Satire is an effective solvent for dogma, until it gets mired in a theology of its own. When that theology melds with background conditions and becomes an entrenched consensus on which the civility of social life is built, it begins to corrode basic freedoms.

Terrorism in Brussels claimed 32 lives in March, all innocent civilians who bore no blame for the grievances — real or imagined — the attackers may have harboured. It took the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo , honoured as a free speech martyr since several staffers were killed in a January 2015 terrorist attack, to read the deeper patterns.

In a searing indictment of all who bore culpability, Charlie named Tariq Ramadan, a well-known professor of religion, active in making the case for a new compact between Islam and the west, an unnamed baker who typically would take over a Paris boulangerie and remove all offerings that violate his personal dietary taboos, and an ordinary woman complying with the sartorial demands of her faith, such as the headscarf or face veil.

France had done itself a serious disfavour by its attitude of tolerance, said Charlie . Ramadan did not carry Kalashnikov rifles into the lecture hall to make his case for Islam. He was open to being challenged and refuted on every substantive point. And if ham sandwiches were not available with the local baker, it was easy to move on and shop elsewhere. That woman in the veil similarly, was unlikely to be carrying a bomb under her enveloping attire.

Interestingly, these simple principles of coexistence — of live and let live — strongly resembled those advanced in defence of the Charlie cartoons lampooning religion, soon after the January 2015 attacks. Those who did not like the cartoons could just move on. But for some reason, Charlie was unwilling to grant that degree of latitude in matters involving symbols of Islam in the public space.

It was all very well to “shut up, look elsewhere and move past all the street-insults and rumpus”, said Charlie , but that would be at the risk of suffocating the spirit of public inquiry. Citizens were stopped from asking perfectly reasonable questions, such as “how the hell did I end up having to wander the streets all day with a big veil on my head?”; and, “how the hell did I end up having to say prayers five times a day?”.

For Charlie , these restraints were just the same as another, which prevented a French or Belgian citizen from asking “how the hell” he ended up in a taxi headed for Brussels airport, “with three rucksacks packed with explosives”. Terrorism lay in a logical continuum with the professor arguing the case for an enlightened understanding of Islam, the benign but bearded baker with the “prayer bruise” on his forehead, and the devoted mother of a family who refused to shed her face veil. What really was at stake for Charlie was secularism as a principle, increasingly being “forced into retreat” by the silences of political correctness.

Even the most extreme liberalism allows some public scrutiny over personal choices. These would be limited in matters sartorial or dietary, since there is little possibility of harm to others here, except in certain bizarre and unlikely scenarios. It is also an observed fact that France’s Muslim community were not given to conspicuous emblems of their faith until recent years, when the retreat of the welfare state and the denial of equality may have triggered a reassertion of identity.

Far from an accommodative posture, the French republic responded with ever more dogmatic assertions of its doctrine of secularism or laicite. This was in the most charitable view, little else than an effort at scapegoating, at blaming the large immigrant communities from former colonies, for their failure to integrate into an inhospitable social milieu.

In further rubbing in its insistence that the free speech right would not recognise the slightest cultural sensitivity of immigrant groups or seek to engage them in a spirit of civility, France retreated further into the dogmas of colonial conquest and racist domination.

The more strident voices within French feminism have called for the boycott of clothing lines that bring the hijab or headscarf to the market. Others have likened a woman’s personal choice of the hijab to African-American acquiescence in their own enslavement in the 19th century.

Meanwhile, a rather crass form of selectivity is manifest in enforcing the free speech right. In March, a protester wearing a shirt denouncing the Israeli occupation of Palestine was arrested and interrogated. And hate-speech law has been invoked to convict at least a dozen civil society activists calling for a peaceful campaign against Israel, under the rapidly growing “Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions” (BDS) movement.

In January, a group of French activists and writers signed a public pledge of support to the BDS movement, defying the declared governmental intent to criminalise any such call. Alongside its crass partisanship for Israel, the French government has also been unrepentant about the chaos it has fomented in seeking regime changes across a wide swathe of the Arab world, from Libya to Syria. This goes with the pursuit of commercial advantage in arms deals with regimes that promote the most primitive forms of religious fundamentalism, such as Saudi Arabia.

It did not take long for Charlie Hebdo to shed the mantle of free speech martyr. Today, it looks very much like the rusty relic of a benighted colonial past.

Sukumar Muralidharan is an independent writer based in Gurgaon

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