“Islam began as something strange and will end as something strange. »

Hadith Sahih (words collected from the prophet by Abu Hurayra according to Muslim)

"The world began without man, it will end without him".

in Sophie Bessis, The double impasse, Universalism put to the test by religious and market fundamentalisms, ed. Discovery.

“Call that God, the Absolute, if it amuses you, what does it matter to me, provided that you do not give this word God any other meaning than the one I have just specified; that of the universal combination, natural, necessary and real, but in no way determined, neither preconceived nor foreseen (underlined by Bakounine), of this infinity of particular actions and reactions which all really existing things incessantly exert on each other. others. »

Rivière, Economic Contradictions, Volume 2. Quoted by Daniel Colson, Anarchy and Religious Facts, in Mondaymatin#55, April 4, 2016.

“If the role of the African elites is in question – there too it is up to the Africans to disentangle, for their own account, the web of responsibilities – it must be recognized that the dice of liberal globalization – at work since the 1970s – are loaded. In this vast game of lying poker, Africa accumulates disadvantages: the aftermath of colonization, rules systematically set by others and changed at will, political marginalization... Because, ultimately, the West decides everything: Keynesian, monetarist, interventionist, liberal, communist… He always asks questions and answers…”

Anne-Cécile Robert, Africa to the aid of the West, ed. From the Workshop.

“_Stalingrad. This is where the British turn things around. In the book, Rommel would never have operated his junction with the German armies coming from Russia, those commanded by Von Pallus. And the Germans would never have been able to go to the Middle East to get this oil they so badly needed or to India to make, as they succeeded, their junction with the Japanese. And… "

Philip K. Dick, The Master of the High Castle, ed. Poached.

“Nearly all the great discoveries,” she asserted vehemently, “have been made by chimpanzees. »

In these troubled times of violence, attacks¹ against a backdrop of identity exacerbations, confusionism², variable indignation, in question of the universal or the abstract idea of ​​virtue and morality (Plato), it is more than urgent to place intelligibility, a rational empirical knowledge (Aristotle), to disentangle, or at least try to understand the root causes of this disarray of postmodern Man in the face of these storms³ of History and time. Actions, whether voluntary or involuntary, are the product of several factors and several causes. They are not reduced to the essentialization of an individual or a group, but to more complex realities and interactions with each other that we will try to develop here.

First of all, is it out of pure provocation, in a context of passionate even hysterical Franco-French debate on the "gangrene of Islamo-leftism in our universities" and "separatism" that to affix to the syntagm "islamo" the term "anarchist" in the epigraph of our article? The word Islam today is so much the same media obsession as communism was under McCarthyism. Maybe. Reflection that arises in the complexity of a globalization experienced here in France as not happy, but declinist⁴, populist⁵, even resentful⁶ , contrary to what Alain Minc had prophesied, but rather resembling what Christopher Lasch had sensed from the 70s and 90s in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy⁷. Giving rise to the emergence of inter-socialities⁸ or the return of populism⁹ to quote Bertrand Badie. And echoing the reality or chaos experienced by the Middle East¹⁰ and Africa, particularly in the Sahel¹¹ (reservoir of resources for our energy-intensive civilization), without which the globalization would be impossible, like the maintenance or rather the perplexity or even the incomprehension¹², of what the Dominican father Adrien Candiard, Understanding Islam or rather: why we don't understand nothing¹³, explains in his excellent book. To remind you for the umpteenth time that it is time to restore all the complexity of a subject and a reality that cannot be reduced to a media Manichaeism driven by the urgency of emotion¹⁴, and an electoral deadline to prepare for the presidential elections on the worn-out theme of immigration, insecurity and Islam. As if political responsibility for territorial segregation and the problems of urbanization, unemployment and insecurity had not been at stake for decades, and stemmed from an imagination or representations¹⁵ maintained either by a form of denial¹⁶ or laxity, or by historical or even systemic political practices¹⁷. In short, a ghettoization¹⁸, even de facto Americanization via the culture of Hip-Hop and Rap and other Gangsta-Rap conveyed by free radios (eg, Skyrock). And the apology for a culture of crime¹⁹ (Scarface, Heat, La Haine, My city is going to crack, The prophet, The world belongs to us, etc.) oscillating between fascination with American codes of Bad Boys and a form of fatality, even miserabilism of a lost youth²⁰ drifting either towards nihilistic delinquency (Les Miserables) or towards “Islamization” or radicalization²¹ (Made in France). Referring back to back the reactionary analysis of a Pascal Bruckner²² or "poor little white²³" and of a whole fringe of the intelligentsia close to identity theses or even far right²⁴. And more generally, as if the whole history of Christianity and all Christians could only be reduced to the abuses of extremists²⁵, like Judaism and the Jews of today 'today²⁶ assigned²⁷ to an injunction of identity²⁸ or even community²⁹, once the spearhead of modernity and avant-garde movements³⁰. Postmodernity, identity crisis, loss of meaning, of landmarks, what Bernard Stiegler had described as disruption³¹. Why should it be any different for Islam and Muslims³², or at least of Muslim culture? Hasn't the figure of the Arab³³ been held hostage since colonization³⁴ and the Orientalist tradition³⁵ for purely political and ideological issues³⁶?

Dialogue of the deaf³⁷, the tragedy of modern Islam to resume Hamadi Redissi³⁸ and the Decadence³⁹ of the West, who run in the same way after their glorious past, in a multipolar and complex world where they are no longer the center of the world, but part of the world, like the negative, the inverted mirror that the most extreme would have us believe. A sort of inseparable Abel and Cain.

