First I would like to thank you for being here and for giving me the opportunity to share my questioning with you.

And I have chosen to start my introduction with a question, which I put to you: do people resemble each other primarily because they share a religion, or primarily because they had the same education?

I am talking about communities; because I often feel closer to a non-Muslim French person than to a foreign Muslim.

But when we talk about Muslims, anyone would think that we are all clones, just “cut and pasted”. As if Islam always produced identical results. All too often, when people are trying to understand the behaviour of a Muslim girl born in France they call in university experts on North Africa, and listen to Algerian or Iranian women’s’ opinions. As if the fact that she has been socialized in a school of the Republic had no impact on the girl’s view of the world. As if “when you’ve seen one Muslim you’ve seen them all”, without regard to the culture of the country where she is living, her family history, the neighbourhood where she grew up, or her social, economic and intellectual standing.

This idea of an “Islamic personality” – unchangeable down the ages and around the world, this idea of an Islam that determines everything about an individual – beware! That is exactly what the fundamentalists believe in.

For them, Islam has an answer to everything. Ready-made solutions are “waiting” in the divine text. Are you looking for a good husband? All you have to do is to find a “good” Muslim. Do you want to bring up your children properly? Just apply “good Islamic teachings”. All the answers to contemporary problems can be found in Islam: the mistreatment of one “sister” by her father, another’s arguments with her husband, a third’s failure at university, a fourth one’s health problems. All the conferences that the radicals organize relate the subject matter to Islam and ignore the social sciences, history, anthropology, economics, sociology, etc. To judge by the lectures’ titles, everything would be fine if “true Islam” were applied; the only battle to be fought is to know what “Islam’s answers” are.

I call this the “hamdulillah complex”, after the Arabic word meaning “thanks be to God”. Which shows you, by the way, that I may be a Muslim, but I am also a thoroughly western woman who has read her Freud….

So, whenever the television or the newspapers talk to you about “the Muslims”, as if we were all part of a defined global and homogenized entity, remember: that is the fundamentalists’ way of looking at things….

To believe that human beings are determined by their religion is to accept the fundamentalists’ approach. Sometimes, journalists and politicians slip into that; Islam becomes the explanation, the framework for understanding anything a young “presumed Muslim” does. No need for sociology or economics or psychology any more – we are meant to believe that young peoples’ behaviour is a “product of Islam”. But that is to reduce an individual to his or her religious dimension, to enclose them in the one facet of their personality that is Muslim.

We ‘Islamize’ economic and historical problems. This kid is hyper-active? It’s a result of Islam. That kid is apathetic? Must be because he’s a Muslim. We “denomination-ize” social diagnoses. It’s simple, and it saves us having to ask difficult political questions. But we know where mixing religion and politics leads us. The problem with certain Muslim countries is not Islam, but the mixture of Islam and politics.

To believe that religion is an essence, that religion itself determines an individual is dangerous, because that denies the whole dimension of human history. Some political approaches, in a mirror image of the radical imams’ view, drain the debate of its anthropological and historical aspects. They limit the debate to its ideological element. As soon as you impose a rigid interpretation, it becomes a political weapon. To turn a religion into an ideology is to enclose it in a straitjacket that forces it to serve ideological ends.

I would like to delve a bit more deeply into the idea of the historical dimension with you today, because it seems to me to be more and more important, especially in regard to international current affairs.

One thing that terrorism experts are looking for is the common denominator among terrorists, the thing that young people who engage in terrorism share. To begin with, some of them linked radicalism with young peoples’ loss of hope in a better future. Others explained it by the collapse of motivating ideologies such as Communism, trade unionism, and so on.

All of this seemed logical and probably true, but none of the explanations covered all the young people engaged in terrorism – just remember how many attacks turned out to have been the work of young engineers, professionally successful, well off and well integrated in society.

At this stage we find only one point that all the young terrorists have in common: they do not feel any attachment to a national history, to a piece of territory. Bin Laden tells them “you are not English, Americans, French, Moroccans or Algerians; you are above all those people! You are real internationalists!” That message sounds authoritative because it makes sense to youths who don’t feel as if they belong anywhere. The ones who feel French, English, American, Arab, Parisians, Londoners or Kabil are not open to this sort of appeal.

So, the first point, which you will have got by now: ‘Homo Islamicus’ does not exist!

You are not dealing with religions but with simple individuals who appropriate a number of cultural and religious elements that are in constant interaction.

Islam is not an abstract essence, defined once and for all. Like other religions, it is what Man makes of it.

It is not religion that maketh the man, it is the exact opposite: an individual understands his or her religion according to the level of development of the country where he or she lives. The story that one makes of one’s religion depends on one’s own story.

