Dounia Bouzar

What Does it mean to be a Muslim in a Secular Country?
Some opening thoughts...

Is anyone still thinking when it comes to Islam? One thing is sure, someone is always ready to speak out on someone else's behalf. This is not really about racism. No, people don't hate us French Muslims. It's just that they think for us. They're convinced they know us. We're no longer individuals, we've become a group. We represent the group and they've already figured us out. How can we break out of the ready-made assumptions of politicians, the media and Islamists to become actors of our own history?

When Nicolas Sarkozy appointed me to represent French-born Muslims on the French Muslim ommunity Council, the CFCM, one headline read, "Sarkozy chooses his beurette." No, I'm not anyone's beurette; I don't feel one bit like a beurette. Why must we be forever differentiated? As if being Muslim shut me off in a circle, defined me once and for all. I am in fact a pure Parisian, as French as they come! And as such, the Republican doctrine taught me to say "I" and gave me the intellectual tools to deconstruct everything: religious discourses but also political, media and institutional discourses! All those who talk of Muslims based on what they see in other countries… How can anyone think that my vision of the world could be the same as that of an Iranian who grew up in the throes of Islamic revolution or that of the Chadian woman, living alongside five other women and struggling every day to feed her children? How can one think that when I - a researcher who lives in Paris - open my Koran, I understand the same thing as an old Egyptian peasant grandmother who has never left her kitchen?

To think that people are defined by their religion is to accept the Islamists' approach! I think just the contrary: It's not religion that makes the man (and even less the woman!), but the individual who understands his or her religion according to the degree of evolution of the country in which he or she lives.

In France, secularism puts me in a new situation. I can no longer look abroad to find answers to my questions. Old interpretations no longer give any meaning to the new situations I experience here and now. I have to ask myself what I myself understand of my divine message, according to my reality. I have to think, review and revisit my Islam. And I realize that every search for meaning, every interpretation, always comes from an experience of the world. Which is the same thing as saying that the standards presented by preachers as sacred always come from human understanding. That they come to us from social and historical processes, based on men's interaction with their text. The Koran remains the same, but mens' understanding of it depends on their experimentation.

And now for women. Because here we are … Living in the midst of society, it's strange, we don't have the same understanding! What is sacred? The divine message or the ways of understanding it? I regard Muslim history as unsacred. I untangle the divine message from the historical structure in which it was played out. Men used the Koran to structure the world as they saw it. Words don't just describe the world, they shape it. I stretch language: Away with images and symbols that are solely masculine. I name things too. I'm the one who writes. So, non-French Muslims and non-Muslim French, stop thinking for me and let me become the author of my story!

Beurette: feminization of the popular and somewhat condescending term used for Arabs.

Webmaster: Markus Haag – Graphic Design: Maya Ayad – Last updated: 06/30/05