In the wake of the Paris atrocities, a Dubai-based satirical news website last week ran a ‘story’ in its deadpan style. The Pan-Arabia Enquirer said the Gulf was bracing itself “for a torrent of ‘Islam is peaceful’ articles”, admonishing the public that columns pointing out the painfully obvious will continue for at least two weeks before abating, while warning that several publications were worried that their stockpile of ‘Islam is peaceful’ articles was running dangerously low.

Meanwhile, on certain Arab Facebook pages, there was earnest discussion of the terrorist attacks. On one page that I’m aware of, the discussion went beyond condemnation. It was actually seriously suggested that the atrocities could be part of a cunning Zionist plot to defame Islam.

No, it wasn’t satire but Arab satire had got there first. One famous anti-ISIS Arab cartoon, from last year, had two ogres, one representing “the Jewish State” and the other “the Islamic State”, shaking hands against a devastated landscape.

It is very difficult to argue – at least, not intelligently – that these three instances (and many, many more could be given) represent fundamentally the same mentality, even though they all originate from the Muslim Arab world.

The anti-ISIS cartoon is in the style of Charlie Hebdo – in bad taste, playing up to racial stereotypes (although the physical resemblance of the two ogres is part of the political point), not particularly sophisticated, but making a left wing political point about how opposing hard right groups might actually serve each other’s interests very well.

The humour of The Pan-Arabia Enquirer is one we can share, however. It is inspired by deadpan political satire in Europe and US. One of its stories is, for example, about how Ikea has assembled a team of linguistic experts to make sure the various names of its lines of furniture do not offend Arab sensibilities while also trying to make its new names ‘future-proof’ – against future ‘discoveries’ of potential offence by some cultural policeman on the make.

The target is obviously the periodic cultural ‘clean-up’ that the region sees, which has everything to do with power struggles and little with public decency.

The Enquirer’s joke about a spate of articles on Islam as a religion of peace requires some explanation, however.

In Europe, we can readily identify with the idea of a wave of such articles sweeping across the media, just as the counter-wave of articles and online comments saying that Islam is a wolf in sheep’s clothing is also something to be expected here.

The Enquirer isn’t making the point that Islam isn’t really a religion of peace. It takes it as obvious that it is. It is satirising the need to repeat the obvious endlessly, for a brief while, until the entire issue is forgotten. It is self-satire.

It may be news to many Europeans that Arabs are as capable of self-mockery as anyone else. But, once we notice it, we also can readily recognise a middle-class humour that has a lot in common with, perhaps, our own: eclectic, drawing on global references and media culture, auto-ironic.

It’s a very different attitude and mentality from the one that earnestly discusses whether the Paris attacks were really the result of a sinister conspiracy to defame Islam. It’s not that this mentality is irrational. It takes as a given that no such attack could possibly be approved by Islam because it is horrendous; then it tries to seek who could possibly profit from the resulting harm done to Islam and Muslims and draws the conclusions.

In terms of reasoning, it’s not that different from that of other conspiracy theories, not least those that attributed the 9/11 attacks to sinister forces in the White House – if not Israel.

A Europe polarised between ‘us’ and Muslims is what would really play into the terrorists’ hands

The fact is this: with a world religion like Islam, a religion of 1.6 billion, spanning half a dozen major languages, every continent in every kind of social environment, it is simply mistaken to expect there to be a single culture. Not only are there many cultures within it; there are also different kinds of culture.

Let me explain. European culture is not that of the Gulf; but The Pan-Arabia Enquirer displays a mentality and style of thought we can recognise in Europe.

Likewise, a European who thinks Muslims really want to take over Europe belongs to a different culture from the Arab Muslim who sees a Zionist plot in the Paris attacks. But their two cultures are of the same kind, sharing a sectarian mentality and style of thinking: one of us versus them, of who is not with us is against us (or at least an appeaser).

The first, cosmopolitan mentality flows from an eclectic kind of culture, open to various influences and ready to absorb them with modification.

The second mentality is a Manichean view of the world, which polarises everything into black and white, seeing any emphasis on nuance and shades of grey as feeble-minded. It is, of course, always convinced that the evidence is on its side while dismissing any real evidence that undercuts its point of view.

Now, here’s the thing. While the reactions to the Paris atrocities have drawn on a huge popular defence of freedom of speech, some of the reactions have actually been a mirror image of the kind of sectarian, Manichean culture that ISIS and Al-Qaeda represent.

There has been the same blanket dismissal of Islam as a religion. There have been similar claims of a Muslim conspiracy to take over Europe (the ‘feed the tiger’ parables).

The biggest irony is that there has been the same scriptural literalism that fundamentalists show, with Islamic verses taken to speak for themselves (as the fundamentalists insist) and not within the context of the whole Quran and history.

We have the spectacle of instant experts on Islam, spouting concepts like ‘jihad’ or ‘taqiyya’ and giving them the jihadist interpretation – when the classical Islamic understanding of such terms is considerably different.

Of course, if you use jihadist interpretations to characterise Islam, you are bound to make every Muslim seem like a proto-jihadist.

The fact is, Arab satirists (not just cartoonists) have been in the forefront when it has come to the mockery of Islamists. It has been enough of a phenomenon to merit coverage in the Euro-American news media last year.

A systematic analysis of some two million tweets worldwide, by Italian academics, found that the most critical tweets of ISIS – critical on the basis of religion, as much as anything else – originated in the Middle East.

There were more tweets originating in Europe that were sympathetic to ISIS (although the European total formed only a fraction of the whole). But that was in the context of a systemic, sophisticated online campaign by ISIS (targeting chat rooms and using profiling to select vulnerable individuals who could be groomed).

ISIS is a formidable enemy and it will require tough strategic thinking to defeat it as an effective force.

A sectarian Manichean approach – that divides Europe between ‘us’ and Muslims – might sound tough-minded. It’s actually feeble-minded because it ignores everything we know about terrorism in general and ISIS in particular.

A Europe polarised between ‘us’ and Muslims is what would really play into the terrorists’ hands.

ranierfsadni@europe.com

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