Islamism is no longer articulated except lip service. Besides, we no longer say “Islamism”, but “radical Islamism”. As we no longer say “Taliban”, but “ultra-conservative Taliban”, as if a Taliban could be something else, as if Islamism was not a precise ideology, theorized since the 1920s and put into practice since the Islamic revolution of Iran of 1979. This is magical thinking: by murmuring “Islamism”, we would overcome it, by distinguishing between “Islamism” and “radical Islamism”, we would tame those who want to replace the laws of the Republic with those of God. Emmanuel Macron did nothing else during the commemoration of the Hyper Cacher massacre of January 9, 2015, preferring to justify the act of the Islamist terrorist with the excuse of “madness”.
“There is a case where tolerance can become disastrous to a nation: it is when it tolerates an intolerant religion”, wrote Helvétius, referring to the Catholicism of yesterday, but one can apply his maxim to the Islam of today. Tolerance towards intolerant Muslims has given birth to a cold monster whose mission is to sweep away culture, to wipe out democratic precepts and replace them with religious taboos.
The case of the representation of Muhammad in an American university is the most glaring example. An art history professor from Hamline University, Minnesota, chose to study a 16th-century painting of the angel Gabriel and Muhammad. In a process of tolerance, she warned, by mail and orally, her adult students, so that their bigoted sensitivity could not be offended by the representation of the prophet of Islam. On the day of the course, no absence is to be deplored, neither in class nor online. The painting is a masterpiece, its fascinating analysis. But then the president of the Muslim Students’ Association attends the course, and his trauma is such that he complains to the university administration about the choice to show a “degrading and disrespectful” image for Muslims. Neither one nor two, the dean of Hamline aligns himself with the sentimentality of his Muslim student: the decision to propose this image for study is “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic”. The president of the university goes a little further by considering that “respect for Muslim students should have prevailed over academic freedom”. The full professor’s course is therefore cancelled, and her contract will not be renewed.
No respect from anyone should outweigh academic freedom, no sensibility should curtail academic freedom, no insult should stop study. Especially since the representation of Muhammad is not prohibited among Shiites, and the painting in question is neither blasphemous nor insulting, but glorifies the figure of Muhammad and immortalizes, through art, the moment of the revelation. But since when is Islam capable of subtleties? And even if the painting studied had been blasphemous and insulting, since when has the West taken up the prohibitions of retrograde countries which, by dint of prohibitions and taboos, are not able to meet the primary needs of their populations and who stagnate intellectually as Islamism spreads?
The affair has taken on such proportions in the United States, which is experiencing a major culture war, that Ali Asani, professor of religion and Islamic culture at Harvard, intervened in the columns of the washington post : “To make general statements that it is forbidden, in particular the image in question, is absolutely false. It shows a lack of knowledge of religion.” He could also have explained why his course is banned in almost all Arab-Muslim countries, that it is a chance for knowledge and the future to be able to study without the sharp sword of moral censorship, and that ‘at this rate Islam would be reduced to the Koran and only the Koran, which is the wish of Islamists of all stripes.
“The tolerance that is noticed and often praised in great men is always only the result of the deepest contempt for the rest of mankind; when a great mind is thoroughly imbued with this contempt, he ceases to consider men as his fellows and to demand of them what is demanded of his fellows.” We should definitely all re-read Schopenhauer to avoid sinking into the marble of intolerance.