This is why the reflection on "Islamo-anarchism" could not be more serious, and opens up multiple perspectives and in a broader way, beyond ethnic origins or philosophical or religious persuasions. , in short, a universal reading. Even if this thought and this reality, and we will come back to it, is located beyond the frameworks that one would like to establish arbitrarily according to a traditional vision of Orientalism or current Islamology⁴⁰ circumscribed to an Arabness or an “inseparable Islam⁴¹” conveyed by our media eager for scoop and buzz. Whose neo-religious⁴² or rather neo-traditionalism⁴³ instrumentalized in a geostrategic game and in a context of economic competition and global commodification is rarely highlighted or even criticized. What Georges Corm returning to the historical and geopolitical reality and the marginalization or even concealment of the diversity of culture⁴⁴ and Arab critical thought⁴⁵ from memory collective for utilitarian or even ideological or profane purposes⁴⁶, has analyzed and dissected in his excellent works and essays⁴⁷. Like Daniel Colson⁴⁸ and his analysis of the gaps in history, and the distinction between the khabar (The current narrative), Al-tarikh (the official history or that of the victors) and the Kadr (Divine or possible design) in a neo-monadological perspective borrowed from Leibnitz, opening up new fields of reflection on I(i)slam. And to a certain extent Olivier Roy when he denounces a religiosity without culture⁴⁹ and Hamadi Redissi who goes even further by showing a hybridization of Islam between protean modernity and elusive tradition^{50< /up>. Moreover, it is astonishing to realize through the theft of History51, to use the title of an excellent book by Jack Goody52, how crying to see the ignorance of the new generations about the culture53 of classical or imperial Islam54, not to say traditional, which has existed in its diversity for centuries and which has never ceased to be in relation with what we call the West, or shall we say the foreigner or the other55. Which is only a manifestation of possibilities (Leibniz, Islamic notion of Kadr) constantly renewed (Bergson, Islamic notion of Khaliq) which is expressed in its full freedom desired by Rab Al 3alamin (The Lord of the Worlds). Like the mythical divide56 between East and West which has often been exploited in an ideological way57, since the industrial revolution and the growing awareness from technological superiority58 to globalization, commodification and the standardization of consumption patterns, what some call mass culture59< /up>. As Didier Musiedlak60 aptly demonstrates, even “jihadist terrorism”61 stems from Western modernity.}

In this, we could say the same as Jacques Ellul about Christianity, namely the subversion of Islam, not to say of Islamism⁶², in a reverse movement: from the diversity of interpretations and currents encountered in history to a “clericalization⁶³” (Wahhabization or Salafization) often supported by the very people who want to essentialize about two billion Muslims. Thus reproducing the pattern of two blocks, as at the time of the Cold War, or conforming to a simplistic binary and biblical vision to which the American neoconservatives attach themselves with their alleged clash of civilizations (like Al-Qaeda, of Daesh⁶⁴ and other terrorist franchises⁶⁵). What is happening here at the time of the "Titanic⁶⁶ syndrome" or the Anthropocene⁶⁷ is much more serious, and concerns all of us, Muslims or not. who live on this Earth and who have the responsibility to protect it. In the concern for the transmission of these common goods, biodiversity and the ecosystem, in short all the heritage of the living to future generations, which cannot be reduced to objects with a view to excessive commodification, where the economy speculation would supplant the real⁶⁸. It is time to get out of this illusion⁶⁹ at all economic⁷⁰ to return to the living and the human, before it is too late.

We will outline some definitions or rather some clarifications on I(i)slam and anarchism. To immediately dispel the misunderstandings that these polysemic terms can give rise to. And how can the Koran be interpreted according to an anarchist reading grid?

We will see in the second part (Carbon Democracy and globalization of Wahhabo-Salafism?), the incestuous links between the leaders or supporters of neoliberalism and the clerics and other neo-religious people. In short, does not the myth of the curse of the oil revenue system of not being able to generate a democratic and egalitarian system translate into reality what some call "energy dependence", and the survival of a neocolonialism which does not say its name?

We will come back in the third part to market dogmatism (difference from classical liberalism) or neoliberal (Neoliberal dogmatism between Saint-Simonism and evolutionism?). How does it strangely borrow the same shortcomings as the monotheism it criticizes, positioning itself as a counter-model. While he substituted an immanent and immaterial God close to the idea that Platonic philosophy of the world of ideas has of him, by a golden calf of which he only sings the praises. In short, to use the image given by Sophie Bessis⁷¹ which inspired us for the title of this article, to summarize the situation, a representation of Janus whose neoliberalism and neo-religious would constitute each side of the same coin.

And finally, in conclusion, we will outline some openings borrowed here and there from anarchist thought to renew general thinking on the subject.

A few clarifications

Indeed, Islam is often translated as submission (dixit Zemmour et al). While the trinitarian root SLM is polysemic. When Muslims and Jews say Shalom Aleykhem or Salam 3alaykum, does that mean they are greeting each other saying “submission be upon you?” ". Or is the city of Jerusalem actually called the “city of submission”? This would shed a whole new light on the reality of the Occupation suffered by the Palestinians. Etymologically this is certainly ridiculous, but alas in reality⁷²… Going back to variations such as Islamo-fascism or, conversely, Islamo-capitalism (the two are not incompatible in consumerist practice< sup>73), and many others, to show how it is used according to political and media circumstances, of modern inspiration. Let us not forget that fascism is the product of modernity⁷⁴ and this crucial question would take us out of the format of the article and would require an entire book on the subject, which others have attached to analyze⁷⁵. It is clear that this meaning or definition of the word Islam is turned ideologically, by our media and our politicians for purely utilitarian or even electoral purposes. Is Islam left-wing or right-wing, an old debate launched by reformists in the 19th and early 20th centuries following the October Revolution and the rise of Capitalism⁷⁶, this which gave rise to different currents, each attached at the time either to the communist bloc, or to the Atlanticist bloc, or seeking an alternative path.

