Kahina Bahloul: "Islam has not known an intellectual and modern revolution"

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Kahina Bahloul.

Paris, 1979. She was the first female imam of

, which earned her constant death threats from fundamentalist Muslims.

In

(La Llave) she advocates an Islam in keeping with modernity.

He says that Islam is going through a crisis of thought, that it has not been able to adapt to today's world.

To what does he attribute it?

The reason for the crisis that Islam is going through is multifactorial, and it is necessary to go back to recent history to understand some things.

I believe that poverty, intellectual and spiritual misery, is one of those factors, but so are economic, social and political misery.

And we must not forget or minimize the role that colonization played in these consequences.

Keep in mind that most Muslim and Arab countries have known colonization until recently.

This is the case, for example, of Algeria, a young country that has not known the exercise of power by the people;

the people who now hold power there have to remember that the older generations, the ones who brought them up,

they couldn't access that power, there hasn't been a transition.

And there is also the problem of ignorance: we colonized countries have been plunged into ignorance.

At least since the 19th century, if not before, there has been a significant movement of reformist thought in Islam.

And yet, it is fundamentalist thinking that has prevailed.

Why?

The main factor is the financial support that fundamentalist and fundamentalist Islamism has received.

Saudi Arabia, a very rich country, has, for example, spread the Wahhabi ideology (an ultra-conservative current of Islam).

When this ideology has a political power behind it, and even more so if it is an extraordinarily powerful oil monarchy, that happens.

However, reformist thinkers have had their pen as their only weapon.

One of the aspects in which the inability of Islam to adapt to contemporary times is perhaps most profoundly manifested is the woman's body, don't you think so?

Undoubtedly, the woman's body is at the center of the concerns of patriarchal power, it is a central political issue.

But this is not something specific to Islam.

However, and having said this, we can establish a difference between the Muslim world and the Western world.

The Western world has known an intellectual and modern revolution, while Islam has not.

One of the causes of this difference, as I have said before, has been the colonial movement, which has caused the countries that have been under that domination to suffer an involution, not an evolution like the one that other countries have had, both intellectually and socially. ,

philosophical and technological and that has led them to modernity.

Countries that have been under colonization have been left with an archaic mode of operation.

Does Islam today have a problem reconciling faith and reason?

Yes probably.

But again: Islam, as a religion and as a spirituality, has the problem that it comes from a state of involution.

Because of colonization, no evolution has been possible in the Muslim world.

Islam is not at the origin of not taking reason into account, in fact in Islam we have had great thinkers, great philosophers, and an important rationalist movement.

What happens is that the human and social development that the Muslim world has had has meant that the only hope in those countries not to fall into depression, because life in them is very hard, is to cling to religion and spirituality. .

The Muslim population has not had access to the proper tools, they have not had access to an enlightened religion,

religious experience has itself been a consequence of this situation.

Because it is not religion that makes society, but society that makes religion.

The Hambalite school, the most ultraconservative and puritanical of Islam and the one that has prevailed in many places in recent years, makes a literal reading of the Koran, including those verses that call for violence, right?

Yes, and it not only affects those verses that allude to violence, but it is something that has affected the place that reason occupies.

The Hambalita school constitutes the foundations of the fundamentalist movement and is based on not taking into account the reason why human beings do not have too much freedom;

it leaves aside philosophy, theology and mysticism to be as close as possible to the text of the Koran, to the letter of the text, and does not interpret it.

That is a serious mistake, because when the historical dimension is not taken into account,

human and philosophical knowledge of a sacred text with a very strong symbolic content, very big mistakes can be made.

It is true that Islam has a very large prophetic tradition, what happens is that it is a body of apocryphal texts.

Those texts are not attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, but were produced in the 12th century by anonymous people.

You maintain that in the Koran it does not say at any time that women should wear a veil, right?

Exactly that's it.

And how do you explain then that in Algeria, for example, there are now many more veiled women than there were when you were a child?

In Algeria we see the level to which the fundamentalist movement has reached, which has dominated religious practice and has dictated the ideological orientation and religious norms.

Fundamentalist Islam has not won the armed battle in Algeria, where the army intervened, but it has won the ideological battle.

