On the occasion of an international colloquium held in Brussels in November 1999, organized by the Centre Communautaire Laïque Juif (CCLJ — Jewish Secular Community Center) on the theme “Jews and Arabo-Muslims in a secular society,” I was invited to speak on the process of the integration of Jews in Europe and to say how that historical experience might inspire Arabo-Muslim cultural minorities in their own integration within European countries.
I stressed at the outset that it would be presumptuous to venture to say, in general terms, what Jewish communities represent in the eyes of Arabo-Muslim communities. That is an impossible task, so diverse are the Arabo-Muslim communities — on the one hand by reason of their territorial origins and the historical experiences of each, and on the other from an ideological, cultural, and socio-economic standpoint.
Before delivering my analysis of the theme proposed for debate, I shall devote myself above all to developing what is, in my view, the major problem to be solved in the face of the structural blockages afflicting all the Arabo-Muslim countries: that of laïcité — secularism, freedom of conscience guaranteed by the state — in the land of Islam. I believe in the virtues of the debate of ideas, and in the necessity of plain speaking, in order to help bring about acceptance of the imperative need for laïcité. This concept is subject to ostracism, in the Arabo-Muslim world in particular, owing notably to the lack of political legitimacy of most Arab rulers and to the conservative religious ideology that profoundly permeates these societies.
My ideas are those of an Algerian, at once of Berbero-Arabo-Muslim culture and of French republican culture, a political militant of long-standing secular convictions. My gaze and my approach are addressed principally to my Maghrebi compatriots, since, for the most part, my political engagement has as its priority concern the question of how to contribute to extricating the Arab countries — and the Maghreb in particular — from their state of underdevelopment. It is through this prism that I write.
Concerning the process of integration of Jews in many European countries, as an experience that might serve as a model for the Arabo-Muslim communities living in Europe, my analysis rests on the fundamental datum of the Shoah. Beyond the historical specificities relating to the presence of Jews in Europe — well enough known that I need not retrace its course here — I observe, for my part, that the integration-assimilation approach of many Jewish women and men within European societies in no way prevented their exclusion, their hunting down, and the death camps. This historical fact leads me to retain, among the other lessons to be drawn from Nazi barbarism, that, all things considered, it is better to assume one’s identity-origins in all circumstances and in all places.
The Arabo-Muslims would be well advised never to forget the tragedy of the Shoah in thinking through their integration within European societies. The appropriate path to follow, for a sound integration, is that of laïcité, which implies the adoption of universal values while preserving, as needed, a cultic and cultural personality manifesting an attachment to identity-origins. From this standpoint, the experience of the Jewish communities, in the diaspora, is instructive on more than one count, notably for the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim communities, who have for a shorter time been confronted with the questions of integration in Europe.
Indeed, if the Jewish communities, and in particular their intellectuals, have in their great majority assimilated secular values, the same does not hold for the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim communities and their elites. For these, the road that leads to a serene acceptance of laïcité is strewn with obstacles of every kind: cultural, political, economic, and social. But the Gordian knot that these elites will first have to cut — or, to put it otherwise, the umbilical cord that will have to be severed, or at the very least loosened — lies in the insufficiently critical relationship that the men and women of Muslim culture maintain with Islamic dogmatics.
On the part of the Arab political leaders, the rejection of laïcité poorly conceals their ulterior motives and politicians’ calculations, whose true foundation is the refusal to implement a democratic system, without which it is vain to hope to achieve lasting progress, whatever the society considered. No fundamental incompatibility exists between a secular and democratic political system and the free practice of a religious creed. For more than a century this has been a historical fact that any observer of good faith can ascertain.
Laïcité is freedom of conscience, guaranteed by the State, and in no case an anti-religious stance. In the land of Islam, the Turkish example1 demonstrates the compatibility of a secular political system within the framework of a deeply Muslim society. Moreover, the economic, cultural, and social performances of this system are incomparably higher in comparison with those of the other, non-secular Muslim countries. Conversely, wherever a religious power directly holds the reins of a government — or else exercises it indirectly through an excessive influence of religious ideology upon society — individual and collective freedoms are flouted, the economy stagnates, the populations suffer and grow poorer, notably on the cultural plane. Among the many examples one could cite to support this assertion, two come immediately to mind, because they refer to a claim, banner to the wind, of a model governance according to supposedly authentic Islamic traditions:
First, one thinks of the cruel and obscurantist power of the Taliban, which for six years dragged Afghanistan2 back to the worst barbarities of ancient times, which one believed to be over and done with. Then, of Iran, governed for more than twenty years by a retrograde mullahcracy that has displayed the many faces of the intolerance and violence of an Islamic fundamentalism.
