We have to make sure that Europe’s problems do not become ours and that the fury there does not resonate here, says Max du Preez.
Fierce debates on the terror attacks in France raged in our country this week. That is a good thing. We are part of the global community and the issues of free speech, religion, tolerance, bigotry, history and alienation concern us as much as any society.
But we have to take care that we don’t make France’s (or Europe’s) problems South African problems.
We should not allow the venom and the fury of the debates elsewhere to sow division and promote intolerance in our society.
Most of the Muslims in France are second- or third-generation French citizens, most of them from Algeria, the former French colony where France fought an ugly war between 1954 and 1962 during which about a million people were killed.
The roots of Islam in South Africa go back about 340 years when Muslim slaves from the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia and political exiles from Dutch colonies, many of them learned Muslim scholars, were brought to the Cape.
South African Muslims became completely integrated into South African society and influenced the politics, languages and cultures of our society.
They are us; we are them.
But our cultures and public mores are also very different from those in France.
A satirical magazine specialising in giving extreme offence such as Charlie Hebdo could never have worked here.
I cringed when I first saw a copy of the magazine some years ago, yet it was greatly revered as a symbol of free speech and legitimate irreverence in France.
Our public discourse around Islam and acts of violence have already been unduly influenced by the simplistic debates and deep-seated prejudices in the West.
Already the Americanisms are creeping into our public vocabulary, especially after the 9/11 attacks; words such as “Islamists”, “political Islam” and “the War on Terror”.
As we have seen in the US and Europe, many South Africans look at al-Qaeda, Islamic State (Isis), Boko Haram and the Taliban and equate that with Islam. After every act of terrorism where the perpetrators say they acted in the name of Islam, all Muslims are expected to publicly condemn these actions, even apologise.
When Chris Hani’s killers, Clive Derby-Lewis and Janusz Walus, appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they declared that they were Christians and that they had no remorse because they saw Hani as the anti-Christ.
They killed for Jesus.
I did not hear a chorus going up demanding that all Christians in South Africa denounce this distortion of their faith. The same applies to Anders Breivik, the Norwegian who killed 77 Norwegians in 2011, and Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people in Oklahoma in 1995. It was generally accepted that these acts in the name of Christianity were aberrations.
Why is it so difficult to accept that terror in the name of Islam is also an aberration? There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, and the overwhelming majority of them are as peaceful and tolerant as any other faith group.
Yet there is no denying that many power-hungry politicians and charlatans, oil barons, tribalists, misogynists and racists have had much success in hijacking Islam – al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, the Taliban, Isis, the Wahhabis of Saudi-Arabia and others.
It is them we should condemn, not the Islamic faith itself.
It is unfortunately true that some South African Muslims, some of them prominent, came close to condoning the Paris attacks through their faint condemnation.
The attack on Charlie Hebdo was an attack on free speech, pure and simple, and the murders in the kosher store were acts of racial hatred, pure and simple.
Many ordinary Muslims become defensive when acts of terror are committed in the name of their faith and resort to all kinds of rationalisations.
More often than not, I think, this doesn’t mean they agree with this behaviour. It is probably more because they see Islam as an integral part of their identity, history and culture and feel under siege – just as any other community tends to become defensive when under attack.
But Muslim leaders should work harder to help their more conservative followers understand that free speech is also a keystone of our Constitution and that local journalists and artists have an obligation to push the boundaries on occasion. The relationship between South African Muslims and Jews is not a good one.
Often the rest of us get sucked into this.
In the spirit of what happened in Paris last week, I would love to see two hashtags trending in South Africa: #IamMuslim and #IamJew.
And yes, while we ponder these things we should also ask hard questions of ourselves as Africans about why we talk animatedly about 17 dead Parisians and not about 2 000 murdered Nigerians in the town of Baga last week.
Shame on us. Let #IamBaga also trend.
* Max du Preez is an author and columnist.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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