Things are moving positively among Muslims in France and you don’t know it. Normal, no one bothers to tell you… Rachida Dati is pregnant and you know it only too well? No wonder, all the press is talking about it. What relationship, you say? It’s very simple: the custom consists, in these dear European countries – and especially in France -, of presenting, in the Islam department, only defective products, outdated practices and morbid codes of honor.
Boys prone to violence and budding terrorists; misogynistic males not hesitating to veil their daughters or to impose a husband on them, when they do not think of annulling a marriage for vice of hymen; obtuse practitioners who push French courts to adjourn trials because of Ramadan… The list, as we can see, is long.
And now a fulfilled Muslim like no other displays a round belly on all the covers of magazines, without embarrassment or headscarf, and no one applauds! The baby, moreover, was conceived out of wedlock, and his family does not say a word or throw stones at him… Yet the father of the child is not identified – the height of hchouma (“shame”) – and Rachida does not conceive any embarrassment to let it be said… The male lineage being sacred among the Arabs, is there no “big brother” to wash in blood the honor of the Keeper of the Seals? Nobody, either, to accuse him of zina (“fornication”), hated by Allah? Didn’t the ulemas of Morocco or Algeria, where Rachida has her roots, issue fatwas?
One can legitimately wonder why the French media, so quick to invoke the Muslim religion (to make it, often, the cause of all evils), have forgotten the cultural and religious origins of the French Minister of Justice. As if by magic, pregnant Rachida Dati would have ceased to be an “Arab woman of North African origin”, as we usually caricature her? For once that proof is made of the tolerant and modern reaction of Islam in France, I think that it was now or never – perhaps even the duty – to make it known. And rather twice than once, instead of continuing to glean fatwas from gutters…
Therefore, dear colleagues, dear colleagues, even if I have been taught that the job of a journalist consists first of all of reporting on the trains which arrive late, I beg you to testify, at least for this time, that the train of Islam has conformed to world time. You who constantly refer to a minister who is “symbol of the community”, “emblem of immigration”, sometimes accusing her of being the “Beurette on duty” (to the great displeasure of the person concerned), I pray, go ahead without hesitation, abuse the community label, say loud and clear that Rachida is a Muslim of immigrant origin! And above all, do not forget to point out that neither her pregnancy outside marriage, nor her atypical love life seem to shock Muslims. It will be a victory over obscurantism as much as over Islamophobes of all stripes.
