Replicas, Alain Finkielkraut’s weekly program on France Culture, is one of the few to honor public service in the name of adversarial debate. The first of the school year brought together philosophers Marylin Maeso and Norman Ajari around the question “Where does racism begin and end?”. In addition to the quality of the debate, the program was above all an opportunity to understand, through Norman Ajari’s speech, the mechanisms of political Islam. That is to say a falsely humanist discourse, hiding the desire for separatism refusing any integration – or even any cultural dialogue – all in the name of the crimes of colonialism and other historical events of the past which serve as a excuses to withdraw from the rules of the social game.
Responding to a frank and simple question about the ban on the abaya, Ajari blurted out this chilling sentence: “It’s a way of pushing young women to reveal more flesh, which seems to me a rather strange idea in itself from an educational institution. Implied because the flesh of young Muslim women can only be a sexual issue? Because showing more flesh is equivalent to provoking desire, to awakening the lust of men who are only good for that? Ajari’s response is why the abaya should be banned. Because he reduces women to their flesh, because he wants to create a border visible between Muslim women and others, between women offered and women forbidden.
Things get seriously complicated when the expression “clothing police” comes to the table, used by a number of left-wing neo-feminists to describe the ban on the abaya, a police force that exists for real in countries like Iran and who is behind the assassination of Mahsa Amini for wearing her veil incorrectly. The rhetorical reversal carried out by Norman Ajari to explain that prohibiting here, in secular and republican schools, and obliging there in the Islamic Republic would amount to the same sums up the use against liberal democracies… of liberal democracy: “The desire of the people who demonstrate in Iran for the relaxation or repeal of these laws seems to me linked to a desire for liberal democracy. It is these limits to the principles of liberal democracies which are also brandished by the proponents of the cultural specificity of French secularism.” And to kindly concede that the degree of repression is not exactly the same – it is more “intense” in Iran… No joke?
We settle this between us, go your way!
When Alain Finkielkraut cites the Stasi report which led to the banning of religious symbols in schools in 2004 and the testimonies of the young women concerned who felt liberated by the possibility of escaping family domination, Ajari refuses that the school can be a place of emancipation, refuses to imagine that offering a space of doubt, outside the family, outside the origin, could be an opportunity, since any possibility of touching another culture is… part of the civilizing mission, therefore of colonization: “I do not believe in the civilizing mission of these state institutions. To believe that you are giving yourself this mission is to delude yourself. I do not believe that this is the mission of the middle and high schools of free young women from their own families, from the image we have of the backwardness of their own culture.” And to refer these questions of liberation – basely Western, I add – to community issues. We settle this between us, go your way!
Finally, Alain Finkielkraut questions the extension of the domain of racism: defending borders is racist, demonstrating the desire to remain a people and a civilization is racist. Ajari’s response: “I think that if what you call the desire to remain a people or a civilization is not immediately racism, it is the implacable condition of possibility. Saying ‘I want to remain what I am ‘, it’s the worst motto that can be, wanting to remain what you are, it fundamentally supposes a lack of reflexivity, a lack of self-examination… A life without examinations is not worth living. ”
We finally agree! But what does communitarianism do, exactly? If it is not refusing self-examination, if it is not wanting to remain what we are, by importing, not customs and cultures, which are part of healthy cosmopolitanism, but by wrapping ourselves in an acultural political Islam which is only a desire to brutally oppose one civilization and one way of living to another, establishing separatism?
* Abnousse Shalmani is a writer and journalist committed against the obsession with identity