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Much has been said, tweeted and posted about the horrific incident at Charlie Hedbo in Paris over the last few days. The Twitterverse and social media has witnessed an explosion of sentiment ranging from outrage, anguish and shock, and a plethora of opinions from well reasoned debates to badly argued theories from all corners ranging from the far left , center and right. We’ve heard almost universal condemnation of the terrorists and expositions on the right to uphold free speech - that cherished hallmark of western democracy. Not to mention an exploration of the ‘offensive’ cartoon images, to scholarly discussions around the lack of integration of Muslims and other immigrant communities in Europe. In all of this, how this incident stands apart from most of the brutal acts of global violence that we have begun to hear of lately, is the clean noose it loops around the contours of a major world religion and the directness with which it exposes the fault lines between western civilization and the Islamic world. Post the 9/11 World Trade center attacks in the US, we’ve seen misguided retaliatory wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to sink deeper into the mire we were already in and incidents of US neocon foreign policy backlash. In the Arab world we’ve witnessed localized Arab Spring movements, the civil wars in Syria, and uprisings extended deeper now into the larger body of an increasingly unstable Middle East. The mainstream western narrative around most of these events has been either to condemn the Muslim world’s problems as a result of its own internal manufacture, or as attributed to the nature of rising fundamentalist Islamism and to portray the participation of the West as an unobliging but necessary interventionist to set things straight for a better and more stable world order (meanwhile skirting its own piecemeal contributions to these problems through its own historical power ambitions - countering Soviet socialism, Ba’athism you name it). Even so, rarely has an attack on a western city been so confrontational with religion and directly perpetrated by Islamic extremists for the pure purpose of upholding fundamentalist ideology in both the cause and the agency of action.

One could say from history that attacks or wars in the name of religion are almost never really about the inner workings of religion, ritual or faith itself. Instead, they are almost always about politicization motivated by a power ambition which relentlessly abuses distorted and extremist ideologies uniting members of a common identity by exploiting their socio-economic failures through their adherence to an allied faith. In that, events of terrorism such as these are just plainly that. However, as much as many such as myself would like to purport that this is not really about Islam, and it may as well not be if we are talking about a religion which motivates a fifth of the world’s population, most of which is peace-loving, it would amount to not calling out the elephant in the room if one were to pussyfoot around it in political correctness. Wahabbism which motivates the Islamic state’s ideology has morphed into a compelling force for many a youth that is being drawn continuously to its distorted versions and fanatical power ambitions. It intertwines the methods of Islamic texts and interpretations in ways that make it inseparable from the religious doctrines that enforce it, and in turn it rejects all other forms of Islam. An account of the history of the Wahhabist movement  states "A whole generation of Muslims, has grown up with a maverick form of Islam that has given them a negative view of other faiths and an intolerantly sectarian understanding of their own. While not extremist per se, this is an outlook in which radicalism can develop. In the past, the learned exegesis of the ulema, which Wahhabis rejected, had held extremist interpretations of scripture in check; but now unqualified freelancers such as Osama Bin Laden were free to develop highly unorthodox readings of the Quran.”  And yet, as the article suggests,  “far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could . . . be regarded as religious novices.”

And this is why we need to exercise extra caution while framing the attacks as an issue with ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamism’. From the meditations of political and media groups on how this is a problem of Islam vs Western democracy to right wing anti-Muslim rhetoric pounded by the National Front and other equivalent organizations, a backlash against Muslims in general is imminent. Europe, already under deeply strained relations with their immigrant and unassimilated North African Muslim populations will likely see a lot of the aftermath of this backlash. Should that happen to a degree that in turn fuels the West’s so called war against Islam, terrorism gets to win the day. The terrorist’s strategy to recruit from impressionable and disillusioned Muslim youth from the West will only gain momentum, and in that, the Paris terror attacks are meant to trigger a repercussion and further alienation among the Muslim youth to steer them towards an increasing workforce for Islamic terrorists.

From any of the countless theories that are emerging from this event, I haven’t found any opinion (with the exception of loony extremist dialogues by the most idiotic right wing blog commentators) who feel that the killings could be justified by any stretch of imagination. There is no question that the attacks on Paris were immoral, unwarranted and in no way condonable by any perverse angle of conflating the satire of creative or even supposedly racist journalists who poked fun at anything and everything under the sun, even if more so of one race and religion than another. There is no justification for violence against civilians, and there is no need for an analysis paralysis on how Western cultural hegemony or the dominant narrative fails to realize the shortcomings of its own racially contorted attitudes against Muslims and other oppressed people. You don’t achieve parity by fighting a pen with a sword, period. But what must emerge from this is that it really matters how we react to the situation. And this is where the differences emerge. One needs to treat this for what it is - a terrorist event by a cold blooded organization of (politically and financially motivated) extremists who want their target audience to submit into irrational and emotional retaliation. Terrorists gain ground not by actually being able to topple stable and democratic governments but by instilling fear and loathing that pushes liberal societies towards falsely guided illiberal and belligerent policies. The right thing to do here would be to treat terrorism as such - strengthen your security, beef up your intelligence systems and develop methodologies to counter the recruitment of more of your own youth by radical extremist organizations. And also accept that there are limits to what can and cannot be achieved. The wrong thing to do is what was done in the aftermath of 9/11 -  to overreact and treat this as a turning point in the direction of the West’s war against Islam, to up the ante on the challenge of the war against Islam, to conflate the connect between extremist ideologies and Islam as a whole through popular media and politics and to perpetuate systemic cultural biases against Muslims in an already deeply fractured plural society. Over-publicity and extra attention showered in the after-effect will only reinforce and strengthen the terrorist’s resolve to create impact. Unfortunately, given how high sentiment in the general population is running at this point, the latter as a consequence is more likely in the longer run. And it may prove to do a lot more damage than a blip of infringement on free speech. One can only hope to be wrong about that.