Maspero massacre: I am an Egyptian and I will always stand against brutality

For all the victims of the Massacre of Maspero: Rest in Peace. May God offer you an afterlife worth a million earthly lives. Ina lillah wa ina ileihi raje’oon.

For the murderers, whoever they are: Shame, eternal shame on you. May Allah put you one day in front of your horrible deeds.

I am a Muslim Egyptian and I will firmly stand against those who want to divide our people, against those who attack my brothers and sisters, wether they are Coptics or Muslims. We are one people and nobody will spread fitna among us.

 

Comparing Obama’s speech on the Middle-East with his Cairo Speech

The communication with the Arab and/or Muslim World looks like being a conundrum for the Western World. The way George W. Bush adressed some issues related to the Arabs/Muslims is maybe the perfect example on what to not say to them. Obama speeches were always clean of the obvious mistakes of his predecessors and this 2011 speech on the Middle-East was even cleaner. The 2009 Cairo speech was actually so brillantly written that it really raised hopes in the Middle-East for a change. But alas, from 2009 to 2011, these high expectations were disappointed, not only because of Iraq and Afghanistan wars or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also because of the attitude towards the Arab dictators facing street protests: the support to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt came too late, only when it was clear to the US that they can dump their dear allies (Mubarak, Ben Ali, Gaddafi,…) because they were already almost toppled.

Thus, it is in this mindframe of scepticism that most of us, Arabs, listened to this Middle-East Speech. We kind of all had our “checklist”: some were waiting how Obama will mention Bahrain, some others how is he to address about Israel and Palestine, etc. None of us was really waiting for anything interesting and special to be said, most of us were just looking for a renewed confirmation of a new form of the good old hypocrisy: same old routine, only covered with more elegant words than his predecessors would have used.

What I was personnally interested in was in fact the difference between the Cairo speech of 2009 and this speech of 2011 on Middle-East, not in terms of the content itself, but in terms of the form, the strategy of communication. Although the latter was pronounced from the White House, it is quite obvious that it was prepared with the intention to address to the Arab World. The decision to not hold this speech in front of an Arab audiance in an Arab country proves there is a hesitation to face directly Arabs, as there is no certainty on the welcoming it would have had (after all Clinton was boycotted in Egypt by youth and hooted by Tunisians to the point she had to cancell her speach in Tunis). As the changes go in the North African and Middle Eastern region, the”West” adapts its communication.They are totally aware the Arab revolutions were the occasion of multiple  failures in communication and decisions, and that this caused a great damage on the trust the Arab and Muslim World have on them. Not only they want to restore that trust (surprisingly they seem to think that regaining it needs only to adapt the way of speaking, instead of admitting it needs a complete change of policy, what will apparently never happen), but also they are in high need of understanding the new Arab references.

The main differences between the two speeches are:

