François Rastier is Honorary Research Director at the CNRS and member of the Observatory of Decolonialism.
Last book:
Exterminations and literature.
The inconceivable testimonies
, Paris, PUF, 2019.
We know how much intersectional ideology systematically mixes “race”, sex turned gender, religion, as if multiple discriminations met to divide society into two camps, dominated and dominant. Racialized people, women, homosexuals and Muslims are equally victims of systemic violence enshrined in republican institutions.
This confused and simplistic ideology has penetrated deeply into universities and research, as underlined by the report of the Observatory of decolonialism and other identity ideologies submitted at the end of June to Jean-Michel Blanquer.
This report was the subject of a public discussion in the National Assembly between the Minister and Julien Aubert (LR).
One of the questions he poses is that of the militant justification, under the guise of scientificity, of Islamist theses on secularism, described as the cover for a systemic racism directed against Muslims.
Censorship against science recognized in "the global academic world" would come, it is said, from an unfounded fear of Islam.
Francois Rastier
The thesis according to which secularism is a machine of war against Islam remains a constant of the indigenous discourse; but recent comments from academic authorities also make secularism a war machine against science. “How many attacks against science will it take to break the silence?”, Is the title of a column published in
L'Observateur
(April 15, 2021) by Sandra Laugier, philosopher specializing in gender and
care
, formerly responsible at the Institute of Human and Social Sciences of the CNRS, and Albert Ogien, co-author of
Antidémocratie
.
They denounce "
sickening attacks on law and thought".
The victims would be “
academics who simply work to maintain French research at the level of international standards. This is because, with all due respect to our censors, the questions of systemic racism, violence against women, sexism and homophobia, but also of climate disaster and animal suffering (questions that were no longer believed to be consensual but since included, for good price, in the package) are recognized in the global academic world
”. They add : "
And little by little, the stalking and the opprobrium gained other themes presented as so many manifestations of degeneration: decolonial studies, inclusive writing, gender studies, the use of the word `` racialized ''. , single-sex meetings…
”.
This allows us to clarify what the authors mean by
science
, with all the more authority given that Sandra Laugier was for a long time an important executive at the CNRS.
To read also "The historical proximity between the Islamist and decolonial movements goes beyond the university framework"
Censorship against science recognized in "the global academic world" would come, it is said, from an unfounded fear of Islam: "
What is strange is that this front of the right-thinking is built on a visceral fear of the Muslim religion, to which he attributes properties which would make him the irreducible enemy of democratic modernity
”. This amalgamation between Islam and Islamism is no less strange, but none of this is dangerous, claim these authors:
“No information filters that would confirm the fears of the fearful. The only indication that periodically gives a little credit to this accusation is that, delivered without any details, of the number of attacks which would have been thwarted by the intelligence services on French territory. Sometimes, the staging of the arrest of a "terrorist" whose, most of the time, it is difficult to know exactly what objective he or she was pursuing "
. In short, if they are to be believed, would not all these fears be staged? The hundreds of victims of Islamist attacks are no longer there to deny.
Yet the "suspicion" would extend to "
all those who, in the fields of research and education, strive to take the proper measure of the jihadist danger
", among whom the authors are evidently numbered. It is the work of “
ignorant ideologues in the field. This shameful situation, which recalls the bad times of McCarthyism, is explained here by a combined hatred of research and the objects / subjects of this research
”. This "
lately takes the ultra creepy allure of a concerted assault
".
In Islamist propaganda, the parallel between the Jews of yesterday and the Muslims of today is declined everywhere, as if the Muslims were becoming the potential victims of an extermination which is looming.
Francois Rastier
Despite such indignant remarks against "ideologues ignorant of the field", and therefore foreign to science, these authors are silent on the criticisms of the epistemological inconsistency of a militant discourse which, under the guarantee of intersectionality, is extends from decolonalism to inclusive writing. They sum them up to a fear of Islam, which confirms, if necessary again, the link which they nevertheless deny between Islamism and decolonial discourse. Denial is thus overtaken by the inversion which makes the executioners pass for victims, an argumentative tradition now in full swing.
A few months after the massacres at Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher, the journal
Multitudes
, which presents itself as a unifying body of the radical left, published a special dossier (n ° 59) entitled
Décoloniser la laïcité
. It is presented by this statement from Mohamed Amer Meziane: “
The modernist ideals that still fueled traditional anti-racism are serving a new form of discrimination - a new racism? - whose stigma is no longer called “class” or “race” but “religion”. This dossier tries to understand how it is by constructing the “Muslim problem” that the right has been allowed to proclaim itself “secular”
”.
To read also "Decolonialism and identity ideologies represent a quarter of research in the human sciences today"
It will be understood that, for this author, secularism is a form of anti-Muslim racism specific to the "right", the very opposite of the separation of Church and State.
Some have even suggested that the Kouachi brothers and Ahmedy Coulibaly were fighters for true modern anti-racism who intended to decolonize secularism.
The indictment of the French Republic obviously extends to all secular states, which would have simply replaced the wars of religion with colonial wars. Secularism or “secularism” thus becomes the source of all violence, according to Talal Asad: “
Can secularism therefore guarantee the peace that it supposedly ensured in the early days of Euro-America? by replacing the violence of religious wars with the violence of national and colonial wars?
