Freedom for You is freedom for me
The blood curdling news
of the massacre of 145 people in Peshawar,that included 135 children, the fatal hostage drama in Sydney four days
later and the brutal killing of 12 journalists and five others in Paris last
week are assertions of the terrorists’
freedom to pull the trigger as and when they want and at any target they desire
irrespective of their victims’ culpability in any real or imaginary crime or insult to them. It is
symptomatic of aggressive violence against all they perceive to be ‘the Others’
- those who are alien to their views and perceptions especially related to
their religion and its dogma. They assert that their freedom to kill has the
sanction of God and hence is justified.
It is a sad but true coincidence
that all the three above mentioned killings have been carried out in the name
of Islam by a group of fanatics who suffer from lack of true knowledge, understanding
and discernment of values inherent in the Quran. The genesis of the word Islam goes
back to the Arabic “salema” which means peace, purity, submission and
obedience. In the religious sense, Islam means submission or surrender to the
will of God in ultimate peace. Almost all religions underline the worth and
value of surrender. Hindus believe in submission or surrender to God. One of
the main divisions of Hinduism-Vaishnavism- talks about ‘saranagati or
prappati’ as the high watermark of one’s devotion or Bhakti to God. The Bible
says: “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee
from you.” (John 4:7) and “Humble
yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you. (John4:10). In Judaism, we have these lines: “To stop wittering for a few moments and to declare your faith in God’s power/ is
to surrender both your fears- and your entire self to
Him.”
The tragedy is those who do not understand their religion- of whatever
denomination it may be- demand from all others obedience and submission to them,
substituting themselves for God. Who has given them the claim to be God or the
representatives of God? Jesus alone is accepted as the Son of God and no one
who believes in Christ claims to that status. So is Prophet Muhammad whom the
Muslims believe as the last Prophet sent by God to mankind. In which case how
can any Muslim claim to act and speak as though he is the messenger of
God? Whether one is born into a
Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu family, s/he follows the teachings of the Gods
the family worships. The prophets of different religions speak in one voice about
belief in God, who has sent them as messengers with revelation and guidance for
humanity. All of them stress on peace and tolerance as crucial for the survival
of humanity.
But all major conflicts
have hinged upon violent disagreements between different faiths incited by
egoistic religious groups seeking to assert their power in the name of
religion. Religion has been the most powerful concept in human minds that has
been used and abused to unite as well as divide people. These bigoted militant groups, intolerant of
faiths other than their own appropriate to themselves the license to kill. This
is the freedom they enjoy as they go trigger happy at some imaginary
provocation. Religion is no longer the opium of the masses; it is the poison
that kills thousands of innocents who are least bothered about others who
follow different faiths other than their own, leave aside harbouring any
animosity towards them
The latest shooting in
Paris goes beyond the simple cartoon that featured a weeping Muhammad
overwhelmed by fundamentalists saying "C'est dur d'être aimé par des
cons" ("it's hard being loved by jerks").- a cartoon that
was aimed at Islamic hardliners and not against Islam or its followers. But the
cartoon was seen as offensive and provocative resulting in the tragic shooting
of a dozen journalists employed in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Everyone
has a right to view a cartoon or a statement in his own way; getting offended or
hurt is as rightfully valid as enjoying a humorous satire. The Paris tragedy is
a deadly debate between freedom of expression and freedom to kill.
Freedom to kill
produces irreversible results while freedom of expression holds out hope or possibility
of solution. It is easy to pull the trigger, but not easy to enter into a
dialogue with those who have a different point of view. Dialogue demands mental
strength, intellectual empathy and humility to accept and appreciate
co-existent contraries. Freedom to kill needs only a pistol or an AK 47 without
reason, emotion and humaneness. Hand triggers the pistol, the mind directs the
dialogue.
