First and foremost, Eid Mubarak! Indeed, all Allah’s faithful and we, their friends and relatives, have cause to celebrate and rejoice at the auspicious completion of the holy month of Ramadhan. The discipline, sacrifices and prayers of the believers must have brought all of us a bouquet of benefits and blessings, both seen and unseen.
One of the blessings that, I think, the Muslims of France, and people of goodwill everywhere, ought to be celebrating is the defeat of Madame Marion Anne Perrine ‘Marine’ Le Pen at the recent presidential elections. I, too, am rejoicing at the French voters’ decision to keep her out, and I know you will be surprised at my response, for two reasons. First, you are aware of my habitual cautious distance from politics, and, secondly and more importantly, you know my passionate love for women, and especially women in leadership roles.
What we have in Marine Le Pen, however, is much more serious than politics or a woman’s fair aspiration to public office. She represents a complex of negative human and cultural values that threaten both the present and the future of decent society as we understand it. You heard that Le Pen ran for the Presidency on a ticket of the “far right” National Rally party, of which she is the head. Now, “far right” is a political euphemism for narrow, hard-line, intolerant and supremacist extremism in western countries.
Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is supposed to be a “de-demonised” (softened diabolical) version of the National Front party founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 1972. Indeed, Marine expelled her father from the party for expressing “extremist” views. The difference, however, between Jean-Marie’s Front and Marine’s Rally are largely cosmetic, and consist mainly in the rhetoric.
The ubiquitous toxic attitudes of the Rally, as of other far right outfits elsewhere in the Western World, are basically “anti”-everything liberal and open-minded, and everything-“phobic” (hating) that does not strictly conform to their blinkered worldview. Thus, the “far right” is not only racist and supremacist (irrationally supporting ethnic superiority of their own group). Among their many phobias are xenophobia (hating all outsiders/foreigners) and islamophobia (hating Muslims). It is also anti-Semitic (hating Jews and other Mid-East peoples), anti-multiculturalism, anti-globalisation and anti-immigration.
Mention of islamophobia and anti-immigration stances illustrate the nearness of the “far right” threat to us, and the relevance of its recent defeat in France. We should not think of such developments as those things happening out there, with little or nothing to do with us. In many ways, they have a lot to do with us . The rise, in the past few years, of far rightist tendencies in the US, for example, witnessed not only beastly brutality visited on Black people in broad daylight but also our dear lands being branded “-hole” countries by the top authorities there.
In the case of France, the “anti-liberal” and multi-phobic excesses of Le Pen’s far right is the last thing that the country needs, especially in view of its history, which created its current reality. Do you know, for example, that France has got the highest Muslim population in Western Europe? This is the direct result of its colonial adventures, especially in North Africa and the Sahel and other West African countries, regions which are overwhelmingly Muslim.
Because of the French colonial policies, which regarded all its overseas territories as provinces of France, many of the natives of those countries ended, and still end, up in France, “assimilated” there as French citizens, while retaining their faith. A particularly complex case is Algeria, where the lines of French citizenship are indissolubly interwoven, even six decades after the bitter struggle that led to the country’s independence.
How can you espouse islamophobia, discriminating against Muslim citizens simply on the basis of their religion? Yet Madame Le Pen had promised that one of the things she would do as President would be to ban the hijab.
France would face the same dilemma if they opted for the racist discrimination of the far right. The “France Overseas” policies, mentioned above, meant that many Black Africans have always had full access to most metropolitan French institutions. Historical characters, like Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal and Houphouet Boigny of Cote D’Ivoire, for example, were Deputies (MPs) in the French National Assembly before they became Presidents of their independent countries in the 1960s.
There has been a sizeable Afro-French population in France for many decades. Do you remember the French national football team that won the World Cup some years ago? It had a majority of players of African descent, and despite the many snide remarks about their victory, it made an emphatic point about the multiracial, multicultural nature of French society.
Then there is the “Francophonie”, a kind of union of French-speaking countries, comparable to the English-speaking Commonwealth. This includes even those countries which ended up speaking French because it was the language of their colonisers, like Belgium. This is how our East African relatives, in DR Congo, Burundi and Rwanda, ended up in the Francophonie.
Incidentally, do you know that the Secretary-General of the French-speaking club, known officially as the “Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie”, founded in 1970 and headquartered in Paris, is an East African? Ambassador Louise Mushikiwabo, former Rwandese Foreign Minister, is the woman at the helm, and I do not know how comfortable she would have been with a far right leader like Marine le Pen. Much as we may root for female leadership, we have to agree that there are women but there are also ideologies, and some ideologies are dangerous whether held by men or by women.
The bottom line is that, although far rightist tendencies seem to be gaining ground in many countries, the majority of decent people are still prepared and willing to oppose them and defeat them in a straight fight. This is what happened in the US in 2020, and it is what happened in France last Sunday.
