1.

Did the terrorism perpetrated against the staff of Charlie-Hebdo

achieve anything but adding another drop of blood to a battlefield
already covered in blood?
Certainly. It gave those who consider Islam- Islam mind you, and not
expansionist neo-Imperialism, Neo-Liberal economic tyranny, or
rampant racism- to be the worlds first, and maybe even only problem
another call to arms in what is in effect the 21st centurys own crusade.
When exactly did Islam come to be a global problem?
Dont bother thinking too hard. There is a pretty straightforward
answer. For those who are beating the drums of war now have a million
ears perked and ready to nod along that Islam has been a problem
since it first appeared more than 1, 400 years ago.
On the other side of the same cheap coin, there are those who would
have it, and with no lesser degree of enthusiasm, that Islam and
nothing besides Islam, is what provides the answer to any and all of
the worlds problems.
This miserable absolutism needs some deconstruction. Not just a
theoretical deconstruction but a historical deconstruction. An
examination of the logic of events that were the actions of people who
(we hope) can yet alter the course of these events. Because if left as it
is, this course will lead us, hurtling and heedless, towards an abyss.
2.
Denial will do us no good. Islam has a certain exceptional quality: it is
true that it has become, in our time specifically, the most global of
religious fundamentalisms. Oil and Israel, being the two critical
elements in contemporary Imperialist structures, have created a
context which made Islamist fundamentalism exceptional among
religious fundamentalism. Global Imperialism has made Islamist
fundamentalism a global phenomenon in this post- cold war
international space. I know what youre thinking. You are thinking that
a rational, classical liberalism, despite its limitations can restrain the
adoption of the idea of an Islamic threat to the same proportions it
restrained the Communist threat or the Arab nationalist threat or the
Nasserist threat. In short liberalism would see the Islamic threat in its
limited political and historical context as it saw the other threats in its
cold war bipolar period. In other words, that liberalism would be able to
perceive that Islamist fundamentalism, or Islamic exceptionalism, is a

concrete reality with specific causes and a specific context within the
broader context of living human struggles.
You would be wrong however. Because in this age of neo-liberalism,
what we knew as liberalism has lost its mind completely. It has become
in fact a competing essentialism, seeing in Islam nothing but an
essential evil, which cannot be reformed. It sees Islamists as devils, all
carbon copies of each other, and all the victims of some inexplicable
mental disturbance which appeared for no reason among the subjects
in this unfortunate corner of the world called the middle east.
The secularism we have now, and the influential Islamism of the day,
both see that the central issue of the day is the eternal, unchanging
essence of Islam: in the structure of its theology, or its sacred text, or
whatever . Whatever it is, it makes Islam different than any other
religion, unchanging as it proceeds through time and space, or with the
historical conditions of the Muslims themselves.
And of course, if this was really the case, the results would be
catastrophic. Because from the point of view of an extremist
secularism, and one which sees Islam as an inhumane essence, the
obvious solution looks remarkably like a crusade. Even if it is no longer
officially in the name of Christ, it will be a crusade against an essential
evil which can only be destroyed by the sword, and which is waged
against 15% of the worlds population of the planet. Not to mention
that from the perspective of an extremist Islamist perspective, the
essential and fundamental power of good in
Islam must be spread through conquests of neighboring lands
inhabited by evil, crusading or secularist, peoples.
Which is exactly what Samuel Huntington assumed when he wrote,
more than twenty years ago, his infamous work The Clash of
Civilisations.
3.
The fact of the matter is that the existence of secularists and Islamists
avid to kill each other is not the problem at all. This is an evil that is
inherent in all belief systems whether earthly or heavenly. The problem
is how to control this urge, and how to counter this logic, of mutual
hostility. The problem is that gradual slide of humanity in general down
to the conviction that this struggle of identities is the critical issue in
the battle which is raging across the planet today.

