TRIBUNE. The historian, a Maghreb specialist, read the latest work by the liberal essayist Ferghane Azihari, contributor to Le Point. A book whose “political and intellectual pugnacity” he salutes.
The only precedent I know of to Ferghane Azihari’s book, Islam against modernity (2026, Éditions La Cité), dates back to 1983, when the former correspondent of Monde in Egypt, the Marseillais Jean-Pierre Péroncel-Hugoz, published Mohammed’s raftafter the Islamic revolution and the assassination of Sadat. Afflicted by the litany of injustices done to the Copts by Islam for centuries, haunted by the fate of Iran which passed into the hands of the mullahs in 1979, and by the cruel Lebanese civil war which destroyed the only Christian Arab state, the journalist revealed what was in his heart against the French thugs of Islam, and against the evils of Islamism ready to devour the countries of Islam. His freedom of thought cost him his position, his reputation, his notoriety in France, to the point that he took refuge in Morocco for life.
43 years later, after his predictions were validated in a Middle East ravaged by five decades of war, a young 32-year-old journalist, French of Comorian origin, delivers a resounding essay which resonates with him. After the night projected by the Islamic Republic on the Middle East, the author exercises a right rarely used in matters of Islam: his total freedom of thought and expression. But the settings of the world and the author have changed radically.
Imaginaire de la conquête
No one in Europe is now unaware of the scale and radicality of the Islamist phenomenon, which has engulfed the Middle East, from Algeria to Afghanistan, and which has taken root in Western Europe, scarred by unimaginable mass killings. Everyone is aware that the imagination of Islamic conquest has captured a myriad of organizations established in Europe, encouraged by the high authorities of global political Islam: Erdogan tells his emigrants never to integrate into Europe in order to establish an Islamic counter-power there.
While the Islamic Republic is dying, Ferghane Azihari’s position is no longer compromised. It revokes the Islam/Islamism dichotomy, invented around 1980 to separate the Islamic wheat from the chaff of the mullahs and the Muslim Brotherhood. He recalls that Islamists present themselves as the best Muslims, a quality that cannot be denied since they pride themselves on applying the Koran to the letter, to resurrect the original times of Islam.
To organize Islam in France, our authorities are struggling to find interlocutors other than the Muslim Brotherhood and foreign consulates (Algeria, Morocco and Turkey), due to the lack of an organized collective body, whether “French” Muslims, Sufis, secular Muslims or Republicans, atheist Muslims or independent Muslim women, etc. The Muslim Brotherhood preempts representation by calling itself “Muslims of France”. Who protested apart from the very isolated imam Hassen Chalghoumi?
Essence divine
Ferghane Azihari assumes her position as an atheist of Muslim origin, without acrimony or provocation. Exercising his freedom of thought guaranteed by our Constitution, he pushes the reflection to its conclusion: for him, Islam is a mythology all the more formidable because it presents itself as irrefutable, the Koranic text specifying the unenviable fate reserved for those who refuse to embrace it, and promising death to apostates from Islam. The author deplores that Islam is eschewing the historical-critical approach that Christianity and Judaism ended up accepting, after Ernest Renan imposed it.
Because Islam presents itself as purely divine in essence: the Koran would be the word of God, and the prophet Mohammed his mouth. There is no need for history or historicization in this transcendental vision: Islam is a self-referenced and tautological religion, which gives no importance to what is done outside it, neither before Islam, nor alongside Islam, nor during or after Islam.
The Quran of Historianspublished in France in 2019, a collective work of high quality, historicized the little-known life of the Prophet Muhammad, and the writing of the Koran, the corpus of which was fixed centuries after his death. This historical elucidation enterprise has not attracted the slightest attention from the leaders of Islam in France or elsewhere: a secular work, it escapes the gaze of those who profess Islam or Islamism.
Taboos and totems
But the author does not limit himself to the relationship of Islam with our times. In her documented work – which has 65 pages of precise references and indisputable quotations – Ferghane Azihari presents the birth of the Islamic phenomenon within the Eastern Roman Empire. It is not the work of a historian – neither thesis nor dissertation – because the style is that of a documented essay, pamphleteer in substance – it pushes into each page several totems and taboos relating to the Islamic conquest, the destruction of previous cultures, Islamic colonialism, from the invention of the millennia-old African slave trade to its abolition imposed by the Europeans – but rigorous and well-founded in form.
The message is clear, the style limpid and rigorous; the concern to inform and quote can give the impression of a whirlwind, but the concern to demonstrate is so assertive that it achieves its ends. Ferghane Azihari first emphasizes that Islam inserted itself by force into the refined world of the Hellenized Christian East, whose frameworks and borders it shattered, as much towards North Africa and Europe, as towards Persia and the Byzantine Empire, which it destroyed and aggregated.
Against European orientalist academic scholarship, he asserts that if Islam was first nourished by Greco-Roman and Persian science, to the point of building a brilliant cosmopolitan imperial medieval civilization, it ended up drying up and devitalizing these cultural contributions. The closure of theijtihad (free interpretation and debate) in the XIe century, dear to Mohammed Arkoun (Algerian historian, Editor’s note), is not its key to interpretation. The author prefers withdrawal into the hard Islamic core, its impermeability to external civilizational contributions (the persistent refusal of printing), and fixation on the Islamic dimension of human and social life.
Weakness of Westerners
Jean-Pierre Péroncel-Hugoz écrivait that « colonialism » was not responsible for the state of Islamic civilization, “a beautiful death” according to him, because “There was nothing left to destroy”. Ferghane Azihari says nothing else. He updates the subject to the post-colonial sequence.
Without exonerating colonization from its defects, it underlines the deplorable situation of the Islamic world in globalization, whatever the criteria adopted: political freedoms and democracy, development and creativity, the state of science, women’s freedom, publishing, etc. He calls on his ex-coreligionists in Europe to take note of this situation, because they are condemned to remain in Europe, and to draw the consequences that reason imposes.
Finally, he deplores the signal weakness of Westerners, who fail to overcome post-colonial guilt, which has become structural and paralyzing. It places Europe in a state of « colonisabilité » (to reverse the concept of the Algerian intellectual Malek Bennabi, cited by the author) by conquering Islam, a hypothesis that Ferghane Azihari refuses with all her political and intellectual pugnacity. There is no doubt that his book is a shock that will challenge any lucid reader.
*Pierre Vermeren is professor of contemporary history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, specialist in the Maghreb and Arab-Berber societies.
