“Hands clasped on his knees, Daoud says he wants to share ‘a few words about Aboubakar, someone who was cherished by everyone.’ Tears in his eyes, he speaks of ‘his great heart and kindness,’ describing him as ‘a poor man, but rich in spirit.’ According to several worshippers at the mosque, Aboubakar Cissé was homeless and dedicated his life to his faith and to the mosque, where he spent much of his time. ‘To me, he was an ambassador of Islam. Every Muslim would aspire to be like him,’ says Hamza.
[...]
Praising a quiet man, Daoud adds: ‘It may sound surprising, but it was precisely his discretion that made him so well known.’ Excerpt from Mediapart.
When I was a child, my father would take us to the mosque on certain Fridays (he always gave us the choice to come along), I would sometimes come across gentle, devout souls like Aboubakar. In France, just as in Egypt, they had that quiet aura I associate with certain Buddhist monks, almost hermits, whose asceticism grants them an indescribable presence.
Even as an apostate, a part of me grieves with a broken heart at the cruelty of his assassination and the deafening silence that followed, the relentless minimization of such crimes when they strike an Arab, a Black man, an Asian, especially when he is Muslim.
I still remember the man who threatened to kill me last year, hurling racist insults simply because my face displeased him : “If I see you in the street, I’ll kill you.” Since that moment, every threat carries the scent of suspicion, even if racism isn’t explicitly stated.
“Why was he so cruel to me? Why such vehemence?”
Or when someone you once appreciated replies, with a cold detachment, after you calmly ask, “But where will the Palestinians go if we drive them from their land ?” because apparently, it's reasonable to dismantle with meticulous savagery a strip of land inhabited by people, all under hollow pretenses :
“They’ll just go to other countries. Anyway, there are already too many Arab nations as it is.”
Too many Arabs, too many Muslims… Is this the corollary of what unfolds today ? Why not erase our existence altogether, simply to better deny it?
After visiting the exhibition Banlieues Chéries at the Museum of the History of Immigration, I arrived at the final room where each visitor was invited to write a thought:
“In my dreamed suburb, I can…”
Hundreds of messages covered the walls, each beautifully written; filled with hope and peace, with anxiety, fear, resolve, the desire to be free, and to no longer be hated, nor forbidden...
The testimonies were edifying and deeply moving. They reminded me of the intentions I’ve read in church prayer books, or the wishes written by the Japanese on ema (絵馬) plaques in Shintō shrines.
When I came across an old newspaper clipping titled Convergence 1984, I read it with great care. It stood, in my eyes, as one of the exhibition’s centerpieces, because today, we’re reading what someone else had already written back in 1984.
That article reveals how we remain trapped in a fateful spiral :
“This initiative was born because we are tired of seeing the same thing, over and over. This observation can be summed up in a single word : Retrenchment.
Despite the efforts of many, despite attempts at openness, Retrenchment still reigns in this country.”
I grieve the extent to which an entire population, of which I am part, a generation more educated and intellectually equipped than the last, continues to be cast into oblivion, reduced to what it is not, to what it does not represent.
All of these individuals, within an expanding collective consciousness, are still seen as parasites in society, as profiteers, as threats to security, as agents of economic decline, as the cause of an alleged erosion of French identity...
It is this very same corrosive logic that, in other contexts, gave rise to the Shoah and to the Nakba.
This dark blindness, this complicit silence, weighs upon Muslim peoples across the globe with unprecedented gravity from the Rohingya to the Uyghurs, Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Afghans, Palestinians, Yemenis, Sudanese...
If it continues, this grim enterprise will soon engulf us here in Europe. A new brown wave is rising inexorably and with it, anything associated with muslims will be devoured.
Hatred has seeped into the newspapers, the media, institutions, and political discourse, poisoning the minds of those who once had no opinion and built one from Cnews (French version of Fox News), Twitter, or Instagram, rather than through knowledge, or speaking to those affected.
Because it takes time and effort to form a well-grounded, philosophical perspective. That’s incompatible with the instant gratification of social media, whose purpose is not to prompt reflection, but to inflame our irrationality for the sake of propaganda.
In the end, we never realize we’ve been indoctrinated or that we’re yielding to evil, even in its most absolute form, because it always comes with a reason, a justification.
It’s an irresistible grip, because we all want to believe we are in control of our destiny, rulers of our own kingdoms, sculpted by peak individualism. Alas, it’s only an illusion, because in the end, we are all slaves to those who hold the reins, until the wind of awakening consciousness spread although the world in echo, to ancient time to this contemporary era.
Alas, it’s only an illusion, for in the end, we are all slaves to those who hold the reins, until the wind of awakening consciousness spreads across the world, echoing from ancient times to the present era.
…Ultimately transcending determinism.
Younis M.