On Wednesday, May 26, 1993, there gathered in Paris a group of French intellectuals — secular Jews of Sephardic or Ashkenazi parentage, on the one hand, democratic Arabs whose parents originate from the three countries of the Maghreb, on the other — and bringing together different sensibilities: observant Muslims, non-observant believers, agnostics of Islamic culture.
An encounter that was, if not unusual, at least uncommon. The exchanges were frank and serene. All of them, Arabs and Jews, debated their search, their possibilities of humanist and secular expression, in the France of today and of tomorrow.
On the Jewish side, the creation over the past few years of various secular Jewish organizations was explained — among them the A.J.H.L., Association pour un Judaïsme Humaniste et Laïque [Association for a Humanist and Secular Judaism] — and the need to which this responded (numerous liberal currents, “mixed” marriages, “assimilation” with the loss of one’s roots), that is to say, the need to break, without anticlerical animosity, the systematic equation: Jew = religious Jew.
The difficulties, the incomprehensions, and the misunderstandings on the part of certain components of what it is customary to call “the Jewish community in France” were underscored — whose typical remark is: but then, you are no longer Jewish!
The secular Jewish Associations of France bring together, to date, several thousand members.
On the Arab-Islamic side, various stances: from a hardline secularist demand to a nuanced compromise between the pursuit of religious traditions and the necessary opening onto the outside world — plural, even secular in the good sense of the term.
Moreover, the problem of terms, or of their absence, was indeed underscored: how to name these Arabs of Islamic culture who wish to express their humanism and their secularism while affirming — at least for the majority of them — their origins in their traditions and their history, without being subservient to religious and political ideologies that they judge sclerotic and dangerous.
This did not prevent the participants from insisting on the necessity of the recognition of the Muslim fact in France, namely that Islam (thought and the right to worship) should have there the same status as the other religions. More difficult was the attempt to define what a “secular Islam” might be. Some affirmed themselves to be uncompromising freethinkers. Others warned against the danger of the development of nationalisms and fundamentalisms in our country.
No one expected “revelations” from this encounter. The mere fact that it was able to take place in an obvious climate of trust and friendship, and that one and the other promised to keep in contact, to inform one another, to help one another explain their positions and their aspirations within their respective communities, and to meet again, of course deserves to be noted.
Writing these lines after that historic month of September, the beginning of direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, but also, alas, after the continuation of the murderous attacks of the F.I.S. [Front Islamique du Salut, the Islamic Salvation Front] in Algeria and of the fundamentalists in Egypt, one cannot but feel that “things” are decidedly moving. They will surely move still more from now on; in this Judeo-Maghrebi encounter of May 1993, the Israeli-Palestinian question acted, between the lines, like a kind of brake. Let us hope that more and more this brake will loosen.
P.S.: In the same spirit, it should be noted that on the daily poetry program (from Sunday to Thursday inclusive) on 94.8 (Radio Com. Judaïques F.M.), at 10:50 p.m., a whole series of “Minutes of Poetry” was devoted in April-May 1993 to a two-voice reading, with Nadia AMIRI — vice-president of Migrations Santé, former vice-president of France Plus — of a number of poems drawn from Jacques ELADAN’s chapbook Salam vé Shalom [Peace and Peace, in Arabic and Hebrew], published by Noisi Elargudi, a publisher in Paris, bringing together Jewish and Arab poets, Muslim or not (Maghrebis, Palestinians, Egyptians…), all working for peace and the rapprochement of peoples.