[by Renée Fregosi, extracted with her permission from Thinking Salman Rushdie, Coordinated by Daniel Salvatore Schiffer, Éditions de l'Aube Released November 10, 2022]
The designated emblematic enemy of Islamism
In 1989, the injunction made to the "true believers" to kill Salman Rushdie and all his accomplices illustrated in the clearest possible terms what was going on in the global neo-Islamist offensive. Since 1979, the signs of the rise of Muslim fundamentalism had multiplied, but it was above all the terrorist attacks (whose sponsors were not always clearly identified) that struck people's minds, and democracies did not seem to understand the global polymorphic phenomenon that was developing. While that same year, 1989, was marked in France by the affair of the veiled schoolgirls of Creil, euphemistically called the "headscarf affair", reactions to oppose what was called at the time "the rise of Muslim fundamentalism" were dramatically lacking, and support for Salman Rushdie was very few.
Today, the Islamist jihadist offensive "Salafi-Brotherhood" can no longer be in doubt. And the murderous aggression against Salman Rushdie, which responds late to the first Islamist call to kill the "impious" outside the "lands of Islam", is now part of a long litany of attacks and assassinations perpetrated for this reason throughout the world in the name of "Allah the very great". The French think tank Fondapol lists between 1979 and May 2021, "48 Islamist attacks in the world, which caused the death of at least 035 people", and their increase is exponential: "210-138: 1979 attacks and 2000 deaths; 2-194: 6 attacks and 817 deaths; 2001-May 2012: 8 attacks and 265 deaths »1.
Through the individuals massacred by the Islamists, it is free thought and the free disposition of one's body which are targeted, as many problems raised of course by satanic verses. Parodying "holy scriptures", mocking the puritan hypocrisy of a debauched prophet or simply asking eternal metaphysical and existential questions without absolute answers, so many unacceptable remarks for a combative orthodoxy, rejecting humor as much as doubt and criticism. Beyond the West, its humanism and its universalism, it is emancipatory culture in general that is the target. From the extermination of the Algerian intelligentsia by the GIA to the children murdered in their schools in Pakistan, from the Buddhas of Bamiyan to the precious manuscripts of the Timbuktu mosque, from the Pardo museum in Tunis to the monuments of Palmyra, it is the awakening of consciences to free examination and free choice that is condemned like all the pleasures of the senses, images, music, dance, even the beauty of landscapes, and those of sex in all its emotions obviously.
Because, as is often recalled, Muslims are the "first" victims of Islamism, which is undeniable from the point of view of numbers: "The Middle East and North Africa, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa concentrated 95,7% of Islamist attacks between 1979 and May 2021"2. The globalized Islamist offensive has two components, the first of which consists of the re-Islamization of the so-called Muslim world, originally advocated by Hassan al-Banna in the 20s. Against the incomplete modernity imposed by Western colonialism, then Kemalism and Arab nationalism, neo-Islamists inspired in particular by Sayyid Qutb, Ayatollah Khomeini or Youssef al-Qaradawi are reactivating a rigorous traditional Islam and fueling a new mystique of conquest conceived both as a reconquest, including territorial, of the historical spaces of the different caliphates (including Israel of course) and as a planetary expansion through the diffusion of the great principles of Sharia. Specialists such as Gilles Kepel3 or Michaël Prazan4 have perfectly explained this totalitarian logic which therefore also targets the West.
The second objective of the Islamist offensive thus consists in an Islamization of Europe and particularly of France, a former colonial power and land of significant Muslim immigration. It is not a question here of converting the entire population to Islam but of working on mentalities in general and decision-makers, in order to have the great fundamentalist principles accepted: the recognition as crimes of blasphemy and apostasy, the separation of the sexes, communitarianism inducing distinct rights between individuals, the veiling of women's bodies, the ban on mixed marriages without prior conversion to Islam, the systematic adoption of food taboos in collective canteens... To do this, the Islamists use both the manipulation of segments of the immigrant population and the action of their useful idiots5, persuasion through institutional infiltration, and the strategy of tension through violence.
