In Molenbeek, that morning, the women who did not wear the Islamic veil could be counted on the fingers of one hand. On this first real summer day, the others flooded with their dark profiles the chaussée de Gand, the main commercial street of this municipality located a stone’s throw from the historic center of Brussels.
It is in this setting worthy of a street in Rabat or Algiers that Djemila Benhabib finds herself regularly since she lives in Brussels. How ironic for someone who fled Islamism by leaving Oran in the 1990s to take refuge first in France, then in Quebec.
“I think it’s chasing me,” she admits, laughing. Is it Islamism that pursues Djemila Benhabib or this fight for secularism that leaves him no respite? The one who left Quebec nearly three years ago gave an interview that day on Maghreb TV, a Belgian-Moroccan television, on the occasion of the release of a new book entitled Islamophobia, my eye ! (ed. Kennes). We don’t redo each other. Even far from Quebec, Djemila Benhabib remained the secular activist she became here in the 2000s.
In the heart of the beast
And for good reason. In Brussels, the Quebec passionaria of secularism is found in what is nothing less, according to many, than the European capital of communitarianism. Where jihadists left to murder 131 people in Paris and injure 350 others on November 13, 2015.
We are here in the heart of the beast, she said. “Belgium is a country increasingly fractured by religious communitarianism. You don’t have to be a diviner to feel it. You just have to walk around the neighborhoods. As a journalist from the daily newspaper puts it From MorganMolenbeek has “become synonymous with anything that can go wrong in a big, mixed city”.
The Salafist groups did not wait for Djemila Benhabib to launch an assault on the European capital. It is also here that in 2010 the first veiled deputy in Europe was elected. “Here, we feel a desire to instrumentalize the Muslim electorate, says Mme Benhabib. At the end of the 1970s, the Belgian State offered Saudi Arabia the keys to Belgian Islam by entrusting it with the management of the Great Mosque of Brussels. Today, Muslims in Brussels vote overwhelmingly for the Socialist Party. »
Who could believe that in the 1970s Greeks, Italians, Poles and Arabs lived here in harmony? Yet this is what Malika Akhdim experienced, a woman in her fifties who grew up close to the town and who is a member with Djemila of the Collectif laïcité yallah. “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 Salafist nephews who no longer speak to me and who call me a whore because I don’t wear the veil. Do you understand why we need Djemila? »
When she was a teenager in Oran in the 1980s, she nevertheless thought that Islamism was a strictly Algerian or Arab problem. “We would never have 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 it is from Algeria that Islamism would be exported to Africa and Europe. Even today, Algeria has not taken stock of this era. We simply wanted to heal by forgetting. »
A “low noise” progression
In her most recent book, Djemila Benhabib paints a picture of this Islamism which is progressing “quietly” in Belgium as well as in France and Quebec. All of this thanks to what she calls “no vagueness”, this fear of hurting, of stigmatizing, this obsession with consensus that muzzles even the most enlightened minds.
She tells in particular how her friend the comedian Sam Touzani could not perform in Molenbeek for almost 10 years. The city was then led by mayor Philippe Moureaux, now deceased, a tenor of the Brussels Socialist Party today accused of clientelism. Because he talked about Morocco and Islam, Touzani was threatened with being beaten when leaving the shows.
“When I arrived in France with my family in 1994, we expected left-wing intellectuals to show solidarity with us. We were surprised to find the opposite. Because Islam was the religion of the oppressed, nothing was to be said. I found myself at odds with my political family. We had to mourn not only our country, but also our political family. I did not hesitate to do so. »
Often accused of “Islamophobia”, Djemila Benhabib rejects this term, she says, which “was invented to allow the blind to remain blind”, as Salman Rushdie wrote in his novel Joseph Anthony. A way to stifle the debate, she insists.
However, not a day goes by without Islam making the headlines in Belgium. One day, for fear of losing their Muslim voters, the socialists refused to pass a law prohibiting the ritual slaughter of animals (without stunning), in accordance with Muslim tradition. Another day, it was the wearing of religious symbols by the staff of a court in the Liège region that was the subject of debate. Since she has been in Brussels, Djemila Benhabib and her companions have had to defend two Tunisians expelled from a center for refugees because they were atheists. In another center, it was necessary to protect a Moroccan transsexual abused by her co-religionists. This will even force the state to open centers reserved for LGBTQ+.
An open wound
If it weren’t for her aging parents, it is not certain that Djemila Benhabib would have left Quebec. If it weren’t for this offer as project manager for the Center d’action laïque (CAL), a very influential organization in Belgium born at the end of the 1960s. Instead of “recognizing no religion”, like the law of 1905 stipulates it in France, Belgium has chosen on the contrary to recognize several of them. So that atheists and agnostics are not left out, the Belgian State therefore finances the Central Secular Council, of which the CAL is a member, responsible in particular for secular morality courses in the network of public schools.
From Quebec, Mr.me Benhabib misses her friends whom she was forced to leave. This Quebec of which she only knew, before arriving there in 1997, the song Helen by Roch Voisine. “Who isn’t even Quebecois, as I learned later,” she says.
But a memory haunts her. This day of February 12, 2017, when, after the attack on the Quebec mosque, she was banned from speaking at the Maison de la literature in Quebec “so as not to offend the Muslim community”, writes Radio-Canada. Long before SLĀV, Kanata and Mélissa Lavergne, recently fired as spokesperson for the Nuits d’Afrique festival because she is “white”, Djemila Benhabib was one of the first victims of the ” cancel culture “. This gesture of “purification of public speech”, she says, she never digested it. Censorship may have been more “gentle” in his case, since the meeting was finally rescheduled three months later, “I was condemned even before speaking. Well, I didn’t expect that. Something in me broke that day.
The kind of wound that won’t heal.