Charlie Hebdo and Professor Fincke, Part Trois

“I refuse to say ‘Je Suis Charlie’ because I don’t do the offensive things they do.”

As have covered this question in a previous blog post, at least as far as I myself am concerned, there is little for me to add here, except to take exception to Professor Fincke's assertion that those of us who refuse to say "Je Suis Charlie" possess a "self-righteous lack of introspectiveness."  How exactly would Professor Fincke propose to measure the introspectiveness of millions of people he hasn't met?  Is it not possible that people with whom one disagrees, even vehemently, may be just as introspective as one is oneself?

More to the point,is introspection necessarily a virtue in this case? Secularists in the West often know far too little about the religious traditions they criticize both in other parts of the world and even in their own.  Fincke's own repetition of the ills of slavery, misogyny, narrow tribalism, violence, and homophobia the Abrahamic faiths supposedly bequeathed to the world ignores the definition of "sacred text" believers in these faiths actually use. For Jews, holiness rests not only in the Torah, which on its surface seems to support the continued existence of slavery, but also in an accumulated rabbinical tradition spanning centuries that ended slavery once and for all centuries before abolitionism emerged as a social and political movement in the late eighteenth century.  Similarly, for Muslims, the Quran is supplemented with and interpreted by the Hadith--interpretations, teachings, and sayings that go back to the Prophet--without which the Quran cannot be fully comprehended.  What offends religious Jews and Muslims about the kinds of cartoons Charlie Hebdo publishes of religious figures is that they do not simply mock us personally--we are thick-skinned enough to take that--but at the way they distort and oversimplify traditions so broad that they ought to be, and often have been, conceived of as civilizations rather than mere religions.  Indeed, these traditions encompass so much of life that only in relatively recent centuries has anyone attempted to wall them off into a small box called "religion".

Fincke is perhaps on more solid ground when he criticizes the cries of "context" from religious pluralists who argue for a more nuanced understanding of scriptural passages that seem to condone evil, while ignoring the context of the Charlie Hebdo pictures that merely "play in bigoted tropes".  But context often gets lost when works from one culture are consumed by another, as happens with ever-increasing speed in a world of wireless phones and computers.  What is satirical in its home context may not appear so to people a world away, and yet people from a world away may now be as close as next door.