When does a news item become a social event? We generally agree that the first may arouse all the emotion in the world, but it does not necessarily have any social or political significance. All journalists know this quote from Lord Beaverbrook: “A dog bites a man, it’s a news item. A man bites a dog, it’s a scoop. » But neither can be qualified as a social fact.
The murder of young Shemseddine, committed last week in Viry-Châtillon, south of Paris, has every chance of going down in history as a real social event. Especially since it is accompanied by a series of other incidents of a similar nature occurring the same week. The 15-year-old young man died of his injuries after being beaten up outside his school by a group of hooded young people, four of whom were indicted. The investigation revealed that two of them were the older brothers of a young woman who, in the words of the prosecutor, had had discussions with the victim on “subjects relating to sexuality”.
“Fearing for her reputation and that of their family, they had ordered several boys to no longer have contact with her,” they said. They then learned that the victim boasted of being able to speak freely with their sister. » The investigation will reveal more precisely what was going on, but for the moment it appears that young Shemseddine’s only sin was not having obeyed a moral, clan and religious diktat that was nevertheless incompatible with French customs.
Two days earlier, in the La Paillade district of Montpellier, a 14-year-old girl was lynched, also after leaving school. After being put in an induced coma due to the severity of her injuries, Samara eventually recovered. The same day, her mother denounced harassment from a friend who wears the veil. “All day long, she called her a kouffar [mécréant] […]. My daughter, she dresses European style. All day long, there were insults, people called her a kahba [pute]. »
To the great dismay of some of her classmates, Samara wore makeup, dyed her hair, did not wear a veil and talked to boys. In short, she believed she could live in France like a French woman. Error ! Her grandmother said she saw “a rape call for Samara” on her granddaughter’s phone. With some hashtags “call for the knife” or even “we’re going to kill you”.”
Shockingly, a few days later, the mother found herself on television gravely reading a text that she had obviously not written. There we discover a “pious” Samara which “respected Ramadan” and said “prayers five times a day”. While the lawyer of one of the suspects affirms that this attack has no religious character, testimonies from the neighborhood confirm that the mother, caught in a vice, would have given in to pressure. “You have to put yourself in their place,” says an educator. The affair will fall again, but she will continue to live here, with her children. There will be no one to protect them. » The story could be titled “When the moral police and Islamist communitarianism prevail over the Republic and citizenship”.
In both cases, are we not faced with what must be described as “honor killings”, a concept which dates back to Antiquity and against which the former Jordanian Minister of Culture courageously fought Asma Khader? It is found in the jurisprudence of several Muslim countries, such as Jordan and Pakistan, where it is considered an extenuating circumstance. In short, in these countries, if you murder your wife in order to take revenge for adultery and to protect the family’s reputation, justice will be more lenient.
These events illustrate the clash within these very neighborhoods of two moral codes, two legal traditions, two systems of morals, two models of relations between the sexes and two conceptions of legitimate violence. Perfectly incompatible conceptions whose main issue today is schools, where a real cultural war is being waged to conquer young minds. The first victims are the Muslims themselves.
These dramas also tell us a lot about the meaning of the veil, this civilizational and proselytizing marker intended to “protect” women from the gaze of men and to assert a religious identity in the public space. Already, the anthropologist Claude Lévy-Strauss had delicately described its wearing as “impoliteness” in the land of seduction which invented courtly love. Coming from a civilization whose tradition is that of religious endogamy, at least for women, the veil sends us a clear message: these women are not for you! The cultural shock is frontal for a population which prides itself on being a champion of sexual freedom and mixed marriages.
Will you believe it? At the age of 24, Victor Hugo described in The Orientals the murder of a young Muslim woman by her brothers. The poor thing had been furtively seen by a man as she was returning from the bath. His “veil opened for an instant”, writes the poet, before suddenly “a veil of death” spreads over his gaze.
Two centuries later, this almost happened in Samara.