August 2, 2016
Don’t hate Islam. Critique it.
Who does not recall the early 2015 slogan “Je suis Charlie” taking social media by storm, galvanizing the world in solidarity following the ISIS massacre of twelve cartoonists and staffers of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo? And who has not, even in a mere flash of compassion, displayed the various sad iterations of “Je suis Charlie” in subsequent months, on the heels of additional—lewder, more brazen—orgies of carnage perpetrated by votaries of ISIS? Yet, even as “Je suis Paris,” “Je suis Bruxelles,” “Je suis Beirut,” “Je suis Orlando,” “Je suis Nice” and suchlike came to define our modern times’ indignation in the face of depravity, they also illustrated puzzling indolence, impotence, disorientation and aphasia before a millenarian, apocalyptic malady that many remain ill prepared to call by name—let alone combat and maim.
Then came the July 26, 2016 slaughter of a geriatric French priest, on the altar of his church, in the Norman city of Rouen in northern France; a dreadful deed, yet one barely meriting mention, let alone drawing spates of outrage and media brouhahas accorded earlier feats of religious barbarity. Even an otherwise spunky, unvarnished, straight-talking pope would remain speechless at this horror when his pastoral duty might have required he spoke. And so, “Je suis épuisé,” “I am exhausted,” seems to have become the meme of choice; the times’ appropriate, diffident, politically correct response to an abomination otherwise better left euphemized, exorcised, placated, unnamed.
Yet it is precisely this form of resignation that leads to the victory of a radical Islamist party in the 2022 French presidential election in Michel Houellebecq’s dystopian novelSoumission. In Houellebecq’s narrative, the French Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Ben Abbes clinches the presidency by upholding retrograde, misogynistic, patriarchal, archaic ultraconservative values, and squashing the right-wing National Front party in a brief “civil war” (with the help of the “progressive,” “enlightened” rabidly secular Socialist Party), transforming France and Frenchness into an unimaginable, degraded state of being.
Soumission (submission)—as both condition and religion—subsequently morphs and, in Houellebecq’s telling, “reforms” a godless France: Paris’s iconic Sorbonne soon mutates into the “Université Islamique de Paris-Sorbonne”; non-Muslim professors are compelled to convert to Islam or forcibly resign their posts; female-professors are dismissed; gender equality is abolished; polygamy is advocated and legalized; and all displays of such emblematic symbols of Frenchness as museums, cathedrals, libertine mores, provocative sartorial habits and daily porcine epicurean delights toasted with the obligatory French libations are all prohibited.
And so, Islamist rigor and zealotry and ostentatious orthopraxy become as French as—and indeed replace—Voltaire’s rationalist irreverent skepticism, Marianne’s topless Liberty Leading the People, Joan of Arc’s Christian fervor, and the definitive ode to freedom and republicanism that had been La Marseillaise of times past. “New opportunities would be lain before us” as dutiful Muslims, wrote Houellebecq in the conclusion of Soumission, in a final act of voluntary servitude; “a new, second life, would be bequeathed to us, utterly alien to the one that had come before; and we shall have no regrets.”
But Houellebecq’s novel, by his own admission, is not very realistic, its events not very likely to take place anywhere, anytime soon. Indeed, in order to dismiss his ominous vision as “the dumbest of them all,” Houellebecq’s sanctimonious detractors felt justified recalling inflammatory language that he had himself used in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks describing Islam as “la religion la plus con” (the dumbest religion of them all.)
Yet, Houellebecq’s narrative, incendiary and farfetched as it may seem, is not impossible. Still it remains a work of fiction, aimed to shock, to instigate debate, to compel people to engage in a conversation that ought to be had, on Islam, on freedom of expression, on secularism and republican values, and on an alien and alienated religion and culture that are still maladjusted, still easily offended, still ill prepared to accommodate the challenges of Western modernity, irreverence and skepticism.
Houellebecq and others who dare speak to the angst of a world troubled by Islam and stricken with aphasia are dismissed as demagogues, racists, Islamophobes—even though those critical of the indiscretions of other religions rarely warrant similar expressions of indignation in similarly colorful epithets. And so mutism, stupor and subdued anger are today some of the emotions gripping the French, dismayed by the July 26 murder of the elderly priest, the priest of the city of Joan of Arc’s martyrdom no less, the fifteenth-century “Maid of Orleans” who is still viewed in many French quarters as the “mother of the French nation.”
Save for the few sparse quickly muffled loud voices still defying sanctioned aphasia, the murder of the Rouen priest has largely been met with abdication and resignation; desperation and despair of a so-called “dialogue of cultures” gone awry; a dialogue that had been the apanage of the French Catholic Church for the past fifty years, but one met with utter failure.
No comments:
Post a Comment