1. The Storytelling: in Obama 2009 speech, there were very few of the “storytelling” US rethoric is normally full of (emphazing arguments with an example of a person’s life story), besides the very brief mention to his own story linking him to Africa, while in the 2011 Speech, many mentions were done: Rosa Parks, Muhammad Bouazizi, Wael Ghonim (indirectly, by mentionning his position at Google), some Israeli father whose son was killed by Hamas starting a peace NGO. The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions certainly made realize to Obama, Clinton and their team how important will be now the ordinary people of the Arab World. Instead of talking about elites, refering to great places or figures of History, the ‘normal’ people (including women) that achieved great things with almost nothing were mentioned. The storytelling, that ensured Ronald Reagan with a great popularity in his country as a president and was so to say the standard of communication of George W. Bush (and Nicolas Sarkozy), is a very classical technique to reach the very general audiances: (over)simplifying in talking with images instead of building a consistant chain of arguments.
2. Erasing American references: only with the “told stories” one can see that they refer all but one (Rosa Parks) to Arabs. But the shift goes beyond this. In 2009 speech, there was a point about stressing on the fact that Islam was part of American History, about the fight for civic rights of African Americans, about the Cold War, etc, while in 2011 speech the direct references to American History are completely erased (except for the reference to the American Revolution where Patriots refused to pay taxes to a king). Even the cited locations were chosen to fit to the Arab perspective (Cairo, Benghazi, Sanaa). In two words, we are moving here from speeches where we talk about “American values to export” to speeches where we talk about “universal values”, that happen to be shared by America as well as by other parts of the world, worth fighting for, although America didn’t create these values. US want to give a more “modest” image of themselves, they don’t  anymore commit the mistake to pretend they are  bringing democracy/peace/hope as global leader (although Hillary Clinton in the few words preceding Obama speech expressed her views about the need of an American strong “leadership”). On the contrary they emphazise on the fact that these values are wanted and activelly won by the Arabs themselves. Americans want now to endorse the more “neutral” role (in surface only of course) of those who will just propose help (economical, G20, technological, etc) and let free the Arabs to decide if they want that help or not (of course it is just a very hypocrit way of presenting things).
3. Avoiding religious references: of course, 2009 was technically a speech to the Muslim World, while 2011 is a speech on the Middle-East, but no one will deny how much entangled are Middle-East and Islam. 2009 was not only refering to Al-Azhar, the Quran or Obama’s own Christianity, it was also speaking the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of Jews and Shoah, Muslims and Christians. In the 2011 speech, he prefered to talk Israel-Palestine in terms of frontiers, security and official mutual recognition, Bahrain in terms of Iranian strategic political interest, and Arab revolutions in general in mentionning freedom, economy, technology, information. The only explicit references were made were the “region that was the birthplace of three world religions” and the Muslim/Copt violence in Egypt and the offered solution to take the Iraqi “multi-ethnic multi-sectarian democracy” as an example (what a strange idea by the way to take this as an example). In erasing the reference to religion and particularely to Islam, it is quite clear that the United States want to enter in a new phase of their relation with Arabs where they can close the Islamism/extremism/Al-Qaeda chapter. In a way, by saying that Al-Qaeda was against democracy, that it lost its revelancy in the region, that more has been done in six months of civil unrest  than in decades by terrorists, but also by not referring to the recent choice  of a new head for Al-Qaeda and denying the Ossama Ben Laden’s posthume message praising Arab revolutions, US call for having the right to “move to something else”: US wants to make known that they want to make politics, business (a lot of business in fact), partnerships; they don’t want anymore to be seen as the oppressor of Muslims around the World. As if there was any chance that Arabs could forget the military support of Israel anyway (clearly mentionned in the 2011 speech).
4. Adopting Arabic rethoric: the only concession done to arabic language in 2009 speech was the opening “Salam Aleikom“. In 2011, there is a will to “speak the way Arabs speak”. Some linguistic specifities of the Arabic language are adopted. For example, the repetition of terms, very classic in arabic, but avoided as much as possible in english is clear in a sentence like “Square by square, town by town, country by country” (unfortunately for Obama, his advisors do not seem to have noticed the similarity that each Arab will notice with Gaddafi murderous speech “Zenga zenga, bit bit, dar dar“, meaning “street by street, house by house, room by room“). Another flagrant example is the sentence (actually the answer to the non-asked question) where he says: “Bin Laden was no martyr“, the word martyr being extremely often used not only in Islamic lexical field, but also in general Arab’s (for example, the people killed on Tahrir Square, regardless of their religion, are referred as martyrs by Egyptians), while it is totally absent from previous American official speeches. Adapting arabic rethoric is a way of looking “more familiar”, or “more comprehensive”.

I see the 2011 speech on the Middle-East as being a “grammatical contortion”: US diplomacy makes moves that are unnatural to them, not because they are taking a new orientation with us, Arabs, but because they think that if they want to continue to pursue the goals they always pursued in the region (oil, Israel and capitalism), they just have to make it a bit more subtly. With this Obama speech we officially entered in the era where the United States understand Arabs are not just parameters to adjust and fine tune, but a whole part of the world with 400 million people with real personal expectations and real intention to be sovereign. Let’s be clear: that’s only plastic surgery. If there was any real consideration to Arab aspirations, a word would have been adressed to the aspirations of the people living in the most repressive country of the region governed by a medieval feodal system, Saudi Arabia, and more firm positions would have been taken to condemn what happens in Syria and Bahrain.

Mimmicking our way of building sentences and arguments and using our own references is not enough and will never be; in fact it is even almost a bad idea from an American perspective for it makes it even easier for us  to detect where exactly there is hypocrisy,emptiness or offense. It is as if President Obama tried to cook for us a couscous or any other Arab dish and really thought we won’t be able to make the difference with our own cooking. The thing is, sadly for Americans and luckily for Arabs, very, very few of us were fooled by this new way of addressing us.