Let me give you an example.

Ask a Parisian Muslim woman, a graduate of the free and obligatory education that Jules Ferry introduced in France, which is the most important of the Prophet’s words for her, and she will tell you that it is “the search for knowledge is a duty for all Muslim men and women”.

Ask a Chadian Muslim woman the same question, and she will say that the Prophet’s most important commandment is the one that obliges a man to feed all his wives and children.

There is always an interplay between the person that I am and the way in which I understand a text.

I read my religious Text according to who I am.

I read my religious Text according to the experiences I live.

2nd point: any search for meaning, any religious interpretation, always depends on one’s experience of the world

What does being a Muslim mean when you live in a French-style secular society? Where do you draw the line between the profane and the sacred? There are no ready made responses any more. I can no longer find answers to my questions by imitating Muslims who live elsewhere.

The old, traditional interpretations no longer make sense of the concrete new situations in which I find myself in a secular, pluralistic society.

I cannot go on simply reciting what I was taught, “what Islam says”. I have to ask myself how I understand my Koran, based on my reality, here and now.

I cannot open my Koran and find recipes. The Koran cannot be a catalogue of prescriptions or a medical guide.

Living in France I am forced to recognize that the solutions are not ready-made in the Text, but can be found in an understanding of the Text.

And when I ask myself how I understand my religion, I become a Subject, in my own right.

Most Muslims who live in the west come to realize that there is always an interplay between a reader and the message he is reading.

And when you accept that interaction between a human being and his understanding of his religion, you accept that all believers interpret their Texts according to the mentality of the era in which they live.

That means that all religious messages make sense only in the context of historical circumstances. So norms presented as sacred by religious leaders always flow from human understanding.

The divine Text remains the same, but how it is understood depends on Man’s experience.

3rd point: Asking questions on the basis of this new experience of a modern context leads one to distinguish between Islam’s principles themselves and their historical aspect.

How can one possibly think that when I open my Koran – me, a researcher in Paris in 2005, or a journalist in New York – that I understand it in the same way as an illiterate Egyptian grandmother who has scarcely left her kitchen?

In the modern cities of the Arab world and in the west, young people are placing Mohammed’s message into the context of their own lives, and they are aware that rules make no sense beyond the moral ends that they seek to serve.

They are putting norms in their proper place, seeing the Koran’s 300 ‘rule setting’ verses (out of 6,000 verses overall, remember) in their historical context.

For example, they see the verse explaining how a wife should be punished as an attempt to lower the levels of marital violence common in 7th century Arabia.

They believe that God wanted to put an end to the generalized violence widespread in that epoch.

They do not consider that verse a definitive rule that consecrates the right to punish a woman. What is sacred is the goal that the verse is aiming at, the values it seeks to impose – an end to violence against women.

Young Muslims today reckon that each era must work to find ways of putting the theoretical message into practice.

So, by living new situations in a new modern context, youngsters draw a distinction between the principles of Islam themselves and the historical forms they have taken.

This is pretty revolutionary! The sacred aura around Muslim history is dispelled: other Muslims’ ways of understanding the Koran are not sacred. There can be other ways of being faithful to the Koran’s message.

For many reasons, most of them historical, Islam has not yet made the distinction between its belief system and history. Christians speak of Christianity and of Christendom.

The word “Islam”, on the other hand, can mean a religion or a civilization, or even a memory, a history, or a social system.

This awareness of the historical dimension is new: until recently even “enlightened Islamic reformers” criticized the faulty way in which Muslims practiced their religion rather than consider the manner in which Islam was historically constructed.

4th point: developing this sort of thinking about history is fundamentally important. Defining Muslims as a homogenous entity, thinking for them, slows this down. Take the example of secularism:

The public debate has presented Islam as a specific case. Unlike Christianity, which suggests you should “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and render unto God that which is God’s”, Islam is said not to make a distinction between religion and politics.

This way of presenting Christianity – contrary to Islam – as essentially secular drains both religions of the historical dimension of their development.

Indeed, it was precisely secularism that forced Catholics to re-define their way of believing and of existing, free of the tutelage of state religions. (see ‘La Religion Pour Memoire’ by Daniele Hervieu-Leger, Edition du Cerf, Paris 1993).

A number of authors have shown how disenchantment with the world does not lead to the end of religion, but rather to the decline of traditional religious institutions and patterns.

One forgets that it was only at the end of the 19th century that Pope Leo XIII urged believers to abandon their aspirations to a “Catholic nation”, to give up their “dream of a theocracy” and to “rally to the Republic”.