There can be no development and no progress without a capitalization of knowledge, and there can be no capitalization of knowledge without a politics that places women and men at the heart of the organization of any society. The spirit of creation, as well as the desire for investment — intellectual and scientific, productive and lasting — can flourish only in a political system that guarantees to its women and men citizens the free expression of their potentialities, the strict respect of freedom of conscience, and the possibility of undertaking in political transparency, that is to say, under a credible regime of the rule of law. The absence of these conditions drives into exile far too great a number of competences, dearly acquired, thereby engendering an impoverishment and an accumulation of handicaps almost exclusively to the benefit of the developed nations of the Western world. In this outcome, the negative impact of ideologico-religious pressure upon society is far from negligible.
Indeed, the monotheistic religions are totalitarian in essence by reason of their pretension to hold the absolute truth and, by that very fact, are antinomic with democratic values and principles. These religions accept opinions contradictory to their fundamental doctrine only if they find themselves outside political power and/or within the framework of an ideologico-cultural balance of forces that limits their influence on society.
This is why a confrontation seems to me inevitable with the Muslim ideologico-religious doctrine, the one that has irrigated and structured, for more than ten centuries, the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim cultural being, and concomitantly, a need to challenge the political class on this subject. This doctrine is fundamentally anachronistic, conservative, and inegalitarian in several respects, for example on the subject of the status of women3 and the question of inheritance in Muslim law, the Sharia. The thought that results from it, a veritable monolith of conservatism, is so rigidified that there is little chance of transforming it from within, all the more so since it is buttressed by more than 95% of intellectual production and discourse, of all kinds taken together (books, newspapers, reviews, radio, television, mosques, primary, secondary, and university teaching, public and private discourse, etc.).
From then on, this thought turns into a leaden pall that grips, to the point of suffocation, the critical spirit within the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim societies, and whose traditionalist ideology, which permeates them, is the first cause of the formatting of retrograde mentalities. Under these conditions, the question arises of how to make heard an opinion contrary to the ambient consensus, often imposed by societal pressure?
Despite a balance of forces that is largely unfavorable to laïcité, the battle of ideas must be waged, because it is necessary and because it corresponds to a vital need of the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim societies. To emerge from this ideologico-religious confinement, the peaceful alternative appears to me to be that of intellectual courage, which presupposes the affirmation and the demand, in all places, of respect for two intangible principles: freedom of conscience and freedom of expression — and this until it carries a majority of adherents toward the goal of establishing a democratic political system.
On the concept of modernism and modernity
There has never existed in this world, nor can there be envisaged, save in utopia, a perfect social and political system. Among believers, perfection is considered the sole prerogative of the divine. It is therefore excluded from the human order, something everyone can agree upon by common sense. However, human experiences are not of equal value. The whole history of humanity bears witness to this, through its processes of the progress and the decadence of civilizations, of which a few have left but scant traces. Thus progress and decadence partake of a historical movement on which it behooves us to question ourselves ceaselessly.
Modernism and modernity stand opposed to all traditionalist and retrograde religious ideology. These concepts are thought historically and not mythically, and are incarnated in the emergence of the individual with his status as autonomous consciousness, as well as in a mode of thought founded on the least possible alienation to the irrational. They are the pure product of the lights of science, of philosophy, and, all in all, of critical reason.
In the land of Islam, this modernity burst in brutally at the end of the eighteenth century with the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon. It was a traumatizing shock for the Arabo-Muslim societies, and at first disturbing for their elites, who took the measure of the considerable backwardness accumulated in the face of the European societies aboard the train of a modernity that had become the reference in the matter of the acquisition of scientific, philosophical, and literary knowledge. In short, the most accomplished model on the plane of a political and social organization dominated by principles and values of equality that could only translate durably, in reality, by virtue of a rupture with the traditionalist and conservative Catholic religious ideology that had prevailed from the Late Middle Ages until the beginning of the twentieth century.