By dying, Ossama Ben Laden won his last battle

There is nearly nobody on the 7 billion people on our planet talking about anything else than Ben Laden’s death at the moment. When the American President Obama spoke late night, bringing the news that was already largely spread on all social networks and TV broadcasts of the killing of the most feared man on Earth after a hunt of nearly 10 years, he sounded victorious. “Justice has been done“, he argued. Really?

When one sticks to the facts, one is forced to conclude that:

1. Apparently Ossama Ben Laden was not hidden in mountains, under the ocean or on Planet Mars, but in a small cozy town of Pakistan, an ally nation of US. The trillions of dollars put in the wars against terrorism and the extravagant sums spent to supply the Intelligence failed to bring practical and efficient solutions to catch the most wanted man on the planet in a reasonable timing.
2. He was caught only after he clearly retired from his duties in Al-Qaeda. US totally failed at catching him while he was active, challenging the whole planet with his tapes recorded in Afghan mountains. Al-Qaeda legendary figure is dead, but Al-Qaeda works for now at least 3-4 years without Ossama Ben Laden. In a sense, he was more like a “Godfather”: highly valued and respected by his men for the “glorious” record, feared by his ennemies, but not being anymore the field guy.
3. The logistics and organization of the number 1 terrorist nebula won’t be affected by Ben Laden’s death. Ex-Number 2 who is now Number 1, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, is not a youngster anymore either and very unlikely to be technically leading Al-Qaeda; he’s just the other ‘Godfather’. The technical leadership, planning of operations, recruitment, are to find somewhere else. So to say, US have totally failed to disrupt Al-Qaeda as a criminal organization able to schedule operations and put them into practice.
4. Al-Qaeda’s emulators, such as Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb or Jamaat Ansar As-Sunna, are  deeply rooted everywhere and do not depend on Al-Qaeda itself to pursue their own goals: Al-Qaeda created a template and it was successfully used to spread terrorism.
5. The release of the Wikileaks Guantanamo Files (779 detainees files, with extensive individual description, charges, medical statements) a couple of days before the “arrest” of Ossama Ben Laden are nothing but a testimony of how far had Americans to go to get very few information, with an extremely weak “return on investment”. In other words, the enigma is still unsolved. Al-Qaeda succeeded to create the most opaque organization ever (the Wikipedia pages about Al-Qaeda are among the most poorly documented), almost impossible to stop but from the inside.
6. By killing Ossama Ben Laden, any hope of a trial/instruction/interrogation is automatically suppressed, depriving anti-terrorism strategists from a number one source to key information on Al-Qaeda and depriving victims from a real justice process.
7. The war on terrorism done in Afghanistan and Iraq ruined financially America, ruined its reputation worldwide, made about a thousands times more victims than the terrorist attacks themselves, planted the seeds of the dramatic collapse of the global influence the “American Empire”: US were weakened by this decade of “shock and awe” campaign. Al-Qaeda and Ossama Ben Laden made in less than 10 years what the USSR did not achieve in 30 years of Cold War.

When in 2008 Bush administration spokesman pronounced the simple sentence “Ladies and Gentlemen – We got him.” to announce the arrest of Saddam Hussein, it did not prevent G.W. Bush from the complete failure of his policy in Iraq. Today, Ossama Ben Laden death is certainly not a victory on the battlefield, where Amrican troops can surely already prepare for an intensification of terrorist acts against Amrican interests.

Indirect consequences of a decade of Al-Qaeda threat over the world would be interesting to study. A few can be already be named: Al-Jazeera was “made” by Ben Laden tapes the same way CNN was “made” by the Gulf wars, empowering the Arab region with its first subversive towards Arab regimes and the West TV channel; virtual activism and on-line recruitment, “headless” or “structure-less” political entities constitute the jist of the method mostly developped by Al-Qaeda (some used it for terrorism, others to ask for democracy); war on terrorism weakened enough US and allies for them to lose hand and perfect control on global geostrategy (they have hard time evaluating the dangers and the appropriate answers).

At the end, they offered Ossama Ben Laden what he always wanted: to die as a “martyr”. By his political criminal acts, as incredible as it appears, he created the “post-September 11th” world he wanted, where Western nations are terrorized and violently challenged for their imperialism and let a large “heritage”: a method to aggressive resistance.

Yes, definetly, by dying, Ossama Ben Laden won his last battle.

