For the Muslims by Edwy Plenel

Author:Edwy Plenel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

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This is the point where the endless religious complaint against our Muslim compatriots comes into play. We want Muslims to be transparent. Self-effacing, secret, hidden. Assimilated, as we say in polite society. In actual fact, non-existent.

Assimilation is a terrifying injunction. It was also the demand of colonizers, and of the French in particular: the Other would be accepted only on condition that they ceased to be themselves, allowed to progress only if they agreed to resemble us, embraced only if they renounced everything that they were. This has nothing to do with the requirement of integration that expresses a quest for unity in plurality, a life to be constructed and invented together, by weaving bonds that are not those of destruction or distraction. The quest, in other words, for a life ‘in connection’, as defined so well by the poet Édouard Glissant: ‘You exchange with the other without losing or denaturing yourself.’

The imperative of assimilation is a euphemism for disappearance. A way of desiring that the Muslims of France, in whatever degree they are Muslim, should no longer be so. Their religion is neither to be mentioned nor claimed, expressed nor practised. And this is how the sorcerer’s apprentices who too often govern us give birth to monsters. For who cannot see this habituation to intolerance as making a silent call for the Muslims to no longer exist among us? The idea is that they should either rid us of themselves, or we should rid ourselves of them. That the varied humanity denoted by the words ‘Muslim’, ‘Arab’ or ‘North African’ should in future be somewhere outside and away.

This is why, in the project of negating a minority, initially denied of its rights before it is possibly denied its very existence, the question regularly waved in the way of a red rag is that of the visibility of Muslims in public space. Whether it is a matter of mosques, prayers, dress or food, these recurrent polemics, made up of media exaggerations in which a journalism of opinion flourishes rather than one of information, make France sick of itself. By this I mean France such as it is, such as it lives and works, such as it develops and changes. For they enjoin it to reject the pluralism that is its own characteristic, not to accept its own diversity and, as a consequence, not to face up to its social challenges.

In fact, the obsessional issue of the headscarf is a veil cast over our sensitivity, generosity and curiosity. To brandish the visibility of this piece of cloth as the key question for our public space is to encourage us to stop seeing the rest, everything that this focussing hides and obscures, and above all the social question, that of the working-class neighbourhoods. The religious hatred that an intolerant secularism expresses towards Islam and its practitioners is the expression of a social denial: a rejection of the dominated and oppressed whoever they may be.

This blindness is attested by the nonsense commonly spouted by those on the left who confuse religion and fundamentalism.

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