By Joseph Massad
7 October
2020
France is
in crisis.
Official
and unofficial Christian French radical extremism, legitimising itself under
the umbrella of what the French ostentatiously call laicité, continues to
increase its attacks on French and non-French Muslims.
French
President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech to present his strategy to fight
'separatism' on 2 October (Reuters)
-----
The
Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France (CCIF) listed 1,043 Islamophobic
incidents that occurred in 2019 (a 77 percent increase since 2017) - 68
physical attacks (6.5 percent), 618 incidents of discrimination (59.3 percent),
210 incidents of hate speech and incitement to racial hatred (20.1 percent), 93
incidents of defamation (8.9 percent), 22 incidents of vandalism of Muslim
sacred places (2.1 percent), and 32 incidents of discrimination linked to the
fight against terrorism (3.1 percent).
French
Christian and so-called 'secular' hatred of Muslims is part of everyday speech
by the French government, the pundits, and the media
In fact,
the normalisation of hate speech against Muslims not only legitimises the
institutionalised discrimination to which French Muslims are subjected, but
also incites violence against them inside and outside France, including the
shootings at the mosque of Brest and the targeting of its popular imam Rachid
Eljay in June 2019 and the attack on the mosque of Bayonne in October 2019 that
wounded four.
Outside
France, the terrorist who committed the 2019 massacre at the Christchurch
mosques in New Zealand, killing 51 Muslim worshippers and wounding 49, cited
the murderous theories of the Islamophobic French thinker Renaud Camus as
influencing his actions.
In October
2019, French President Emmanuel Macron (whose first name is the name which the
angel Gabriel gave to Jesus in the Gospels, meaning "God is with us")
and his then Interior Minister Christophe Castaner (also named after Christ
himself) connected terrorism in France to any signs of French Muslims' faith
and culture, including having a beard, praying five times a day, eating halal
food, etc.
It is
purely coincidental that the president and his interior minister are named
after Jesus Christ, which should not implicate all those named after Jesus with
having a crisis with "Islam", but rather only some of them who
express anti-Muslim "secular" hatred.
'Liberating' Islam
Last week,
Macron declared that "Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the
world today, we are not just seeing this in our country". He added that he
is seeking to "liberate" Islam in France from foreign influences by
improving oversight of mosque financing.
This is an
old French "secular" tradition. When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt
and Palestine in 1798, his clever plan was to lie to the Egyptians by
announcing that he and his army were "faithful Muslims" and that they
came to liberate Muslims and Islam from the tyranny of the Mamluks.
His
deception did not work and the Egyptians rose against him as did the
Palestinians. He returned in defeat to France after his army committed untold
atrocities in Egypt and Palestine. Napoleon and France’s crisis with Islam two
centuries ago was that they were defeated in the Palestinian city of Acre.
Three decades later, when France invaded Algeria, the French no longer needed
to lie to Muslims to conquer them, rob them, and destroy their places of
worship.
The
official casus belli that King Charles X used to justify the invasion of
Algeria in 1830 was France’s refusal to pay its debt for grain that Algerian
merchants had supplied Napoleon’s French army during the Italian Campaign under
the First Republic. In view of the fact that the Algerian merchants were from
the Livorno Jewish banking families of Bacri and Busnac, the public debate at
the time in France had an "antisemitic tenor".
Ironically,
this is the same King Charles who in 1825 forced the liberated slaves of Haiti,
whose revolution overthrew French colonialism and slavery, to pay millions in
indemnity for the property losses of their former white French masters who had
enslaved them in exchange for France’s diplomatic recognition and lifting its
punishing blockade of Haiti.
A
placard held by a protester reading "Let Muslims live their faith"
during march against Islamophobia in front of the Gare du Nord, in Paris on 10
November 2019 (AFP)
-----
In 1827,
Hussein Dey, ruler of Ottoman Algiers, demanded payment of the debt from the
French consul, Pierre Deval, who insolently refused. Incensed by the consul’s
affront, the Dey struck him with a fly-whisk (what the French refer to as the
coup d’éventail incident) - and called him "a wicked, faithless,
idol-worshipping rascal".
Invading Algeria
The
invasion was launched in mid-June 1830 and Algiers fell on 5 July. The
financially struggling France robbed Algiers’ treasury clean, stealing upwards
of 43 million Francs in gold and silver, aside from the sums that disappeared
and those that were spent on the French occupation army. Perhaps poor West
African countries that continue to be indebted to France today should prove how
assimilated they are into Frenchness by invading France to rob its treasury.
The
conquering French army took over mosques and converted them into churches and
cathedrals at gunpoint
The
immediate goals of the invasion, as Charles enumerated them to the French
national assembly on 2 March, were to avenge the French for the Algerian
insult, "end piracy and reclaim Algeria for Christianity".
In line
with France’s Christian commitments, the conquering French army took over
mosques and converted them into churches and cathedrals at gunpoint, including
the largest Ottoman Ketchaoua mosque in Algiers, built in 1612, which was
converted into the Cathedral of St Philippe in December 1832.
That same
year the French wiped out the entire tribe of the Ouffias, sparing no woman or
child, and seizing all their possessions.
Not unlike
contemporary white French Christian supremacist intellectuals' utter hatred and
racism towards Muslims, in the early 1840s, France’s celebrated thinker Alexis
de Toqueville declared in this regard that "it is possible and necessary
that there be two sets of laws in Africa, because we are faced with two clearly
separate societies. When one is dealing with Europeans [colonial-settlers in
Africa], absolutely nothing prevents us from treating them as if they were
alone; the laws enacted for them must be applied exclusively to them."