Piss Christ: blasphemy is right, but blaspheming blasphemy is wrong

The “Piss Christ” is an artwork of the American photographer Andres Serrano. The photography shows a crucifix immersed in a yello/orange liquid consisting in a mix of blood and urine. On April 17th, three catholic men entered in the art gallery in Avignon (France) where it was exposed and destroyed what they believe being a blasphemous artwork with a hammer. French Minister of Culture François Mitterand condemned the act of destruction and claims that it “undermines” fundemental principles, french political parties such as the Communist party and the Socialist party also consider it offensive and regressive.

The analysis of this event is quite enlightening and allows to draw a few conclusions. First, the artwork itself, although offending the belief of 1.5billion people worldwide is considered as admissible by States, represented by Ministers, politicians, attorneys, etc, and worth being protected by ‘freedom of expression’. Another recent well-known blasphemy affair is the Quran burning by priest Terry Jones, was the occasion for politicians to condemn firmly the act of a Christian disrespectful for Muslim feelings. One can easily imagine if instead of being produced by Andres Serrano the Piss Christ was made by a Muslim person (artist or not), similar offended reactions towards the blasphemy of the Christ would have been expressed… and they would be right to do so: burning a Quran and immersing a crucifix in urine is of equal blasphemy, and this has to be condemned, regardless of who commited the blasphemy. Apparently, there is a ‘moral order’ that makes suitable to care for believers feelings if you are a believer yourself, but allows you to not bother at all to shock them if you are an atheist.  In other terms, blasphemy is right only if the blasphemer is an atheist, seen as an ‘absolute’ source of moral values while a non-atheist (believer) can only act and think relatively to others.

The second conclusion one can draw from the Piss Christ issue is that although there seem to be a tolerance for the blasphemous picture, there isn’t acceptance of blaspheming the blasphemous picture, despite the fact that immersing a crucifix in urine and destoying an artwork is at least of equal violence. It has to be noted that most of the press refers to the destructors of Piss Christ and those who, the day before the destruction, gathered for a peaceful demonstration, as being ‘integrist catholics’, as if only integrists could be offended by the blasphemy of sacred art; on the other hand, Andres Serrano has never been described by any journalist or politician as being a ‘integrist atheist’, despite the fact that he cannot ignore how hurted are hundred of thousands of Christians by his photography.  The blasphemors find it right to blasphem other’s people icons but offensive if these other people react in blaspheming theirs.

I consider this last point interesting: it clearly shows that the blasphemators do not at all oppose to sacralization,  they only make a substitution consisting in replacing a sacred idol by another. Agreeing with Piss Christ while condemning the destroyed Piss Christ is no more than trying to state the superiority of materialist values over spiritual values: a sacred item is to be symbolically destroyed, but a physical attempt to an artistic item is a taboo. What really bothers the politicians condemning the attack of the Piss Christ: isn’t it the fact that there is no consensus about the sacrality of a materialistic good?  Blasphemy is nothing than the expression of the despair of those who cannot accept the world do not worship the same idols/gods than them.

Blasphemy is a lost battle: after all, the piss Christ is a photography, it can be reproduced a billion times, and nothing, no destruction, would make it disappear from Earth. On the other hand, all blasphematory acts (Piss Christ, Quran burning, Prophet cartoons) will never succeed in finding a substitution to transcendental beliefs in the heart and mind of billions of human beings: it is not by showing how ungly can unfaith be that people will be renounce to faith.

Sufi vs. Salafi: the Manichean Paradigm on Islam

As a Muslim, one of the questions my western friends always ask me – sooner or later – is “What current of Islam are you from?“. My answer, quite brief is always “sunni“. Mostly, they then ask what is the difference between sunni and shia (I prefer to ignore the ethnical part of the answer and focus on the theological difference between sunni and shia). As the conversation goes on, there is always a time when the various interpretations of Quran and Sunna and the various currents of thought of Islam we are discussing lead my friends to ask “And what about sufism?“. As an experience, I always ask what do they know about sufism. Basically, the answer can be summerized as follows: “Sufism is a peaceful current of Islam, focusing more on the inner faith and love than on the outer appearance. It is opposed to literalist and violent currents of Islam like Salafism that advocates Djihad, Sharia and Niqab.”.

