You know I went and watched the speech and he addresses all of this, in a very measured manner. The fact that the guardian and other pundits analyse this as 'Macron inciting hatred against all of Islam!' is such a terrible interpretation I don't even know where to start. Actually, it may even be an intentional misreading and frankly considering how in depth and extensive he is I find that in itself an affront. Deliberate misrepresentation.uziq wrote:
why would he say it's a religion in crisis in response to a terror attack in france? what's the connection between that and sunni-shia?
the vagueness and casual elision of these matters is what makes it easy to portray him as a crusader who is specially singling out islam for some time-tested, age-old european laundering.to be sure, everything from the muslim brotherhood onwards is a fascistic strain in islam. but not an existential threat to the west, nor was it in 2001, either. only ever construed that way by right-wing conservatives and warhawks. the bigger terrorist threat to western nations thesedays is posed by the far-right, as recent FBI reports have portrayed - who, incidentally, love to portray the majority of law-abiding, peaceful, tax-paying muslims as 'threats' to society and 'incompatible' with our way of life.If we're talking about the relationship with regards to the west, the fact is that quite a few Islamic schools, through their dogmatism, rigidity, idealisation of the first caliphate, have a (very) hard time accepting or tolerating any progressive social ideas let alone western cultural norms, media or social practices. Qutb's writings weren't the ravings of a madman, and much of it perfectly defensible in the context of his environment. In the advent of a smaller and technologically connected world, that isolationist fundamentalism can be termed as a crisis within the religion as well.
again, really seems worth pissing off 1/4 of the world's population for. qutb and wahhabism, those enormous threats.
I found an english text translation on the diplomatique website, here's a segment of the controversial speech:
This section is a pretty bad translation but the gist is to not stigmatize all muslims. He even says it before all the above:Macron wrote:
There’s been a lot of very in-depth writing, description and analysis about what our country is experiencing in this regard. I’ll be humble enough not to claim to be an expert, but in a few words, to share things as I see them. Islam is a religion that is currently experiencing a crisis all over the world. We’re not just seeing it in our country, it’s a deep crisis linked to tensions between forms of fundamentalism, specifically religious and political projects which, as we’re seeing in every region of the world, are leading to a very strong hardening, including in countries where Islam is the majority religion. Look at our friend Tunisia, to take just one example. Thirty years ago, the situation was radically different in the way the religion was applied, the way it was lived, and the tensions we’re experiencing in our society are present in that one, which is undoubtedly one of the most educated and developed in the region. So everywhere there’s a crisis of Islam, which is being infected by these radical manifestations, these radical impulses and the desire for a reinvented jihad, which means the destruction of the Other. The project for a territorial caliphate which we fought against in the Levant, which we’re fighting in the Sahel, and everywhere the most radical, more or less insidious forms of it. This crisis affects us by definition too.
In addition to this, external influences and systematic organization by political powers and private organizations have pushed these most radical forms. It has to be said that we’ve let it happen, both at home and abroad. Wahhabism, Salafism, the Muslim Brotherhood – many of these manifestations were also, initially, peaceful for some. Their discourse has gradually deteriorated. They themselves have become radicalized. They’ve promoted messages of separation, a political project, radicalism in the denial of gender equality, for example, and through external funding, through indoctrination from outside, they’ve reached the heart of our country.
This reality affects us, strikes us. It’s grown in recent years. It needs to be named.
Added to this is the breeding ground where everything I’ve just described has grown. We ourselves have built our own separatism. It’s the separatism of our neighborhoods, it’s the ghettoization which our Republic – initially with the best intentions in the world – has allowed to occur; in other words, we’ve had a policy, it’s sometimes been called a settlement policy, but we’ve created a concentration of abject poverty and difficulties, and we’re very aware of this. We’ve crowded people together often according to their origins, their social backgrounds. We’ve concentrated educational and economic difficulties in certain districts of the Republic. Despite the efforts of elected representatives, of the Republic’s prefects, whose commitment I pay tribute to, we haven’t been able – precisely because of this – to rebuild sufficient integration, and above all, we haven’t managed to keep up with this phenomenon in terms of educational and social mobility. In this way we’ve created neighborhoods where the promise of the Republic has no longer been kept, and therefore where there was an attraction to those messages, those most radical configurations, which were sources of hope, which delivered and are delivering – let’s be clear – solutions to educate children, learn the languages of origin, care for elderly people, provide services and enable sport.
Basically, what the Republic no longer provided, because it was overwhelmed by its own difficulties, because it had sometimes gone backwards in terms of public services – those organizations promoting this radical Islam systematically took over from them. And so they built their project – again systematically – on the basis of our withdrawal and sometimes our cowardice. That’s why the shortcomings of our integration policy, of our battles against discrimination, racism and anti-Semitism – each of which feeds the others – have also gradually encouraged this development.
Added to all this is the fact that we’re a country with a colonial past and traumas it still hasn’t resolved, with facts that underpin our collective psyche, our project, the way we see ourselves. The Algerian War is part of this, and basically this whole period of our history is being replayed, as it were, because we’ve never unpacked things ourselves. And so we see children of the Republic, sometimes from elsewhere, children or grandchildren of today’s citizens of immigrant origin from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, revisiting their identity through a post-colonial or anti-colonial discourse. We see children in the Republic who have never experienced colonization, whose parents are on our soil and whose grandparents have been for a long time, but who fall into the – again deliberate – trap of some others who use this discourse, this form of self-hatred that [they say] the Republic should nurture against itself, but also taboos we ourselves have maintained that make their origins mirror our history and also fuel this separatism. I’m systematically distinguishing each of these elements, but they all blend into the reality of our lives. They all blend together and feed off each other. And the political project, by the way – that’s why I called it Islamist separatism, because it sometimes even strays from strict religion into a specially-designed project – well, it mixes up all these realities, but they are there.
https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/comin … uel-macronIf you want to tell things as they are and believe that millions of our citizens live in the Republic as full citizens and believe in Islam, you’re told “you’re naive, you’re covering up for them, you aren’t facing up to the problem. If we want to address the abuses I’m talking about, including in their most radical forms, we fall into the trap of stigmatizing a whole religion.
Last edited by Larssen (2020-10-28 11:33:21)
