Jeannette Bougrab holds a doctorate in public law from the Sorbonne, a former academic, former president of the HALDE and former Secretary of State. She has published a Letter to veiled women and those who support them (ed. Du Cerf, 2019).
It is a tragic story worthy of William Shakespeare. A young Bosnian of Muslim faith aged 17 and a Serbian of Christian religion aged 20 live in the same low-cost housing building in Besançon. Romeo and Juliet fall in love with each other. The family of the young girl learning of the latter's wish to marry this boy decides to punish her. She is beaten so badly that her frail ribs break, her whole body is swollen, and to add to the physical pain, her long hair is torn off. Her uncle shears her like one shears an animal. Alerted by the fiancé, the police intervened and the young girl was taken to the hospital and placed in a home to protect her from her torturers.
His family, part of which should have left the national territory for several months, is placed under judicial control. Will this measure be enough to protect her from the wrath of the family? How many women in the world are killed by a brother, an uncle, a father for being accused of dishonoring the family? Given the impact of this affair, they must be enraged. In many Muslim countries, honor killing is even a mitigating circumstance.
In many Muslim countries, honor killing is even a mitigating circumstance.It is because people are reluctant to defend republican principles and values that such abuses are occurring today in France. I am indignant! When an ex-LREM deputy writes a tweet to put into perspective the seriousness of the acts - kidnapping of minors and violence in meetings - when this same deputy explains, as if to justify the inexcusable, that it is a simple ethnic rivalry between Bosnians and Serbs or that expelling the family would amount to “putting a coin back in the jukebox of anti-Muslim hatred” … Yes, I am outraged!
To read it, only violence committed by men of non-Muslim faith could be denounced, under penalty of being accused of Islamophobia. Yet in this case, the victim is Muslim. Because she was beaten by Muslims, she would not be entitled to the same protection, to indignation? Would she be condemned to silence? Victims of violence should have the right to the same protection regardless of the perpetrator's faith.
The ethnic character is a decoy to deny the religious basis of this aggression. In Koranic law, it is forbidden for a Muslim to marry a non-Muslim whatever her religion, Christian or Jewish, yet considered to be part of the Book according to the scholastic tradition. On the other hand, a Muslim can marry a non-Muslim. The explanation for this inequality between women and men would be "the innate psychological weakness of women, who, under the influence of their husbands, could be led to convert". All Muslim countries have included in their family code this ban on mixed marriage for women.
If Muslim countries are trying to free themselves from the weight of the religious, why has France become this country where we seek to excuse the inexcusable?This impediment is, however, discrimination in access to marriage on the grounds of religion, which texts on the protection of human rights condemn in the same way as the impediment to marriage based on race or nationality. Women who dare to marry non-Muslims are rejected, marginalized, even threatened with death because for Islamists, this type of marriage is a form of apostasy and can be punished with the death penalty. A glimmer of hope has come from the other side of the Mediterranean where Tunisia, despite the anger of the imams and thanks to the President of the Republic Béji Caid Essebsi, has repealed the law prohibiting women from marrying a non-Muslim man.
If Muslim countries are trying to free themselves from the weight of the religious, why has France become this country where we seek to excuse the inexcusable? If in Muslim societies, women do not belong to each other, France is the country which allows women to be free. To renounce this in the name of communitarianism or post-colonial guilt is to renounce the very essence of our identity. For my part, I would never resolve it. One cannot help but think of this sentence of Friedrich Nietzsche: "We are of a time whose civilization is in danger of perishing by the means of civilization."