by ADAM SHATZ
Women who were caught up in the Cologne attacks describe their experiencesPHOTO/Independent
Algerian writer/journalist Kamel Daoud PHOTO/Wikipedia
‘I write in French to tell the French that I am not French,’ the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine once said. ‘The French language was and remains a trophy of war.’ In his novel Meursault, contre-enquête (a retelling of Camus’s L’Etranger), Kamel Daoud, one of Yacine’s most gifted heirs, slyly suggests that the coloniser’s tongue is not so much ‘war booty’ as ‘biens vacants’ or ‘vacated property’ – something Algerians are free to inhabit however they wish, much as they did the homes abandoned by the French who fled in 1962.
The game of appropriation, however, goes both ways. To write on a topic as polarising as Islam and sexuality – as Daoud did in two columns earlier this year, one in Le Monde, the other in the New York Times – is to risk, if not invite, a counter-seizure of one’s own words. But not even Daoud could have anticipated the scale of the ‘Affaire Daoud’, whose latest participant is Manuel Valls, France’s prime minister and one of the most outspoken defenders of the state of emergency imposed after the 13 November attacks in Paris.
On 31 January, Daoud wrote a piece in Le Monde headlined ‘Cologne, the Scene of Fantasies’. The causes of the sexual attacks by a group of Arab men in Cologne on New Year’s Eve had not been established by the German police, but ‘fantasy did not wait for the facts’, and neither did Daoud. In his view, the horrors of Cologne – and of the anti-immigrant backlash it provoked – were the result of a collision of ‘fantasies’. One was the racist fantasy of the anti-Muslim European right, who saw men of Arab origin as barbarian predators, attacking ‘our’ women, and called for an immediate halt to Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming Syrian refugees. But Daoud soon turned his attention to two other ‘fantasies’: the ‘angélisme’ or naive optimism of the left, which, he said, refused to acknowledge the challenges of integrating refugees from the Arab world; and the place of women in the Muslim world:
The woman is denied, refused, killed, veiled, locked down or possessed … She is the incarnation of the necessary desire and is thus guilty of an awful crime: life … The woman’s body is the culture’s property: it belongs to everyone, not to her … A woman is a woman for everyone, except for herself.
Daoud said that while he supported the integration of Syrian refugees, its success depended on changing ‘souls’. To ‘welcome’ is ‘not to cure’.
Daoud’s column elicited a stern response from a ‘collective’ of 19 academics, most of them affiliated with Western universities. ‘The Fantasies of Kamel Daoud’ was published in Le Monde on 11 February. Daoud, it said, had recycled ‘the most well-worn Orientalist clichés’, thereby lending himself to the ‘Islamophobic fantasies of a growing proportion of the European (and American) public under the comfortable pretext of refusing to engage in a naive optimism.’ As for his argument that European governments would have to change immigrant souls, this was a recipe for ‘colonialist paternalism’.
On 12 February, Daoud published an editorial in the New York Times, headlined ‘The Sexual Misery of the Arab World’. Though he had written it much earlier, the timing made it seem as if Daoud were responding to – even baiting – his accusers. He entered the ring swinging: ‘After Tahrir came Cologne,’ he began, and went on to depict ‘Allah’s lands’ as a virtually totalitarian space, where ‘Islamists have a de facto monopoly on talk about the body, sex and love,’ where pre-marital orgasms, pleasure, even love have been made impossible; where sex is taboo yet ‘determines everything that’s unspoken’. After Cologne, he concluded, people in the West are now ‘discovering, with anxiety and fear, that sex in the Muslim world is sick, and that the disease is spreading to their own lands.’
I think that Daoud, who is a friend of mine, was mistaken to link the Cologne attacks to the ‘fantasies’ of a ‘sick’ Muslim world. But I recoiled at the inquisitorial and censorious tone of the letter from the ‘collective’ to Le Monde. I also found it disturbing that Daoud could be dismissed as an ‘intellectual who is part of a secular minority in his country, where he struggles against a sometimes violent puritanism’. Daoud is not a typical secularist; he has read deeply in classical Islam, and is close to Algeria’s minister of religious affairs. What he rejects is the intrusion of Islamist doctrine into politics. A ‘sometimes violent puritanism’ is a mild, if not sanitising description of what Daoud has faced as the target of a radical Islamist cleric, Abdelfattah Hamadache, now on trial for calling for Daoud’s execution on Facebook. And though Daoud is hardly representative of the Algerian ‘masses’, he is no more in a ‘minority’ than the authors of the ‘collective’ are, and indeed much less so: he has a sizeable Algerian (and North African) audience, who delight in his audacity and wit, and even his rhetorical excesses. For them, he’s the classic impulsive rebel – Camus’s ‘homme révolté’ – who dares to say publicly what others will only think.
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