So it is history, and notably secularism, that has led Christians to ask themselves what it means to be Christian in a secular society, and how they could be useful if God was no longer setting the rules? Then they entered the social sphere, and asked themselves “are we acting as Christians or in a Christian fashion?” Should we base our charitable work on Christian structures or on common law associations? And you get the same sort of debates among Muslims.

Today, many Muslims are convinced that the political system linked to Islam has more to do with Muslims’ historical experiences than with guidelines emanating from their sacred sources: that it is a simple human choice, one of many possible choices.

The first Muslims chose, at a certain moment in history, to give their community the trappings of a state for reasons that were strictly to do with their earthly interests at the time.

We must not shut ourselves up in ready made definitions. Being Muslim in a secular society is an experience that is still under construction. This secularism is a blessing, because it puts us in a new situation where we are forced to think about our Islam.

When you accept the historical and experimental dimension, different ways of seeing the world are not a threat but a source of wealth: because I don’t “Islamize everything”, because Islam has not “invented everything”, it is no longer in competition with other visions of the world.

When I accept the interplay between me and my Text, I can enrich myself with everything around me – different human beings with different ways of looking at the world – to build and hone my perception, my reception and my understanding of the holy message.

The more I enrich myself with other visions of the world, the better I can grasp the new dimensions of what God is telling me today. So the closer I grow to others – non Muslims and non-believers generally – the better I will understand my religion’s message.

5th Point: there is a direct relation between one’s relationship with the past, and history, and one’s relationship to others.

Fundamentalists deny the dimension of experience, they reject the idea that all interpretation derives from an experience of the world.

Their only way of remaining faithful to the Muslim message is to think like their pious ancestors. Contemporary questions are not addressed directly: instead, a similar case from the past is sought. The fundamentalists reason by analogy: what would the Prophet have thought of this question? Would he have drunk from this glass? Would he have worn these clothes?

Instead of referring to the Prophet, they identify with him. No need to understand, no need to think, no need for anyone else – repetition gives the impression of remaining true to oneself.

The past is made to re-live in the present. Instead of understanding the universe thanks to its history, they try to make it repeat itself.

They leap over chronology to enter a sacred time. There is an unhealthy relationship with the past, which is endowed with supreme power.

Fundamentalist groups approach young people in a fairly subtle manner: they seem to be so careful to be faithful to the Prophet that their radical-ness is seen as evidence of their attachment. None of Islam’s foundations are in question.

The youngster who wants to get close to God feels secure, he or she finds reference points, a place, a role, he fits in, and in order to match up he is ready to apply everything, down to the last comma.

The Prophet ate with his hands, sitting on the ground? Him too. The Prophet had a beard so many centimeters long? Him too. The Prophet’s wives wore long ‘niqabs’? Her too.

As for Islamists, for them Islam is not only a religion but a social system.

They sometimes support modern values, but they do not see them as the fruit of history, and of experience.

They would have you believe that values come before human history, that Islam enshrines them already, regardless of history.

Some young Muslims talk about “Muslim feminism”, or “Muslim ecology”. Others will tell you that the French government’s Family Allowance system was copied from the Koran. The indexed quotients by which the government calculates a family’s benefits - the result of a struggle for social rights at a particular moment in French history – are elevated to the level of the divine.

What we have here is a refusal to recognize a reality if it does not come from the way the universe is ordered by absolute divine Truth. Reality must match the sacred text like a carbon copy.

In fact the Islamists build up religion by giving it a content that puts it in competition with society’s organization: societies have produced nothing, everything is written in the Koran, other Muslims are backwards because they don’t know how to apply their religion, in fact Islam has detailed solutions for everything.

In order to adapt to modernity, Islamists Islamize everything societies have produced. The Islamists Islamize history.

Paradoxically, contrary to what one might think, it is the Islamists’ political motivation that leads them to evolve.

Because as soon as they find themselves with political responsibilities on the ground they realize very quickly that all the answers cannot be found in the Koran. To do their jobs properly they have to ‘de-Islamize’ and seek solutions elsewhere too. We have seen this abroad and in France.

Terrorists, on the other hand, build their identities outside history, and thus outside culture.

We have seen how fundamentalists situate themselves in a history on which they have stopped the clock and Islamists Islamize history as if it were a product of Islam. But Al Qaeda terrorists don’t situate themselves in any history; they construct their identities in a virtual manner.

I am talking here about Al Qaeda terrorists, not about other terrorist micro-groups active in specific countries who are fighting their battles at a national level against particular governments.

Young Al Qaeda members do not feel part of anybody’s story, even from the past, nor part of any culture nor any national polity.

