Macron and Islamism: Shooting the Messenger

Elham Manea teaches Political Science at the University of Zurich. Her forthcoming book The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism will be published by Telos Press in the spring and can be pre-ordered today in our store. The following talk was delivered as a keynote speech in German at the Convention of the Schader Foundation in Darmstadt (online) on November 6, 2020.

It is becoming difficult lately to turn on the news. And I do not just mean the American presidential elections. The year 2020 was and still is a hard one. COVID-19 has dominated our lives with its limitations. But it has also welded people together in every corner of the world in the fight against a persistent and ultimately deadly virus. This struggle, this common challenge, has united us and yet divided us. We are still irritated by the lockdowns, afraid of their economic repercussions, and divided in our ideological fronts. Times like these are worrying and provide fertile ground for conspiracy theorists and right-wing and left-wing extremist groups.

In times like these, our societies can all too easily become polarized, and we run the risk of being trapped in a discourse of division, trapped in identity boxes. “Us” versus “Them.”

The Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris, Nice, Dresden, and Vienna give precisely this impression: the impression that Europe is involved in a kind of clash of civilizations. Islam against the West. The West against Islam. Muslims against Europe. Europe against Muslims.

We should be careful about these binary depictions. Those who are pushing for such discourse are often a minority, aiming for polarization not unity. Those who are pushing for this discourse of division are often religious far-right groups—functionaries of Islamism—or far-right groups in Europe.

Consider the reactions to French President Emmanuel Macron’s speech of October 2 on “Islamist Separatism.” Macron’s core proposals included:

• fighting Islamism—a religious far-right extremist ideology that seeks domination;
• ending its control of closed Muslim communities by dismantling its structures (mosques, Quran schools, schools, charity, and culture associations);
• ending the widespread practice of bringing over foreign imams to work in France, where they often preach a neo-fundamentalist version of religion;
• stopping the flow of foreign financing of Islamist structures;
• and addressing the social segregation of neglected and disadvantaged communities by bringing back the state, its presence, services, and access to justice to these areas.

Instead of focusing on these issues, which are all well documented, somehow Macron became a target of harsh critique for “stigmatizing Muslims.”

A similar pattern of “reframing” the issue took place after the French teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded outside his school in a Paris suburb earlier this month. He was beheaded because he showed his pupils some of the Charlie Hebdo Mohammed cartoons in a lesson on the freedom of speech. Instead of focusing on the decapitation of a teacher and the ideology that led an 18-year-old young man to commit such an abhorrent crime, the topic became the limits of freedom of expression, “France’s ‘draconian’ measures against Muslims,”^[1] and a call to boycott French products.

The reframing is deliberate.

It is a strategy often deployed by Islamist organizations and states sponsoring different forms of Islamism: divert the attention from the real issue—Islamism, conflate Islamism with Muslims and Islam, and embrace a victimhood discourse—Islam is being attacked, Muslims are being stigmatized, and the world is watching. It is presented as a clash of civilizations.

I am a Swiss-Yemeni academic of Islamic faith who, among other things, researches and teaches on the ideology, context, and consequences of Islamism in its various forms. And when I address you today, I speak to you as someone who rejects the discourse of “us against them”; who knows what it means to be part of “us” and also part of “them.”

I speak to you as a bridge—a bridge between the poles of “us” and “them,” a bridge that seeks to unite us—all of us—in our humanity.

This is the reason why I support French President Emmanuel Macron’s measures. He did just that—he called the problem by its name. And it takes courage to do that.

We may question the timing of his speech. But it is well known that he postponed delivering the speech several times because of its sensitivity. He also conducted several long rounds of meetings with leaders of French Muslim communities, some of whom urged him to take these actions. The outcome was a speech that recognized the magnitude of the problem. Using his words: “The problem is an Islamist separatism. It is a deliberate, theorized, political-religious project that is reflected in repeated deviations from the values of the Republic, which often lead to the formation of a counter-society.”

France has a problem of closed communities in the banlieues, the working-class suburbs that ring its major cities, which have become fertile recruiting grounds for Islamist groups.

