宗教沉默的困境 Un silence religieux by Jean Birnbaum Seuil

Last year, the French sociologist Emmanuel Todd caused controversy with his book Qui est Charlie? Todd argued that France had succumbed to collective hysteria after the murder in January 2015, by homegrown jihadi terrorists, of members of the editorial team of the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo and customers at a kosher supermarket in Paris.

去年，法国社会学家埃马努埃尔•托德(Emmanuel Todd)的著作《谁是查理？》(Qui est Charlie?)引起了争议。托德辩称，在2015年1月土生土长的圣战恐怖分子杀害了讽刺杂志《查理周刊》(Charlie Hebdo)的部分编辑团队成员和巴黎一家犹太超市的顾客之后，法国人已屈服于集体歇斯底里情绪。

The enormous government-sanctioned popular mobilisation that followed the attacks was little more than an orgy of national self-congratulation, he said. And there was a darker side to the “virtuous ignorance” of those who marched in towns and cities across the country declaring that they too were “Charlie”. “The obsession with Islam was everywhere”, Todd observed, and French Muslims found themselves subjected to impromptu citizenship tests that required them to accept that ridicule of religion was not just a right but a duty. And in calling for mass demonstrations in the wake of the attacks, President François Hollande ran the risk of glorifying the perpetrators and giving “ideological meaning” to acts better understood as products of individual pathology.

托德表示，恐怖袭击之后经政府批准的大规模民众动员，不过是一场举国的自我夸耀狂欢。在全法国各城镇游行、宣称自己也是“查理”的那些人，他们那种“自鸣得意的无知”还有更阴暗的一面。“在各个地方，人们都对伊斯兰教感到困扰，”托德评述称，法国穆斯林发现自己必须接受临时的公民测验，该测验要求他们接受一个观点：调侃宗教不仅仅只一种权利，也是一种义务。恐怖袭击之后，法国总统号召进行大规模示威游行，他这么做造成了一种风险，即美化行凶者，并赋予那些最好被理解为源于个体变态的行为以“意识形态含义”。

Jean Birnbaum, a journalist for Le Monde, offers a very different account of the reaction to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in his new book, which, like Todd’s, was written before the slaughter in Paris on November 13. Indeed, you could say that Todd’s analysis is in fact an example of what Birnbaum calls “religious silence” — the failure of French politicians and intellectuals, especially on the left, to acknowledge or understand the religious dimension of Islamist terrorism.

法国《世界报》(Le Monde)记者让•伯恩鲍姆(Jean Birnbaum)在他的新书里，对《查理周刊》人员遭屠杀事件后法国的反应做出了非常不同的描述。跟托德的书一样，他的这本书也写于去年11月3日的巴黎屠杀之前。实际上，你可以说，托德的分析其实就是伯恩鲍姆所称的“宗教的沉默”的一个例子。宗教的沉默是指，法国政客和知识分子（尤其是从属左翼阵营的）未能承认或理解伊斯兰恐怖分子的宗教特征。

There are, of course, good reasons for not wishing to “faire l’amalgame”, as the French put it — for avoiding the conflation of Islam in general with sanguinary jihadism in particular. For one thing, social peace depends on it. This is why Mr Hollande said, at the huge Paris demonstration on January 11 last year, that the Charlie Hebdo attacks had “nothing to do with Islam”. This was echoed by the president’s colleagues and also by commentators like Todd.

当然，我们有充分理由不希望“搞混淆”，避免把作为整体的伊斯兰教和血腥圣战运动这一特殊现象划上等号。首先，社会安定依赖于此。正因如此，奥朗德在去年1月11日的巴黎大规模游行中说，《查理周刊》遇袭“与伊斯兰教无关”。他的政府同僚和托德等评论人士也表达了同样的观点。

The problem with this position is, as Birnbaum points out, that those responsible for the attacks saw themselves as “soldiers of God”. Yet it was if the words of the Kouachi brothers and their accomplice, Amedy Coulibaly, could not be heard. Few seemed capable, Birnbaum observes, of performing the elementary intellectual manoeuvre of resisting the identification of Islam with terrorism, on the one hand, while on the other acknowledging the religious dimension of jihadist violence.

正如伯恩鲍姆所指出，这一立场的问题在于，那些对恐怖袭击负责的人把自己视为“真主的战士”。然而，人们好像没法听到库阿奇(Kouachi)兄弟和他们的同谋阿米迪•库利巴利(Amedy Coulibaly)的话一样。伯恩鲍姆评述称，似乎很少有人能做到一方面用基本的理智拒绝把伊斯兰教和恐怖主义划上等号，另一方面又承认圣战主义暴力活动的宗教特征。

There is an abundant literature on the question of just how Islamic Islamist terrorism is. But although he devotes a few pages to the theological “civil war” within Islam, Birnbaum’s main interest lies elsewhere — in the difficulty that many western, secular intellectuals have in accepting that religion itself is sometimes a motive for action, rather than being, say, the misplaced expression of legitimate rage at geopolitical or socio-economic conditions.

有大量的文献讨论伊斯兰恐怖主义在多大程度上与伊斯兰主义有关的问题。虽然用了几页描写伊斯兰教内部的神学“内战”，但伯恩鲍姆的主要兴趣在其他地方——许多西方世俗知识分子很难接受宗教本身有时就是行为的动机，并非（比方说）以错误的方式表达对地缘政治或社会经济状况的合理愤怒。

The rise of political Islam over the past 40 years has been discombobulating for anyone who might have assumed that religion had been consigned to the dustbin of history. Birnbaum argues that the intellectual disarray was particularly acute in France, where the anticlerical tradition is very strong. The French left has traditionally treated religion either as an historical relic or a purely private affair that could not have anything to do with politics.

过去40年，政治伊斯兰(political Islam)的兴起使所有可能本以为宗教已被扔进历史垃圾箱的人士惊慌失措。伯恩鲍姆认为，在反教权传统非常强大的法国，这种思想上的扰乱尤为严重。法国左翼传统上一直将宗教视为历史遗物或纯粹的私人事务——不可能与政治有任何关系。

This inability to grasp the political salience of religion goes back a long way. Birnbaum shows, for instance, how French supporters of the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria in the 1950s simply denied, in the teeth of abundant evidence to the contrary, that Islam played any role in the Algerian uprising. And he examines sympathetically the account of the Iranian revolution offered by the philosopher Michel Foucault, who was denounced by some compatriots as an apologist for theocracy for suggesting that an entirely novel fusion of politics and religion was fomenting on the streets of Tehran.

这种对宗教的政治重要性的理解无能可以追溯到很久以前。例如，伯恩鲍姆在书中描述了上世纪50年代阿尔及利亚反殖民斗争的法国支持者就是不承认（虽然有大量相反证据）伊斯兰教在阿尔及利亚起义中发挥了任何作用。他满怀同情地审视了哲学家米歇尔•福柯(Michel Foucault)对伊朗伊斯兰革命的论断——福柯因为认为一种全新的政治与宗教的融合正在德黑兰街头兴起，被当时一些法国同胞谴责为神权政治的辩护者。

Birnbaum’s excellent book contains lessons for secular liberals and leftists elsewhere. They should be wary of assuming that history is on their side.

伯恩鲍姆的精彩著作包含了其他地区的世俗自由主义者和左翼人士可以吸取的教训。他们应该警惕假设历史站在自己一边的幻想。