John Menadue

Chris Clohessy. Bad reading leads to destructive religion.

The recent terror attacks in France have highlighted a number of issues, all needing furtherdiscussion. One is the reality that it took an attack on European soil to provoke such a reaction 1.6 million people marching in Paris, led by forty or more world leaders. But militant groups,under Islamic guise, have been slaughtering people for an extended period of time in Nigeria,in Pakistan, in Syria and Iraq in the last few weeks Boko Haram terrorists have killed over twothousand in Nigeria. The world reaction, compared to its reaction to Paris, has been negligible,suggesting an inconsistency in the way we value human life.

A second issue is whether free speech can legitimately include hate speech. The reason that Idont walk down the street calling out racial or bigoted epithets at people of colour, or of aparticular culture or religion, is because I am neither a racist nor prejudiced against people whoare different, but also because such behaviour is profoundly wrong. In that sense, I quite rightlydo not have complete freedom of speech: both the civil law and the moral law forbid speechthat is hateful: leading one to ponder whether the now popular #jesuischarlie slogan believesthat bigoted or hateful speech is a permissible part of free speech. Charlie Hebdo is anunpleasant publication: not satire, for satire is subtle and clever, but simply crude, bigoted andunfunny. Those who speak in its defence insist that religion is an idea, and that ideas can beattacked. But Muhammad, or Pope Benedict or Jesus of Nazareth are not ideas: they are people,and Charlie Hebdo attacks them brutally and regularly. In 1946 the judges at Nuremburgunanimously sentenced to death a Nazi named Julius Streicher. He had never killed anyone: buthe did publish an appalling newspaper call Der Strmer, which incited anti-Semitic feeling mostlyby its cartoons caricaturing members of the Jewish faith. So, can free speech legitimately includehate speech? If not, then we dont have freedom of speech: and who knows, maybe thats not abad thing after all.

But no cartoon could ever be as offensive as the taking of a single human life: the slaughter ofmen, women and children, young and old, armed and unarmed, Christian, Muslim, Jewish,Yazidis and so many others in the last few months by men and women claiming to act in thename of Islam, remains the most pressing issue. It is not because these are educated Muslimsliving Quranic principles that the massacres are happening, but because they are uneducatedpeople, Islamic only in name or in the slogans they carry, who consistently fail to read theirsacred texts correctly. A sacred text cannot be read and then acted out: there is a middle step,that of authentic interpretation which, if bypassed, leads to all sorts of fundamentalisms. Theissue with the Quran is not whether it exhorts to violence at times it does but whether ornot those exhortations were for their time only, or whether they have a universal and timelessvalidity. As long as a portion of people read their text incorrectly, we will continue to experiencebehaviour in the name of religion which is destructive and life-threatening.

*Fr Chris Clohessy is Parish Priest of Newlands/Claremont in the Archdiocese of Cape Town. He isSouth Africas leading Catholic Scholar in Islamic Studies and wrote this guest column for theJesuit Institute.

John Menadue

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