He who has no memory has no future, Primo Levi said. Psychologists have studied the fundamental role that memory plays in an individual’s search for identity and dignity. These young people have grown up in memory black holes, each for his own reasons.

At the personal level they have grown up in such black holes and on top of that they find themselves in the middle of world events that themselves are disorienting.

They are “outside history”, “beyond place” in the generally frightening context of globalization.

As a general rule, the erosion of geographic frontiers between countries gives rise to theories that seek to impose new borders that have no concrete geographic existence. I am thinking especially of the “clash of civilizations” theory. We build walls to protect ourselves from others when those others get too close, or perhaps when they start looking too much like us…..

(As an aside, I often wonder nowadays whether it isn’t the right to be similar that frightens people more than the right to be different.)

These new abstract frontiers are defended all the more violently because they are made up, and exist only as imaginary constructs.

Bin Laden works at this level. He is not going to achieve a new Islam, or a new culture, or a new political project, but he is building strict frontiers with religion. His goal above all is to erect unbreachable barriers between those who are with him and everybody else.

I think one can talk not of “Islamic fascism” – I am not going to be like the Islamists and Islamize historical concepts – but of “Islamo-fascism”, which reduces Islam to a collection of codes and norms that separate those who are inside from those who are outside. You are either in or you are out.

But there is no history by which you might attach yourself to others. A substitute virtual community is created in a substitute virtual space. Which explains the success of terrorist internet sites.

Bin Laden is an apologist for rootlessness. He tells his followers “It is very good to be rootless, because that makes you a true internationalist”. That fascinates young people who don’t feel connected, who don’t know where they come from, nor where they want to go, because the message puts value on what they are already. Minus signs become plus signs. A disadvantage becomes an advantage.

Instead of telling these kids that they should put down roots, Bin laden tells them that they can be heroes of world revolution.

They are in a universe where they rebuild their demarcation lines without other people. Theological debates have nothing to do with this; it is a search for identity, for self affirmation and self realization that leads eventually to self exaltation and a sense of all-powerfulness. This is “Islamic ecstasy”, religious orgasm.

Theological knowledge does not much interest this sort of youngster, who is more into putting together and using a God for immediate application. That is why they are often Islamized after they have become radicalized.

Al Qaeda cannot stand places of exchange, where people meet and mix. That is why it chooses to target things that symbolically or in reality bring people together: tourism, means of transport, entertainment centers, or symbols of globalization such as the Twin Towers.

I hope I have convinced you how much shared human action produces new ways of believing. Religions do not advance through grand theories but through shared life experiences.

It is especially important to not enclose within the history of their ancestors young Muslims who live in the West. That is a part of their story. But they have to keep telling it. Today, every French person – whatever his or her memory, whatever his or her religion – should be able to play a part in France’s story. The way young Muslims are now demanding recognition for the role that their parents played in the Second World War is highly symbolic, because it shows that they are not as foreign as all that: their ancestors were already part of France’s history.

To build a common future, you need a common past.

To leave you with a little hope, I shall end with a short anecdote that should convince you once and for all that it is a shared history that makes us like each other, and brings us together.

In June 2003, Father Shoufani organized a visit to Auschwitz for a group made up half of Jews and half of Muslims. One evening, after listening to a survivor tell his story, 20 year old Khalifa, a Muslim from St. Denis (a poor suburb of Paris), fell weeping into the arms of Monique, a 67 year old Jewish woman from the 6th arrondissement (a very smart district).

“It made me realize how much we all need light,” Khalifa sobbed.

“I needed some silence” Monique recounted later. “We sat down together to share the silence, and then I talked about God. For me it was not mere chance that had brought us all together to Auschwitz. Khalifa was surprised that I was still talking about God. She said to me ‘You still feel His presence, after all this?’ I smiled and answered that I could see the light in His eyes. Khalifa couldn’t see it because she was in the sunlight. Me, I had come back from the night, and I can see in the dark, like a cat. I told her that I was leaving Auschwitz reassured: I knew that she would shine that light, so that there should be no more shadows. And that’s when she broke down.”

How to take the step from memories to common Memory? Monique made room for Khalifa, and Khalifa, who had been ‘outside’ this history, moved ‘inside’, charged with a mission, a responsibility, a purpose. Monique’s memory became her memory.

On the way back from Auschwitz, in the coach, the passengers broke up into groups. People had their arms around each other; they held hands; they rested their heads on each others’ shoulders. The Muslim Scouts and the Jewish Scouts swapped shirts, and knots of them would leap onto an adult from behind, all shouting “Which of us is Jewish? Which is Muslim?” before cracking up with laughter. They liked their new game. It could have been called “One race, the human race”. Thank goodness that kids can inject hope and lightness where we adults break down.