Abnousse Shalmani is a journalist, novelist and essayist. In her new book entitled “Laïcité, j’écris ton nom” (Éditions de l’Observatoire, 2024), she praises secularism and universalism. And she points straight to the threat posed to France by Islamism.

– In what way was the 1989 headscarf affair, which you describe in your book as a “Republican Munich”, the starting point for the political and media assault led by the Muslim Brotherhood?

– I keep rereading this article published in Le Nouvel Observateur on 2 November 1989, written by Élisabeth Badinter, Alain Finkielkraut, Élisabeth de Fontenay, Catherine Kintzler and Régis Debray: “And if tomorrow they ask that their children be spared the study of the Rushdie works (Spinoza, Voltaire, Baudelaire, Rimbaud…) that clutter up our education system, how can we refuse them”? And here we are, with teachers warning that their pupils are refusing to visit the Musée d’Orsay – because too many nudes offend the eye – or to study Flaubert – because too many sins clutter up Madame Bovary.

We should have avoided abandoning French Muslim citizens to community pressure from Islamists. In this way, we could have avoided letting Islamists confuse Muslims with Islamists. What we are paying for is our cowardice and fear in the face of the guilt-inducing and misleading rhetoric of the Islamists, who have not only transformed our universalist and republican values into “Islamophobia” but are muzzling French Muslim citizens in a communitarian illusion that serves everyone.

We have been deliberately blind, because the “victim” discourse of the Islamists, combined with the visceral and understandable fear of terrorist attacks, has created a fog that has given rise to the policy of “no shame” at all levels. Some people, far too many in my opinion, thought that we could “negotiate” with the obscurantists, that compromise was possible. Compromise never works with radicals, never!

– You are French of Iranian origin. What do you think of the role played by the Fedayeen Islam, the Iranian and Shiite branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, during the 1979 Islamic revolution?

– Secularism was born in Persia in the 16th century under the fifth Safavid ruler, Shah AbbasI the Great. Originally Turkish-Sunni, the Safavids later converted to Shi’ism and, like all new converts, wanted to be zealous in imposing Shi’ism as the state religion. But because, unlike Sunnism, Shiism has a clergy, Shah AbbasI the Great very quickly wanted to prevent the Mullahs from meddling in the affairs of state. So, he introduced a separation of powers, with the clerics dealing with spiritual matters and souls, while the Shah alone regulated affairs of state. And it worked perfectly, anchoring Shi’ism in secularisation.

In 1905, when France passed the law on secularism, a constitutional revolution was taking place in Persia that once again recognised the separation of State and Mosque. This is why Khomeini’s first exile in 1965 was requested of the Shah by the Shiite clergy. And if the clerics wanted to exile Khomeiny to Najaf, the Iraqi holy city, it was because, although he was not a good student of religion in Qom, he was reading Sayyid Qutb, the ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, and was beginning to make political speeches. Nothing could be further from Shi’ism!

That’s why I say that the Islamic revolution of 1979 was a Sunni revolution in a Shia country. Interestingly, the only books published by Khomeini’s successor, the current Guardian of the Revolution Khamenei, concern Sayyid Qutb! The intellectuals of the Shiite clergy in 1979 were opposed to political Islam and still are today. From its birth in Cairo in 1928 to Hamas today, the Muslim Brotherhood continues to sow chaos and terrorism. Whether they use infiltration or plant bombs, their political aim is immutable: to impose Sharia law.

– Why is it that the Iranian diaspora, the majority of whom are Muslims, are particularly well integrated in France and embrace secularism, whereas those from the Maghreb sometimes find it more difficult to assimilate?

– This is primarily due to the difference between Shiism and Sunnism. Shiism is secularism. It is unnatural for Shiites for the religious to interfere in public affairs. On the other hand, the Iranian diaspora has clearly seen and experienced at first hand the ravages of political Islam. The exiles know that Islamism is an anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynist totalitarianism. They are immune. Finally, we must never lose sight of the fact that the Iranians are above all Persians, aware and proud of their three-thousand-year history. Having never been colonised, they have neither resentment nor guilt. For exiled Iranians, secularism is a refuge and a sacredness, but also a part of their own history. When Iranians demonstrate in their homeland, when they dance in the streets, burn the veils, tear down the turbans of the Mullahs, they reactivate the ancestral memory of all Persians. Iranians in Iran are also demanding secularism.

– How do you explain the demonstrations and blockades by pro-Palestinian students at Sciences Po and the Sorbonne? Are they being manipulated by foreign states?

