Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism

408 Pages·2013·2.58 MB·English

by  Karima Bennoune

Boualem Yekker was one of those who had decided to resist, those who had
become aware that when the hordes confronting them had managed to
spread their fear and impose silence they would have won.
—TAHAR DJAOUT (1954–1993),
The Last Summer of Reason
For Leila and Mohamed Redha Kheddar, Abdorrahman Boroumand,
and Ahmad Reshad Mosadiq, who live on in the unquenchable human
rights struggles of those who love them.
For Amel Zenoune-Zouani, an Algerian law student. For the lawyer she
could have been, and the free woman she was.
For Lakhdar Bennoune, my grandfather, who died defeating colonialism
that his descendants might be free.
For all the Boualem Yekkers—female and male—still resisting.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Everything Looks Different Once You Have Seen “Death To”
Before Your Name
CHAPTER ONE
Creativity versus the Dark Corner: Tales from the Muslim
Culture Wars
CHAPTER TWO
Karachi Open Mic: Guardians of Cultural Space
CHAPTER THREE
The Imam’s Liberated Daughter and Other Stories: Women
Battling Beyond Stereotypes
CHAPTER FOUR
To Speak Out and Die: Journalists Writing for Their Lives
CHAPTER FIVE
Growing Roses in the Triangle of Death
CHAPTER SIX
Reading Spinoza in Tehran
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Ramadan Basketball Tournament
CHAPTER EIGHT
Why I Hate Al Qaeda: Surviving and Challenging
Fundamentalist Terrorism
CHAPTER NINE
Sidi Bouzid Blues and the Green Wave: Journeys through the
Arab Spring and Fall
CHAPTER TEN
The People of Al Qaedastan: Voices from Northern Mali
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A Baby Cries at Qalandia Checkpoint: Opposing Injustice in
the Struggle against Muslim Fundamentalism
CONCLUSION
Raise Your Voice While Singing Is Still Possible
AFTERWORD
Your Fatwa Still Does Not Apply Here
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
INTRODUCTION
Everything Looks Different Once You Have Seen
“Death To” Before Your Name
_______________
C
ould I defend my father from the Armed Islamic Group with a paring knife?
This was the question I pondered on Tuesday June 29, 1993. That day I woke
up early in Dad’s apartment, on the outskirts of Algiers, Algeria, to an
unrelenting pounding on the front door. It had been exactly two weeks since the
murder of Dr. Mahfoud Boucebsi, the country’s leading psychiatrist, and one
week since the assassination of Mohamed Boukhobza, a sociologist and former
colleague of my father’s at the University of Algiers. As a local newspaper
described the season, “at the time, every Tuesday a scholar fell to the bullets of .
. . fundamentalist assassins.”1 Boucebsi and Boukhobza, and others, had been
killed that year by the Muslim fundamentalist armed groups that plagued
Algeria’s predominantly Muslim population. The learned Dr. Boukhobza was
tied up in front of his daughter and had his throat cut.
One Tuesday later, and at the same time of day, unwanted visitors were
outside the entrance to the home of Mahfoud Bennoune, professor and
outspoken critic of successive Algerian governments and the armed
fundamentalists who opposed them. My father’s teaching of Darwin had already
provoked a classroom visit from the head of the Islamic Salvation Front, who
denounced him as an advocate of “biologism” before Dad ejected the man. Now,
whoever was pounding on the door would neither identify himself nor go away.
We tried to ascertain who might be outside with him. Inside the apartment, my
father was not frightened for himself, but visibly worried for me, then a law
student visiting for the summer break. He tried repeatedly to phone the police.
Perhaps terrified themselves by the rising tide of armed extremism that had
already claimed the lives of many Algerian officers, the local police station did
not even answer. We were alone to face whoever was on the other side of the
door.
That was when I went to the kitchen, found a paring knife, and took up a
position inside the entryway. What happened to Dr. Boukhobza was not going to
happen again here, I told myself. I don’t know what I was thinking: I am not
exactly the combatant type. My father looked at me and rolled his eyes. But I
could not come up with anything else to do. So there I stood.
That moment set me on the path to writing this book.
It was the very beginning of a journey that would eventually lead me to
interview about 286 people of Muslim heritage from twenty-six countries to find
out how they fought fundamentalism like my father did, and how they coped
with the attendant risks. My hope is that telling the stories of those who have
truly faced the fire to battle extremism will be a far more useful contribution
than my attempt to deploy a kitchen utensil was.
Fortunately, on June 29, 1993, the unwanted and unidentified visitors
eventually departed. We never knew why, or exactly who they were. Perhaps
they were deterred by watching neighbors or by the industrial-strength metal
frame my dad had just installed over the frail wooden portal to his apartment.
Whatever made them go away, someone would return a few months later,
leaving a note on the kitchen table: “Consider yourself dead.” They would
scrawl “death to” on the mailbox, tragicomically misspelling it in French (mor a
Bennoune). The world looks very different once you have seen “death to” before
your name.
Subsequently, Algerian fundamentalists would add Mahfoud Bennoune’s
name to “kill lists” posted in extremist-controlled mosques in Algiers, along with
the names of so many others—journalists, intellectuals, trade unionists, women’s
rights activists. They would murder more of my father’s colleagues, his friends
and relatives, and as many as two hundred thousand Algerians during what came
to be known as “the dark decade.” No matter how awful things became, the
international community largely ignored these events. Like the local police who
would not even answer our urgent calls in June 1993, the world would leave all
those victims to fend for themselves.
Finally, my father, an Algerian peasant’s son turned professor who had spent
his entire life building the young country, would be forced to flee his apartment
and give up teaching at the university. Life in Algeria as we had known it during
my regular visits—in an ordinary apartment in a cité in a then-quiet suburb of
Algiers—was over.
EAT, PRAY, HATE
My father’s country showed me in those grim years of the 1990s that the
struggle waged in Muslim majority societies against extremism is one of the
most important—and overlooked—human rights struggles in the world. This
remains true twenty years later. In this book, I will describe as much of this
antifundamentalist engagement as I can, and tell the stories of those who make
it, because they deserve to be known and remembered.
This is a very personal account of my peregrinations there and back again,
across every kind of border, to record these oral histories. I sometimes joked to
myself that I was writing, Eat, Pray, Hate. Or perhaps Fast, Pray, Hate.
I hope that readers will come along on my trip, and view the landscape
through my eyes. My perspective—that of a secular person of Muslim heritage
concerned with both rising fundamentalism and increasing discrimination
against Muslims—is rarely heard in the West. In the post-9/11 era, this is all
contentious subject matter often seen only through right-or left-wing versions of
the so-called clash of civilizations, a set of paradigms I reject. For me, the
clashes within civilizations, like those between fundamentalists and their
opponents everywhere, are much more defining today.
Nevertheless, writing about Muslim fundamentalism in this era for an
American audience feels like dancing on a minefield. I have decided to do it
anyway, given that what I face is merely a metaphorical minefield, while many
of those you will meet in this book confront something rather more like the real
thing and continue to speak out anyway. They sing and dance and write and joke
and bare their heads and speak their minds and claim equality and the right to be
themselves when all these things are forbidden by fundamentalists, sometimes
on pain of death.
I think about a Pakistani woman I interviewed in December 2010 who with
considerable courage, sitting in a crowded place near where a militant’s bomb—
and the militant himself—had exploded some two weeks earlier, looked at me
and said, “Personally, I am an atheist.” She does not stop there. “In the sixties
and seventies, I could openly stand in public and say, ‘I am an atheist.’ Today,
dare I say it? I would be killed.” But here she was saying it to me in public
nonetheless, without lowering her voice.