Modernism therefore imposed itself first upon the Catholic Church, not without a hard and long battle of ideas waged within this very Institution.4 It was under the pressure of a new scientific spirit, and of contemporary rationality, that modernism and modernity gained the upper hand over religious tradition, to the point of influencing it, obliging it for example to adopt the historical and critical methodology in biblical exegesis, bringing about the “demythologization”5 of the Bible, now taken on by the government of the Church.
Thus modernism and modernity are the product of a European history borne along by struggles, often bloody, for the establishment of a new order, one of whose characteristics resides in a greater respect for the Rights of Man and, concomitantly, in the lesser hold of religious ideology over the organization and the action of human beings. From then on, modernity cannot be a storehouse of accessories where each would come to draw, at will, the element that seems useful to him, according to the idea he forms of progress. Modernity is an indivisible whole, inseparable from structuring values, certainly susceptible of perfecting, like any human work, but which in all cases imply a fundamental choice of society in which inegalitarian principles and rules of every nature have no right of citizenship and, above all, are struck with absolute illegitimacy. Consequently, to opt for modernity is, necessarily, to renounce outdated practices and traditions, not in conformity with a universal humanism that can exist only within the framework of a rule of law where the place of the religious is obligatorily confined to the private sphere.
This choice imposes itself, however painful it may be in the eyes of a great number of Muslims, for there is no alternative if a society wishes to benefit from the boons of modernity. Those who seek a third way, between the values of conservative and retrograde traditions — such as some of those already mentioned above, which characterize the dominant Muslim ideology — and the values consubstantial with European modernity, delight in chimeras. Those people, more gravely still, perpetuate a thought and forms of behavior that buttress mythological, superstitious, and fatalistic ideas.
In accordance with the principle of the lesser evil, to choose between two types of society is to prefer, in conscience, the values of one to the detriment of those of the other, for if no society can claim to have a perfect organization, one can nevertheless measure which social and political system best answers the needs of women and men. Winston Churchill, by his famous formula — democracy is the worst of systems, with the exception of all the others — gave this value a merited renown, since its efficacy, as a vector of progress and development, has been incontestably validated for more than two centuries.
The causes of the decline, or the origin of underdevelopment
Attempts at gentle transformation — that is to say, at the implementation, by the written and the spoken word, of a strategy for circumventing the conservative and retrograde Muslim ideology — have been engaged many times over, without success. Among the best known, I shall cite those led by the eminent philosopher Ibn Rushd, “Averroes” (1126–1198), then those of the school of the Nahda, the so-called “Renaissance” of the Arab peoples (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), with as principal figures Mohammed Abdou (1849–1905), Djamel Eddine al-Afghani (1838–1897), Rachid Réda (1865–1935). These transformations, which aimed at the revivification of Islam in order to modernize society, were already imposing themselves as early as the twelfth century, and even more so from the beginning of the nineteenth. They impose themselves further today, so much have the rigidities of this religious ideology been reinforced since. A key moment, known by the term “the closing of the gate of ijtihad” [independent reasoning in Islamic jurisprudence] at the beginning of the tenth century, is, from my point of view, the principal cause of the stagnation, then of the regression and, in the end, of the contemporary underdevelopment of the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim societies.
One may summarize this historical moment as the victory of the conservative current — which very quickly engendered the traditionalist-obscurantist schools — over the Mu’tazilites in particular, the latter being the first to advocate the use of reason in the exegesis of the Quran. It must immediately be specified, however, that it is the “rationalizing” Mu’tazilite ijtihad that had right of citizenship only for some thirty years, under the reigns of the Abbasid caliphs al-Ma’mun (813–833), al-Mu’tasim (833–842), and al-Wathiq (842–847).
It was under the caliphate of al-Ma’mun, toward the end of his life, that the Mu’tazilite doctrine endeavored to establish itself, alas through an inquisitorial practice known by the name of the Mihna. This inquisition no doubt contributed to producing a boomerang effect that reinforced the rigorism, and the entrenchment, of Sunnism — that is to say, the conservative tradition in the land of Islam. But this traditionalist doctrine endured only by reason of internecine struggles for caliphal power, of the lack of political legitimacy of numerous Abbasid caliphs and other sovereigns, who moreover led lives of extravagant pleasures, which weakened in particular their moral authority, thereby entailing both the grip of the conservative religious ideology and the effective holding of real power by a caste of military men. These factors count, assuredly, as important sources of the process of disintegration and decline of Arabo-Muslim civilization.
