In France, it is only cultural majoritarianism with its arrogant secularism, combined with the reminiscence of colonial imaginary that dictates the limits of freedom of expression. There, you go to prison if you question the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust or if you call for boycotting Israeli products. Macron repeated in many speeches that he equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, i.e. calling for its criminalization. While I fully understand, by all the standards of social responsibility and intellectual integrity, the requirement to ban from the public sphere those who deny the Holocaust as a clear historical event, one should not criminalize historical discussion about historical details.
At the same time, President Macron, the ally of most of the Arab dictators (chiefly for economic reasons including selling them arms), joins the authoritarian choir which “juridically” seeks to ban what they lump in one category as “political Islam”. Currently, France is deploying its security apparatus to dissolve some of the Islamic NGOs and political entities deemed to fit this description.
Against “political Islam” or simply against an organized social movement?
While many politicians and journalists, even some social scientists, insist on using the term “political Islam”, it haemorrhages meaning by not clearly demarcating the foundational differences between classical Islamism and neo-Islamism. It is a stereotyping generalization that does not account for the heterogeneity of Islamic political thought, from the moderate to the extremist, from that carried out by individuals to Islamic movements and to official Islam.
The term political Islam is often used to deride a movement and to suggest that all of their trajectories are the same, composed of readers of Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood and the proponents of al-Qaeda and ISIS. It is worth noting that in the Arab world among those who employ such categorizations are those ‘guardians’ of official-Islam who consider that the Islam to which they adhere is essentially apolitical. As such, the delegitimation by those guardians of the Islamic opposition in the religious sphere is a way of denying that they too are political.
In the Gulf monarchs, for example, any opposition figure is viewed as being part of the Muslim Brotherhood (this is how Khashoggi’s murder was justified according to some political statements and popular tweets in Saudi Arabia), and then considered as a terrorist. The Lebanese philosopher Karim Sadek has studied how one can understand the Tunisian leader of al-Nahda Rachid al-Ghannouchi’s liberal thought and policy by using Alexis Honneth’s theory of recognition. What Ghannouchi is asking for is the recognition of Islamic identity in the public sphere and recognition of the importance of religious texts, interpreted through ijtihad (innovation) and the concept of maslaha (interest).
Among the most important reformists in the Arab world today are figures from these neo-Islamic movements: Sheikh Ahmad al-Raysuni and Dr. Saadeddine Othmani. The former was the head of the Movement of Unity and Reform (MUR). He is currently president of the World Union of Muslim Scholars, and his innovative influence extends far beyond Morocco. Saadeddine Othmani has, since 2017, become the Moroccan Prime Minister. In the line of what is universal today in secularism, Othmani was the first to theorize clearly the distinction between politics and religion and between State institutions and religious ones, while connecting them through ethics. He constructed a theory differentiating between religious advocacy (da’wah) reasoning and political reasoning.
In a nutshell, Macron’s Minister of Interior, Gerald Darmanin, declaring a potential ban on the “Muslim Brotherhood” (MB) in France, and portraying them as more dangerous than Salafism, shows such a degree of bigotry and ignorance of the importance of such actors in potentially facilitating Macron’s very call – a just call – for an “Islam des Lumières” (Islam of Enlightenment). Anyone can consult fatwas and statements of the European Council for Fatwas and Research or the teaching of the European Institute for Human Sciences (both historically close to the Muslim Brotherhood) to see the huge difference between these and the teachings of any Salafist or traditionalist Islamic movements either in Europe or in Islamic countries.
This clearly indicates that Macron and his minister are simply banning those Islamic movements which 1) are politically highly organised, 2) refuse to call for assimilation to cultural majoritarianism, and 3) call, instead, not only for integration into French pluralistic society but for positive integration (i.e. being proactive actors as opposed to victimized agents). These actors, in line with similar ones in all religions, are extremely important in providing care, conviviality, love, hospitality, and communal solidarity in our individualistic capitalist world. Again, I am not endorsing here any conservatism to be found in the existing MB social agenda, but stressing a differential analysis between this agenda and that of other forces. In any case, Macron’s call for “Islam des Lumières” cannot be set in motion by some anti-clericalist intellectuals, nor with some puppet Imams close to the French or North African intelligence services.
This so important top-down call needs a broad religious socio-political movement to carry it (bottom-up) while operating in a democratic and pluralistic political and social space. The most flagrant case is the attempt to ban The Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) which has won many court cases during the last decade. This is despite the fact that many social scientists in France have been using the word Islamophobia between quotation marks (i.e. “Islamophobia”) over the last decade, as if they did not believe that it constitutes a social phenomenon sufficiently dangerous even to merit a label.
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Sari Hanafi | Radio Free (2020-11-02T14:37:54+00:00) Macron’s populism and Islam. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/11/02/macrons-populism-and-islam/
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