In France, we regularly see a succession of assassinations and attacks against Jewish people considered by Islamists to be the ancestral enemy of Muslims, journalists, teachers, people free to enjoy the pleasures of life in the streets and cafes, as well as the increase in the damage to places of worship and Jewish and Christian cemeteries. And we also see every day the "soft" spread of the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood in all directions. However, a large number of political leaders still persist in denying or minimizing it, and the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie did not arouse frank and massive support from all democrats. Certainly, in France, "the political class condemns"6 but many elected officials and representatives of civil society still dodge the issue, preferring to speak of "fanaticism", "obscurantism", "permanent threat"7 rather than clearly designating the Islamist enemy.
The Useful Idiots of Islamism
Since the spectacular Al Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers in 2001, when jihad was manifesting itself to the world in all its scope, a certain left has clearly made itself the useful idiot of Islamism: continuing its long-standing blind support for "the Palestinian cause", the left of the political and intellectual left systematically defends the demands of political Islam without worrying about their anti-democratic, anti-republican, sexist and anti-Semitic character, nor even their terrorist violence.
Jean Baudrillard8 or Jacques Derrida9 virtually justified the attacks of September 11, 2001 and Noam Chomsky10, those of January 2015 in Paris. Out of the question for them to take the defense of a Salman Rushdie, whom they would have easily qualified as a traitor in the same way that Boualem Sansal, Kamel Daoud or Zineb el Rhazoui are today insulted and treated as "native auxiliaries" 11"neocolonial" reactionaries. Because intellectuals "of Muslim origin" are assigned to the Muslim religion and are booed when they proclaim their atheism or even their opposition to fundamentalist versions of Islam. While they are in danger of death, accused by Islamists of blasphemy and apostasy, their criticisms of Islamism or their simple claim to freedom of conception of Islam are considered by this left as manifestations of "Islamophobia" and racism.
Islamo-leftism, defined by Pierre-André Taguieff12, in fact equates Islamism with Islam, Islam with the Maghreb and African immigrant populations, and immigrants with the new "damned of the earth". And in this, the extreme left absolutely enters into the game of the Islamists themselves in the fight against Western societies. Rediscovering the logic of the minority "vanguards" who achieved the "junction with the people" by investing in mass nationalist movements, this left now willingly considers Islamist movements as a Trojan horse for its own anti-capitalist strategy. Islamism is for them an "objective" ally against the hated West, in a self-hatred reminiscent of that which yesterday animated the bourgeois Marxists redeeming their fault of hated social belonging by going to convert the proletarian masses right up to the "workbench" of factories.
We also know about the Islamo-clientelism of the right and the left which, in order to garner votes from French people of immigrant origin, advocates "no waves" and "nothing to do with Islam" and immediately describes Islamist assassins as "lone wolves" and "unbalanced". Céline Pina13 described it well. We denounce less another form of Islamo-complacency that is just as guilty, Islamo-negligence that minimizes the danger of Islamism: Islamism would be a secondary phenomenon, even negligible compared to the threat of the extreme right. A variation of this type of position consists in the invention of "the identity pincer". By putting them back to back, accused together of mutually supporting each other, the two threats are presented as antagonistic and symmetrical, and the supposed danger that the extreme right would represent is in this "balanced" vision inevitably a counterpart to the very real Islamist attacks.
Yet it is Islamism that calls for “revenge” for Salman Rushdie’s alleged offenses to Islam and attempts to assassinate him. It is Islamism that kills, persecutes and terrorizes non-conforming Muslims, Jews, Christians, Yezidis, apostates, atheists, free thinkers and all vectors of freedom of expression. Not so much the neo-Nazi groups when there are any left. The constant threat to the existence of the State of Israel and to the lives of Israelis is Muslim extremism with its rockets, its knife murderers and the search for nuclear weapons. Not so much the Nazi allies of yesterday’s Arab nationalism. The enemy on the front line against secularism today is Islamism. Not so much the far-right that has become populist and has even made it its new mascot.
