Gorton and Denton is an electoral district in Greater Manchester. Where there were once mines and textile industries, there is now poverty. Elections were held in Gorton and Denton on Thursday, and the seat went to the Greens, followed by the far-right Reform Party, and in third place, Labour. The Conservatives didn't even show up. The result demonstrates how the political map of the United Kingdom is changing. But there's something even more interesting: the Greens won thanks to the Muslim vote.

1714 is a well-established and significant date in the history of Catalonia. A thousand years earlier, in 714, it should also be remembered as a milestone: it is when Berber and Arab Muslims completed the conquest of the entire Iberian Peninsula in what is now Catalan lands (only Galician, Basque, and some Pyrenean territories remained untouched). The invaders then continued north: Narbonne (720), Toulouse (721), and Carcassonne and Nîmes (725). In present-day Catalonia, Girona and Barcelona offered no resistance, but Tarragona did, and was destroyed and abandoned, as did Badalona, ​​Mataró, Terrassa, and possibly Empúries. All of these areas became part of Al-Andalus—there is much debate about the correct spelling—within the Islamic Umayyad Empire, governed from the city of Damascus, now in Syria.

Who were the members of the first wave of Islamic migration to Girona? They weren't soldiers with a thirst for conquest, but rather family groups who came from various parts of North Africa, the Arab world, and even Europe. This is one of the findings of the first genetic study of the remains from the 8th-century Islamic necropolis on Carrer Galligants in Girona, discovered in 2016 during excavations to renovate the building that had been the former Hospital dels Capellans and now houses the Aqva Gerunda baths. The area served as a cemetery for 200 years, from the first quarter of the 8th century until the first quarter of the 10th century.

There is a vast difference between living in a secularized society and one that is not. Getting rid of theocratic domination and separating religious power from political power is undoubtedly one of the culminating moments in human history. Those of us born into a democracy have already found ourselves in a world where no religion is law, but anyone with a modicum of memory can recall what it was like to live under the obscurantism of National Catholicism.

The Muslim community in Catalonia is significant: there are more than 300 places of worship and nearly 700,000 members, most of whom are practicing. Their presence is visible in many neighborhoods and cities. Young people don't attend synagogues as often, partly because many imams don't speak Catalan or Spanish, but they do follow sermons on social media.influencers Muslims, some of whom are linked to jihadism. The danger of radicalization is real and cannot be underestimated. Leaving its denunciation in the hands of an extreme right wing that spreads Islamophobic rhetoric—with solutions like bans or expulsions, which violate respect for individual and religious freedom—is also a worrying danger.

One of the hardest things to understand when we become feminists is the role of mothers in transmitting sexist values. Countless young women have told me this, explaining that to advance their liberation they not only had to confront the figure of their authoritarian father but also another woman—the one who gave them life. The question we've always asked ourselves is: why do they impose on us the same rules that harmed them? Why, having suffered the ravages of a lack of rights and freedoms, do they want to subject their own daughters to the same system? Perhaps mothers can't teach their daughters to be rebellious, they can't turn them into outcasts if the general context isn't conducive to change. That's why equality is only possible when it's collective. In the case of women of Muslim origin, this transformation is being interrupted and slowed down by various factors. One of those who will now finish burying us in the misery of Islamic patriarchy will be precisely the extreme right, which rails against practitioners of Muhammad's religion for their sexism but silences us and proposes racist measures that will especially affect women. I watch helplessly as Aliança Catalana rises and I feel more like a foreigner than ever in the country I consider my own and which I believed was equipped with more intelligent resources to combat fanaticism than another kind of fanaticism—in this case, identity-based, supremacist, and exclusionary. The redundancy is understandable.

Reality repeats itself to the point of boredom, and that boredom can be a deterrent when it comes to writing about what's wrong, what's unfair, what's discriminatory. That's why, much to my chagrin, we need to be tiresome.

Exactly a decade ago, in mid-2015, a terrorist cell was taking shape in Ripoll. It was made up of nine young men and led by an imam. They were young (between 15 and 26 years old at the time) and there were four pairs of brothers. Two years later, one of them drove a van at full speed, destroying everything in his path, on Barcelona's La Rambla. Hours later, other members of the cell sowed panic with knives on the Cambrils seafront. It was August 2017, and sixteen people were murdered. What led nine young men, most of them raised in Catalonia, to embrace jihadism? Today we are a little closer to answering this question with certainty.

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.

Muhammad was a feminist because he had the generosity to recognize that women have souls and because he loved all his wives equally, even though his favorite was Aisha, whom he married when she was nine. Allah is merciful and compassionate because in the Quran he said it was unfair for men to keep the entire inheritance and that daughters were entitled to half of what sons were entitled to. In his infinite consideration for us, he also established that our witness was worth half that of a man's witness. Girls, what more could you want? If the Holy Book also makes it very clear that we owe obedience to our father and husband, surely he would do it for our own good. And when he recommends that men keep us on a tight leash if we don't comply with his dictates, he does so by proposing a graduated scale of punishments. Don't be barbaric, gentlemen: first take away her word, then keep her away from her bed, and if, even then, she doesn't obey, hit her. Fundamentalist Islamists and publicists of Islam in the West have made all kinds of dialectical curves to deny the patriarchal structure of the religion, from blaming the evil and malicious translators, probably Islamophobic even if they have dedicated their entire lives to working on the Quran, to transposing them. daraba, what does it mean paste for all Arabic speakers except proselytizers living in democratic and open societies. Some even claim that the root of the word actually means ""hit gently." They focus on interpreting the ways in which male domination should be exercised as if the most scandalous thing were not precisely the domination itself.

