They are almost the same commentators, journalists who have written a clever book, historians as disgusted by the West as they are fascinated by Islamism, sociologists fed on an enlightened Michel Foucault who only want to see the odious articles on the spirituality of the Islamic revolution. They are almost the same people who commented on the return of the Taliban by seeing it as an inclusive and moderate version. Take out the popcorn, the relativists are back, their eyes watering in front of the well-trimmed beard of Abu Mohammed al-Joulani – who even puts on a jacket to conjure up Westerners, the memory of a goldfish in majesty, already amnesiac of the coming to power of Neo-Sultan Erdogan, who was compared to a Christian-democrat Muslim version who would combine faith and political pragmatism with balance and respect.
It was called a Muslim Brother, it is still called a Muslim Brother, and this only ever results in censorship of the media, bringing the justice system into line, homophobic, anti-Semitic and racist policies, forced Islamization, educational propaganda, increase spectacular violence against women, Islamist internationalist toxicity (Armenia, Cyprus, Libya among others, with regard to the Turkish example), stubborn anti-Westernism and goodbye to freedom.
The Middle East is a cauldron where ethnic groups, religions and ideologies simmer so disparate that it is impossible to find political coherence there, which has the consequence of making it permeable to murderous ideological invasions maintained by a paranoid and always anti-national. This is not new, since the fall of the empires, Persian, Roman, Ottoman, the borders have been artificial, and the populations have been communitized. Aside from Iran, which has jealously preserved its borders like a nostalgic talisman from the time of Persia, proud of its language and jealous of its history, all the other countries in the region – except Israel in its political borders and not religious, which can also refer to the ancient kingdoms of Judea and Jerusalem – are prey to an original rupture within them which rules out any possibility of forming a nation.
We tend to see Lebanon as the only community country, because its political organization reflects its religious mosaic. Iraq and Syria are also populated by diverse communities, but their state expression is non-existent – Iraq with a Shiite majority was, from its creation in 1921, governed by a Sunni, until the American intervention of 2003 ; Syria with a Sunni majority was ruled for fifty years by the Assads, from the Shiite Alawite minority. The consequence is a virtual absence of nationalist sentiment, a patriotism reduced to its closed community, a fertile ground for internationalist discourses which flatter the umma – the community of believers – and absolutely prevent the constitution of a democracy where the citizen It is not only reduced at its birth, all regularly leading to inevitable civil wars.
Islamism is not soluble in democracy
The welcome fall of the Assad clan, the end of an oppressive system which imprisoned, tortured and massacred its population by copying the lessons of the Nazi Alois Brunner, a refugee in Syria, should not push us to accept without a shudder of concern the Islamists came to power. Abu Mohammed al-Joulani held his first speech in the Great Umayyad Mosque, ensuring that “this victory is a triumph for the entire Islamic community. » Not for multi-ethnic and multi-faith Syria, not for the Syrian nation. Al-Joulani switched from Salafism to Brotherhood out of opportunism. He followed the money, in this case that of Turkey and Qatar, which assured him power, and to do this he agreed to become “Zelenskyized”.
When I hear that in Idlib, of which he was the leader, mixing was only authorized in parks and shopping centers, that he did not have Christians executed, preferring to subject them to tithing, but that he still removed crosses from churches and banned the ringing of bells, effectively creating civic inequality. I have one single certainty: Islamism is not soluble in democracy.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
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