In fact, throughout the history of Islam there have been several anti-authoritarian groups, often linked to Sufism and other Shiite mystical currents⁷⁷. The end of the XX^th century brought ideas related to an Islamic and libertarian socialism promoted by thinkers such as Hakim Bey, Abdennour Prado, Leda Rafanelli and Yakoub Islam.

However, it must be recognized that Arab and Muslim regimes in general are and have been for the most part under the authority of caliphs, sultans, monarchs, or most often tyrannical presidents or raïs⁷⁸ and elected for life, and transmitting power from father to son⁷⁹.

Some, like Sayyid Qutb among many others, as Sabrina Mervin⁸⁰ reminds us, went even further in rejecting such leaders, "According to his system of thought, all societies, whether they claim to be Muslim or not, in fact live in jahiliyya, that is to say in ignorance of God and the sacred law, because they worship other Gods, or well a party. To establish divine sovereignty, it is therefore necessary to anathematize the tyrants (takfîr) and to fight them with jihad; thus we can create an Islamic State. »

The Gordian knot between reformists⁸¹ such as Al Afghani, Muhammad Abdu’ and the revolutionaries they opposed lies there. Hence the difference in strategy between the reformists of pan-Arab nationalist, Marxist tendencies, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist-jihadists. For the latter, like the quietist Salafists and other Salafist Wahhabo, they have opted for cultural hegemony⁸² via education, the economy, the media and politics, and the jihadists have favored to use an anarchist meaning, "the revolution by the fact".

Rereading this quote from Qotb, is the sovereignty of God leaving man with free will really called into question even when a leader or a society according to him is impious? We do not think so. And is even in contradiction with the Acharite thesis and classical Sunni Islam which had separated the religious from the political, thus founding the beginnings of a secularization⁸³, following the episode of Mu3tazilism who had imposed rationalization by constraint. Today Saudi Arabia or Iran, or the so-called Islamic State they are calling for, do they embody divine sovereignty? Neither⁸⁴. At most the realization of free will giving a possible manifestation or evolution, and certainly not, to use Voltaire's Pangloss in Candide, "The best of all possible worlds". Isn't there a risk, like the Bolsheviks, of taking the entire population hostage in order to achieve not liberation but a totalitarian system⁸⁵? Should we therefore confine ourselves to this same fascism-communism dialectical relationship on which François Furet and Ernst Nolte⁸⁶ had debated, and here concerning the question of Islam and neoliberalism?

Isn't there also a lesson in the fact, as the Koran says, "We have constituted you into Ahzab" (currents, parties, sects) or even "We have made you peoples in order to meet you and get to know you”. If the notion of Nation-State or people does not appear in the sense of the thinkers of modern philosophy and political science, and if the Koran speaks of tribes and peoples, or that Muhammad did not constitute during his lifetime that a City-State, is it pure chance? One may ask. Because after all the Koran talks about diversity, and the search for peace as the ultimate goal. Even if certain eschatological or even messianic hadiths speak of ecological or even cosmogonic finitude: “Everything is doomed to disappear (the Universe or the universes) if it is not the face of Allah”, or “They destroy their houses (ecosystems? ) with the help of believers”. Or "The land will be eaten by the waters" (global warming?) or "You will never stop following them, so much so that they will go into a hole you will follow them", not to mention the hadith of 3ulamat Sa3a (Signs of the End Times⁸⁷) which prophesy the chaos that the world in general, and the Muslim world in particular, will experience. And the decline that all spiritualities and traditions constantly warn about, which René Guénon did not care to explain⁸⁸. In short, was not the material success of the West and its decline the harbinger of all this? If the prophets appeared in societies that seem to our eyes archaic⁸⁹ but which were in harmony with the ecosystem, Nature and the Universe, is it a coincidence? Can we imagine prophets revealing themselves in corrupt societies, and where commodification and pollution have become significant in our lives? But before the apocalypse⁹⁰, there is still hope...

And contrary to a Western-centric vision, is it fair to imagine Islam as a stasis or a monolith in total opposition to what some call modernity? It is enough to know the history of the Islamic civilization in its discoveries and the elaboration of the sciences⁹¹, and closer to us to see the dynamism, the constitution of a middle class connected to globalization in the Muslim world, even integrated into capitalism and offering no counter model⁹², to contradict this prejudice. Moreover, Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd demonstrated it in Le rendez-vous des civilisations⁹³, the figures are there! And yet, the representations of a monolithic, static Muslim world, resistant to progress, persists in the collective imagination...

Already, rereading the Muqadimat and the analyzes of Ibn Khaldun, one can only be struck by this contestation and instability of the power that has existed in the past. Some would say divine will, and others free will and human inclinations for power⁹⁴.

Besides, it is surprising to note that at the height of Ottoman imperialism, and many others, the diversity of indigenous cultures and societies subject to imperial authority had not been threatened to this point as it has been since the standardization imposed by industrialization and mass culture. As Gabriel Martinez-Gros reminds us so well, these traditional modes of governance only required the payment of taxes, and according to the Khaldunian theory which analyzed why the margin (Bedouins, nomads, "barbarians") overthrew the center (sedentary, city ​​dwellers, Empire), which explained this layering of populations and dialects in a thousand sheets like a tower of Babel keeping everyone in their particularities. In short, the notion and the reality of the State or even of the Nation-State resulting from modernity was in no way universal, exemplifying what some today call multiculturalism⁹⁵ or cosmopolitanism via assimilation⁹⁶. While Muslim societies were multicultural, multi-confessional in fact, and from the outset. Perhaps we should look for this fear in France, particularly in the unconscious patterns of a biblical interpretation of the Tower of Babel? Because after all, how would this standardization or assimilation differ from the Iranian or Saudi model, where in the public space everyone is called upon to standardize? Above all, no diversity and visibility of the other in their difference!

