T

he satirists have been slain; their killers have been gunned down; a million have marched in peaceful protest; the dead have been buried. But on Jan. 14, the new cover of Charlie Hebdo came out: a caricature of the grieving Prophet Muhammad holding up a sign, '€œJe suis Charlie,'€ under the banner, '€œtout est pardonné,'€ (all is forgiven).

It is business as usual.

I find it awkward, however, that we should carry on and somehow pretend as if the future of the global community remained largely unscathed by the carnage in Paris, which has a startling symbolic value.

The roots of resentment between the West and the rest are deep and they are entangled in a complex set of historical narratives that provide a lead on how we can possibly comprehend why or how these Islamist militants were driven to the point of a gun.

Paris is an isle, a city that proudly stands by itself, distinct from and yet vital to the nation to which it belongs. It was the hotbed of the 18th century revolution that brought to the world the French ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity; hence in the age of empire, Paris was a resource of the '€œcivilizing process'€ through which our European predecessors were confident that their values would succeed beyond their borders.

In 1919, the city provided the backdrop for the peace conferences that would end the Great War, but that would also give birth to the League of Nations and the arbitrary partitioning of the Ottoman Empire '€” present-day Turkey, the Balkans and the Middle Eastern states '€” principally between France and
the UK.

Worthy of note is the resilience of the liberal democratic state, largely accompanied by models of capitalist economy. But its unstoppable charge has been challenged since the events of 9/11, including the occupation and eventual dismemberment of Iraq and the legitimacy of governments emerging out of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, including the present conflict in Syria. It is in these areas of brutish conflict and oppression that Muslim rage against the West, unfortunately, becomes understandable.

Islamic terrorism can be understood in at least two ways: first, as the rancor of a disgruntled civilization where state and religion continue to coexist in political rule vis-à-vis the secular state; and second, the manifestation of what some scholars say is a '€œdeeper malaise'€ within Islam among tribal factions '€” Sunnis and Shiites, between al-Qaeda and the IS cult, to name a few '€” but all of them seeking to redefine what it means to be Muslim in a modern world in which the faithful feel their beliefs have been left behind.

Equally worthy of note is the expansion of the international human rights regime that goes hand in hand with the advance of political liberalism. The primacy of reason, individual freedom and autonomy are essential to making rights claims. One of the major human rights documents, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, interestingly also came out the French Revolution. The Paris attacks have now poignantly spun the debate on the freedom of expression.

One dominant response has been to claim that the freedom of speech is absolute. We hold this to be true. But it is absolute only in the sense that it is inviolable; it does not grant us free license to exercise such a right, especially where it violates the dignity of another human being.

Rights come with responsibilities. What Muslims and indeed the followers of any creed for that matter claim to be sacred is, likewise, not only in every way absolute but also constitute the essence of their humanity.

The argument being made here is not so much that the West and Islam are at odds with each other as that there is a sense of inequality that is corroding the peaceful coexistence of cultures '€” irrespective of whether one condescendingly deems the other '€œbackward'€. There is a vacuum of human respect '€” a mockery of the differences that arise from the hopes and frailties of our finite
existence.

In this light, the Paris attacks are the most recent of a series of face-offs: the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie'€™s The Satanic Verses, the 2001 US terrorist attacks, the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the 2005 London bombings and the deadly riots against the Danish paper Jylland-Posten and the 2014 Taliban massacre of 132 schoolchildren in Pakistan in December.

Paris 2015 must be understood as forming part of the struggle of the disenfranchised and the contest to define emerging standards of civilization as human society grows in global interconnectedness. It was a rupture caused by the excesses of freedom of speech no less than by the cruelty of fanaticism. The tragedy is that this just indignation is wielded by the hands of zealots; and the death and destruction they inflict makes of their cause a genuine travesty.

The French prime minister must, therefore, be clear about what he means when he declares that France is '€œat war with radical Islam'€.

We continue to live in what the historian Eric Hobsbawn has called the '€œage of extremes'€. It is hijacked by the terrorism that we ourselves sow. The war that we are waging is against violence in all its forms, not against the faiths in which the history and the future of humanity abide. Losing sight of this distinction will, I believe, kill the gifts that reason has bequeathed us.