Silvia Orriols proposed a couple of weeks ago that the Quran be banned because, according to her, what is said in it is barbarism. Dictators, authoritarians, and fascists have that urge to burn and ban books, I don't know if it's because they've never read them or because they can't stand the fact that there are consciences that endure on supports as light as paper. Eternity on thin sheets transmitted through the centuries. The holy book of Muslims, taken from a literary point of view, is a very interesting work full of stories, imagination, and fantasy. The snag is that so many millions of people over the centuries suffer from the quixotism that religious people call faith: confusing fiction with reality. The Quran also has very boring passages, and if it were an original aspiring to be published, any editor today with a minimum of professional judgment would take scissors to remove superfluous repetitions, worn-out clichés, and other defects in the supposedly sacred text. Some of its fragments are sublime, with rhythm and musicality, images of enormous beauty and lyricism. My favorite surah, which I still remember from the times I memorized it in the oratory on Ramada street in Vic, is the first one revealed to Muhammad when he took to going alone to the mountain. Or so says the official history of Islam. That the angel Gabriel appeared to him and told him the first word that would be used to found a religion that today has over a billion believers. Gabriel told him: Read! Thus, with such a categorical imperative. Something that surprised the future prophet because, according to the myth, he was completely illiterate, a merchant who traveled Arabia and the Middle East buying and selling things but without any ability to decipher written letters. "Read!" the messenger angel repeated to him. "Read in the name of your Lord, who created you from a drop of blood," etc. In this, I confess that I have been very obedient to my parents' religion. If Gabriel had stopped at the beginning of the surah (Read, damn it, read!) perhaps I would still be a Muslim. But that miraculously appearing being from nowhere kept returning with the ups and downs typical of someone who insists on writing a long book, sometimes more inspired and sometimes not so much. 

There is a chilling report on the ARA. about influencers IslamicOne of them, a young, Spanish-speaking man with oratorical skills, advocates female obedience to her husband in any circumstance (including that of an overstepping husband, whom, we will not suffer, Allah will surely punish). the editorial from two days agoRegarding this issue, we read that "the danger of radicalization is real and cannot be underestimated" and that "leaving its denunciation in the hands of an extreme right wing that spreads Islamophobic discourse—with solutions like bans or expulsions, which go against respect for individual and religious freedom—is also a worrying danger."

Just as we have previously focused on changes within the Catholic Church or on crises of faith among young people, this Sunday we turn our attention to one of the religions with the most followers in Catalonia: Islam. It's not easy, because although there are 319 mosques in Catalonia, it's unknown how many imams there are, what countries they come from, or what their ideology is. The same is true in other European countries, but many governments have begun to take steps to better understand the situation in order to prevent radicalization and, above all, to facilitate a better understanding of the country's social and cultural reality. Journalist Mònica Bernabé has spent months investigating who the imams of Catalonia are and has spoken with countless experts. The conclusion is that Catalonia lags behind the rest of Europe in this regard.

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.

In that country you can appear on public television and tell lies and nothing will happen. Najia Lotfi was invited as a Muslim woman to the Ideas Cafe Gemma Nierga and set herself up as a representative of all those who belong to this religious denomination, hiding a relevant fact: that she is not only a believer, but a member of an Islamist party. That is, a political party whose ultimate goal is the establishment of an Islamic state based on Sharia law. It's not that she's a sympathizer or that we can attribute any affinity to her with the Justice and Development Party (PJD), but rather that she was a member of parliament. With a strange gift of ubiquity, she was one during Ada Colau's first term, and while in the Moroccan parliament she was part of the ranks that want the lives of all Moroccans to be based on the Quran, in Barcelona she was inventing a supposedly ethical bank and receiving subsidies from the city council, and I didn't care.

The Islamic veil isn't exactly the tip of the iceberg, but it's close. The veil is a sign, a symbol, proof of how the human landscape of our streets has changed, and it's a subject of political debate.

A 73-page report commissioned by the French government on the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood –The Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islam in France– It points to a process of "Islamist entryism" that, according to authorities, threatens national cohesion. The text warns of the Islamist movement's strategy to infiltrate various areas of French society: from places of worship to schools, as well as by deploying extensive activity on social media and occupying local economic structures.

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.