muslims to take ownership of their religion and to develop the tolerance and wisdom to save themselves from manipulation and persecution by eliminating those who desecrate the religion by their terroristic acts. This is because the survival and reputation of the religion are now conflated with the acts of very few, and those very few are opening up the religion for unjust attacks and making it a vulnerable target for those perpetual enemies of the faith who have sworn a cabalistic oath to eliminate it from the surface of the earth.
Samuel Adjei Sarfo is a Doctor of Laws, Attorney and Counselor at Law, a Teacher of Lore, Certified High School English Educator, Researcher and Scholar. He can be reached at sarfoadjei@yahoo.com