As for the argument of "playing into the hands of the extreme right" by refusing to denounce Islamist atrocities or by using the rhetoric of social and colonial excuses, it is all the more fallacious since the true allies of the extreme right, heir to Nazi anti-Semitism and retrograde and misogynistic Pétainism, are precisely the Islamists. Rather than opposing each other, were not the Islamists and the most reactionary fringe of the Catholic right united in the fight against same-sex marriage? Could it not be that the return within "liberated" Western societies of a certain prudish and oppressive conservatism, particularly for women, is largely due to the convergence between the pressure exerted by Islamism and old traditionalist and fundamentalist religious currents which are therefore regaining strength? Their common "reaction" is, it is true, encouraged by the delirious extremism of militant wokeism, itself paradoxically very puritanical.
"Islamo-Nazism" is also a historical constant, from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem proposing to Hitler the formation of a Muslim SS division, to the former Nazis, some of whom converted to Islam, warmly welcomed after 1947 by the Arab regimes in the Middle East to fight against the young State of Israel. The Islamist-extreme right alliance continues today in Latin America, for example, where Hezbollah is just as linked to former supporters of the dictatorships of the 70s as to the Castro regimes of Cuba or Venezuela. It is also the same anti-Semitism that drives the Holocaust deniers nostalgic for Nazism that Dieudonné willingly invited to his rallies-shows, also denouncing the famous "Islamophobia".
But within the left and political ecology, there is a commitment to the burkini in municipalities or to the veil at university, within sports associations there is an attempt to impose the hijab on playing fields and in women's athletics, within humanitarian associations promoting "living together" there is acquiescence to the practices of a fundamentalist Islam, and even at the heart of associations defending secularism there is a dismantling of secular principles in the name of an "open" secularism based on "religious freedom" and no longer on freedom of conscience. School of course, but also other public services and the state apparatus are part of the stakes of Islamist entryism. We see it at work at the Fondation de l'islam de France which, under the cover of secularism, trivializes the expansion of Islam in France.
How can left-wing people, defenders of democracy, secularism, and public and individual freedoms, not consider that Islamism is the most immediate threat in the face of these realities? Of course, we must salute the anti-Islamist commitment of "left-wing intellectuals" like Jacques Julliard or Georges Bensoussan, as well as a few very small minority figures like Manuel Valls, who are now out of the game. But despite entire sections of the former socialist electorate becoming disillusioned, taking refuge in abstention or even moving to the RN, the leaders of this "zombie left"14 as Laurent Bouvet called it, but also many secular activists who have not updated their analyses, persist in not engaging resolutely against the Islamist offensive.
"The new Socialist Party", breaking in 1971 with the line of the defunct SFIO, had never been very keen to defend secular principles. And it showed itself to be particularly reluctant to fight against the new enemies of secularism that are the Islamists when they clearly began to test the republican defenses from 1989. Finally, the calamitous candidate of the PS in the 2017 presidential election was a perfect representative of Islamo-leftism. But it is also the clientelist Islamo-complacency and especially the guilt-inducing Islamo-neglect of the various sectors of the democratic left, which weakens the fight against Islamism. Thus, the convoluted or watered-down expressions of the partisan and journalistic institutional left after the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie were as scandalous as they were sadly predictable.
The language of Islamism and dhimmitude
The use of the expression "controversial work" employed by Agence France Presse15 and taken up without flinching by many French media and political leaders, is quite symptomatic of an Islamo-complacency that could be likened to the submission of Dhimmis. In order not to anger the Islamists, it would be appropriate to show a certain disapproval of any questioning of the Muslim religion, however poetic, metaphorical or even supposed it may be. Because Westerners now also live under the threat and in fear of jihadist reprisals. But if they believe they can avoid them by systematically demonstrating complacency towards Islamist fundamentalism, it is because they have not understood the conquering logic of this politico-religious movement: whatever is done to please them, the fighters of "the true faith" try to advance and impose their domination on the minds and bodies of all.