Moreover, Allessandro Barbero⁹⁷ brilliantly demonstrates that it was not the Ottomans who wanted to break with the reality of a multi-ethnic and centuries-old empire, but the powers which precipitated the nationalist and ethnic wars: "Thus England and France began and agreed to fight alongside the Ottoman Empire in an attempt to reconquer Crimea and wrest it from the Tsar.

In the end, this war was catastrophic and brought hardly any results, but the Turks, although formally on the side of the victors, paid a very high price, because now Great Britain and France will pretend to interfere in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire. They do so on the basis of an apparently humanitarian ideology, claiming to be the defenders of the Christian subjects of the empire. But this reality amounts to sabotaging the attempt of the imperial government to create this single nationality, common to all ethnic groups. English and French demanded and obtained the absolute opposite: that each ethnic group within the empire benefit from its autonomy, that it be placed under special supervision and that the Western powers be recognized as the protectors of the different nationalities. »

What about the current situation in the Middle East and the Sahel, with this nagging question on which the historiographic currents of future generations of historians will never stop providing multi-causal and not mono-causal answers as do our media: are these desires for separatism inspired by the people or by leaders caught up in strategic or geopolitical games? We can ask the same question of polemicists criticizing dhimmitude⁹⁸, concerning the situation of the suburbs on French territory, hypocritically renamed "Lost Territories of the Republic", as if our leaders had no responsibility over this situation which has been going on since the slums of Nanterre⁹⁹.

The same is true for those who imagine a united Caliphate or Umma, like the identitarians and monarchists who are nostalgic for the miracle-working kings, representatives of God and absolute monarchs of "the eldest daughter of the Church", or Napoleon¹⁰⁰ and the Jacobin centralization that the French state inherited. What difference after all? An idealism and a dogmatism referring to the other, back to back, at a time when some will have fearfully called the “French archipelago” the antithesis of the “global village” or “happy globalization” of Alain Minc, treating some as populists and others as watchdogs of a system whose coherence we no longer know except that of "market monotheism" or "money monarchy", for take up an expression of the rap group IAM.

Similarly, few are aware of the grievances that anarchists have leveled at so-called representative democracy or universal suffrage, which in their eyes is a charade to reproduce elite domination through ballot boxes. David Graeber demonstrated it well in his excellent book Democracy on the Margins, that for a long time the term democracy¹⁰¹ was considered synonymous with anarchy by the elites who preferred the term Republic^102. .

Similarly, and little known in the Muslim sphere, Francis Dupuis-Déri returns to a certain Mohamed Abdou¹⁰³ (real name Mohamed Jean Veneuse) who signed a memoir of master's degree in sociology in which he proposes to merge anarchism and Islam. Coincidence in resonance with the succession of our articles and analyzes which have never ceased to explain by an exercise of reason and in the continuity of the reformist movement how the word I(i)slam has become a catch-all term , whether it refers to civilization, societies, and religion.

Like Mohamed Abdou (Jean Veneuse), and well before him Ali Abderaziq as we showed in a previous article¹⁰⁴, we ask the same questions (François Dupuis-Deri emphasizes), "He asks 'who can say that Islam should be institutionalized, organized, authoritarian, and repressive?' and “proves in this thesis that it doesn’t have to be like that”.

(…)

Specifically, it seeks to offer “an alternative reading of the classical interpretation of the Islamic concept of the Caliphate, the Islamic State.” For this, he discusses the principles and practices of Islam, including deliberative consultations (Shura), consensus (ijma) and the common good (Maslaha). Other interpretations translate possible affinities between anarchism and Islam, for example this sentence attributed to the Prophet, on the subject of government: "By God, we do not entrust these functions to those who claim them nor to those who covet" (hadith of Al-Bukhari and Muslim).

Indeed the historical reality is much more complex, the Muslim world will have been gripped by the movement of the crusades in the context of the leprosy pandemic, but above all by the Asian invasions of Genghis Khan or Tamerlane, and the Turks who will form the last empire, contradicts this centrality and this Western-centric vision ¹⁰⁵ tinged with a strong Hegelianism. This one explaining history according to a totalizing and general vision can only make us smile when re-reading Huntington and his simplistic explanations on civilizations in monolithic blocks, an oh so messianic, not to say biblical vision of Good and Evil (shared by Muslim extremists). It is in this apocalyptic and messianic context (Leprosy, Mongol invasion and crusades) that one can understand the topicality of the thought of Ibn Taymiyya¹⁰⁶ far from an interpretation, according to Yahia Michot , eager contemporary excommunicators and activists claiming to be him, and of this false vision of a paragon of extreme intolerance imagined by certain new post-9/11 Orientalists.

Byzantine disputes, disputes over the interpretation and instrumentalization of sources. Georges Corm asks a real question, what caused the Arabs to lose the use of power from the 9th century, often governed by foreign ethnic groups? Or were they not themselves minorities and foreigners, far from the omnipotence of Islam or Arabism? Because after all what is Islam and to whom does Islam belong?

The same was true of the great schism between Christianity in Rome and Christianity in the East, or even between Catholics and Protestants. Because History is made through time and to the detriment of a clerical or temporal or secular dogmatism or of a propaganda or factory of consent¹⁰⁷, even if the temptation was great before the criticism of Annales and the new historiography to reduce it to an apology or even to an identity narcissism¹⁰⁸. Which, moreover, is exploited both inside Muslim societies and outside by foreign powers, who have every interest in maintaining chaos or the status quo in order to justify any form of military interventionism in the name of state or strategic issues or the fight against terrorism. As if the complexity, the diversity, the heartbreaks, the claims of the populations, and the emergence of the individual and of his hopes and his desires like what was expressed during the Arab springs were denied, repressed , despised. As if the Arabic of the real or the future¹⁰⁹ should not supplant the imaginary Arabic which has been skilfully constructed as much by apology of the supporters of a neo-religious orthodoxy, as neo-liberal heiress of a whole mythological construction¹¹⁰ of Islam and the Muslim¹¹¹.

