Twelve people were murdered in Paris simply because they exercised their right of free expression. Two people were murdered simply because they were police officers, ordinary patrolmen performing their duties. A day later, four people were murdered simply because – as the attacker himself declared verbatim on the telephone – they were Jews. This happened in the middle of Europe, in the center of France’s capital city, not far from the Bastille, where citizens took to the barricades in 1789 so that they would be ruled no longer by an individual despot, but by liberté, égalité and fraternité. This is the revolution that stands at the beginning of our freedom as well.
It took years, decades, almost two centuries, in fact – Europe and, yes, France itself took detours and horrible blind alleys – until people finally almost enjoyed the same rights regardless of their gender, their origin, their religion or their sexual orientation. Yes, I intentionally said “almost enjoyed” the same rights because things haven’t gotten that far in Europe yet. But they can claim the same rights and stand up for them. Freedom and equality alone are not the entire legacy of the French Revolution. The last few days have reminded us that, even with all the political rights and legal regulations, we must always also keep in mind the instance of fraternity, of empathy, of standing up for the weaker, of hospitality toward the foreign, of solidarity with the persecuted. That was the decisive civilizing breakthrough that was surely not successfully completed, but still initiated, that was the transfer into societal reality of the biblical command to show charity: not we Frenchmen and we Germans, not we whites over blacks, not we natives over foreigners, not men over women, not we nobles and we common citizens, not we capitalists and we workers, not we Christians, we Jews and we Muslims, not we European, we Asians and we Africans – no, we humans.
The Islamists are making Islam into a caricature of itself
The terrorists want to drive a wedge between us; they want to force us to make a decision about whether we are Europeans or Arabs, Westerners or Easterners, believers or nonbelievers. In the wake of September 11, 2001, they almost succeeded in doing so – when terror was answered with wars, with torture, with an erosion of the Rechtsstaat, the state based on the rule of law. The inevitable results were more violence and retaliatory violence, more enemy stereotyping, more hatred, more attacks and more deaths, hundreds of thousands of them. Today, the response to the terror must be something different, something enlightened, in the best sense of the word: Not less, but more freedom! Not exclusion, but – especially now – equality! And, more than anything, not antagonism, but fraternalism!
And, indeed, we’ve seen the images from last week, the images of rallies in Paris and Berlin, in Madrid and London, and even in Beirut and Hebron. We’ve experienced global grief and global solidarity. The large, the overwhelming majority of people – across all religious, national and ethnic boundaries – have placed what unites over what divides. No, we Europeans don’t all share a single opinion. Yes, we have our conflicts, differences and contradictions. And, admittedly, not all of us would like to laugh at jokes that come at the expense of a minority, whether they are Jews in Germany, Muslims in France or, say, Christians in Iran. Perhaps some of us also felt offended by the caricatures that appeared in Charlie Hebdo. But we are agreed – in fact, in these days, we were more agreed than ever – in our belief that we never again want to settle these conflicts, differences and contradictions on our continent with violence.
And so I see here, too, in this square in Cologne, in this place that was once one of the darkest in our city, before the doors of the EL-DE-Haus (the Documentation Center on National Socialism of the City of Cologne), the former headquarters of the Gestapo and the epitome of a regime of nationalist terror – yes, I am thrilled, I am absolutely thrilled because I see so many people standing together no matter which religion, political party or union they belong to, no what which origin, which skin color, which gender they have. I see that we are all jointly and resolutely united in our remembrance of the victims of Paris. Together, we express our sorrow; together, we express our revulsion; together, we express our sympathy for the victims’ relatives – but, resolutely, we will resist those who wrongly use the death of 17 innocent people to stir up hatred toward a single segment of the population. We will resist those who fancy themselves the saviors of the Occident, but betray everything about this Occident that is worth loving or living for. We will resist those who are infuriated by a few caricatures and fail to see that, in doing so, they are themselves making Islam into a caricature of itself.
Yes, we will resist – and we should have already resisted much earlier. Indeed, the last week has reminded us all that liberté, égalité and fraternité are neither to be taken for granted nor free, that we must constantly stand up for them anew, fight for them and, if necessary, even defend them with our own life. The fight against oppression and violence is not only being waged in Kobani and Aleppo, not only on September 11, 2001 in New York or on January 7, 2015 in Paris. We must stand up for the ideals of justice and tolerance every day, during our everyday lives, in the workplace and in schools, in political parties, unions and religious communities, and also – too many of us regrettably undervalue this – at the ballot box, and especially during common European elections. The last week has reminded us that Europe could be ground up between nationalists here and religious extremists there, whose mutual hatred whips them into a frenzy. It has reminded us of the conflicts and wars that are taking place not in ages past or on distant continents, but directly on Europe’s doorstep. Only two or three hours away by plane, dozens, hundreds of people are dying every day. And if they aren’t torn to pieces by bullets or bombs, then they die while fleeing or drown in the Mediterranean. Dozens, hundreds of people. Every day.
We shouldn’t sit on the sidelines. And we can’t. What happens in the Middle East will affect us no matter what, affect our security, our prosperity and our societal peace, too. For decades, we supported the bloodiest dictators there and even played a direct role in overthrowing democratic, secular governments. We looked on rather passively as the Palestinians were robbed of their land and their future, settlement by settlement. But, more than anything, we – yes, I say “we” because, even though most of us protested against the war in Iraq in 2003, the war was waged by the leading Western nations, in the name of the Western community of values and also from German airports – more than anything, we brought lawlessness and violence to an entire country while claiming (or perhaps actually believing) that we were liberating Iraq.
