The great irony of Islam’s continued clashes with the Western way of life — whether its widespread riots over a YouTube video or the murderous actions of a crazed minority— is that it has revealed, to the surprise of everyone but Pope Emeritus Benedict, that modern secularism is a kind of epiphenomenon of Christendom.
To borrow from G.K. Chesterton, secularism is the second fermentation, where the wine of Christianity becomes the vinegar of laïcité. Force either of them into the mouth of a Muslim guest, and he will spit it out.
Pissing on a Bible is similar to pissing on a Koran only as a chemical reaction of urea and pulp. As gestures of desecration they mean entirely different things.
When Westerners read the editorial from radical cleric Anjem Choudary, they are tempted to think he is stupid for asking why “why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims…?”
“That’s not how it works here,” we want to reply. But Choudary’s view that the state authority is responsible for the moral and spiritual condition of the nation is quintessentially Islamic. It is a reflection of the fact that Islam’s great debates are centered on jurisprudence, on the right order of the ummah. This is very different from Christianity where the primary debates center around orthodox faith and morals withing the Church. In an odd way, Choudary’s complaint against France is a sign of assimilation. He expects France to assimilate to this vision of Islam. He offers France’s leaders the same complaint radical Muslim reformers always offer to lax Sultans and Caliphs.
To ask Muslims to respond peacefully to Charlie Hebdo‘s provocations makes absolute sense to me, because I want to continue to live by the norms set by a detente between secularism and Christian churches. I suspect many (perhaps most) Muslims want the same. But those Muslims who are faithful to a religious tradition concerned primarily with restoring fidelity to sources from the first three centuries of Islam were not a party to the secularist bargain. And we ought to be aware that we are asking them to live as Christians, and to be insulted like them, too.
Leadingchurch.com 