Daniel Colson says nothing less about I(i)slam when he says, "To a completed history that wipes the slate clean of past and what is, in the still time of Sharia and religious obligations Incessant, sensitive, material and circumstantial stories are thus replaced, which, from old animist and polytheist beliefs to hidden or martyred imams, never ceases to begin again, in the impatient expectation of what can always happen. The idolatrous, fetishistic and authoritarian exteriority of religious prescriptions is replaced by the interiority and indeterminacy of life, of its power and of its truly unheard-of hopes. The dictatorial intermediaries of the letter and the law are replaced by an intimate and direct relationship with the totality of what is. The oppressive and arbitrary legality of a God-Imperator, orderer of the world and who entrusts the most obedient and therefore the most "limited" men with the task of imposing its rules and prohibitions, is replaced by the infinite and sensitive character of life, of the subjectivity of beings, of what they can, starting from themselves; in good as in bad as Proudhon would say. The nothingness of a divinity that appropriates the world by emptying it of its substance is replaced by the superabundance of life. The transcendence of a divine power communicating only by decrees and by norms (sunna) is replaced by the unpredictable immanence of an infinite power which the world bears and to which (by misfortune and by submission to grammar) we give the name "God". To the "law of the Father" and its way of cutting us off from the real world, to the castration operated by the sleight of hand of the patriarchy, of the symbolic, of representatives, of "patents" and other property rights, substitutes – under the figure of demons, witches but also of the infinite and obscure background of desires, of experience and of the hearts of men – the reality of what is. »

Certainly. Yet the terms Islam and anarchy seem contradictory. But this Proudhonian paradox that Gaetano Manfredonia cites in his World History of Anarchy highlights as a definition “Few words have been used in such a contradictory way as that of anarchy. Synonymous with disorder, even chaos, in everyday language, anarchy is considered "the highest expression of order" by its supporters because it would be based, in such a social state, on respect for a system of standards and values ​​freely agreed and not imposed by any authority. may be suitable for an Islamic, let's say universal, vision.

And this is all the more true since, as Eric Geoffroy reminds us, “The religious pluralism expressed by certain Koranic verses has even bothered certain Muslim commentators (…). Thus from verse 48 of the fifth sura; “To each one of you We have given a law and a way. If God had willed, He would have made you one community, but He wanted to test you by the gift He gave you. Seek to surpass one another in works of good. The return of all of you will be to God; He will enlighten you, then, of your disagreements. In the context of the preceding verses (44 and 46), which qualify the Torah and the Gospel as "guidance" and "light", the most restrictive exegetes could only conclude that there is a diversity of paths leading to the Hi. »

Concerning the issue of religious freedom and apostasy, he explains "In Islam, human freedom is, spiritually speaking, axial, since no clerical authority can interfere in the direct relationship of man to God . Man enjoys an interior space on which no one can encroach. Each individual exercises for himself, and to his own measure, a magisterium comparable, mutatis mutandis, to that which gives authority to the pope over Catholics. In this regard, Louis Massignon described Islam as an “egalitarian and secular theocracy”.

(…)

About the verses establishing religious freedom, the Tunisian thinker Mohamed Charfi offers these reflections: “With such clear words, one would have expected the ulema to construct a theory of freedom of conscience. It is not so. On the contrary, they bequeathed to us a series of rules prejudicial to freedom of conscience both with regard to Muslims and People of the Book or others. »

(…) Tahar Jabir al-Alwani concludes his study on the subject in these terms: “It is inconceivable that the Koran affirms the freedom of choice of human beings in more than two hundred verses, and that it renounces it in condemning those who exercise this right with a penalty as severe [as the death sentence]¹¹². Doctor Al Ajami goes in the same direction, and one could cite many other authors who devote themselves to a re-reading of the scriptural data of Islam: "There is no sanction in the Koran against the apostate and even less of a death sentence pronounced against him. On the contrary, the Koranic vision of an ideal and realistic society is based on a social pact¹¹³ integrating its various components¹¹⁴. (…)”

Similarly, doesn’t the city-state of Medina, on the contrary, prefigure what Proudhon praised with the example of the Renaissance and these city-states? A form of mutualism, federalism, or communities linked together and self-managed from below. Not so strange that in the Koran the term State does not exist, but rather that of peoples, tribes, organizations on a reduced scale and called to meet to know each other and today we would say to connect with each other . Because after all this one was revealed in a tribal context. And that ultimately, human beings do not have this propensity to organize themselves, to come together in small groups of various affinities, whether in clubs, associations, and even networks social?

Indeed, another more spiritual path that is more in the acceptance of Kadr (divine design or field of possibilities) leads us to these questions: what if the states no longer existed? Or were the coercive modes of organization like the totalitarian ideologies that claim to be of the tradition and the way taught by the Prophet Muhammad wrong? Or even contrary to its message based on al-3aql (reason) and Shura (consultation close to the agora and self-management)? And what about this episode which nevertheless remains in sacred history as a very strong moment, when the Ansar (inhabitants of Medina) separated from half of their goods (properties) and from their second wife which they gave to the Muhajiroun their brothers in struggle, brothers in Islam (exiles who left Mecca following the persecutions)? Which Muslims would be able to do the same today? Is there not what some of the Nahda reformers saw as a form of communism, namely property or personal property not as a permanent or acquired possession, but as common that can be shared with a view to acquiring social peace, fraternity? Isn't there an egalitarian vision that no anarchist would deny? Strange that the new religious can be so attached to their goods and their properties. Because after all, the interpretation of the Koran and the prophetic words have already given in the past a multitude of reflections and religious and political currents. To imagine that only one would be the good one, following the example of the Hadith Da3if (weak), which explains that there would be 73 sects, and only the way of those who claim to be Salaf will know salvation, is as pretentious as to claim know the Ghayb¹¹⁵. And the individual responsibility of everyone, to which the Koran constantly refers, is closer to the individualism of Stirner on the vertical relationship, and of Proudhon and Bakunin on the horizontal plane: "he who has taken stock of a atom of good or evil will see it” (individual responsibility) or “You are the community that recommends the good and condemns the blameworthy” (common interest). Because after all, whether we are in a Muslim country or not, are we not confronted with this loneliness of postmodernity specific to life that everyone encounters at some point in all agglomerations or megalopolises, faced with the tragedy of Modern man reflecting and oscillating between the possibility of an island¹¹⁶ and Awakening¹¹⁷. The disconnect between theory and practice, to put it in Muslim language Al Qul (the saying) wa Al Fa3il (The action). And the Koran reminds us, "Do not say what you do not do". And we measure it every day in our daily lives with ourselves, with our relatives, our neighbours, our fellow citizens and our leaders, whether we are here from the West or the East.