– If it is natural and even initiatory for a student to demonstrate, to oppose, to resist, if it is even formative to rebel, this is not what is happening in Western universities in the face of the Israel-Hamas conflict. What I see and hear is not a defence of the Palestinians but a hatred of Israel that flirts dangerously with anti-Semitism. This is blatantly obvious on American campuses, where pro-Hamas slogans have become the norm and where we can hear, without any complexes: “7-October every day!” or “Go back to Poland”. Even if in France, the slogans don’t reach such a level of abjection, proclaiming “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means nothing more than “Israel must disappear from the map”. When students paint their hands red, reproducing the gesture made by two Palestinian killers in Ramallah in 2000, after dismembering two Israelis, they cannot say “we didn’t know”, because they are participating in a dying Islamist discourse that does not want peace, but the disappearance of Israel and the Jews.

I would have liked to see all those students demonstrating their disgust at the destruction of the historic Palestinian camp of Yarmouk in Syria by Bashar al-Assad in 2018, which is considered by the 100,000 Palestinians who had to flee the bombardments and hunger as a second Nakba. I would have liked to see them marching for the 377,000 dead in the war in Yemen, or in defence of the Uighurs in China or the Rohingyas in Burma, victims of massacres and cultural genocide. I would so much have liked to hear them shouting for the freedom of the Iranians who are fighting so bravely against mullahrchy, or in support of the democrats in South-East Asia. I wish they had demonstrated in 2007 when Hamas came to power in Gaza and killed members of the opposition, defenestrated homosexuals, closed the University of Fine Arts, diverted humanitarian aid and incited anti-Semitic hatred among young people. I wish they’d suddenly realised how uneducated they were after receiving the support of Ayatollah Khamenei. I would have liked to see these students, who are tomorrow’s elite, live up to their humanism, but they wallow in anti-Semitism by adopting the Islamist doxa.

 – In your opinion, is the alliance between Islamists and the far left that we are witnessing in France a replica of what happened in Iran in 1979? What is the political objective of this unnatural “coalition”? What can it lead to?

– The Islamic revolution of 1979 was made possible by the coming together of communists and Islamists in the name of anti-imperialism. After the revolution, Khomeini did not hesitate: he imprisoned and executed his communist allies without the slightest hesitation. Later, in 1999, a British Marxist, Chris Harman, published “The Prophet and the Proletariat”, in which he theorised Islamo-leftism: “On certain issues, we will be on the same side as the Islamists against imperialism and the state, particularly in France and Britain. Where the Islamists are in opposition, we must sometimes be with the Islamists, but never with the State”. Islamo-leftism is a vicious opportunism that always ends up devouring the left.

– Why do you say that the word secularism has become a burden in the current context?

– Secularism is “the end of the reprobate”, said Jaurès. Secularism is the republican promise incarnate: whatever our differences of birth, sex, ethnicity or religion, we are brothers and sisters in humanity. It’s revolutionary and powerful. Secularism is a sufficient weapon because it expresses universalism and humanism in the same movement. It offers us choice, and therefore individual freedom. It unites under the same flag and without discrimination all citizens who sign the republican pact. This is what Islamists, decolonialists and other indigenists are attacking, provoking a spectacular reversal of values. And so far, it’s working.

The republican pact is in crisis, and our disenchantment with it is the driving force. We no longer know how to be proud of France and we no longer know its history. In 1989, a key year that also marked the bicentenary of the French Revolution, a report by the Commission de la Nationalité (Nationality Commission) was submitted to the French Prime Minister by a State Councillor, Marceau Long. It reads: “The weakening of the institutions and universalist values around which the national tradition was built, and which have enabled the integration of foreign populations over the last two centuries, is the real danger for the national future”. Rediscovering universalist values, being the children of Lamartine and Aimé Césaire, is what can save our Republic, renew it and make it shine once again.

– You talk about “self-hatred”, which has become a form of posturing in France. How do the French perceive their culture and history?

– People come to France with a hatred of France, its past, its history, its language and its customs. The freedom it grants is turned against it. What’s worse, they boast that they don’t like France, condemning its Marseillaise as bloody, its liberty as an illusion, its equality as a lie, its fraternity as a hoax, its secularism as “Islamophobic”.

The problem is the prestige accorded to self-hatred in France. The problem is one of intellectual posture. This is the line taken by a considerable number of French intellectuals who see love of France as a sign of fascism, and enthusiasm for French culture as proof of a rancid nationalism. Self-hatred blurs historical reality destroys otherness and opens the door to endless flagellation, where every positive aspect of the Republic is denied, in the name of colonisation alone. The history of France cannot be summed up in terms of the Enlightenment, Napoleon, slavery, de Gaulle or the Conseil National de la Résistance, but rather in terms of a complex set of advances and errors, luminous aspects and reprehensible choices. Loving France does not mean endorsing colonisation, denying the reality of collaboration, or applauding the Code Noir. To love France is to recognise, in the same movement, its enlightenment and its errors, its incredible revolutions and its lamentable counter-revolutions.