We are not Arabs

The French Ministry of the Interior published a few weeks ago a report called Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islam in France in which he warned about the dangerous penetration of this organization, whose values run counter to the principles of the Republic (and any democratic system based on individual freedoms and the separation of religion and state). One of the measures the French government has taken to counter the Brotherhood's influence has been the decision to promote the teaching of foreign languages, some of which are the mother tongues of the children of North African immigrants. What is striking is that Amazigh is not among these twelve languages to be offered. Regarding the issue, Rachid Raha, president of the World Amazigh Assembly, has written to Emmanuel Macron in which he warns against the error of mistaking Franco-Berbers for Arabs. "Discrimination against the children of immigrants," says Raha, "accentuates their cultural uprooting and reinforces their identity crisis, which facilitates their isolation and ultimately leads them to be drawn to Salafi Islamist ideology." Raha cites an anthropologist (Tassadit Yacine) and two historians (Pierre Vermeren and Omar Hamourit) to affirm that the second language of France is Amazigh, not Arabic.

The French case could be perfectly extrapolated to what is happening in Catalonia, although we have no official report on the extent of Islamism in our country. It is enough to speak with Muslims about religion to discover that, in many cases, the ideas and beliefs of this specific—and, in fact, modern—way of understanding religion have gradually permeated people's consciences, and in many cases, have replaced an identity of origin that has nothing to do with either the Muslim Brotherhood or Salafism. When a young girl, "a lifelong resident here," who is unaware that there are laws based on the Quran that specifically discriminate against women, claims that the machismo she observes and suffers at home or in the neighborhood is not due to religion but to culture, what she is demonstrating is the success of this process of cultural substitution. This also includes linguistic substitution, because Amazigh or Darija (the dialect of Arabic spoken in the Maghreb) become invisible under the theocratic domination of fundamentalisms.

It is not in vain that Islamism has successfully spread this simple but false idea: that Islam, practiced and transmitted for centuries, has been corrupted by pre- or para-Islamic cultural traditions that must be purified to return to the supposedly original and "authentic" religion. In this way, the children of immigrants are acculturated to their own roots and are even confronted by their own families, who are branded as ignorant by these organizations. The entire diversity of the Muslim world is thus being erased in a global process of substitution whose ultimate goal is totalitarian uniformity. And a clear victim of this cultural and linguistic colonization is the mother tongue of many Europeans descended from immigrants, who cannot appreciate it because it is often not even known to exist. If I have to take my own experience in this field as a reference, it would not be surprising if Amazigh were not only the second language of France, but of many other European countries. I could navigate many of them with this language alone; I just need to listen carefully. In Catalonia, Carme Junyent had been estimating for years that Amazigh must be the third most spoken mother tongue in our country. It would be good if this were valued and officially recognized, if ways were found to connect the new Catalans with their true roots and thus protect them from the siren call of Islamism.