ISLAMABAD (Dispatches) -- French President Emmanuel Macron’s deployment of anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies in his fight with the extreme right for re-election continues to rile Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan.
“Does he not understand that his statements and actions only power the vicious cycle of violence in France?” Khan said in an interview with Middle East Eye in Islamabad.
“I feel that President Macron does not really understand how he is going to deal with the Muslim community if he does not understand this vicious cycle.
“Someone on the fringes will insult the Prophet. There will be a reaction, a stabbing. This will outrage French society… saying freedom of expression is our religion. Police will clamp down on the mosques. Muslims will be marginalized and someone from those ranks will strike again.”
Khan sees two scenarios: either France finds a way of living with the biggest Muslim community in western Europe - a “code of existence” is how he describes it - or it will continue to alienate and exclude its Muslim citizens from public life.
Western society refuses to understand the hurt caused to millions of Muslims when Prophet Muhamman (Peace upon Him) is insulted, Khan says.
“They cannot understand the reverence we have for the Holy Prophet, peace be upon him. People love him, more than anything, respect and love for him is paramount in our religion.”
At the heart of this dispute between two national leaders is profound disagreement about the nature of free speech.
Khan believes that the right to free speech should not override community cohesion and the need to protect communal relationships.
As an example, he defends Pakistan’s bitterly criticized blasphemy law on the grounds that it has protected religious communities.
“The blasphemy law was made by the British when they were ruling India. What was the blasphemy law? Three different human communities living in a village. Someone would insult a sacred entity of the other community. There would be a riot. People would be killed. So they then said this is not allowed. So instead of there

being a riot, they would go to the police saying the law has been insulted.”
Khan presses this point: just as Western society recognizes that Holocaust denial caused “a lot of pain to the Jewish community”, so it should also recognize the pain caused to Muslims by orchestrated insults of the Prophet Muhammad.
“No one should be allowed to cause pain to human communities. If we have to live in a global village, therefore we Muslims must make every human community define what gives them pain. This [insulting the Prophet] is what gives us pain.”
But for Khan it is not just the West that has failed. Muslim leaders kowtowing to the wave of alienation have failed too.
They too, he said, have allowed the West to conflate Islam and terrorism.
He said that just as it was wrong to blame India for a deadly variant of Covid, terrorism should not be associated with any religion.
“What has Islam got to do with terrorism? Just now, this Indian variant of the Covid-19 came across, devastating the world, but the Indians said, ‘Look, don’t call it Indian variant, call it Delta variant’. Because why should any virus be associated with any nation? Similarly, why should terrorism be associated with any religion?”