Everyone knows that the effective treatment of an illness passes first through a correct diagnosis. While the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim societies have been wasting away for centuries, the solutions envisaged up to now have remained inoperative, precisely because the diagnosis of the ill that gnaws at them was mistaken, and consequently the proposed therapy ill-suited.
The dominant idea that ran through the whole of the attempts undertaken to apprehend the causes of the regression is that of the Ruju’, or the return to the sources, in the sense that one ought to take into account only the Quran and the authentic Sunna in order to resolve the social and moral problems with which Muslims were confronted.6 Today this analysis continues to hold currency.
It is this traditionalist and obscurantist religious ideology that has structured thought in Islam for some ten centuries which Ahmad Amin, an Egyptian intellectual, denounces in an essay7 published in Cairo in 1936, in these terms: “In my view, the death of Mu’tazilism was the greatest misfortune that ever struck the Muslims; they committed a crime against themselves.” Another Egyptian intellectual, Zuhdi Hasan Jarullah (1947), completes the analysis by considering the elimination of the school of the Mu’tazilites as, historically, the “victory of obscurantism” and the cause of the decadence of the Arabs.8 These courageous voices and this true speech, alas rare, scarcely audible, and so ill received in the Arabo-Muslim world, would deserve to be better known and recognized.
Prospects
The Arabo-Muslim elites have these failures to ponder, and radical lessons to draw from them — that is to say, they must integrate a logic of rupture in the face of an outdated and dangerous religious ideology; they must confront the ambient societal terrorism and, without censoring themselves, question these multiple and vain attempts at gentle transformation of this religious ideology, whose reality has for too long shown its tragic effects of immobilism upon the Arabo-Muslim societies. They must, most particularly, take a stand and argue without mincing words to defend the principles of free expression and freedom of conscience. In other words, they must grant themselves the right to refute rules imposed by the Sharia, a religious juridical system invented by men.
It is the duty of the Arabo-Muslim elites to illuminate the cultural and political field by explaining, for example, why verse 34 of sura IV,9 because it structures inegalitarian relations between men and women, is unacceptable both in form and in substance, since its exegesis has enshrined in law an iniquitous principle.
The Sharia applied in nearly all the Arab countries does indeed give the force of law to this Quranic verse, and consequently it is indeed a matter of the deliberate choice of an exegesis privileging a traditionalist and conservative reading, consecrating relations of inegalitarian law between Muslim women and men. We should be ever more numerous to reject, categorically, this law and those of the same nature, and to make it known on every occasion, for no conscience enamored of an ideal of justice can accept it.
The coming to awareness of a broad public as to the necessity of setting at a distance this religious ideology, with its alienating effects upon mentalities, passes imperatively through public and private stances, by using all the available channels of communication; it passes also through acts of boycotting the prayers in mosques led by fundamentalist ideologues developing a hate-filled discourse and buttressing a terrorist thought (cf. the sermons riddled with calls to murder of Ali Belhadj, the Algerian fundamentalist leader).
It behooves us to challenge the defenders of a mythical Islam that exists only in the brains and hearts of those women and men who refuse to confront past realities and daily lived experience, in order to push them to pronounce on evident facts that structure the Muslim societies: the family code, which establishes relations of inegalitarian law; the barbaric punishments never denounced, even if they are rarely applied,10 etc. The point is to unmask the double language in which one too often sees these zealous defenders of an Islam proclaimed just betray themselves, by consenting to legitimize the Quranic verses and hadiths that are in contradiction with a discourse with pretensions to equality. This dialectic of questioning and challenge is to be encouraged in every circumstance, because it is in fine formative of an enlightened consciousness and, consequently, a bearer of the values of progress. More broadly, no utterance should be deemed useless whenever it is a matter of signifying to censors of every stripe that women and men citizens are no longer disposed to tolerate discourses and practices not in conformity with human dignity. This way of behaving presents a didactic interest useful to the process of the transformation of mentalities, thereby facilitating, sooner or later, the establishment of a rule of law in the land of Islam.