Of course, this is a very schematic answer I give mixing all answers I got, but it represents pretty well what we could call the “Manichean Paradigm on Islam“: Sufi is seen as being the Islam of the “good guys”, Salafism as the Islam of the “evil guys”. Sufism would be apparently about whirling derviches, philosophy and Arabian Nights; Salafism about terrorists, politics and Middle-Age mentalities. Like any other Manichean representation, this paradigm on Islam is essentially wrong. It is driven not only by medias who give to western citizen a skewed image of Islam, but also was thought long ago as a solution by some think tanks (see for example the american neo-conservative  think tank RAND, endorsing sufism and secularism as a solution to counter the increasing influence of Islam as an opposing force to american imperialism).

The truth is totally different: Sufism, as a current that existed since almost the first years of Islam and that originated in Sunnism before to influence Shia doctrine, is far from being this “trendy New Age” Islam that is promoted nowadays. If it is true that Sufism fights ostentation in favor of a richer inner spiritual life, it was originally not opposed to outer signs of affiliation (like beard or veil), but to too visible wealth and pride about a high social level. Some early sufi were imprisoned for criticizing the excess of luxury goods acquired and ostensiously shown by princes. If it is true that Sufi have always given a high importance to mediation, ascetism and prayer, they yet were advocacing for applying sharia very strictly (meaning: without any dispensiation for the mighty people, but also without neglecting any aspect of sharia). Sufi are not “muslim buddhists” like people tend to think today, some where yet more peacefull than other (like in any current), but there is nothing in Sufism that intrinsically makes of the faithful person a “good guy” (nor a bad one). A lot of people nowadays self-proclamed Sufi are in fact very far from origins of Sufism, and should be considered like “Neo-Sufi“: an ideology not for a peaceful Islam, but rather for a weak Islam, an Islam of inaction. Islam is not making war, but Islam is not either looking at the state of the world and feel satisfied enough to call for no change. Of course this “Neo-Sufi” definition do not include the real Sufi of today, that still exist, especially in Pakistan and India.

On the other side, the mirrored misconceptions about Sufism are found in the modern image we have of Salafism; like Sufism, Salafism is rather a methodology of understanding the Holy Quran and Sunna than anything else. Salafism (from the arabic word Salaf referring to the Prophet Mohammad (SWS) and his companions) is based on the idea that studying the behaviour of the Prophet (SWS) and his companions in different situations give a pretty good idea on how a muslim “should” behave. A person keen to be gentle and peaceful in nature would find easily through the Salafi methodology proofs that the Prophet was a very soft and calm person, that even refused to harm beasts or trees during wars, while a tormented person would find their way through violence, the same way they could find it in reading the Communist manifesto by Marx or the newspaper in the morning. So no, Salafism is not Islam for “bad guys” (nor for good ones). To be noted that like the “Neo-Sufi”, there exists also a “Neo-Salafism“, represented by sectarian movements that aim in things that never even existed in Islam like racism and apology of suicide-djihad (which is totally unacceptable in “orthodox” Islam). Continuously referring to the West and non-Muslims, they show only how much they are obsessed by their hatred to the outer world.

Representing Islam in the globalized  21st century world as being binary (“moderate” soft Sufism vs. “integrist” hard Salafism) is thus a trickery: there is not really opposition between these two currents, nevertheless they are both incompatible with the “Neo-Sufism” and the “Neo-Salafism”, invented not really by Muslims themselves but rather shaped and promoted through a very efficient communication strategy for serving interests of limited groups. The existence of worldwide Neo-Sufi organizations (like the International Sufi Movement) and Neo-Salafi (like the Jaish Ansar As-Sunna) in itself totally strange in Islam, where the absence of religious institutionalized hierarchy is kind of a “trademark” of islamic philosophy. Another caracteristic of both movements is the existence of  highly mediatic Neo-Sufi and Neo-Salafi preachers (using the same technics than the evangelist TV-priests) that tend to attack verbally each other: as far as one can go in History of Islam, there always has been civilized debates and intellectual divergences of interpretation of texts between muslim true theologists that always respect each other’s points of view, but the mutual attempts to discredit others in order to gain more members in their own group that we are currently witnessing in the Neo-Sufi and the Neo-Salafi currents is clearly something out of the traditions of Islam.

Thankfully, the very majority of the 1.5billion Muslims worldwide are so far from being Neo-Sufi or Neo-Salafi, that the failure of these two artificial movements is only a matter of years; indeed, although the amount of investment for promoting these movements, they haven’t succeeded at all in gaining the heart of the Muslims. For Muslims themselves don’t want to be imprisoned inside this Manichean Paradigm on Islam.