In the bazaar of Khujand, Tajikistan's second-largest city, women in hijabs and abayas, others in European clothing with their hair uncovered, and others with scarves tied around their necks and colorful tunics, strolled until May of last year. Now, however, one of these garments has been banned. In a country with a Muslim population of over 90 percent, one might think that the state has banned wear your hair uncovered. But no. In Tajikistan, which is constitutionally secular, the woman who is fined is the one who wears the hijab.

Last week, I met Turkish sociologist Pinar Selek at a conference in Paris. She is exiled in France because Erdogan is persecuting her for her defense of women's and Kurdish rights. A committed feminist, she explained that outside her country, she had established relationships with other women who had fled misogynistic regimes like Iran and Afghanistan. Since the situation of Islam in France is a topic that always generates heated debate, I dared to ask her what relationship they had with women of North African origin and their defense of a feminism rooted in religion, so-called Islamic feminism. She considered her answer and told me that, while they stand in solidarity with women who suffer from racism, there is no way to make their fight for equality compatible with what is disseminated by an Islamic order. And I realized how well Islamists of all stripes have performed in Europe, where in theory the democratic and liberal framework and the long history of feminism should have allowed for the emergence of a women's liberation movement that would fully challenge theocratic power and its discriminatory morality. Of course, this feminism of women born Muslim, which promotes equality through secularism, also exists in Europe, but unfortunately it is disparaged, considered "unrepresentative" or an eccentricity, a rarity. Selek herself told us about the complaints of Tunisian women who led the fight to achieve equality in inheritance (which is still half that of men in Muslim countries) and had received no support from feminists on the Old Continent. "They only see us if we wear a headscarf," said one of them, with the anguish of knowing they had been abandoned by those who boast about intersectionality and diversity but show no solidarity with the oppressed on the southern shore of the Mediterranean.

Since the 18th century, Islam has failed to respond to the challenge of the West. It has either taken refuge in an obscurantist regression or followed the West with nationalism or a caricature of modernity based on technology and the worship of money, like the elites of the Golf monarchies. This is how expert Jaume Flaquer explains it. Reformism within Islam, which exists, fails to achieve this.

Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan translates as “I am here, Pakistan!”. It is the motto of an Islamist movement that was born in 2015 among those who demanded the release of a bodyguard who murdered the governor of Punjab, in the north of the country, for criticizing Pakistan’s blasphemy law. The fines of this law, created to maintain the sanctity of Islam in the country, go as far as the death penalty. This movement became a political party, the TLP, which in the last elections won three million votes, without ever having representation. It all seems very far away, but from these acronyms has emerged a radical, violent and terrorist ideology that kills blasphemers and that has reached our home.

A few years ago, together with the psychologist Pilar Arlándiz, I organized a reading club in the public library of Ripoll. Among the people who attended the activity was Sílvia Orriols. There was still time before she entered the town hall. I recognized her when she intervened to ask me a question whose answer, if I answered honestly, could only confirm her racist and xenophobic postulates. The situation was not new to me, that of Aliança Catalana could be exactly the offspring of another essentialist whose political party only had one point in its electoral program: making life impossible for its Moorish neighbors. I am referring to Josep Anglada, who, when I was in high school, dedicated himself to stoking the fire against immigration in neighborhoods like our organizer. activities like the collection of signatures against the opening of an oratory. The difference between the leader of Plataforma per Catalunya and the mayor of the capital of Ripollès, also from Vic, is that she cannot be blamed for the clearly fascist past that Anglada had, who had been a member of Fuerza Nueva. Although seeing the little eyes she makes at Vox when it suits her, ignoring the fact that it is a formation that deeply hates Catalanism, I would not be surprised if she ended up establishing the alliance with that other nationalism, Spanish but as exclusive and morophobic as hers.

Two splendid tables occupy half of the dining room. Sali and Nadia, who are sisters, have taken care of every detail. Today is the first day of Ramadan And, in addition, two journalists come to the house. Avocado and banana smoothie, tea, harira (which is a soup that has everything except pork, obviously), sweets, empanadas and dates, as is the Muslim tradition. Sali's children, Yassin, eight years old, and Rodayna, ten, look at the table as if they had also gone all day without food, but they are too young to fast. "I tried to do Ramadan, but I turned on the television and on all the channels they were eating... and I got hungry," says the frustrated little boy while the family laughs.

Comrade Xavi Tedó wrote a report on the impressions of the "Muslim community" of Ripoll that had this headline: "Sílvia Orriols doesn't want us to integrate, she wants us out of here". The subtitle read: "The Muslim community of Ripoll, disappointed with Junts for having distanced itself from the motion against the Catalan Alliance." The report featured Mohamed Bahloul, who was having tea in the Esperanza café, "meeting point for the Muslim community in Ripoll"; Bilal Elkasmi, president of the El Fath Association, which manages one of the two mosques; Rashid Elmarajie, a faithful who was leaving prayer, and Omar Elabdali, president of the Moroccan Youth Association of Ripollès.

On Wednesday, the French judge sentenced eleven people to sentences of between four and six months in prison (which they will not serve) for having cyberstalked a teenager who had criticised Islam with rude words through Instagram. The sentence, which according to the same judge should "set the rules of what is acceptable and what is unacceptable" on social media, can create jurisprudence. "In the street, when we come across someone we dislike because of their physical appearance or their statements, even if they are offensive, we refrain from insulting them, threatening them or laughing. What you don't do in the street, don't do on social media", said judge Michaël Humbert.