This is quite simply not a problem which can be solved or even

analysed from within the framework of identity politics. Accepting in
principle that the issue is one of identity conflict allows only for two
approaches. One can either find a framework for co-existence which
maintains these essential identities intact (a sort of simplistic multiculturalism), or otherwise to make these national identities totally
uniform (a sort of simplistic mono-culturalism). The latter of course
would certainly reflect those values which the monoculture considers
absolute.
And this is precisely the problem with the forms of secularism which
are hegemonic over the world as a whole, but particularly that which
wields power over our Arab-Islamic corner of that world. For in a world
increasingly concerned with the issue of essence and identity, towards
accepting easy ahistorical arguments, we move towards a secular
solution focused primarily on form. It seeks a form of politics which
solves this eternal clash between these two essential identities by
adjusting the form of political rule in such a way that it can simply
leave to Caesar that which belongs to Caesar and to God that which
belongs to God.
The problem here is that the logic of this particular form of secularism
reinforces this clash of identities because it refuses to engage
substantively the question of extremist Islamist fundamentalism in
terms of its historical development. When the hegemonic form of
secularism insists that the problem is the very essential, eternal nature
of the Islamic text itself, then it is by definition descending into that
essentialist identity politics which makes it a part of the problem and
not part of the solution. To put it simply: asking from the external
secular perspective what is the real Islam? (is it essentially good or
essentially evil?) merely makes you a combatant in a battle.
This identity based secularism which is predominant in our Islamic
societies seems to be the result of the predominance in turn among
the intelligentsia in this part of the world of a vision of the world which
is constrained by either liberal political thought, or Stalinist thought.
Both of these theoretical standpoints lean towards an approach
depending heavily on the carrying out of massive social engineering
projects executed from the top on to the masses. Identity politics is the
flip-side of political thinking springing from a bourgeois or petit
bourgeois sense of trusteeship over the population.
This is because one of the definitive elements of an essentialist politics
of identity is this ahistorical approach. Seeing the various elements of
the social field as essences or identities (achieved or desired) is to
choose not to see them as a constant historical becoming which is

carried out by actual subjects who are in turn formed by that historical
activity and context. This view is characteristic of the ruling classes of
any society, or of classes who fail to develop a comprehensive project
of liberation. Among these classes is that class of enlightened
intellectuals in the Arab and Islamic worlds who insist on an elitist
project of social transformation.
By opening itself up to the historical contextualization of ideas,
including its own ideas, secularism will begin to assure that it does not
remain simply as one essential identity in a perpetual clash with other
identities, but rather as a historically specific mechanism which
humanity has developed as a response to the particular conditions of
modernity and its contradictions. It will then be forced to find a social
locus for its humanistic project. For there is no true, living presence to
any idea which does not become a real and widespread popular
awareness. In this way, secularism will cease to be a top-down, elitist
project forced upon this society. It will cease to pursue this failure of a
project: namely, the attempt to destroy, by force, some essential
identity, which is the source of all evil. Rather it will begin to fight
another sort of battle all together: it will fight to empower the forces of
liberation- those humanistic, concrete, historical forces of liberation,
whatever they may be- the theoretical tools they need to elaborate on
their specific historical projects.
Secularism will not gain a viable non-identity based political approach
unless its theoretical project becomes totally immersed in a concrete
social project. This is not to say that it should abandon its mission to
enlighten and reform the political and economic orders of society, but
that it should engage the society in which it finds itself from within,
engage with the concrete human subjects who are fighting to actualize
their visions to better that society. Nor will it succeed in this if it just
represents itself in this struggle as a combatant. Rather it must engage
these forces as the representative and vanguard of all the
dispossessed and victimized segments of that society. To put it as
simply as possible, secularism must guarantee for all identities an
overarching framework of freedom, tolerance and cooperation in a
world where it is increasingly obvious that the freedoms of
marginalized individuals or groups works as a guarantee for the
freedom of the society as a whole, and, of course, vice versa.