Marieme Helie Lucas: Stand and Be Counted
Marieme Helie Lucas, an Algerian sociologist and freedom fighter, founder of the solidarity networks Women Living Under Muslim Laws, and Secularism is a Women’s Issue argues that the roots of the murder of Samuel Paty go back to the 1990s and the experience of Algerians in the ‘war against civilians.' She argues that we should Stand and Be Counted....
Assassinations by decapitation or by the sword - which are highly symbolic of all Muslim extreme right organisations (Al Quaeda, the Taliban, GIA, Shabab, Daesh, Boko Haram, etc) are not a new phenomenon in France. Several cases have already happened in recent years. It points at the will of the sponsor to not just ‘execute’ the victim for his ‘crimes’, but also to send a chill down the spines of potential next victims - in this present case anyone who will dare re-publish the ‘drawings of Mohammed’. This is why filming decapitations or taking a photo-graph of French teacher Samuel Paty‘s head severed from his body is a crucial step. Who will dare teach freedom of speech in French schools after the mid-term holidays? Stand and be counted…
No
spring for Arab women - Interview with Marieme Helie Lucas
In Algeria too, long before the ‘bloody nineties’ and the ‘war against civilians’ as we called it then, we too witnessed some such public terrifying Islamist war crimes: the first ‘execution’, in the early seventies, was a communist student, who faced an ad-hoc Islamist Tribunal inside the premises of Algiers University where I taught at that time, and was ‘executed’ by the sword then and there. For it is important to understand that the same scenario which developed in Algeria right after independence and culminated in the nineties is being replicated in Europe: gradually, there was fundamentalist control taking place over women, their dress, their behaviour, their space for choice, etc; there was ‘Islamic punishment’, as they call it, for ‘kofr’ (unbelievers) – generally death penalty – or for ‘un-Islamic behavior’ such as smoking, drinking, not praying 5 times a day, not fasting during Ramzan/ Ramadan, etc…
But who cared for a bunch of women who did not conform, for
drunkards or for gays and for unbelievers? The State certainly was not about to
endanger ‘social peace’ for these un-important citizens. The French State did
not do any better, when the first victims on its soil were young women or
isolated intellectuals, decades before the assassination of a teacher that took
place a couple of days ago. And France has, so far, not learnt from what
followed suit in Algeria.
For three decades from the 60s to the 80s, violence in
Algeria mounted, until by the 90s fundamentalists deemed ‘Kofr’ any
citizen who had anything to do with the ‘kofr state’, such as, for
instance, sending children to school, getting treatment in government
hospitals, or going to any government office for an identity document, etc. For
all the critics of the government at that time, , let me remind readers that,
in Algeria, education was totally free for boys and girls alike, and so was
access to hospitals to all citizens. (Not many European or North American
countries could say the same, when poor people still die at the doorstep of
hospitals, for lack of resources to pay for their treatment.) In other words,
in Algeria, not having anything to do with the ‘kofr state’ was a
fundamentalist command that was impossible to comply with, in a country where
everything was controlled by the state. The number of victims that received
their ‘punishment’ from extreme right Islamist armed groups skyrocketed; the
estimated number is 200,000 victims in the decade of the nineties.
In France, Algerian refugees from the nineties, who had already
lived through this whole process, kept warning about similar developments in
France. We were never heard. Moreover, we were deemed anti-Islam, as if armed
Islamist groups were the sole true representatives of Islam; or we were deemed
henchmen of the Algerian government, when most of us had already been
persecuted by the State for being part of the progressive opposition.
International human rights organisations were at the
forefront for welcoming Islamists as the victims of the State and shunning us
as ‘Islamophobic’ – a concept quickly coined by the Muslim extreme right, which
has now spread worldwide. Human rights organisations will carry the stigma for
their inhuman political choice: I am convinced that history will judge.
https://feministdissent.org/blog-posts/stand-and-be-counted/
Charlie Hebdo - Letter to the Left Leaning
Manifesto
for a Secular Middle East and North Africa
Karima
Bennoune - Charlie Hebdo: "There is no way they will make us put down our
pens."
Defend
this reporter! Case over Paris cartoon forces Mumbai editor to go behind a veil
Sandip
Roy: Harassment of Urdu editor proves our own hypocrisy
Mohd
Asim - Congratulations. We've Forced an Editor Into a Burqa
Shirin Dalvi case: The tyranny of hurt sentiment
The
hounding of Shirin Dalvi: 'These people are doing all this to damage my career'
People’s
Alliance for Democracy and Secularism: Statement on the harrassment of Shirin
Dalvi
Warwick Student's Union apologises, Maryam Namazie to speak on campus
Interview
with Karima Bennoune, author of 'Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here'
Woman
filmmaker in Iran sentenced to 18 months in prison
Ruqia Hassan, murdered by
ISIS
The Daoud Affair By Paul Berman and Michael Walzer
Leading Saudi activist dies in detention, say campaigners
Bethan McKernan - Ayasofya: the mosque-turned-museum at the heart of an
ideological battle
Michael Walzer: Islamism and
the Left - including a reply & debate with Andrew March
The religious persecution of Nasr Hamid Abu
Zayd
Mahmoud Mohammed Taha (Author
of Second Message of Islam); a.k.a. Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed
Taha was a Sudanese religious thinker and trained engineer. He
was executed for apostasy at the age of 76 by the regime of Gaafar
Nimeiry. (See his Court statement)
THE
MODERATE MARTYR - A radically peaceful vision of Islam
The
St. Petersburg Declaration (2007)
Khaled
Ahmed - Rollback nations (NEWSWEEK PAKISTAN)
MAX
REGUS - The state of silence: Indonesia’s religious discrimination
