Islamism: News from Jamila bin Habib

In Molenbeek, that morning, women who did not wear the Islamic headscarf could be counted on the fingers of one hand. On this first day of true summer, others flooded with their dark features on the rue chaussée de Gand, this municipality’s main commercial street just a stone’s throw from the historic center of Brussels.

In this street-worthy place in Rabat or Algiers, Jamila Benhabib regularly finds herself since she lives in Brussels. What an irony for someone who fled Islamism by leaving Oran in the 1990s to seek refuge first in France, then in Quebec.

“I think it haunts me,” she admitted, laughing. Is it Islamism that pursues Jamila Ben Habib, or does this struggle for secularism leave him no rest? The person who left Quebec nearly three years ago gave an interview that day on Moroccan-Belgian-Moroccan television on the occasion of the release of a new book titled Islamophobia, my eyes ! (Editor. Keynes). We don’t get each other back. Even away from Quebec, Jamila Benhabib remained the secular activist who became here in the 2000s.

In the heart of the beast

And for good reason. In Brussels, Quebec’s passions for secularism are found no less, according to many, than in the European capital of communism. The jihadists left 131 people in Paris and wounded 350 others November 13, 2015.

She said we are here in the heart of the beast. Belgium is a country increasingly riven by religious sectarianism. You don’t have to be a god to feel it. You just have to walk around the neighborhoods. As a journalist from the daily says, from MorganMolenbeek “has become synonymous with anything that can go wrong in a large mixed city.”

Salafi groups did not wait for Jamila Benhabib to launch an attack on the European capital. Here he was elected in 2010 The first veiled MEP in Europe. “Here, we feel a desire to exploit Muslim voters,” says M^I Ben Habib. At the end of the seventies, the Belgian state offered Saudi Arabia the keys to Belgian Islam by assigning it to run the Great Mosque in Brussels. Today, Muslims in Brussels vote overwhelmingly for the Socialist Party. »

Who would believe that the Greeks, Italians, Poles and Arabs lived here in harmony in the 1970s? But that’s what Malika Akdim, a woman in her fifties who grew up near the city and a member of Jamila in the secular group Yalla, experienced. “It happened gradually. There was no shock. One day, my brother went to Afghanistan. He came back completely enlightened by the mullahs. Today, I have my nephews who are Salafis who no longer talk to me and call me a whore because I don’t wear the hijab. Do you understand why we need Jamila?” ? »

As a teenager in Oran in the 1980s, she nevertheless believed that political Islam was a purely Algerian or Arab problem. “We never imagined that one day we would cut the throat of a teacher in France, as we were already doing in Algeria. We did not understand that from Algeria political Islam would be exported to Africa and Europe. Until today, Algeria has not evaluated this era. We simply wanted to heal from oblivion. . »

offer “low noise”

Jamila Benhabib, in her latest book, paints a picture of this Islamism that is advancing “quietly” in Belgium as well as in France and Quebec. It’s all thanks to what she calls “unambiguity,” this fear of harm, this stigma, and this unanimous obsession that silences even the most enlightened minds.

In particular, she recounts how her friend, comedian Sam Touzani, was unable to perform at Molenbeek for nearly 10 years. Then the city was led by Mayor Philippe Moreau, now deceased, a member of the Socialist Party of Brussels accused today of clientelism. Because he spoke about Morocco and Islam, Touzani was threatened with a beating when leaving the shows.

When I arrived in France with my family in 1994, we expected leftist intellectuals to stand in solidarity with us. We were surprised at the opposite. Because Islam was the religion of the oppressed, nothing is said. I found myself at odds with my political family. We had to grieve not only for our country, but also for our political family. I did not hesitate to do so. »

Jamila Benhabib, who is often accused of “Islamophobia”, rejects the term, she said, which was “invented to allow the blind to remain blind,” as Salman Rushdie wrote in his novel. Joseph Anthony. She insists on a way to stifle debate.

However, not a day goes by without Islam making headlines in Belgium. One day for fear of losing their socialist Muslim voters Refusal to pass a law banning ritual animal slaughter (without stunning), in keeping with Islamic tradition. Another day is wearing religious symbols by Court staff in the Liege region which was discussed. Since she was in Brussels, Jamila Benhabib and her companions had to defend Tunisians who had been expelled from a refugee center because they were atheists. In another center, it was necessary to protect a transgender Moroccan who had been abused by her co-religionists. This will force the state to do so Opening LGBTQ+ centers.

open wound

Had it not been for her elderly parents, it is not certain that Jamila Benhabib would have left Quebec. Lula was offered this offer as project manager for the Center d’action laïque (CAL), a highly influential organization in Belgium born in the late 1960s. Instead of “not recognizing religion”, as the 1905 law states in France, Belgium on the contrary chose to recognize many of them. So that atheists and agnostics are not neglected, the Belgian state funds the Central Secular Council, of which the CAL is a member, and is specifically responsible for secular ethics courses in the public school network.

From Quebec, A.;^I Ben Habib misses her friends whom she was forced to leave. This is the Quebec that the song only knew about before it got there in 1997 Helen by Roche Voisin. “It’s not even Quebec, as I later learned,” she says.

But a memory haunts her. On this day of February 12, 2017, after the attack on a Quebec mosque, she was banned from speaking at the House of Literature of Quebec “so as not to offend the Muslim community,” Radio Canada wrote. long ago SLĀVAnd the Kanata And Melissa Laverne, who was recently sacked as a spokesperson for the Nuits d’Afrique Festival because she is “white”, was Jamila Benhabib one of the first victims of ” cancel culture It’s a gesture of “purifying public discourse,” she says, that she never really caught up with. Perhaps the oversight was more “gentle” in his case, as the meeting was finally rescheduled three months later, “I was convicted before I even spoke. Well, I wasn’t expecting that. Something inside of me broke that day.

The type of wound that does not heal.

Let’s see in the video