While the true reformist current is in the direction of human evolution and of interpreting the texts in harmony with the challenges of the time, on the contrary, the fundamentalist current has diverted these texts from their initial intention, which has led to a kind of myth about the origin of Islam completely invented,

In recent years, a so-called Islamic feminist movement has emerged that embraces the veil as an act of faith and identity, and has greatly contributed to the widespread use of the veil by Muslim women in Europe.

What do you think?

In my book I dedicate an entire chapter to the veil, because I wanted to present the detailed theological argumentation that shows that in the Qur'anic texts it is never said that there is a religious obligation to wear it.

This obligation is the result of a human interpretation, and like any human interpretation, it has human conditioning.

At the origin of the idea that women are forced to wear the veil is an interpretation carried out fundamentally by men, the logic of a patriarchal system that has always had the objective of controlling the woman's body.

But I insist:

Koranic texts are exempt from this obligation.

If it is considered that the body of women can be provocative for men, why are measures taken on women and not on men?

It should be precisely this way, men should try to control their own impulses and do some work on themselves before trying to control women, that is the spiritual prism.

However, in the Hambalita school and in other schools, the prism that prevails is enormously normative, very legal.

This should lead us to ask ourselves: is the objective of the sacred text to produce norms or to produce a spirituality?

My conviction is that it is the latter.

But it is something closely linked to the history of all human societies, which have come to regard religion as a norm.

In the liberal Fatima Mosque in Paris, you lead Friday prayers in front of a mixed congregation of men and women together, you are the first woman in France who dares to be an imam.

Is that why she gets death threats?

I believe that these threats should not be given more importance than they are or amplified.

I think they come from young people who hide behind a screen to send messages and insults, but I have not received real or physical threats.

And isn't it surprising that it is precisely young people who oppose the modernization and reform of Islam that you preach?

Young people today make religion a very important identity issue.

Religion in general and Islam in particular are going through a very complex situation, and so are many young Muslims, who have an identity and social positioning problem, who feel marginalized and excluded from today's Western society.

And these young people find that the only space of dignity left for them to defend is religion,

and they cling to it, and fantasize about it a lot.

In their eyes, Islam is the best religion there is, but this reveals a deeper problem that is linked to a situation of exclusion, education, an inferiority complex inherited from colonization... That memory of colonization , which is still there and from which we have not yet freed ourselves, hurts.

Islam is there in the middle and becomes an identity issue for these young people.

If Islam is not reformed and modernized, what risks can it face?

I believe that every religion, every society that does not evolve, that does not accompany an evolutionary movement that is typical of life in general and of human life in particular, that remains sclerotized, has a first stage of involution.

But if we go further, it can lead to disappearance.

Every society or social group that does not know how to accompany an evolutionary movement enters into a regression and can end up disappearing.

How is the Islam that you would like to see established?

It is an Islam that has already existed in history.

Being in Spain, I believe that the closest Islam in this sense is that of Al Andalus, one of the most beautiful references of what Islam has produced throughout the history of humanity, both in scientific knowledge,

philosophical and mystical as in his fantastic social life.

That Islam, which has also existed in other parts of the Muslim world, is a model, and that reassures human beings.

The human being needs models, he needs to remember that something has already existed in order to have the peace of mind that he can reproduce it.

The Islam of enlightenment, enlightened Islam, has always existed and we can revive it, always bearing in mind the challenges of today.

In whose hands is it that enlightened Islam can be implanted?

I think we have a collective responsibility.

Obviously, the first responsible are the Muslims.

But it also concerns non-Muslims, for example, the media, which can do a lot of damage when they only deal with the issue of Islam related to terrorism, which creates a lot of confusion.

And it is also the responsibility of non-Muslims in the view they have of the Muslim world, in the view they have of the other.

That is something very important, because depending on that gaze, the other can close in on himself or open up.

The fact that the Muslim religion does not have a single figure of authority at its peak, such as the Pope in the Catholic religion, could it make it difficult to carry out the necessary reforms for its modernization?

The central clerical authority is something very Catholic.

The fact that Islam does not have a visible head is something positive, it is a peculiarity of Islam that gives it flexibility, that offers it greater compatibility with modernity.

Decentralization is one of the values ​​of our current society, democracy and freedom are a consequence of decentralizing thinking, secularism itself is.

The fact of not having that rigidity of a central power, something that Judaism does not have either and that is specific to Catholicism, can allow greater flexibility.

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