What is the outcome of
insensate killing? Is it a triumph or just a Pyrrhic victory? Apart from
snuffing out hundreds of innocent lives, the killers do not achieve anything. They
provoke angry retaliation and counter- violence. History is replete with
religious wars from the 11th century when European Christians waged
a war against the Muslims to recover the Holy Land. The ‘holy’ war continues
even today between the Jews and the Arabs in the Middle East which is viewed as
the most intractable conflict. The Second World War was fought between the Jews
and the Christians resulting in the decimation of six million Jews. The
Partition soon after our independence witnessed Inter-communal violence between
Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims resulting in between 500,000 to 1 million casualties.
The Indo-Pak conflicts continue till date with daily killings in the Kashmir
border.
The barbaric killing of
thousands in the name of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that was practiced by the German
Nazis against the Jews is being replicated now. This has neither served the cause of the terrorists
who constantly burrow themselves in holes and run for safety form one hiding
place to another, nor has the backlash against all Muslims,-of whom the
majority desires to live in peace and harmony with the rest of the world- helped to rein in the marauders of humanity. One
is not certain about the genuineness of the terrorists adoption of Islam and
their Islamic credentials when their actions go contrary to the tenets of
Islam. The ISIS idea of re-establishing the Caliphate by aggressive and violent
killings has not found acceptance even among the Muslim countries. The venom
spewed by these groups and the violence committed by them find no support among
a majority of Muslims. Referring to the
recent Paris attacks, a Muslim mother, Zarine Khan said that the terrorists
reference to the
Quran is completely at odds with our Islamic faith." "We condemn this violence in the strongest possible terms. We
condemn the brutal tactics of ISIS and groups like it. And we condemn the
brainwashing and recruiting of children through the use of social media and the
Internet," she said, adding: "And we have a message for ISIS,
[Islamic State leader Sabah] Baghdadi and his fellow Social Media recruiters:
Leave Our children alone."
Who is the victor in
all these conflicts made in the name of religion? None, except death of
innocents. The result is frightening what Samuel Huntington describes as the
Clash of Civilizations. Can mankind survive such perennial conflicts fought with
guns and weapons of mass destruction? The whole of Europe joined during the
Second World War to defeat the Nazis for their inhuman brutality to the Jews
and all others who were non-Aryans. Now
in the aftermath of the Paris shooting we see the coming together of people of
different nations in protest against the terrible assault on those who believed
in the exercise of free expression that their democratic nation had given them.
If Muslims felt the cartoons mocked at their religion, there is nothing wrong
in it. In a free country, freedom of expression is anchored on freedom of
values and opinions. The paradox is
freedom is not free from restrictions. It was Rousseau who said "man is
born free, but he is everywhere in chains." While freedom is our
birthright, there is a civil freedom enshrined in the civil society we live in.
This freedom is built on social contract between citizens for their mutual
preservation. Hence the freedom of expression has to stay within the limits of the
social contract. What is good for one is not necessarily good for all
others. Even if the cartoon that sparked
the gruesome murder of a dozen scribes and a few others had no overt assault on
Islam, the possibility of it hurting had to be reckoned with because it gives a
handle to the terrorists to pull their guns. They did not observe the elementary principle of law
that a pencil shall not be answered by a pistol. Passion blinds sobriety and
reasoning. Anger extinguishes all human feelings. Once a life is lost, it is lost forever.
A sketch on a magazine
can be rightfully and effectively attacked by another sketch satirical in
intent and expression. Shooting and destroying innocent lives do not restore
humanity. An eye for an eye ends up making the whole world blind. This is a throwback to a jungle life is a
return to dark ages. Gambattista Vicco has described human societies as passing
through ages of growth and decay. The
first bestial age was followed by the age of Gods (the aristocratic age), then
by the age of heroes( the heroic age) and now the age of Man that encounters
the problems of corruption, dissolution, and a possible reversion to primitive
barbarism. Can we prevent the return to primitive barbarism and save humanity?
It is possible if we
observe the rules that govern freedom of expression and the rules that deny the
freedom to kill. Let us learn to live like human beings where freedom for you
is freedom for me.
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