Our Strength, Our Future

This OP-ED has been published in The Guardian [shortened] on Saturday July, 9 2005

The message of the criminals who attacked London is plain: “We have the means to strike the Western societies from within, no one is safe from terror, we have the means to choose the right time, the right places, the right symbols.” The day after the announcement of London’s victory to host the Olympic Games in 2012, we must acknowledge that the message is strong, terrifying, dangerous.

The objective of these attacks is to make us realize how our societies are fragile and so instantaneously fragilised. From this feeling of fragility arises fear, fear for oneself, fear of the Other, and very quickly we start nurturing suspicion. While joy was yesterday uniting the Londoners, here we are now facing the risk that fear divides them and establishes between them walls of doubt and misunderstanding. What can become common to the Londoners from now on is no longer to be together as the winners but to be overcome by the feeling, separated from one another, that they are all potential victims: victims of the Muslim extremists for the ones, victims of rejection, racism and permanent suspicion for the others. The worst that can happen to a democratic society is to see its citizens being transformed to passive victims paralysed by fear. The proponents of the global clash of civilisations’ theory shall win if we accept to be individually colonised by emotional caricatures and suspicion towards people of other faiths and cultures.

Where is and where shall our strength lie? We must condemn these attacks with the strongest energy; the Muslims must be determined and vocal in unison with the British society. But to condemn is not enough: our values, our societies, our common future require that we become aware of our shared responsibilities and the urgent necessity to be committed together. Yes, London is a multicultural society full of diversity but London, as the whole of Europe, is fragile and shall preserve its pluralistic equilibrium only through the personal engagement of everyone in one’s daily life, at the local level within one’s own neighbourhood.

Muslims must speak out, explain who they are, what they believe in, what they stand for, what is the meaning of their life.  They must also have the courage to denounce what is said and done by certain Muslims in the name of their religion. They will not reassure their fellow citizens by pretending to be “like them”, to say only what they want to hear and by becoming invisible. They have to assert their identities, refuse the simplistic discourses, promote critical and self critical understandings and get out from their intellectual, religious and social ghettos. The European societies need to see European Muslims involved in the society’s questions of the day: citizenship, school, unemployment, etc. Their strength must lie in refusing to be victims and in becoming true active citizens, creative, open, politically engaged in all fields, domestic and international.

The temptation is great, after the attacks in London, to curl up, to look for more protection from those who threaten us. The Londoners have a long tradition of diversity and mixing of cultures: it is urgent that they become aware that they will not maintain what has been acquired by remaining passive in front of those spreading terror and are trying to create fractures between religions, cultures and civilisations. Every British citizen, man and woman, should be aware of her/his personal responsibility to resist terror and this new ideology of fear that is establishing itself in the world and in our minds. Yes, we should ask for more security measures but it is imperative that the latter respect just measure, our values and our ethics.

In the name of the rule of law, democracy and human rights, one cannot accept that the rights of individuals (The Arabs or the Muslims) be trampled upon and that populations can be targeted and discriminated against in the name of the war against terrorism. The strength of the democratic societies will rely on their capacity to know how to stand firm against extremism while respecting justice in the means used to fight terrorism. To accept discrimination against a minority is to undermine the future of the majority.  We shall achieve this balanced approach only if every citizen, beyond the shock produced by these attacks, is involved in knowing better his neighbour, his differences, his complexity, his values and his hopes.  It is not enough to think and to say, while being convinced to be progressist and opened minded, “This is not Islam!” It is urgent to encounter and to act with Muslims, practically, concretely, daily. More and more Europeans are becoming passive and are nurturing themselves with pious vows and idealistic discourses: one wants concrete measures against terror and one thinks that the “living together” shall be realized naturally, with no effort, as if by magic.

It is terror that will crash down on us with no magic if we fail to understand that the ideal of the pluralistic society requires a personal and daily commitment of every individual citizen, man and woman. Criminals, no doubt, will continue to kill but we shall be able to respond to them concretely by demonstrating that our experience of human brotherhood and mutual respect is stronger than their message of hate. Our lives are fragile but not our commitment to our ideals.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1524754,00.html