Satire and Religious Tolerance: How Acceptance/Rejection of Satire is Determined by the Capacity of Religious and Political Forces to Agree on a Modern Civic Contract

Abstract

The January 2015 assassination at the Charlie Hebdo offices and the dozen ensuing terrorist attacks in France over the last eighteen months are the manifestation of a structural opposition between a civic identity whose most controversial manifestation is political satire and a religious identity hijacked by radicals. This paper explains how political satire is deeply entrenched in French culture and how it has been used as a democratization and liberating tool by a society eager to counterbalance the existing religious establishment. Similarly, it then addresses satire in the Muslim world and underlines that, instead of being considered a tool of the weak against the powerful, it is perceived as a neo-colonial manifestation of an exogenously imposed political order that ostracizes the citizen from his legitimate religious belief. Instead of a liberating instrument, it is perceived as attacking the foundation of a religion that many see as their refuge against authoritarian elites. This paper then analyses the historical evolution of Islamic political activism. After highlighting the existence of satire and religious representation in Islam in some of its earliest societal orders, this paper argues that the Muslim community under the leadership of its Ulema has been fractured into a range of different scholastic interpretations of Islam resulting into different acceptation of liberal civic orders. The reaction towards Charlie Hebdo and the strong/weak condemning or silent/vocal approbation are representative of their contamination by radicalism. This paper finally demonstrates that the rejection of satire is symptomatic of the incomplete evolution of the state and the weakness of national and transnational institutions. Addressing the reforming of Muslim institutions in France itself, this paper argues that there is no incompatibility between Islam and a liberal republican order guaranteeing freedom of expression and satire.