He objected
to the faint of heart who opposed French barbarism and their use of blitzkriegs
(which they called "razzias") against the Algerian population.
"I have often heard men whom I respect, but with whom I do not agree, find
it wrong that we burn harvests, that we empty silos, and finally that we seize
unarmed men, women, and children. These, in my view, are regrettable
necessities, but ones to which any people who want to wage war on the Arabs are
obliged to submit. And, if I should speak my mind, these acts revolt me no more
nor even as much as several others that the law of war obviously authorises and
which take place in all the wars of Europe."
French Barbarism
In 1871,
Algerian Muslims revolted again against French rule, with 150,000 people
joining the forces of a local Kabyle leader, Al-Muqrani.
The French
genocidal machine responded by killing hundreds of thousands, which, combined
with the French-caused famine deaths in the late 1860s, resulted in the death
of one million Algerians (about a third of the population). The French razed
dozens of towns and villages to the ground while eliminating the entire elite
of Algerian society. But even that did not resolve France’s "crisis"
with Islam.
French
soldiers check the identity of Muslims at a checkpoint on 12 December 1960 in
Algeria a few days before the UN statement acknowledging the right to the
self-determination for Algerians (AFP)
------
In 1901,
the French concern about their "crisis" with Islam increased. This
was especially so as France, which "is and will become increasingly and
without a doubt a great Muslim power", given its acquisition of new
colonies with large Muslim populations, needed to know what Islam would be like
in the 20th century.
This became
such a grave concern that a colonial "quest" for knowledge was
issued. The editor of the important French colonial journal Questions
diplomatiques et coloniales, Edmond Fazy, set out to investigate the question
of "the Future of Islam" by the year 2000.
Future of Islam
Not unlike
many Islamophobic French Christians today, Fazy worried about the increasing
and underreported number of Muslims worldwide (he cited the figure of 300
million, constituting a fifth of the world’s population) and the propagation of
their "simple" religion to Africa.
France
continues to be submerged in a dominant discourse of chauvinism and hate today
that is not dissimilar to the one that always dominated French culture
Many of the
contributors to his journal saw fit to manipulate Islamic theology and
transform Muslim ulamas to produce not only a modern Islam that European
modernity would tolerate, but also one that, they hoped, would weaken the
Ottoman Empire.
The most
practical advice, however, came from the French school of Arabists, staffed by
the French colonial settlers (pieds noirs) in North Africa. One of them, Edmond
Doutte, of the ecole algerienne, a specialist in religion and Islam, spoke of
his encounter with Muslim fanaticism and intolerance.
Traditionally
educated Muslims seem to have "moved away from us" in contrast with
the native workers, who fraternise with the colons and learn "our
habits". Rather than repress "the exaggerated religious
manifestations" of extant Islam, the task before Europeans was more
productive.
"We
could, on the contrary, favour the birth of a new Islam more inclined towards
compromise and tolerance of Europe; to encourage the young generation of ulama
who are working in that direction, and to increase the number of mosques,
madrasas, and Muslim universities, ensuring that we staff them with adherents
of the new theories."
Worshippers
arrive at the Grande Mosque in Colmar, eastern France, while a police officer
stands guard on 22 September, 2019 (AFP)
----
Doutte’s
comments ring so familiar because they could easily be uttered by any
contemporary French - or other western - politician or pundit today.
As for M
William Marcais, the director of the Tlemcen madrasa founded by the French to
train Algerian Muslim judges on "rationalist" grounds, he was partial
towards the "new" and "modern" Islam that the French were
fashioning and in which he was a participant, an Islam that "was closely
tied to France’s destiny."
Payback Time
The project
of transforming Islam into something European Christianity and French laicite
can tolerate continues afoot in 2020, but with unsatisfactory results as far as
Macron is concerned, especially as France’s funding of jihadist groups in Syria
has not so far brought about the French-sought after Islam.
The ongoing
institutionalised discrimination by the French state against its Muslim
citizens shows no signs of abatement under Macron. France continues to be
submerged in a dominant discourse of chauvinism and hate today that is not
dissimilar to the one that always dominated French culture even before the
French Revolution.
It is true
that the widespread white Christian supremacist and fascist culture of hate
across Europe and the United States today, reminiscent of the European culture
of hate in the 1930s, is not exclusive to France, but the French (not unlike
the Israelis) excel at expressing it with minimal euphemisms.
The crisis
that France continues to face with Muslims is the crisis of French chauvinism,
and the refusal of the white supremacist Christian and laic French to recognise
that their country is a third-rate neo-colonial power with a dominant
retrograde culture that insists on holding on to underserved past glories, when
they need to repent their genocidal sins that extend from the Caribbean to
South East Asia, to Africa, and that killed millions of people since the late
18th century.
What the
French need to do is to pay back the debts they owe to all those whom they
robbed and killed around the world since then. Only that will end France’s
crisis with "Islam" and with itself.
-----
Joseph Massad is Professor of Modern Arab
Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York. He is the
author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include
Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, Desiring Arabs,
The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the
Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles
have been translated to a dozen languages.
Original Headline: France's 'crisis' with
Islam: A legacy of 200 years of colonial brutality
Source: The Middle East Eye
URl: https://newageislam.com/islam-west/macron-first-french-ruler-wanted/d/123283
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