France anti-burqa law comes into effect and unveils french hypocrisy

The anti-burqa law has been amongst the most debated measures voted by the French Parliament under the Sarkozy administration. Targeting less than 400 face-veiled women in France, the law acts more symbolically than anything else; it doesn’t solve any pragmatic problem. In my point of view, the ban of burqa in France has no real religious impact, since living in the western society is already conflicting with the islamic laws in many more revelant ways, strictly saying; if Muslims in Europe can live with paying taxes to governments sometimes at war against muslim-majority countries and contributing to a ribaa-based economy without getting where this is contradictory with Islam, it’s not the ban of burqa that should make them feel that they are stopped from fulfilling religious duties. Unlike some “moderated” personnalities say, face-veil exists in Islam (as proven by the biographies of the Prophet Muhammad (SWS) wives), but was is not clear is if it is mandatory or optional. Thus, the burqa ban in France do not put French Muslim women in a religious dilemna, it puts them at the centre of a symbolic battle, opposing a government that made of hypocrisy its trademark to the whole process of democracy.

The arguments used to justify the burqa ban are almost an insult, not only to veiled women or muslims, but to all French citizens, because they don’t speak the true motivation behind it. Not only it is technically limiting in terms of freedom of choice, but also it is a huge trickery: under the cover of fighting for women’s rights, it goes once again in limiting women’s concerns on what they wear – miniskirt or niqab? – instead of real and concrete measures to ensure their rights, let it be by helping single mothers, women forced into prostitution, labour market particularely unfriendly to women who didn’t renounce in having children or the increase of violence made to women (in France, on woman dies every 3 days after being beaten by her husband or boyfriend). It is simple to ban a burqa and stigmatize Muslim men to “submit” their wives, it is much more complicated to break the real chains than imprison French women, let them be muslim or not.

One of the “myths” exported by the government spokesmen and parliamentary groups presidents is that the anti-burqa law defends secularism (the so-called French laïcité), which is untrue given the fact that secularism is a strict separation between religion and institutions that never implied the ban of religious signs in the street, the streets being public but not institutional, and the citizens being representing only themselves and not any official or governmental function when out of duty. Moreover, the French government is commited in a few affairs out of the area defined by secularity: laws have lately been modified in order to allow Islamic finance in France (unlike muslim women, muslim money is always welcome; the ex French Minister of Economy Hervé de Charette is even president of the French Institute for Islamic Finance… secularim is far far away when there is benefit), Ministry of Education gives grants to private jewish schools and the agenda of holidays of all public services follow the christian calendar (traditions and History are absolutely not an excuse for that).

The French people should wonder what could have been their lives if the same amount of energy than what took to make an anti-burqa law accepted was spent on each project aiming in defending employment, housing or institutions for social insertion of mentally challenged people. If the same time spent to communicate and stress on the importance of the law was dedicated to each file concerning the huge lack of means in hospitals or the case of the thousands of homeless people that are refused a bed and a meal in overfull shelters. No, the French government did not vote a law to protect the people’s interest, although they pretend they did. This hyprocrisy about the true reasons behind the anti-burqa law is, technically speaking,  outside the rules of democracy: democracy is the governance of the people by the people itself, and an untruth on the state of the discussed topics equals to fool the people, hence to give choice between fake options, keeping them busy with choices relative to a virtual freedom, while actual freedom based on true facts and arguments stays out of scope. Indeed, instead of asking the right questions and anwering the right answers, the French people are arguing against each other about how awesome or awful is a life under a burqa or a niqab.

The right question here is then not if France has right or not to ban burqa but what are the real reasons that made it so important to the Sarkozy administration, when they always knew that it has no practical impact. Was it for opening a debate on Muslims in France to put them “under the spotlights” for electoral reasons? To provoke a reaction from their side to prove how ‘antidemocratic’ they are? To warn them of any attempt to become more visible on the public scene? To send a “muslim-unfriendly” clear message to discourage Muslim Africans to migrate to France? Or to veil the emptiness of mind of the rulers?

