Abstract
In the aftermath of the attack that killed 12 people at the offices of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, there was a demand to identify with the slain victims in the name of freedom of speech by marching under the banner ‘Je Suis Charlie’. That an amalgam was made between the killings and the right to free expression appeared incongruent when it quickly became apparent that those who did not see themselves as ‘Charlie’ were not afforded the same right to express their opposition to being forced to identify with what, for them, was a racist, Islamophobic publication. This chapter interrogates the call to contextualize the purportedly particularist nature of France’s relationship to satire and secularism (laicité).
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Notes
- 1.
The Charlie Hebdo edition of February 25, 2015, the first to discuss the attacks, features several versions of this explanation. In an interview with Gérard Bonnet and Malek Chebel, Bonnet, for example, contends that a Muslim that objects to caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed ‘remains in an infantile state that confuses the real and representation. It’s like the primitive that believes that photography steals his soul. It’s an enormous regression.’
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http://www.understandingcharliehebdo.com/ Retrieved March 30 2015.
- 4.
All translations to the French are our own.
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See news report available at, https://www.thelocal.fr/20130305/its-pork-or-nothing-pupils-in-french-school-told. Retrieved March 30, 2015.
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https://sites.google.com/site/mamanstoutesegalestest/. Retrieved February 18, 2018.
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‘Nous sommes les Indigènes de la république’. http://lmsi.net/Nous-sommes-les-indigenes-de-la. Retrieved March 30, 2015.
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Indeed, the idea presented by Tonneau, but also in the British context by Steven Howe (2011), that Islam has only recently become a feature of the identity of immigrants from Muslim countries belies the fact that ‘Muslim’ was an interchangeable signifier of identity, along with ‘“natives” (indigènes) and “Arabs” (arabes)’ under colonialism (Fernando 2015c). Hence, ‘race and religion have long formed a nexus’ (ibid). To consider therefore the negative portrayal of Islam as racially neutral or even as consistent with an anti-racist positioning not only reveals a lack of empathy with the Muslim other and a hypocrisy, given, as has been pointed out, the rather different treatment of anti-semitism in the ranks of Charlie Hebdo (Phillips 2015), but, more significantly, provides a historical account that denies the French state’s own amalgamation of race and religion in the management of its colonized populations, a legacy which has been carried over into the post-immigration Metropole.
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http://www.understandingcharliehebdo.com/. Also see, https://www.vox.com/2015/1/14/7546903/understanding-charlie-hebdo. Retrieved March 30, 2015.
- 10.
As soon as the Mouvement des indigènes de la république came on the scene in 2005, it was denounced as anti-French but also as having misinterpreted French colonial history. In a dossier on colonialism, the fear of being accused of taking an ‘ethnicized’ approach leads the editorial to presume that the movement had not really taken off: ‘there were many who, seduced at the outset by what it incarnated, later took their distance’ (Le Monde 2006). In the same dossier, the historian of colonialism, Emmanuelle Saada, questioned the utility of referring to present-day French citizens of colonized origin as ‘indigenous’: ‘the indigenous were subsumed under a discriminatory status, the indigenous code, inscribed in law, whereas today, it is the fight against discrimination and racism that is the law’ (Saada, cited in Bernard 2006: viii).
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Lentin, A., Titley, G. (2018). ‘Non, je ne serai jamais Charlie’: Anti-Muslim Racism, Transnational Translation, and Left Anti-racisms. In: Yaqin, A., Morey, P., Soliman, A. (eds) Muslims, Trust and Multiculturalism. Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71309-0_6
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