Concerning the aforementioned verse, every Muslim can verify here the strict observance in law of the literality of the Quranic text and, thus, easily become aware that the fundamental problem of exegesis is not solely a question of innovative interpretations, or of the issuing of fatwas emanating from enlightened ’ulama. Nor does the problem reside, as one often sees written, and as one regularly hears in public discourse and in the course of informal conversations, in the lack of a judicious understanding of the spirit and the letter of the Quran. Nowhere is the question of the responsibility of the Quranic text, as it is applied, broached, so thoroughly has the dominant religious ideology struck such an approach with prohibition, considering it from the outset as sacrilegious and impious.
In truth, the way out of this impasse can come only from a theologico-philosophical refoundation of the Sunni Islamic doctrine, namely: the taking up again of the question of the created Quran, an approach that excludes considering this text as the literal word of God, without thereby denying its fundamental message, the tawhid, or belief in the absolute oneness of the divine.11 Only this path, glimpsed by Mu’tazilism, allows the adaptation of the dispositions of the Quran to the requirements of the evolution of law, in conformity with the universal values that impose themselves upon any civilized human society.
Moreover, these major problems cannot be the sole province of the ’ulama and the imams — on the one hand because they directly penalize more than 50% of Arabo-Berbero-Muslim society, and on the other hand because these problems are fundamental with regard to the organization of a political and social system. To accept the Sharia as it exists is to abdicate all capacity to change unjust laws and, beyond that, it is de facto to integrate into the unconscious an intolerant logic and thought that buttress a non-democratic mentality and system.
It is therefore a capital stake that touches the very nature of the society to be built. In this matter no domain is taboo. The role of the Arab intellectual is precisely to raise and to debate all these questions, including those abusively considered as pertaining to the sacred, the moment they become a source of blockage and of weakening of the social and cultural body. Without a calling into question, in clear terms, of this religious ideology, tragically alienating, the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim societies will continue to deny themselves the principal tool for triggering the coming to awareness indispensable to emerging from their state of underdevelopment.
Everywhere freedom of conscience exists — an eminent characteristic of laïcité — the peoples who evolve within such a system enjoy a better lot relative to the peoples who are deprived of it. Furthermore, as concerns the future of all these societies, it is not tolerable to sweep aside with the back of the hand the experience of nations issued from another historical process, even as so many Arab intellectuals pride themselves on the contributions of Arabo-Muslim civilization to the universal cultural heritage. Can one seriously conceive that this civilization, which was able to nourish and strengthen itself with spiritual, philosophical, scientific, cultural, and artistic riches come from other horizons, could not once again welcome, without denaturing itself, the values issued from modernity? This civilization, indeed, was truly glorious and “modernist,” in its time, only when it integrated within itself, by appropriating them, the riches of humanity that offered themselves to it.
For me, secular values, consubstantial with democratic practice, are the first conditions to be implemented in order for the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim world to enter into a virtuous process of progress. Historical experience is there to demonstrate it: what has been good for Europe and the United States must necessarily be good for the Muslim world.
Consequently, to militate openly at once for secular values and for political democracy, in all the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim civilizational spaces, is to hasten, in the land of Islam, the advent of freer societies, more attentive to the respect of the other — in short, of societies where law will be egalitarian between women and men citizens.
To this end, the forms of militancy or the ways of being in society are, naturally, multiple. The essential thing is never to neglect to bear witness by the written word, by speech, and by acts in daily life, reacting each time the context demands it. It is at this price that mentalities will be transformed, because they will have been confronted with attitudes and with a different thought on laws, values, and history, and that the hope of getting out will take shape. I have chosen to illustrate this point with a few examples of a nature to suggest one of the paths propitious to the process of coming to awareness evoked above.
I
The first example I shall propose is linked to the creation of the Association pour un Judaïsme Humaniste et Laïque (AJHL — Association for a Humanist and Secular Judaism), in France. Thanks to my friendship with Maître Violette Attal-Lefi, I lived this experience very closely, from the gestation of the idea to the completion of the project. I therefore know how much this undertaking aroused sympathy and contestation, passionate and fascinating debates, within the Jewish communities settled in France and elsewhere. For me, it is a model to follow. I hope soon to see associations of a Muslim cultural obedience militate openly, both in Europe and in the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim countries, for the establishment of laïcité.
