Antoine Menuisier: "Support for Imam Iquioussen proves that not everyone, especially on the left, has broken with the Islamist illusion"

Antoine Menusier is a journalist.

He published

The Book of Undesirables: A History of Arabs in France

In 1999, when Hassan Iquioussen saw his request for naturalization rejected, the Minister of the Interior was called Jean-Pierre Chevènement and the left was in power in a government of cohabitation.

General Intelligence had a "file" on the Imam.

The minister's office opposed his request.

A few years earlier, Hassan Iquioussen, born in 1964 in Denain, in the Nord department, had already tried, in vain, to recover his French nationality, acquired by jus soli but which he renounced at his majority, more or less constrained by his father who wanted to keep his son's Moroccan and Muslim identity intact.

His first request having failed with a right-wing government, perhaps he thought it would be easier with a left-wing government.

That same year, 1999, Place Beauvau - where Jean-Pierre Chevènement shocked the left by calling young suburban delinquents "savages", a term that foreshadowed a stronger and less pleasant one, that of "scum" - was also pressed by the Swiss preacher Tariq Ramadan, who wanted to become the Muslim interlocutor of the government on Islam – a role that the Genevan will hold seven years later with the British Prime Minister, Labor Tony Blair.

But, in France, at the time, the “Islam” pole at the Ministry of the Interior blocked Ramadan.

The Genevan's attempt therefore failed, as will be rejected many years later, in 2016, Manuel Valls being Prime Minister, his application for French naturalization - nationality of his wife.

Then engaged in alterglobalism, Tariq Ramadan had support on the left: the Education League and the Human Rights League, the same which today defends Hassan Iquioussen.

Antoine Menusier

At the turn of the 2000s, the Hani brothers and Tariq Ramadan, after Charles Pasqua had given them difficulties when he was Minister of the Interior (1993-1995), increased their interventions in France from their Geneva "Neauphle". .

Strong is their influence and powerful their aura on a second generation of vulnerable North African immigration, tormented by the complex of the colonized and assailed by identity dilemmas.

The grandsons of the Egyptian Hassan al-Banna, the founder in 1928 of the Muslim Brotherhood, the ideology to which they are attached just like their "brother" Hassan Iquioussen, with whom they have been close since the 1980s, advocate, on the one hand, an Islam of citizen participation coupled with a third-world vision in competition with the

“Imperialist West” of which Israel would be the outpost in the Middle East;

on the other hand, a conservative Islam supposed to give up as little as possible on the “Muslim way of life”.

This is the time when, with Iquioussen, they affirmed to their female audiences that the veil is compulsory from adolescence and that it is necessary to avoid swimming with boys in public swimming pools – was this the speech? to a generation that had to make its life in France?

For the public authorities, resisting the insistence of a Tariq Ramadan was not so easy in France at the turn of the 2000s. In 2003, Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, made him the unofficial spokesperson for the young Muslim generation of France by agreeing to debate with him in the program “100 minutes to convince” on France 2

.

Then engaged in alterglobalism, Tariq Ramadan had support on the left: the Education League and the Human Rights League, the same which today defends Hassan Iquioussen in his legal fight against Gérald Darmanin.

And then, at the same time, a newspaper like

, anchored on the center-left, for whom the nevertheless conservative message of this Islam seems secondary, saw in these young preachers and other associative militants from the suburbs born in France or elsewhere in the West, a legitimate force that would finally manage to integrate into France a second generation of Muslims who feel left behind.

In the early 2000s, an Islamist agit-prop backed by a dominant-dominated rhetoric, orchestrated by junior Muslim leaders, sought to impose a Salafo-brotherhood agenda in a landscape supposedly dominated by “bledard” Islam, deemed too soft. .

Antoine Menusier

Also, for these preachers, integration into the Republic was indeed to take place, but passed through the sieve of Islam, which would become this resource both doctrinal and sentimental, bound to make the link, like a compromise , between the generation of the parents tossed about by History and their descendants promised a French destiny.

A challenge, because Islam could not be this regulating principle of social life in a French society by definition resistant to any religious power.

The expulsion procedure initiated against Hassan Iquioussen marks the failure of this strategy of forceful transition from political Islam to a secular culture, the definition of which is not limited to the separation of Church and State.

The jihadist attacks from 2015 have rendered inaudible any Muslim claim outside the scope of worship stricto sensu.

Today, we are very far from the beginning of the 2000s. At the time, the State made the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, the UOIF, of Brotherhood inspiration, perceived as the expression of the “real Islam”, which in 2017 became Muslims of France, a partner with whom he thought he could deal – which would happen during the suburban riots of 2005, the UOIF issuing a fatwa in an attempt to restore calm.

For its part, an Islamist agit-prop backed by a dominant-dominated rhetoric, orchestrated by

Muslim leaders, then sought to impose a Salafo-Brotherhood agenda in a landscape supposedly dominated by “bledard” Islam, deemed too soft.

This young guard in constant renewal, joined in the 2010s by a trader disgusted with trading rooms, the

Marwan Muhammad and his CCIF (Collective against Islamophobia in France, dissolved in 2020), will never stop wanting break the laws of 2004 and 2010 (prohibition of religious symbols at school and the full veil in public space), described as “racist and villainous”.

From the assassination of Samuel Paty in October 2020, the State, soon relying on the “separatism law”, dealt serious blows to this young guard, sometimes younger than that, moreover. , which claims to most faithfully represent French Muslim sociology.

But it is partly because everyone in France, especially on the left, has not broken with the Islamist illusion, that the government is reduced to sending "signs", such as that of expulsion, on hold. , of the preacher Hassan Iquioussen.