My muslim friends would categorically say that he was no muslim…je was a political terrorist…
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Remember this?
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We all identify ourselves as we wish to be portrayed, he portrayed himself as an Islamic terrorist, so according to his point of view he was very much a Muslim.
Your friends see the contrary point of view.
Well, yes…of course!! 
Spain didn’t even exist at the beginning of the eight century. But more importantly, what resulted from the Muslim invasion of the Iberian peninsula was the replacement of recent Visigoth invaders’ warring tribal kingdoms by what became a very sophisticated and by the standards of the time, highly advanced society, which though dominated by Islam, tolerated both Christians and Jews. Contrast that with the later Spanish expulsions of all Jews and Muslims who would not convert to Christianity
Taking the long view, the centuries of Islamic rule can be seen as one of the high points of mediaeval European civilisation, which produced advances in many branches of agriculture, medicine, science and literary scholarship, and (like the Gothic) left a legacy of some very beautiful architecture. In addition to obvious examples like the Alhambra, Seville’s stunning cathedral (the largest in Europe) was originally a mosque.
During the centuries after the collapse of the Roman Empire, it was mainly arab scholars and translators who preserved and built on the the intellectual legacy of the European classical world. Islamic domination of parts of Europe in the West and the East has left a complex, at times difficult, but nevertheless shared cultural heritage. Unfortunately, too many people are unaware of their history, or lack the mental flexibility to accommodate it.
And I’m not just referring to poorly educated Christian and Muslim fundamentalists…
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Absolutely right Mark. Perhaps even more than the areas you mention, the intellectual heritage of islamic culture is felt in mathematics. Maybe if we used the original forms of concepts instead of their anglicised versions (eg. al-jabr rather than algebra) the real roots of modern ‘western’ knowledge would be exposed.
And like the western islamic empire in Spain, etc, the eastern Ottoman Empire was generally characterised by tolerance of other religions - at least when compared to contemporary christianity.
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I think there’s a cream available for that 
This is all far removed from the President of turkey spouting hatred and Pakistanis marching in the streets doing exactly the same.
My real concern is for Christians in other countries who may very well pay the price for all of this.
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Thanks for pointing out my omission - must have been because when I was scraping through ‘O’ level maths, algebra was all Greek to me!
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I found this interesting…
Thanks Geof,
It’s an interesting analysis and I’ve added the site to my bookmarks. I read the NYT every morning and have come to prefer it to the Guardian, which I feel has gone downhill in recent years due to too many hastily written op-ed pieces.
I hadn’t previously noted the NYT filtering French analysis through a US lens in the manner described, and though I don’t disagree with the article, do wonder if this was an exception, or am I not quite as perceptive as I thought!
On a sort of related topic, could one imagine BJ bothering to go on al Jazeera as Macron did yesterday?
However, the above report doesn’t really suggest that ‘normal’ Muslims should push back on fundamentalists. Until this starts to happen on a large scale there’s going to be a problem.
No - but a factor here is the different legacies of empire - France has been more ‘interested’ (in many ways) in the Arab world for over 200 years, while Brits were looking to India, America, etc.
One of the interesting aspects of getting news and views from 2 (or more) different countries/languages is what each reports - and what they don’t! Then there are the untranslatable aspects - words and concepts like laïcité seem indeed to have a force in French completely lacking in the word ‘secularism’.
And there are also whole cultural traditions in play here: I have to admit I really don’t ‘get’ the French comic tradition of ‘gouaille’ in which Charlie Hebdo is situated. I suspect it is beyond any anglo-saxon journalist. The only handle I can get on it in UK terms is a sort-of Viz-does-current-affairs! And it seems to me there is a sense in which the terrorists were right: in this tradition, literally nothing is sacred.
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Yes. We can laugh at any faith-based belief.
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Faith, should be capable of bearing scrutiny, or its not much of a faith, really is it.
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In Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, humour is seen as the greatest danger of all to religion.
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I would say the opposite - we take on faith that which cannot be objectively demonstrated to be true.
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The idea of ‘faith’ is regarded with great reverence by christian theologists - but to me seems one of the most pernicious aspects of religion. If the problem at the heart of most religions is that they site their moral sanction outside of the human world - explicitly beyond rationality or dialogue - and therefore, ultimately, closed to the reasoning and feelings and standards of other people - then surely the christian emphasis on faith exacerbates the problem - making explicit the view that some beliefs should be held beyond the reach of any rational discourse or evidence. Fine if you’re talking about the ideas in the Sermon on the Mount - not so great if you draw your inspiration from Joshua 6:21.
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My faith in the sturdiness of domestic furniture is strong but provisional. I have sat securely on millions of chairs in my life time, but on at least one memorable occasion my faith has been misplaced: the chair has given way under my weight and I have cracked my head on the floor.
So in my opinion faith, and ‘truth’ , are prudently open always to the possibility of fallibility and falsification, bearing in mind the narrow limitations of our human experience, and the inscrutable nature of the universe of which we ourselves are an inextricable component.
Fair enough Paul
I found this interesting - especially the reference to ‘multiculturalism, as practised in Canada or Singapore rather than Germany or the UK’. I wonder if anyone here understands this difference? (the article only touches on it).
Having grown up through the 60s ‘melting pot’ idealism, I have never quite embraced its replacement in the UK by multiculturalism, so have always felt more at home with the French approach - but is there a ‘third way’? The suggestion in the article might be seen as emptying religion of any real content - rather in the way people follow the rituals of Xmas without any feeling for either their pagan origins or meanings later attached to them by christianity - ‘faith and religion become culture, as do language and ethnicity’.
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