Do you want to have the Goncourt prize? Tap on Islam and Algeria!

The awarding of the Goncourt Prize to Algerian writer Kamel Daoud sparked controversy on social networks.

If some saw it as the reward of an author who had the courage to address taboo questions in his society, others did not hesitate to deny any literary value to this prize, considering that the committee Goncourt made a biased ideological and political choice.

How can we ignore the fact that the Goncourt committee did not reward just any writer, but rather a writer who has not stopped since his arrival in France from pledging allegiance to the most repugnant Islamophobic circles?

How can we forget that the writer rewarded today by the Goncourt is the same one who hit the headlines a few years ago by shamefully participating in an anti-Muslim cabal? Like the one linked to the sexual assault affair which took place on the night of December 31, 2015 in Cologne and other German cities, and which were initially attributed to North African immigrants.

In a stupid and dishonest shortcut, Kamel Daoud believed he was demonstrating great intellectual depth by making an essentialized and imaginary Islam endorse the crime committed by hundreds of young people, most of whom were alcoholics.

We will not address here the literary qualities of Kamel Daoud’s work, to the extent that he himself and his defenders do not hesitate to lead us into the terrain of ideological and political debate. Indeed, when a French TV show dares to compare him to Voltaire, it is clear that the pamphleteering aspect now prevails over the literary aspect.

In a podcast, the writer himself did not hesitate to present his particularity, by highlighting a writing committed against his country of origin and his religion as opposed to the organic intellectual of the south who has long been glorified , according to him, for his fight against colonialism.

In doing so, the writer sought to lock the debate into a false dilemma: either we attack multifaceted Western domination, or we attack the situation which prevails socially, politically and culturally in Muslim countries.

Sacrificing to a caricatured vision of Islam which has nothing to envy of the worst prejudices conveyed by the Islamophobic extreme right, the writer, who suggests that Islam constitutes the main factor in the underdevelopment of Muslims, n does not hesitate to make the fight against the Muslim religion the alpha and omega of the new emancipatory fight in Muslim societies.

The social underdevelopment plaguing Algeria, as in most Muslim countries, is not an illusion. In the case of Algeria, it is even permissible to speak of a deplorable social regression, insofar as the country, which during the first two decades following independence achieved enormous steps in terms of social progress , did not know how to best manage and negotiate the results of the rural exodus and social mobility which ended up giving new vigor to old archaic structures and retrograde mentalities.

To this must be added the sociological and psychological repercussions of the dark decade which traumatized and upset Algerian society, and which explain, at least partially, the social and cultural isolation pointed out by many Algerians loving freedom and social progress. .

However, this social regression has nothing to do with the Muslim religion itself. Religion, as it is lived in the societies of the Maghreb, cannot be detached from ancestral traditions inherited from history, and which have unfortunately experienced deplorable distortions over the last centuries marked in particular by civilizational decadence and domination of despotic and corrupt powers.

Furthermore, when they pretend to combat this social regression by attacking Islam and voluntarily placing themselves under the protection of the political, intellectual and media representatives of the system which produces underdevelopment and domination, the pseudo- intellectuals, who make the struggle for social progress a convenient business, are completely misguided.

How can we believe that we are engaged in a struggle for social progress when our “protector” is Bernard-Henri Lévy who does not hide his support for the genocidal war of the colonialist and racist state of Israel ?

Can we be for the emancipation of women in Algeria and for the massacre of women and children in Gaza at the same time?

Algerians who sincerely fight against social regression in their country know that the fight for social progress is inseparable from the fight for economic development and for the defense of the social state, which the new oligarchies dream of dismantling with the complicity of the circles neocolonialists of French Algeria.

To claim that the fight for social progress must necessarily involve the denigration of Islam is simply an imposture. On the contrary, the fight for social progress involves the revivification of the Muslim religion.

Five centuries ago, Europeans set out to conquer their emancipation by critically revisiting their historical legacy, from ancient Greece and Rome to the pioneers of modernity at the end of the Middle Ages.

Why should Muslims get rid of all their ancient religious and cultural heritage to emancipate themselves?

Why should the Muslim renaissance not also involve the critical reappropriation of the works of our illustrious predecessors, like Al Ghazali and Ibn Rochd?

Why should younger generations ignore, in their duty of Ijtihad and openness to universal culture, the contemporary works of representatives of the Nahda, like Jamal Eddine Al Afghani and Mohammed Abdou, and their successors?