The Big Read: Let us put our faith in tolerance

I do not even like the name Charlie.

My two childhood acquaintances with that name were lousy friends simply because they supported Cape Town City while I was a Hellenic fan; we fought all the time about these rival soccer teams. So no, I am not Charlie, then or now.

Perhaps it was because of my congenital incapacity to follow a crowd that when the Je Suis Charlie masses marched around the world, and pencils went up everywhere, I withdrew to think about the horrific tragedy that took place at Number 10 Rue Nicolaas-Appert in Paris.

To be heard on this sensitive matter I suppose I need to say two things. One, I believe the three men who killed the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, policemen and other French citizens are cowardly terrorists. Two, I do not believe, under any circumstances, that cartoonists or anyone else should be censored, no matter how outrageous their public speech.

That said, I am deeply concerned about the great divide in the Charlie debate - between the secular mind that insists it has no responsibility to even listen to the grievance of Muslim believers, and the religious mind that refuses to respect the rights to unfettered expression in the public space.

Faith and democracy need not be enemies but you would not know that from the public debates on Charlie around the world. We have to learn to hold up two ideas at the same time - the dignity of believers and the rights of the artist.

As I prepare to return from North America for home, I am astounded at how quickly minds swing from one simple truth to another rival truth. The one moment everybody seems to agree on police brutality in Ferguson. Then two policemen were shot in their cars in New York and Ferguson went off the map in the media as police safety became the new issue. And yet this country will not solve the problem of policing unless both ideas are upheld at the same time - police brutality and police security.

This particular point has huge implications for how we teach. We need teachers who can teach grey areas and not those dangerous, simplistic standpoints of the "with us or against us" variety. This demands great educator skill on the one hand and great self-control on the other. Teachers are not automatons; they teach with and through their own emotions.

Grey teaching, therefore, requires the capacity to reflect and the obligation to hear both sides of the argument. It calls for an understanding that good teaching is not the issuing of answers but the careful evaluation of contending thoughts in order to arrive at balanced judgments.

What makes the Charlie Hebdo debate so dangerous is the arrogance of the secular mind and the rigidity of the religious mind; there is no middle ground.

The secular position holds that because we have the right to say what we want to, there are no other considerations. But there are; it's called mindfulness. Respecting the deep beliefs of Muslims - about matters such as the depiction of their prophet - is an act of maturity and a sign of regard.

Shortly after the massacre the surviving cartoonists went ahead and continued their public acts of disregard. The argument that stopping the publication of offensive cartoons will not halt acts of murder by radical Islamists is correct; but they are not the audience. The millions of peace-loving Muslims, including those in South Africa, are the citizens we should respect. The argument that Charlie Hebdo is an equal opportunity offender is no argument - the call for mindfulness stretches across religious communities.

The religious mind is much harder to persuade, given the deep emotional attachments to spiritual beliefs. And yet religious leaders of all faiths have a responsibility to preach and encourage tolerance in multi-cultural and multi-faith countries where democracy has as much claim on the public space as conservative belief. When, on the other hand, religious leaders inflame passions against the democratic rights of freedom of expression, the Paris massacre is an inevitable consequence.

What is now required on a world stage is the kind of leadership on all fronts that can hold up both these ideals as universal values worth pursuing - the right to offend and the right to be respected. Mature democracies allow for both, always mindful of the consequences of disregard in a deeply divided world.

As far as the Hebdo killers are concerned, I am with my favourite basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: these are simply "thugs disguising themselves as Muslims".