By Jean-Marie Rouart · Monday, January 4, 2021 This essay appeared in Le Figaro on December 8, 2020, and this translation by Russell A. Berman is published with permission of the author. Hyperlinks are from the original, while footnotes have been added by the translator. Translator’s comments are here.
In the face of a very real Islamist threat that has led to violence and which the proposed law on “separatism” attempts to address, it is interesting to try to raise the level of the debate. It is necessary to inquire calmly into a question that worries those thinkers least inclined to emotional reactions. In contrast to a Christianity drained of its former ambitions, why is it that Islam has not given up its virulent proselytism and instead appears to pose a threat for the future?
This is a threat that de Gaulle already recognized in one of his extraordinary communications to Alain Peyrefitte, when he declared: “We are after all a European people of the white race, Greco-Latin culture, and the Christian religion.” And he considered Algerian independence necessary to prevent his village from being one day renamed “Colombey-the-two-Mosques”—which does not at all mean that he intended to exclude other “races” or religions. He understood France too well to endorse a narrow or xenophobic vision of it.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, January 4, 2021 Jean-Marie Rouart, a prolific French author and, since 1997, a member of the French Academy, published “Secularism is an Illusory Defense against the Islamist Will to Conquer,” in Le Figaro on December 8 and available in English translation here with the author’s permission. While the essay’s starting point is the challenge of Islamism in France and the efforts by the Macron government to address it, it explores a much wider matrix that includes the historical process of secularism, the status of Christianity in France (and, by extension, in the West more broadly), the role of tradition in national identity, and the imperative of the sacred in any culture. This complex array of ideas has implications far beyond France, yet it also indicates how today’s France has become ground zero for the cultural conflicts around secularization, Christianity, and Islam. To understand Rouart’s argument, one needs first to consider this specific context. What makes this topic urgent now?
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By David Pan · Thursday, April 9, 2015  The worldwide reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attacks can be seen as a welcome indication of a global consensus concerning freedom of speech, individual rights, and opposition to Islamic fundamentalism. However, left-wing critics such as Noam Chomsky have criticized the worldwide demonstrations against the attacks as hypocritical because they ignore the more serious massacres that have been conducted by Americans with drone strikes and in military activities in Iraq, Serbia, and Syria. As Chomsky writes, “[a]lso ignored in the ‘war against terrorism’ is the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times—Barack Obama’s global assassination campaign targeting people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us some day, and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby. Other unfortunates are also not lacking, such as the 50 civilians reportedly killed in a U.S.-led bombing raid in Syria in December, which was barely reported.” Such an equation of “their terror” with “our terror” is based on an image of a universal history in which all of mankind lives within a unified natural community and there is a single standard of measure that could be the basis of criminal behavior. We see this same approach in a more moderate form in Jack Miles’s similar exhortation that the proper response to ISIS and Al Qaeda is that “[y]ou are criminals and we send criminals to jail” rather than declaring a “war on radical Islam.” For both Chomsky and Miles, terrorist attacks count as criminal activity and should be equally condemned from the universal viewpoint of a peace-loving humanity. By diminishing the difference between criminal violence and war, they illustrate the basic tenet of a version of universal history—that all humans are linked together into a common set of natural laws and that such laws transcend historical and political differences. Every war in this perspective would be just as senseless and unjustified as any other form of murder. Teju Cole and Slavoj Žižek make a similar move when they indicate that there is something hypocritical about the support for Charlie Hebdo when other massacres, such as the one by Boko Haram in Baga, Nigeria, go unnoticed and unmourned.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, June 16, 2014  Critical theory inherited classical accounts of social change that linked modernization processes to secularization: in order for societies to overcome traditionalist structures and pursue the accelerated development of modernity, they would have to escape the grip of religion. This is perhaps most famously the case for Marx, who, in the introduction to his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, declared religion “the opium of the people,” blocking the way of progress: “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” To surmount a social condition that produces unhappiness requires renouncing the systematic concealing of that condition which is, so Marx, the genuine function of religion, the ultimate paradigm of ideology as false consciousness.
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