As I write these lines, Chems-Eddine Hafiz, rector of the Paris mosque, has decided to “suspend” the legal proceedings against Michel Houellebecq, after their meeting and the writer’s decision to modify the passages of the interview incriminated by the religious. Houellebecq has made public the modifications which relate to the precision of his thought. He does not change his idea that “reverse Bataclans” can occur, but insists on the “if” – which was already obvious in the first version: if the police and the army can no longer penetrate entirely Islamized neighborhoods, so yes, perhaps, probable, not impossible that acts of resistance respond to them in reaction. And specifies: “It seems improbable to me for the moment.”
The second excerpt put on the index undergoes a more marked facelift: “native” French people who do not want Muslims to assimilate but that they stop “stealing and attacking them”, even “that they leave “, we moved on to “the stories of veils, burkinis, halal food, etc., they [NDLR : une grande partie de population française “de souche”] won’t care at all once they no longer perceive Muslims as a threat to their security. What they are asking for, and even demanding, is that foreign criminals be expelled, and in general that justice be harsher with petty offenders. Much more severe”. We could retort to him that the veil like the burkini or halal food are symptoms of Islamization, that they did not even exist or even no longer exist in Muslim countries before the Islamic revolution in Iran which has opened debates as sterile as they are delusional, such as whether frozen chicken was halal or not.
It is easy to understand that Houellebecq is “deeply attached to the text” and that he wanted to recognize an ambiguity in his remarks which deserved more explanation so as not to “offend Muslims”. I fully subscribe. We do not attack believers, but religions. Any generalization is intellectually limited and gives birth to untruths. That is. But who read the interview between Michel Houellebecq and Michel Onfray without looking for something to incriminate them could not see it badly. That the writer is as provocative as usual, and the philosopher just as desperate and declining, that we can not share their analyzes, it was enough to answer them, with another text, yet another forum. I would have things to answer, elements to bring, corrections to hammer out and even sighs and shrugs to oppose, but it wouldn’t occur to me to do it in court. I would take ideas and a pen and I would stick to the work. This is how we argue in the West.
Problem solved between religious
The drama in this sinister case is not so much that Chems-Eddine Hafiz is not his first blow against the writer – he had already sued him in 2002 for having said (as Schopenhauer had written in The World as Will and as Representation) that “the most stupid religion is still Islam”, just as he continued in 2007 Charlie Hebdo for the caricatures, always in the name of “pedagogy”.
The most serious thing is not that it adorns itself with openness and tolerance, even a fight against obscurantism in order to increasingly amalgamate criticism of a religion and insults to believers. No, the most dramatic thing is that politicians and intellectuals have been silent, the most pathetic is that no one has felt the imperious need to sweep this umpteenth complaint to court in the name of freedom of expression and freedom of debate contradictory. The most astonishing thing is that the problem was settled between religious. Let it be the Chief Rabbi Haïm Korsia who offered to bring the writer and the rector into dialogue, while the politicians looked elsewhere.
On June 15 at the Kore University in Enna (Sicily), Houellebecq gave a speech that all middle school students in France should study: “Fiction, for man, is not only a pleasure; it is a need. He needs other lives, different from his own, simply because his own is not enough for him.” Because what we are witnessing every day is a restriction of this essential human need, so much the injunctions to confine it in its strict birth, factitious identity, prevent it from being fully Man, therefore fully Other.