How could it be more remarkable that the Prophet Muhammad established a constitution, let's say a social contract¹¹⁸, and that unfortunately the successive powers made a coercive use of it, to say the least. Makram Abbès¹¹⁹, rightly attempts these oh so relevant remarks, "It is possible, from these remarks, to provide some keys likely to make certain current political situations intelligible, without however cause and effect relationship is established between the past and the present. For example, the absence of a constitutional tradition and the fact that the politea was only understood by the thinkers of Islam in its individual sense of conduct and way of life could explain the twists that are inflicted on the texts constitutional in order to adapt to the wishes of the chiefs and the perpetuation of their reign. The weakness of the law in the tradition of classical Islam and its inability to put limits on power could explain, for its part, the reason why certain regimes transform the state of exception into a normal mode of government, thus giving the impression that politics is a series of historical accidents that must be dealt with urgently. This weakening of the law is readable at another level, that of the States' refusal to seize legal principles which would be both their source of legitimization and the mark of their self-foundation. In this respect, the problem of the exteriority of law in relation to politics, which remained the fundamental mark of the medieval legal tradition, is more apparent with the establishment, since the end of the 19th century, of the bureaucratic machine of the modern state whose laws seem to be mobilized to serve the interests of a dominant clan, a single party or an exclusive ideology, sometimes disregarding the basic notions of civic engagement.

(…) Bearers of the stigmata of Discord and affected by the discontinuity induced in the history of Islam, the jurists have elected the maintenance of the cohesion of the community as a major criterion of the action of the State .

Strange resonance with our leaders and the current illiberal regimes and the temptation to authoritarian, not to say totalitarian.

But then, following this brief historical review and these elements that show the complexity and the debates that have agitated Islam from its genesis, what makes it possible today to be represented as relevant? magical thinking or a form of irrationality? Or that he is resistant to reason or progress? Which is not certain, given that he fully participates in it by selling his natural resources, and by consuming like any citizen of this world caught in the spiral of marketing and advertising. Or perhaps in a utopian way, opposed to this type of industrial and destructive progress, in a resigned messianic and eschatological expectation?

Father Adrien Candriard evokes a very interesting hypothesis, in particular the Mu3tazilite (rationalist) experience which, according to him, could explain this distrust of anything that claims to be rationalist. He explains, “In general, these mu3tazilites are favored by Westerners: the rationalists seem to us more sympathetic than the traditionalist believers who refuse rational assertions. More friendly, because theoretically more open, more tolerant. This is where our Enlightenment bias deceives us. Because we remember that the caliphal power, at the beginning of the 9th century, eager to give the empire a coherent doctrine, sought to impose the mu3tazilite approach on all the Muslims of the empire, by force if necessary: ​​it created a police force, responsible for ensuring that all imams agreed to recognize the Mu3tazilite creed, affirming that the Koran was created and not eternal. For fifteen years (833-848), repression fell on traditional believers, forced to hide to preserve the transmitted credo.

This episode of brutal repression has left deep traces in Muslim memory. Intolerance and violence are not associated with traditionalist obscurantism, but with rationalism with universal claims, which, because it is rational, must impose itself on everyone and leaves no room for diversity. In Muslim history, the Inquisition has been rationalist; Torquemada was a logician, and the Chevalier de la Barre a believer attached to his traditions. This is almost impossible for us to think, but this effort must be made against the tendency to believe that the intellectual history of Islam is a struggle between an open, progressive and tolerant rationalist current, and a retrograde and violent current. It is infinitely more complicated, of course; and in this complexity, we must remember, as a key to explaining certain reflexes, that Islam has experienced the violent potential of the universal claim of rationalism.

The theological school that imposed itself following this crisis in classical Sunni Islam, the Asharite school, sought in response to maintain a form of balance, by making use of rational tools , but refusing to make it an absolute. This prudence allowed him to facilitate the cohabitation, within imperial Islam, between very diverse currents, from the philosophy of Greek inspiration to the textualism of Ibn Taymiyya, having in heart, to avoid theological violence , less to rely on Greek rationality than to legitimize the diversity of approaches. »

What about the colonial¹²⁰ and imperial¹²¹ shock, and the injunction to modernize Islam¹²².

Carbon Democracy¹²³ and the globalization of Wahhabo-Salafism?

One of the most original theses is that of Timothy Mitchell¹²⁴, returning to a geophysical approach and the reasons which, according to him, would have accelerated the transition from coal to oil, upsetting the energy geography of the world, and neutralizing the democratic levers on which the working and popular masses could act. This can only enlighten us on the relationship that the West maintains with these petromonarchies, incestuous to say the least, if we can consider the colonial and neocolonial paternalism and the maintenance in a form of neo-orthodoxy perceived with benevolence by those who consider themselves the heirs of the Enlightenment¹²⁵.