Because Islamist ideology interferes in many ways and also conditions individuals without their knowledge. Like the "language of the Third Reich"16, the vocabulary of Islamism is spreading among the general population. Reporting the words of Ramin Parham, a former Iranian far-left activist who was once fascinated by the Khomeinist revolution and then took refuge in France, Michaël Prazan notes that the death sentence of Salman Rushdie has "brought the word 'fatwa' into the vocabulary and dictionaries" and constitutes a "prodigious means of communicating at low cost". "This fatwa is disseminated by the Western media, technology and culture, propagating the terror embodied by Iran: terror that has since been internalized, and which will gradually sediment itself, even in the corners of all the editorial boards of the Western world. From then on, each newspaper will ask itself the question of the consequences before writing anything that touches on Islam and its laws."17. We touch here on an essential point of dhimmitude: the transformation of an imposition into voluntary servitude.
Dhimmitude is the subordinate status of populations under Muslim domination, oppressed because of their gender or their non-membership of "the community of believers", that is, Muslims. Women, considered inferior and impure by divine will, are subject to men and must obey them under penalty of punishment up to and including death by stoning. Jews and Christians living in "Islamic lands" are tolerated there only if they accept their humiliating condition and the taxes that go with it, and even then they are always under threat of sporadic mistreatment or brutal expulsion for no other reason than the mood of Muslims. The imposition of dhimmitude is not a reaction to any aggression but an injunction from conquering Islam and its system is once again relevant in the global neo-Islamist offensive.
So, retreating from the secular principles that are the foundation of the French Republic, as well as from the secularized morals generally adopted by all Western societies (individuals freed from religious influence in their life choices), does not constitute a modus vivendi that is "reasonably accommodating" with Islam. It is completely illusory and therefore unreasonable to believe that integrating the prohibitions of rigorous Islam into our societies and a fortiori into our law, would promote a moderation of Islamism: on the contrary, interpreted as a sign of weakness, Islamists push their demands further and increase their influence. Not only is it not appropriate to play tricks on Islamism, but we must also valiantly foil all its traps.
The trivialization of the veiling of women is certainly emblematic of the progress of Islamism in so-called "Muslim" countries as in the West. But it is undoubtedly the most visible part of the offensive, the red rag so to speak, that the Islamists wave to conceal the extent of their all-out offensive. The pressure to have blasphemy condemned in the positive rights of the various states, supposedly secular or not, as required by Sharia law, is another essential goal of the Islamists. They have achieved their goal in so-called Muslim countries even when they claim to be secular; this is the case with the Palestinian Authority of the PLO when it imprisons and tortures the young Waleed Al-Husseini accused of being a blasphemer.18, or in Egypt under General al-Sissi who persecutes young people, democrats and Christians for blasphemy19.
Some Anglo-Saxon countries that have retained the crime of blasphemy in their laws, although it has fallen into disuse, find themselves today weakened by Islamist pressure to condemn any expression that they consider to be detrimental to Islam or its prophet Mohammed. This Anglo-Saxon tradition has undoubtedly also worked against Salman Rushdie. But in France, where the torture of the Chevalier de la Barre in 1766 had a strong impact on the defenders of the Enlightenment, the abolition of the crime of blasphemy was one of the issues of the Revolution of 1789 and since then a marker of the Republic. It is therefore all the more shocking to note the weakness of the camp of supporters of Salman Rushdie accused of blasphemy by the Islamist assassins.
Against the totalitarianism of the third type that is Islamism, the mobilization must be general, and massive must be the support for all the targets of the jihadists like Salman Rushdie. The secular and democratic left must come out of its reserve and no longer fear being assimilated to certain anti-Islamists who would not be acceptable because of their political affiliation or their supposed anti-Arab or anti-Muslim tropism. Salman Rushdie is a symbol of resistance to Islamism and the fight against dhimmitude. He must be defended as such without pusillanimity, without euphemism or "controversy", whether we appreciate his literary style or not!