The question, often posed — among Jews — of whether the pairing “Jewish-secular” makes sense, presents itself as an even more nagging interrogation concerning the binomial “Muslim-secular,” for the impregnation by the religious thought described above, which irrigates the whole of the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim cultural field, is so sterilizing of energies that it imposes that the theme of laïcité be seriously debated. This religious impregnation is indeed the soil into which plunge the roots of the stagnation, of the underdevelopment, and of the relative regression of Arabo-Muslim civilization. This situation, which has endured for ten centuries — I underscore it once again with force, so much should this long night challenge every Muslim woman as every Muslim man — is therefore at the origin of the misfortunes that strike the majority of the Muslim and Berbero-Arab peoples. Consequently, it is the source of their material and human miseries, of their prior state of colonizability, of their present weakness, of their frustrations and of the hatreds of every nature whence are born most of the conflicts and acts of violence, with their trains of bloody tragedies that plunge into mourning numerous societies in the land of Islam.
On the basis of this conviction, forged by the analysis of historical situations comparable mutatis mutandis and by my reflections on the causes of the stagnation and decadence of Arabo-Muslim civilization, I think that associations of the AJHL type, in the land of Islam, can only contribute to the emergence of a consciousness in which religious identity and the secular ideal would no longer be antinomic.
II
I should now like to narrate a situation lived in Paris with my mother, aged seventy-five, in order to show how cultural clichés can convey, often with a disarming good faith, ideas of xenophobia, for example. Beyond this anecdote, I hope above all to give an understanding of the cultural terrain that should be plowed first in order to get mentalities moving. I specify that my mother, illiterate, is nourished by a centuries-old oral tradition, with honorable values12 drawn for the most part from the sources of Islam, and that, knowing her well enough, I know she is a thousand leagues from any consciously racist or xenophobic thought or practice.
Here is the story, in summary. We were invited to dinner at the home of Jewish friends. My mother, a practicing but unsanctimonious Muslim, yet attached to the scrupulous respect of a certain number of rituals, naturally showed herself anxious to eat “halal,” the equivalent of “kosher” for practicing Jews. She suggested that I propose to my Jewish friends that they cook fish. She needed to reassure herself so as not to have to consume meat coming from a slaughter not in conformity with the rules of the Muslim tradition. My close, knowing relations with my mother allowed me to tease her in the presence of my friends, pointing out to her that she had at last been served what she had wished for, and this without my having had to make the request beforehand.
By way of compliments and thanks, my mother addressed my Jewish friends — whom she knew, moreover, since she had received them in Algeria — in these terms: “My children, I am happy to share your food, for as our tradition says, You may eat at the Jew’s table but never sleep in his sheets.” This sentence, like the terms “Houdi hachak”13 (a Jew, saving your respect) which underscore the low esteem in which the Jew is held the moment this word “houdi” is employed in everyday speech, are expressions I have often heard in various Maghrebi Berbero-Arabo-Muslim circles. These expressions reveal a detestable and condemnable dimension of an aspect of Maghrebi and Arab culture which is rooted, however, in religious discourse.
Even if it is widely known that antisemitism takes its source in the Christian Church, one also finds, in Islam, writings — verses of the Quran and hadiths — that authorize the blossoming of this sentiment of detestation and exclusion of the Jew, the Christian, and the Polytheist. From then on, most often, the expressions I have just cited stratify into quasi-proverbial utterances on which most of those who employ them neither reflect, nor imagine that they thereby transmit an idea of xenophobia and, in this instance, of anti-Judaism.
More than once I have been able to verify, on the occasion of discussions that I provoked following the utterance of these expressions, the abdication of critical reason with regard to this cultural praxis on the part of many Maghrebi compatriots and Arabs of the Middle East.
Clichés of this nature, reinforced by readings of antisemitic texts such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which poison the whole of Maghrebi and Arab culture, are to be combated by all Muslims by introducing everywhere the spirit of critical analysis, above all with regard to religious discourse and dogma. In all cases, the role of the Muslim intellectuals is to unveil the unacceptable inscribed within Arabo-Berbero-Muslim culture, were it stamped as sacred, and to denounce any writing or utterance that the human conscience reproves.