The attacks in Paris are not least a consequence of this war, which bestowed on the terror network Al-Qaida a deployment zone in Europe’s immediate vicinity that Osama bin Laden wouldn’t have hoped for in his wildest dreams. And, at the same time, they are a consequence of our failure in Syria, where we didn’t support peaceful demonstrators, who were massacred by a brutal regime and sometimes even gassed; where we watched on passively (or perhaps even out of perfidious calculation) as our own closest allies – Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states – financed and highly armed the jihadists, and even the so-called “Islamic State” invoked by the attackers.
I’m not saying that to deflect responsibility from the Muslims themselves – after all, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are also Muslim, just like all of the dictatorships ruling in the Islamic world. I’m saying it to point out that, instead of arising in a vacuum, terror has a social, political and spiritual breeding ground. Whoever wishes to defeat the terror needs police, intelligence services, a legal system. Many of us who, like me, have grown up with the peace movement have needed a long time, too much time, to also appreciate the necessity of having a security apparatus – and to acknowledge the bravery of our soldiers and police officers. Even so, we will only defeat the terror if we root out its causes. The fact of the matter is that those here in whose name the violence was carried out bear a special responsibility. When war and annihilation was brought over half the world in the name of Germany, it was also and especially up to the German exiles who had fought against the Nazis themselves to profess that there was a different Germany, a better Germany.
At this point, I’d like to direct some words especially to the Muslims, to my brothers and sisters in faith. It’s not enough to say that the violence doesn’t have anything to do with Islam. At the moment when terrorists invoke Islam, the terror also has something to do with Islam. We must seek out a debate with the teaching that today inflames people across the world against each other, that murders or debases people of other faiths. In recent months, jihadists have displaced, raped, murdered hundreds of thousands of Christians, Yazidis and anyone else holding different views. Just a few weeks ago, they attacked a school in Pakistan and shot dead 141 people, almost all of them children. And on the very day that jihadists attacked the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, jihadists in Nigeria razed a village to the ground and massacred several hundred, if not 2,000 civilians – all in the name of Islam. And whether these village inhabitants were Muslims or Christians doesn’t interest me a bit; I don’t even want to bring that up here. They were humans. Peaceful, defenseless humans. They, too, were our brothers and sisters.
Islam has experienced waves of violence time and again. There was the storm of the Mongols, and there was the storm of the crusaders. But this violence and this barbarism are coming out of our own ranks, and neither the Mossad nor the CIA is responsible for them. It’s up to us, to each one of us individually, to tear off the grimace that is disfiguring the face of our religion. It’s our responsibility and our task to see to it that people no longer associate Islam with terror and violence, but once again with freedom and justice, no longer with oppression and punishment, but with humor and culture. But, more than anything, it’s up to us to enforce the supreme commandment of Islam: to show compassion. “If you should raise your hand against me to kill me, I shall not raise my hand against you to kill you.” Most people today will take that to be something from the Sermon on the Mount, but it’s actually from our own Koran, Surah 5:28.
Let us take to the barricades whenever it is necessary!
Don’t look the other way if your children, siblings or friends suddenly hold up the Koran overnight, claim that it should only be interpreted in a strictly literal way, act like they are upholders of moral standards and believe that they know better about everything. Talk with them. Point out to them the tradition of Islamic scholarship stretching back 1,400 years and beginning with the Prophet himself, who never understood the Koran in only a literal manner and always accepted more than just a single interpretation. Tell them that following the Prophet isn’t just about wearing certain clothes or having a certain beard, but about making use of reason, about searching for knowledge even in the most distant lands and about performing deeds of charity. Make it clear to them that, according to all authoritative traditions of interpreting Islam, jihad can only be a precisely defined defensive war that is limited in time, and that it never, ever permits the murder of defenseless people. Remind them that actual jihad is in no way the fight against nonbelievers, but rather the believer’s fight with him- or herself. In your mosques and schools and families, don’t ignore the verses in the Koran that seem to call for violence; instead, address them openly, discuss them and place them in their historical context. Intervene if derisive things are said about people with other beliefs and especially about Jews, as is happening more and more frequently among our youths. “Either you are my brother in faith or my brother in humanity.” Those are the 7th-century words of Ali Ibn Abi Talib, who unites Sunnis and Shiites more than any other successor of the Prophet as both the fourth caliph and the first imam. But that, precisely that, is also at the same time the humane core that is common to the religions of both the Occident and the Orient, and that was secularized during the French Revolution as the principle of equality.
Let us – regardless of whether we are religious or not, black or white, native or foreign – let us take to the barricades whenever it is necessary to demonstrate our liberté, our égalité and our fraternité, too. The 17 people who were murdered in Paris – as journalists, as police, as Jews – are alive in our thoughts and our prayers as humans. They bear testament to the fact that the fight continues, the fight that began in Paris in 1789: All men become brothers.
Translation by Josh Ward
Article published on January 19th, 2015 on the website of the German weekly “Die Zeit”
Navid Kermani is a writer and Orientalist who lives in Cologne and has family roots in Iran. His new book Zwischen Koran und Kafka (Between Koran and Kafka) was recently published. This is the English translation of an article based on a speech he delivered in German on January 14, 2014, in Cologne during a rally to commemorate the victims of the recent attacks in Paris.