To veil or not to veil, that is the (only) question

On the right side of this blog you certainly noted the presence of a tag cloud, i.e. a widget provided by my blog host, WordPress, that lists the most common tags used to describe the content of my articles. The bigger the font size, the more I am obsessed with the related topic. Quite accurate and relevant I have to admit. But you see – try to imagine I am using a soft slow voice and looking at you straight in the eyes like I would do one day with my children when I’ll have to explain to them all those disappointing facts about life – blogs are not the only one to carry tag clouds, people do too. You do, I do, everybody does. We are all categorized following preconceptions, misconceptions and even sometimes inceptions. If you are lucky enough, one or two of the tags would not relate only to your aspect and/or your ethnicity but on the person you are inside – but that’s maybe one case in a thousand.

As for me and more generally for any arab or muslim woman – as people tend to confuse the fact of being arab and muslim – the tag cloud has to list the followings, in font size 72: veil, Arabian Nights, couscous (or baklawa), forced marriage, polygamy, submission, belly dance, virginity, honour killings. Seems long ago we were labelled, and whatever we did or said since, it never changed. The fact is, many arab/muslim women writers, feminists, etc, have fought against these preconceptions that tend to depict us as no more than fully covered under beings with no voice and no will.

But in my opinion, what all of these feminists have failed at is to show that our lives do not evolve only around these topics. For example,  I have so far never read anything written by a feminist that doesn’t imply explicitely or implicitely the question of the veil. Either they would consider it as the symbol of submission of women to men, either they feel the need to object that western women have their own way to be even more submitted by being treated like sexual objects. Some also try to convince that veil is not stipulated as mandatory  in the Holy Quran and finally, some do stress on the fact that wether muslim women wear the hijab or not, it doesn’t matter since you would find strong-minded muhajabat (women wearing hijab) and not-so-strong western-like-dressed women, and, as long as the decision to wear veil or not was freely taken by the woman herself, it is her own business. Anyway, the fact that all those feminists sooner or later discusses the veil issue proves that:

1. whatever is their opinion, they consider it essential in a women’s rights discussion instead of seing it as part of a global discussion on confessionnal freedom (for example, peer pressure isn’t less strong in the case of somebody not wishing to fast Ramadan than in the case of a woman not wishing to wear veil)
2. feminism looks at muslim/arab women essentially “through the tag cloud”, i.e. by confronting the topic of women’s rights only through the few limited topics muslim/arab women are tagged with
3. they assume that arab/muslim populations are accustomed enough to western standards to not consider anymore the option of not wearing the hijab as something “coming from abroad” but really as a choice relevant only about women’s situation

I do not wish at all give any comment about the “veil issue” itself, what interests me here is how the way it is discussed reveals us something about feminism in arab/muslim countries. Actually, feminism in arab or muslim countries is mostly just a not-so-well adjusted version of western feminism, unable to go deeper than the surface. It is understandable that veil generates that much question marks in western world where it appeared only with migration and seems so opposite to western standards. It is on the contrary much less understandable that it goes into so much questions in countries where it is not a “foreign” phenomenon but exists for centuries. As if indians where having a nevertlasting debate over what does wearing a saree means; in such an hypothetic case it would be inaccurate to treat the “saree issue” only as part of the question of women’s rights. It appears then that because of the very limited view feminists have on arab/muslim women, it never really succeeds in defining what is relevant in their situation. My very personnal opinion is that what would help arab/muslim women would be to open the doors out of the clichés and focus on something else than the same 3-4 topics discussed again and again and again. If those were essential to women’s rights in the arab/muslim countries, it would have solved the situation since decades, given the hundreds of NGOs, think tanks, books and talks dedicated to the issue. Meaning we need to rethink totally the basis on which we consider women’s condition in the arab world. Are we gathering the right data? Are we analyzing the right facts? Aren’t we looking in the wrong direction?

Women’s situation in arab world is so difficult in so many ways that the constant focus on the “tag cloud” without noticing how inaccurate this description is ends being almost ridiculous. We need a feminism that gives to women effective solutions to reach visibility in all aspects of civil society, not to focus on the same speeches since decades. For example in many countries women, wearing a hijab or not is not really an issue in day to day life while being sexually harrassed constantly, however she is dressed, is a real problem. A focus has to be done on law: correcting the flaws but also understanding what makes the existing laws uneffective. Inaccecibility to basic education and to higher education for women in rural areas, lack of women in managing positions, under-representativity in politics, lack of means for mothers raising children alone, unavailability of social, cultural and artistic activities outside big towns, etc, all those are topics that need to be at the focal point of our generation’s feminism. The day “to veil or not to veil” will be for real the only question, it’ll mean we made a big step forward.