The systematization of such an approach seems to me necessary not only to give ourselves some chance of arriving at the establishment of a society where respect for egalitarian rights, in particular between men and women, would no longer be an empty word, but also indispensable for a true politics of progress and of economic and social advancement. To take support upon secular values, to ensure their widest diffusion, constitutes a privileged means for engaging this inescapable struggle with a view to cultivating a terrain of ideas more favorable to the respect of the identities and beliefs of each, and, all in all, to acclimatizing a democratic ideal. By design, I evoke here only the role of the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim intellectual and citizen, knowing that the same intolerable practices exist toward Arabs within the Jewish world. As the popular saying goes: “everyone must sweep before his own door,” so as to bring together in a fruitful exchange the women and men of every cultural tradition.
III
The last example I should like to cite concerns the dialectical relationship that an authentic Judeo-Arab cultural exchange induces as a positive effect for a better reciprocal knowledge and, thereby, engenders attitudes of openness, of understanding, and of mutual enrichment. On the very concept of Judeo-Arab, clarifications were called for. I was led to make a contribution in an article published in October 2000 in the review Carnets Séguier.14
I should like to underscore here, quite simply, the symbiotic force of these two terms “Judeo-Arab,” evocative of a glorious past of inter-communal understanding which provoked, in the late Jacques Berque, an eminent Islamologist, on the occasion of his closing lecture at the Collège de France, the following flight: “I call for Andalusias forever begun anew, of which we bear within us both the heaped-up rubble and the tireless hope.”
However, for the Judeo-Arab dialogue to operate effectively upon consciousnesses, one must be clear about ideas, and then inscribe one’s approach within a project of society that transcends particularisms in order to aim at the universal. Such is the approach of my friend Simon Elbaz who, for twenty years, has been investing himself in a “matrouz” artistic creation of song, music, and theater15 emblematic of what is, in my eyes, the most faithful, the most just expression of Judeo-Arab culture. This is so far from banal that one can, reasonably, speak of a revolutionary artistic approach since, for the first time, the sung Judeo-Arab tradition gives itself to be heard by a broadened public, outside the Sephardic Jewish communities.
By the simple fact, for example, that the Maghrebi, Arabo-Berbero-Muslim public comes into contact, through song and poetry, with specifically Hebraic culture, a reflex of curiosity is set off subliminally, then an intellectual journey entailing a process of recognition of the other, rich in repercussions favorable to a Judeo-Arab dialogue and, by extension, propitious to a culture of non-violence, of peace. Moreover, a large part of this public thus has an opportunity to question itself on a Maghrebi identity plural, where the Maghrebi Judaic cultural identity recovers its full place. One may hope that there follows, logically, a reflection on the richness, and the strength, of nations capable of integrating plural identities and, in fine, this dialectic will doubtless take part in the reinforcement of a secular and democratic thought.
But it seems to me that if Simon Elbaz’s message gets through well, both to the Jewish communities and the Arabo-Berber ones, it is first because he displays and assumes his Judaic cultural identity in its full authenticity, without erasing the other, Berbero-Arabo-Muslim cultural identity in which he was steeped and which he also assumes quite naturally. In other words, the recognition of the other calls forth, ipso facto, the recognition of self.
This clarity in the artistic approach is rather exceptional in regard to what has prevailed, for some decades, in the matter of discourse on Judeo-Arab culture. Indeed, many misunderstandings ran about for lack of rigor in the ideas and in the definitions applied to this culture. It is thus that it appears counter-productive for a true Judeo-Arab dialogue to present what Reinette l’Oranaise or Lili Abassi sing as Judeo-Arab culture, whereas the genre and content sung by these two great Jewish performers represent exclusively Arabo-Andalusian music and song and/or derivatives of this classical musical form.
This faulty presentation, by the press and the media, in France notably, is often received by a Maghrebi Arabo-Berbero-Muslim public as a negation of their specifically Maghrebi cultural creation borne by the Arabic language. It is a point, highly sensitive, of Maghrebi cultural identity, mistreated also by two competing ideologies, pan-Islamic and pan-Arab, both deniers of regional specificities. This is why, from this public, nourished by multiple frustrations, one commonly hears anti-Judaic and sometimes antisemitic remarks burst forth, of the type: “these Jews have a tendency toward undue appropriation,” even though these words do not automatically designate the expression of a fundamentally racist and anti-Judaic thought consciously interiorized.