Closed communities feature patriarchal power structures and suffocating social control. Those who do not conform to the imposed social order are intimidated and disciplined. Women are strongly controlled in closed communities. Their behavior, clothes, and manners are watched and followed. If a young woman decides to behave freely and independently—as an adult person, who can decide for herself—she will be called a whore and will be punished in various ways. Closed societies are religiously or ethnically based groups. They develop certain collective attitudes. They are separated, culturally and/or socially, and often spatially, from the surrounding larger society.

Part of this problem was caused by the state itself and its negligence of its banlieues. Results include youth left to unemployment, xenophobia, poverty, and a macho code of behavior. The state’s absence left a vacuum that was filled by Islamist structures, generously supported by transnational Islamist organizations and governments.

These structures systematically indoctrinate children and youths with a religious ideology that divides the world into two camps, believers and non-believers, engaged in a confrontation where the “superior” Muslims are ultimately destined to dominate the world. For example, in the religious curriculum used by the Muslim Brothers, children are led to hate specific figures in Islamic history and then direct that hatred toward a general category of unbelievers and the general society. They teach selected chapters of Islamic history that make “killing others” a legitimate act of defense of Islam.^[2]

Schools have been shaped by this ideology and its separatist worldview. This was well documented by a report submitted to the French Minister of Education in 2004 by the now retired General Inspector of Education Jean-Pierre Obin. Based on fieldwork that covered 60 schools, he described toilets with separate taps for Muslims and “French.” The existence of separate changing rooms in sports halls was explained by a local official “because circumcised youth should not sit with impure youth [sic].”^[3]

The report documented how girls between 14 and 15 years old are forced into marriage. How they are monitored and brutally punished if they defy the moral, social, and religious code imposed in the schools and their communities. It also reported on a political strategy of entryism—where Islamist missionaries are encouraged to join specific jobs in schools as a means of proselytization. Anti-Semitism—which is core to Islamist ideology—is widespread. In fact, the report states that the word “Jew” itself and its equivalent “feuj” have become an undifferentiated insult used by many children and young people.

The issue is well documented and researched. Its ramifications are felt by those whom we call the “Muslims.” They are the ones who are left to face alone the suffocating religious domination of a small extremist minority. Parents who helplessly witness how their children and youths are lost to a religious ideology. Women and girls whose dignity and equal rights are violated by Islamist norms with impunity.

It is they whom we should care about. And the consequences should concern us all. For these patterns and structures are not unique to France. They exist in other European countries too. The French measures are meant to face a serious problem long left untouched. We should express our solidarity with France and Macron. For he is insisting on an inclusive French identity, a citizenship, based on universal norms of dignity and equal rights. He is taking a stance against an ideology of separatism. Instead of shooting him for his message, I suggest that you listen to the message. It is about us, all of us.

Notes

1. “France’s ‘draconian’ measures against Muslims” is the title of a letter published on October 28, 2020, and signed by various Islamic organizations, some of which are known for their association with different forms of political Islam (such as the Muslim Brotherhood and/or Jamaat-e-Islami) and neo-fundamentalist movements (such as Salafi and/or Deobandi organization and movements).

2. For example, in part one of Al Rashad for Cubs, children are told the story of Abu Lahab, the uncle of Mohammed who is condemned in the Quran as the enemy of Islam. The instructions in the curriculum tell the tutor to emphasize: “I hate Abu Lahab because he was Kafir (unbeliever), he did not believe in Allah and the messenger (Mohammad), and he used to torture Muslims.” The instructions specify the following three lessons the children should learn from the Abu Lahab story. To quote the instructions:

     1. Allah will put the Kufar [unbelievers] into the fire of hell;
     2. The Muslim hates the Kufar and loves the Muslims;
     3. The Kufar hate Islam and hurt Muslims.

See Al Rashad on Raising Sons, in Arabic, pt. 1, Al Manara, p. 9.

3. Jean-Pierre Obin, “Les signes et manifestations d’appartenance religieuse dans les établissements s,colaires,” June 2004.