LJUPKO MIŠELJIĆ Hate Speech as a Moral Lesson for the Righteous

By Ljupko Mišelić

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"Tuzla is not gay. Tuzla is made up of men who love women and women who love men. These are not real Tuzla residents. They all came down from the hills..." – says one of the gathered people with a sneer, who came to protest against the queer festival Merlinka. "Fifty years, seventy years of average life in this world is nothing compared to what Allah the Almighty has decreed as punishment or reward" – says another a few moments before shouting 'Allahu Akbar'. When warned by the police commander to disperse because they had not registered a public gathering, one of them, holding a banner, says: "We didn't gather, we came to watch a movie." What can one say to that when seeing banners, even if they didn't know the gathering was announced on Facebook?

Lies, Exploitation, and Violence

The group that came to protest against the queer festival is, in fact, not at all committed to dialogue. They do not show motivation to seek the truth about themselves, they think it is incomplete, they do not want to create new value through conversation, they do not show that they need someone different from them to articulate themselves. From that perspective, we are left to conclude that the Merlinka festival is merely a target of attack and only in that context a reason for gathering.

The response received by the police commander can be qualified as a false statement made in a fit of power or as a trivial lie. In that case, we must consider that the unconditional consequence of lies is exploitation and violence. Speaking about both the individual and the state, Béla Hamvas described it as follows: "The fact of transformation into a system of lies means that the one who made the announcement no longer took it seriously, but used everything to deceive the world, and made it the basis for a system of government." If we assume that this performance is merely a manifestation of some illusion, we cannot help but point to the misery hidden behind this religiously structured simulation of reality. Karl Marx called this misery a profane existence of delusion, writing: "The man who, in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought the superman, found only the reflection of himself, will no longer be inclined to find only the semblance of himself, only the inhuman, where he seeks and must seek his true reality."

If we disregard this detail, which has already been seen by about seven hundred people on YouTube, we will be no further from the position where we must analyze and explain the discourse of curses that guides the gathered people. According to one of them, they are protesting out of fear that God might join their hearts with the hearts of those who came to Merlinka, "which certainly does not work in their favor."

Why is 'Allahu Akbar' important?

All Muslims are at an equal distance from God. This cannot be denied even by those who insist on the difference between high Islam of scholars and low Islam of the common people. "There is no canonized, but only divine law, which actually addresses the community of believers, not the membership and organization of a specialized agency. Thus, divinity has deprived the community of the possibility of prescribing laws; this fact has far-reaching consequences for the lives of Muslims," wrote Ernest Gellner in "Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion.".

The absence of a formal clergy or sacramental status by which a preacher or ritual leader would be separated from the laity in Islam testifies to this theological egalitarianism. And although the Prophet equipped everyone with a complete, permanent, and valid model for building a community, the desire for status and superiority that draws privileges from the Prophet's household has motivated many groups of Muslims to politically (re)conquer the legitimacy of the divine message.

Different ways of drawing legitimacy in Islam are presented as three ubiquitous and well-known currents, but the insistence on the inflexibility of certain religious truths has incorporated renewal movements and their fundamentalist position into the tradition of Islam. "Fundamentalism rejects the belief of the tolerant believer of modern views that faith is something much milder, something far less exclusive, ultimately something less demanding and much more adaptable; finally, something compatible with all other faiths, and even or especially – with disbelief. Such modernism deprives doctrine and its proclamation of all demands, challenges, and persistence," writes Gellner.
Now that this position is clear or at least partially understandable, we know where the banners, shouts, interjections, and curses come from, we see a clear power dynamic, we understand better where the lies, deception, and curses originate. It is difficult to prove that these are not the consequences of interpreting a text containing divine messages, just as it is difficult to deny that for this group there is meaning outside the aforementioned text. The hardest part, in fact, is to find any such text in which it is clearly and unambiguously proclaimed: incite, hate, and discriminate because your religion demands it of you. No one from the prosecution might invoke this argument, but that does not mean that there is no case here. Even if we accept the thesis that religion is the organized practice of clear and unambiguous truths, that is no reason for any prosecutor to abandon a clear and unambiguous case like this: hate speech, not religion. Anyone who watches the video of that protest could easily establish this. Forgive me if I am somewhat objective, but I do not wish to provide the address of that video, considering that the prosecutor and the one who published it can benefit from it. The only question is who among the aforementioned is more demanding, challenging, and persistent in the task of establishing the truth of this world.