One understands from then on that the concern for precision and clarity in ideas does not pertain to any academicism whatsoever, nor to a fussy university requirement, nor to some “culturalo-identitarian nationalism.” As is often the case in various places, plain speaking coupled with intellectual rigor on the part of each of the parties seems to me the best means of communication for an authentic Judeo-Arab dialogue, free of all mythified nostalgias. The Andalusias of which Jacques Berque spoke doubtless existed. They are a subject of pride for many Muslims, but I believe rather that they remain henceforth to be rebuilt in the light of universal values — that is to say, in the light of values founded first upon principles of equality of rights.
Beyond my point of view on the model of integration of Jews in Europe, I should like to conclude by underscoring that I have tried to show, through these examples, that the gaze of the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim communities, notably upon the lived experience of other peoples, is above all determined by the cultural ground that structures it. To eradicate ossified elements of this cultural ground, to dust off others by making recede the suffocating impregnation of a dogmatic and retrograde religious thought, conditions for a good part both the establishment of an enriching dialogue in the mutual respect of the cultural and identity attachments of each, and the capacity, if not to integrate, at least to draw positive inspiration, for oneself, from the experience of other peoples and nations. This work upon oneself seems to me to be the priority task that the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim elites must undertake, vigorously and courageously, under the goad of the humanist values of laïcité, inseparable from a democratic political system.
Notes
This Turkish model is a good case study that illustrates well the fact that laïcité alone does not suffice to be the sole engine of modernity. Hence the absolute necessity of the Laïcité/political-Democracy pairing, integrating respect for the rights of man, in order to create the optimal conditions for a true endogenous economic and social development.↩︎
Without the support of the Saudi, Pakistani, and American States, the power of the Taliban would never have managed to establish itself in Afghanistan.↩︎
Verse 34 of Sura 4, translation by Sheikh Si Hamza Boubakeur, Rector of the Muslim Institute of the Paris Mosque: Men have authority over women by reason of [the qualities] by which God has raised some of you above others and by reason of the expenditures they make from their goods [for the benefit of their wives]. Virtuous [women] are sober and keep intact, in the absence of their husband, that which God has prescribed be thus preserved. Exhort those whose insubordination you fear. Relegate them to separate beds and chastise them. If they obey you, seek no further quarrel with them. In truth God is most high and most great.↩︎
See the exclusions (a kind of fatwa) pronounced by the Church against the modernists, Encyclopédie Universalis, pp. 139–142.↩︎
See Encyclopédie Universalis, p. 136.↩︎
This approach stood opposed to Taqlid, that is to say, to the spirit of servile dependence with regard to the traditional doctrinal authorities, and encouraged the search for new paths, within the limits imposed by the Quranic text and the Sunna for the practice of Ijtihad. This approach proved fruitless.↩︎
A. Amin, Duha al-Islam, Cairo, 1936, chapter of 200 pages on Mu’tazilism.↩︎
Zuhdi Hasan Jarullah, al-Mu’tazila, Cairo, 1947; R. Caspar, “Le renouveau du mo’tazilisme,” in MIDEO, IV, 1957.↩︎
See supra, note no. 3.↩︎
Amputations of hands are still legally practiced in Sudan and Saudi Arabia.↩︎
To be read, two remarkable books on this problematic by Mondher Sfar: Le Coran est-il authentique ? (Is the Quran Authentic?) Ed. Sfar 2000, and Le Coran, la Bible et l’Orient ancien (The Quran, the Bible, and the Ancient Orient) Ed. Sfar 1998, distribution Le Cerf, Paris.↩︎
What, in my eyes, determines the honorability of values is principally daily social and civic action founded on the principles of universal humanism.↩︎
In Algeria, the expression Lamra hachek (woman, saving your respect), of the same detestable vein as the expression Houdi hachek, is commonly employed, in certain popular milieus notably, either in the context of a machoistic humor or simply in a banal exchange between men.↩︎
2000 ans d’Algérie (2000 Years of Algeria), 3, Carnets Séguier, ed. Atlantica, Biarritz, 2000, pp. 63–79.↩︎
Cf. CD Matrouz: “Le chant vivant des langues croisées” (“The Living Song of Crossed Languages”), V. 1, Simon Elbaz, prod. Al-Sur/Concord-Musisoft.↩︎