Timothy Mitchell explains, “In northern Europe the use of coal created the possibility of mass democracy, making the political order vulnerable to this new weapon of the strike. For the first time in history workers have acquired the ability to instantly shut down the entire energy system. From the 1880s the increased dependence of the industrial system on the supply of coal led to a situation where extraordinary quantities of energy had to pass through very narrow and very fragile channels.

Between the miner and the railway line, then towards the docks, depots and consumption sites, there is a series of breaks, vulnerable to blocking actions. The interruption of flows at these critical sites by relatively small groups of workers can neutralize the energy system of an entire country. The old energy systems, based on wood and forests, hydraulic energy or that developed by animals offered less hold to blockage.

From the middle of the 20th century, the emergence of a substitute fossil energy, oil, weakened the political industrial compromise resulting from the coal age. On the one hand, the industrial system has become less dependent on a single fossil energy source and, on the other hand, the oil supply has been massively relocated to distant sites – in particular fields. Middle Eastern oil producers.

Arab and Iranian oil workers also tried to exploit their strategic location in the supply chain to make political and economic demands, but it was much harder to back a democratization movement over oil .

(…)

For all these reasons, the emergence of oil as the dominant energy resource has weakened the possibilities for democratization previously contained in the system associated with coal – whether at the places of production or where it was consumed. Many raw materials are extracted on a large scale (e.g. sand), but not all of them have such significant geopolitical effects as oil.

We see that, when we build new modes of energy production, we open or close political possibilities. Is political transition a prerequisite for energy transition? On the contrary, it seems easier to use the energy transition to produce political change. Politics is inseparable from technical processes. We cannot say that one determines the other, but there is a connection between the two. »

Therefore, we can make the link, not without exaggeration, of the foreign policy of the powers or geostrategic stakes, concerning the "defense of their interests" in the frantic race to exploit fossil energy resources and other rare minerals , and this doctrine of laissez-faire or status quo betting on the stability of strong regimes rather than political instability¹²⁶. Even if recently, globalization via Chinese, Russian, Turkish and American competition has upset the situation¹²⁷.

And it is interesting to see from Timothy Mitchell's analysis the role that foreign powers, notably France, England and the United States have played and are playing in maintaining and supporting strong regimes conservatives and non-democrats and this mythology about their ontological or even anthropological incapacity to emancipate themselves, the reasons for which should be sought since the colonial era in the Koran and the Islamic tradition¹²⁸. And as we have pointed out elsewhere, it is disturbing to see the correlation between the mapping of natural resources and the geographical location of terrorist groups. As if by chance where there are natural resources!

No one can forget this advertisement that circulated on TV in the 80s, “In France, we have no oil but we have ideas”. It was the time of the exclusive relations of Françafrique¹²⁹, which was not yet threatened by global competition, or what some have called happy globalization.

What about representations of Arabs as oil kings, or Africans as bloodthirsty and spendthrift dictators?

These platitudes and contempt were shared on both shores of the Mediterranean and actually date back to the Middle Ages, even if here and there a form of reciprocal fascination began at the height of the Ottoman Empire¹³⁰, and that the presence of Jews and Christians from the East was long established¹³¹. It should not be forgotten that most Muslims were former Israelites or Christian converts, and therefore otherness was not as felt as in Christian lands, where Muslims were rare or even non-existent, except in popular imagination, or represented by gargoyles on the roofs of churches.

Fortunately since the Second World War and independence, from the pagan Saracen to the evil Turk, the representation has evolved somewhat to often endorse a miserable image of the colonized¹³², the immigrant or even the the Arab of the Sonacotra homes described by Abdelmalek Sayad in La double absence¹³³ and in L'immigration ou les paradoxes de l'altérité¹³⁴; to the princes of petro-monarchies buying luxury residences on the Côte d'Azur, or the flagship of French football with the effigy of the Eiffel Tower, passing through self-entrepreneurs and engineers, doctors, professors, managers, executives, little publicized, up to the Bad Boys of gangsta Rap rearing up on stolen scooters or praising the "Moulaga¹³⁵".

However, since the 1980s, in particular the Iranian revolution, and the support by the CIA of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan or elsewhere to counter the evolution of communism, began to profile the figure of the resistant according to a language ¹³⁶ and Islamic codes¹³⁷. Or rather of a revolutionary or romantic resistance imaginary like the figure of Che Guevara.

Faced with the crisis of pan-Arabism and the disappointments of independence and nationalism, pan-Islamism began to emerge often with the support of Western powers against a background of terrorism¹³⁸. Of course, this already existed in Marxist or secular revolutionary forms or of nationalist obedience during the struggle for independence. But more and more, it took shape according to a grid of intelligibility which may seem archaic, even irrational to us. And yet, as Georges Corm explains so well, this is only a way of hiding very profane¹³⁹ and utilitarian reasons for geostrategic motivations and issues.

And Timothy Mitchell underlines, “On the one hand, the 20th century is characterized by an overabundant supply of oil, and therefore by a permanent threat for the oil industry to see this fabulous income suddenly collapse. To ward off the threat, the industry therefore had to work to manufacture and maintain the scarcity of oil. On the other side, political structures have emerged to help achieve this goal. Since the oil industry was never powerful enough to create a political order on its own, it had to collaborate with other political forces, other social energies, other forms of violence and engagement. In the Middle East, several forces were available. But each of these allies had their goals, and they were never guaranteed to coincide with the need to preserve oil scarcity. For the reasons we have seen, the political control of Arabia was the crux of the matter. Due to the unique geophysics of oil reserves, the rent from the world's most profitable commodity could only be collected by harnessing the energy of a powerful religious movement.

