Erika Szostak/Demotix. All rights reserved.
Much western, particularly French, media coverage of the January attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices and the kosher supermarket in Paris fell prey to an old orientalist trope of the ‘War on Terror’: that Western secular culture is innately peaceful, rational and tolerant, while Islam is distinctly ambiguous on these matters.
In some of this coverage, the incident was reduced to an attack on secular freedom. This not only failed to capture the complexity of the events. It also failed to reflect accurately the tangled histories of secular ideas, political settlements, and ways of living in the west and the Arab Middle East, shaped by centuries of interaction, including empire and migration.
