Najat El Hachmi: "Islam was never a feminist and never will be"

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Najat El Hachmi (Beni Sidel, Morocco, 1979). Writer and feminist, she was born in a Muslim family but at 8 years old she moved to the Catalan town of Vic. In They have always spoken for us (Ed. Destino) denounces without ambiguity how Islam discriminates against women.

There are those who argue that Islam and the veil are feminists. What do you think? Saying that is a misrepresentation and tremendous manipulation. Islam was never feminist, never. Nor will it ever be. Defending that Islam is feminist is nonsense. And above all, a danger. What danger does it mean to say that Islam is feminist? The danger is that many very young girls are buying that speech, they are growing with it. And the most effective way to perpetuate injustices and discrimination is to deny them. When a woman in Spain who has converted to Islam states, for example, that she has never experienced any type of discrimination because she has become a Muslim, she speaks from ignorance. He was not born in a Muslim family, he does not know what it is that from a very young age you are taught that your body is a problem, that your sexuality is conflictive, that you have to marry as soon as possible and with a Muslim, that if you fall in love with a no Muslim you are the worst of the worst ... And how did you resolve the conflict between being a feminist and being a Muslim? Monotheistic religions are born in patriarchal societies, and what they do is to regulate that patriarchy in a normative way. There are women who try to make their religious beliefs compatible with equality. For me being a Muslim and being a feminist is incompatible. When I reflected on the discrimination I had suffered, my faith was broken, because you cannot objectively analyze all that construct and at the same time continue to believe. I cannot read Muhammad's life, realize that there are countless things that as a woman violate me tremendously and continue to admire the prophet. I ended up being a non-believer. And stop being Muslim is complicated? Yes. Stop being Muslim, even in Spain, it is still a very, very, very taboo subject. I state that I am not a believer precisely to make it visible, so that it can be seen that you can stop being a believer even if you were born in a Muslim family, which is an option. Because that option is not visible anywhere. And when you raise it is very conflictive. I have never proselytized my atheism, I have never told anyone what to believe or not to believe, I did my individual process. However, I have to endure a lot of religious proselytizing. Is the veil a free and personal decision? The debate about the veil has always focused on whether you choose it freely or impose it on you. I don't care about that. What you have to analyze is what it means to be forced to cover yourself. Because you are forced to cover yourself by rules, you are not born with a headscarf. The veil is put on and educated in normalizing what is really a specific discrimination towards women. Because no one says anything about their bodies to our Muslim brothers, nobody puts scarves on them, nobody covers them. If they go to the beach they can go quietly with a swimsuit and that does not alter their value as a person. However, for Muslim women to teach more than the account means to question our virtue, our dignity, everything. If the veil is a sign of the discrimination of Islam against women, should it be banned? Not adults. But at least in primary education it should be banned. The veil in childhood makes no sense, even from a religious point of view. In Morocco, girls didn't wear a handkerchief before, in my town they didn't wear it until they got married. I thought that the Muslims put on the veil when they started menstruating ... That's the version that the fundamentalists make. As I said, in my town you started to wear the handkerchief when you got married. But there too that has changed and the veil is getting younger and younger girls. The problem is that for fear of stigmatizing women who freely choose the veil, all the discomfort and pain that many of us experience is allowed. And what can not be silenced that reality, because that reality exists. I have lived it in my own skin. And many Muslim girls are also living in complete silence, because they have no chance to go out and talk about it, because talking and breaking the circle of silence has consequences for them. What made you rebel and break the circle of silence? ? I was forced to wear the veil when I was 20 years old and I got married, because in my town in Morocco it was the sign of married women. And it was the worst times of my life. I felt nullified as a person, I felt that they were castrating me. I had grown up in Vic and I was ashamed to introduce myself to people I had known all my life with the handkerchief, with something I didn't feel at all as my own. It was a simple imposition. And if I hadn't had a daughter to take care of, I don't know what I would have done. It was the worst time of my life. And how do I get out of that situation? I tried to negotiate with my family, because the idea of ​​breaking was terrible for me, it is terrible. So for years I tried to negotiate. But there came a time when I realized that I always had the ones to lose, that I was not advancing. I assumed that the break was inevitable. Then it is true that you rebuild, but the conquest of freedom is very hard and very painful. It is not easy. But when I see today how my daughter