”(“ Penser le secularisme ”,
Multitudes
, 59, pp. 71-82, here p.74).
In this Islamic thinker, anti-Zionism is not absent, when he gives this example: "
Ariel Sharon and his indiscriminate assassinations, his acts of terror on Palestinian civilians did not invoke, until proven guilty, passages of the Torah such as the destruction of all living things in Jericho by Joshua
”(p. 77). But he specifies his accusation, where anti-Zionism becomes critical of Jewish law itself: "
The Torah is obviously filled with divine injunctions to its chosen people to destroy the original inhabitants of the Promised Land
".
In short, violence has nothing to do with Islamist ideology, says this author, even as Asad presents his reflection as a response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. His book
On Suicide Bombing
, recently translated into French, establishes that the attacks are only side effects of Western violence and that Islamism has nothing to do with it.
The defenders of decolonized social sciences endeavor to deconstruct secularism and to denounce the “censors” that it inspires.
Francois Rastier
In their contribution to the same
Multitudes
dossier
, “Une République au XXIe siècle” (p. 94-103), the same Sandra Laugier and Albert Ogien relied in particular on
“the genealogy project of secularism proposed by Talal Asad”,
for fight
"the reductive conception of identity secularism promoted by the European populist parties".
They were astonished:
"rare are those who have dared to question the country's military commitment"
in the Sahel. They worried about the anti-Charlie people: "
those who said 'I am not Charlie', or claimed that
'
the Jews got what they deserve
"
or even "that the cartoonists did not have to insult the prophet" were immediately excluded (admittedly implicitly, for the moment ...) from the community of citizens
"(p. 98).
Also,
"the republican office was not made
[sic]
wait: a set of measures were announced aiming to place the School in the front line of the civilizing mission of reconquering the lost spirits of these '' barbarians '' who populate the cities ”
(
ibid.
).
Thus the anti-Charlie, foremost among which Tariq Ramadan, author of the formula
Je ne suis pas Charlie
, have become very living “victims” of the Republic - and we can forget in passing the victims of the Islamism.
To read also Pierre-André Taguieff: "Decolonialism is a global utopian project"
However, two months after the beheading of Samuel Paty, Sandra Laugier co-signed in
Liberation
with the same Albert Ogien, an article entitled "The madmen of the Republic". They affirmed: “
This reduction of the Republic to secularism leads the last square of the devotees to go up to the front as soon as they sense a danger of questioning this pillar of the republican order […]. This irritates those enthusiastic about secularism, who have found an outlet for their frustration: the Muslim presence. This is how they come to confuse the defense of "the values of the Republic" with a crusade against a minority, designated for collective vindictiveness
"(December 12, 2020; we know the term"
crusade "
frequent in Islamist discourse which equates the West with the Crusaders).
Should we therefore deplore the fact that Muslim children are forced to attend secular schools and undergo “
computer marking
” (
ibid
.)?
Stemming from the Islamist complosphere, the accusation of "computer marking", popularized by Pakistani Minister of Human Rights, Shireen Mazari, said earlier in a tweet that "
Macron does to Muslims what the Nazis inflicted on Jews
" , claiming that "
Muslim children will have to have an identification number, as Jews were forced to wear the yellow star"
(sic).
In Islamist propaganda, the parallel between the Jews of yesterday and the Muslims of today is declined everywhere, as if the Muslims were becoming the potential victims of an extermination which is looming. In fact, it was simply a question of giving all school-aged children a personal identifier like the social security number, so that they could be sure that they were actually in school. This alleged discrimination against Muslims was immediately denied by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs and denounced as
fake news
from November 22.
In Pakistan, the demonstrations did not stop and left several dead, without the dissolution of an Islamist party, the Tehrik-e-Labbaik, until mid-April 2021, succeeding in appeasing them.
They began the day after President Macron's speech in homage to Samuel Paty, where he notably declared:
"We will continue the caricatures"
.
Read alsoThe government inaugurates the secularism office
Who is threatened by
"the madmen of the Republic"
denounced by Laugier and Ogien?
Accused of discriminating against his young Muslim students, wasn't Samuel Paty one of those madmen, guilty of showing
Charlie Hebdo
drawings
?
Secularism is thus presented as a dangerous fanaticism; but our defenders of decolonized social sciences apply themselves to deconstructing it and denouncing the
“censors”
that it inspires. This is where we are, and the publication of the first annual report of the Observatory of Decolonialism and Identity Ideologies made it possible to measure the extent of the threats weighing on secularism in the University as in Research.
As if to confirm its content, Yann Moulier-Boutang and Sandra Laugier were indignant in the summer 2021 issue of
Multitudes
(n ° 83),
under the title "
Décolonial, you said '' decolonial ''?" :
“More serious than these ridiculous electoral rantings
[those of the ministers]
there are the various petitions, that of the 100
[or
“ hundred badernes ”…
]
and, in the process, the creation of a“ Decolonial Observatory ”
[sic ]. They conclude: “
The decolonial vision and method are becoming a true alternative culture, the culture of tomorrow.
[…]
The decolonial thus becomes a theoretical culture, a very short culture
”.
The replacement of culture, the very content of teaching and research, by the decolonial ideology promoted to the rank of alternative culture is thus clearly presented as an achievement by eminent members of academic institutions.