lives, the relationship she has with her own body, the relationship she has with the boys and how she feels no less than anyone else in any area I think: it was worth it. If I had consented to continue in that negotiation in which I always lost, sooner or later my daughter would also have to pay the price. If Islam causes many women in Spain to live discriminated against, why don't the authorities or political parties talk about it? Because nobody dares to open that melon, nobody wants to be accused of being racist. They fear more fear of being accused of racists than being blunt with certain clamorous situations of discrimination against women. For me that attitude is deeply racist, because what you do not want for your daughter you are allowing for the daughters of others. You know that your daughter is going to school and she is going to be able to make her pigtails and put her clips in her hair. And if you know that there is even one girl who has to go with her hair covered because hair is a problem, you are being complicit in that injustice. And it is not just the handkerchief, what we suffer is a flagrant discrimination from a very young age, living in conflict with your own body, not being able to go swimming, not being able to learn to swim ... Shutting up the parties are leaving of functions. The second generation Muslims, those born in Spain, are living a regression situation? Yes. It is not about analyzing people at the individual level, but about analyzing standards that we have endured for a long time and that continue to hold many young Muslims who live in a Western society, in which they listen to trap and dance twerking but they have to cover up with A burkini when they go to the pool. It is insane. What has caused that regression? That regression is the result of many factors. On the one hand, the Muslims in Spain do not know very well our culture of origin, neither in the religious nor in the political nor in the historical ... And to that it is added that the fundamentalist currents are increasingly present. Before they were in the mosques or they reached you through the satellite dish, but today they enter you directly by WhatsApp. For example, they send me sermons on WhatsApp. In social networks the religious element has become very important. Through them a great collective pressure is exerted, a form of social control such as that which works in neighborhoods or in families. If you hang a photo of you with a miniskirt on Facebook for example, an uncle from Morocco who has not seen you in years has thrown you out on Facebook. Do you think that this regression can also be partly a reaction to the far-right parties that maintain a clearly anti-Muslim discourse? Yes, there are cases in which there is a kind of identity resistance to all that. What do you not want me Muslim? Well, I'm going to be more Muslim than ever. What don't you want with a handkerchief? Well, I'm going to wear it. But in the end that is getting into the trap of those racist currents that what they are looking for is differentiation, isolating ourselves from others, putting ourselves against the wall. I am not going to act according to what the extreme racist right says, they will not condition my way of acting or doing. We have known for a long time that we are not interested at all, that they do not want us at all, they do not listen to us when we point out their racist fallacies. They want us out of the country, they want to expel us, they don't have any sensibility towards Muslim women. The idea that only Muslim women have the right to comment on the veil is being imposed ... Indeed, it has been imposed that only those who are in that reality can talk about it. And something even worse: there are girls who argue that the fault that people believe that Islam is sexist is that of the Western white woman, who has misrepresented that religion. As if the western white woman had no other things to do ... It is a very dangerous speech, because the western white woman is accused of what Muslim women live. Congress decided to suspend the greeting to a delegation from Iran after denouncing Vox that women could not shake hands with men ... Vox has no legitimacy to talk about it when on the other hand he wants to repeal the law against gender violence and Denies the pain and suffering of Spanish women. All Moors or all Christians: either they defend the rights of all women, regardless of their origin or religion, or it makes no sense. I believe that what is being tried is to use the situation of Muslim women against the Spanish feminist movement. It is like saying: "Look how they are in Iran, they are suffering, you complain about vice." But here there are murders every day, there are violations, there is wage inequality, there is continued harassment, scandalous cases and countless other things that are insulted with data, which are not simple proclamations. How do you imagine your daughter in 20 years? Daughter is now 7 years old. She is super warrior and combative, and I hope that in 20 years she will continue to be. It has many things clear that it took us a long time to assume, and that is very good. Those of my generation, here in Spain, I do not speak of the Muslim context, we received the message that there was no need to fight anymore because everything was done. We confuse legal conquests with social change, we think that one thing would automatically bring the other. And no, you still have to fight a lot. Changing attitudes, mentalities, is the most complicated.

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