The McDjihad describes this deficiency of capitalism. The word refers not to a contradiction between the logic of capitalism and the forces and ideas it encounters, but to the absence of such logic. The extreme political violence that the United States, for several decades, and with several other actors, has promoted, financed and maintained in a large part of the Middle East is the persistent symptom.¹⁴⁰”

It is therefore understandable to understand why the media and the so-called experts on Islam never speak of this golden age where what founded the imperial or dynastic Islam that Ibn Khaldun analyzed in his Muqadimat (Prolegomena). And that this unnatural alliance between the United States and this retrograde Wahhabo-Salafist sect is at the origin of the current situation¹⁴¹, until becoming, for the useful idiots who do not care claim, a reference. Once again, should we see a more distant genealogy in the last Sunni legal school, contemporary with the Mu3tazilites, that founded by Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (780-855)?

But then, why does the West in general, whether at the media level or at the political level, act as if this Wahhabo-Salafist movement, which was originally a minority and sectarian, had already won the battle of ideas? and politics? While the majority of French people of the Muslim faith distinguish themselves from this rigorous and literalist tendency. Even if many young people out of ignorance, by dint of seeing in it the morbid publicity, not to say the overmediatization that the Western media will have aroused via these images of the World Trade Center towers or videos of beheading¹⁴², as proof of a struggle against this capitalist Goliath or Taghout. And our leaders in France in particular, who nevertheless claim to belong to a modern, positivist and secular tradition, fighting against obscurantism constantly reduce Islam and Islamic societies to this single sectarian current, to make it the beautiful part to which attach all these frustrated or losers nihilists of globalization¹⁴³. Of course, acculturated young people, ignorant of the four legal schools and of imperial Islam, even of the Islamic culture which spread at its peak or golden age, up to the reformist movements resulting from the Nahda, would be surprised to see the richness and complexity of the religious, philosophical and political currents in I(i)slam. Because after all, the term Salaf, which appears only a few times in the Quran, means neither more nor less than the term Ancestors. And it refers to the previous peoples both those who had divine consent and his wrath (populations of Sodom and Gomorrah). And that the prophets in the Koran define themselves as Muslim (Muslims) and not as Salaf (ancestors).

Furthermore, it is strange that those who claim to belong to a literalist tradition do not accept any religious pluralism or other otherness. Especially if we refer to the charter of Medina, which some see as a social pact rather than a constitution, and which therefore recognized the Jewish and Christian community as part of the Umma. This globalization of a Wahhabo-Salafist vision, or what some have called globalized Islam¹⁴⁴, and as Olivier Roy reminds us, "today we are witnessing a movement for the reconstruction of Muslim identity operating from the individual and aiming to re-Islamize a community that cannot be embodied in a given territory, except in a virtual and fantastical form. The emergence of radical forms of religiosity is not an isolated fact; it is part of a more general mutation. Whether in the form of the spiritualist quest, neo-fundamentalism or jihadist internationalism, this double process of individualization and deterritorialization marks the globalization of contemporary Islam, and therefore its westernization. Far from expressing a “clash of civilizations”, the tensions it manifests are the syndrome of a badly experienced deculturation. »

Finally Timothy Mitchell¹⁴⁵ warns, and this is reminiscent of the rise of populism¹⁴⁶, identity tensions and illiberal regimes. Or is this the clear proof that politics depends on natural resources? And that this inherent contingency of Man in the face of physical reality or materiality and the exhaustion of it, sets in motion the myth of unlimited progress?

“In Images and Bombs, Ian Boal and his colleagues posit that in order to understand current oil politics, one must be able to jointly think about the violence used to preserve the mechanisms of oil production and the forms of spectacle and representation that appear to be an equally effective aspect of this policy-primarily the recent representation of American militarism as a project to bring democracy to the Middle East.

We can better understand the relationship between spectacle and violence, but also between other seemingly disparate or discordant elements of oil politics, if we take a close look at oil itself. Not because its material properties or its strategic necessity determine everything else (…), but because by tracing the connections made between pipelines and pumping stations, the flow of dollars and economic knowledge, weapons experts and militarism, we discover how a particular set of relations was woven between oil, violence, finance, expertise and democracy.

These relationships are completely different from those of the coal age. If the emergence of mass political movements at the beginning of the 20th century must be linked to coal, a policy which sometimes led to forms of redistributive democracy, it is today from oil that we must grasp the limits of democracy. The possibility of a more democratic future therefore depends on the political tools we develop to confront the end of the fossil fuel era. »

Here lies the Gordian knot of all the social, economic, political and identity crises that have shaken our societies in recent years, such as the secessionism¹⁴⁷ of our elites and the crisis of the yellow vests¹⁴⁸. This partly explains the internal causes of "the disease of Islam¹⁴⁹" and the role of history and Western perception, which some call energy dependence or "disease of West”. Because after all, it is no coincidence that British colonialism attributed to the Saudis the conservation of the holy places of Islam, and that the adoption of the Quincy Pact (1945) between Roosevelt and King ibn Saud at the he pact of Najd (1745) between Muhammad ibn Saud and the founder of Wahhabism Ibn Abdel-Wahhab, allowed the emergence and hegemony of this sectarian current as a new orthodoxy¹⁵⁰; and Mecca and Medina as the equivalent of a Sunni Vatican. While in imperial Islam these holy places represented the symbol of pilgrimage and the birth of Islam, dissociating the temporal or political aspect from the spiritual aspect. Because after all, the imperial cities were indeed in Baghdad, Damascus, Cordoba, Fez, etc. And as we saw above through a Khaldunian analysis of History, and which arouses fear of neo-religious people and a form of emotional blackmail, even making people feel guilty, as Amadou Hamidou Diallo^{151, “Within Islam, two opposing theses exist regarding the behavior of the individual in the face of power. On the one hand, that of the Ahlu Sunna wal jama’a trend. For these every Muslim must respect God, the Prophet and the authority in accordance with the recommendation of the Prophet himself. Respect for the teachings of the Prophet requires respect for the ruling authority. Moreover, the overthrow of power is always linked to risks such as disorder or anarchy, another form of blame (munkar). Even in certain forms, the mutiny against the State is perceived as an opposition to the word of the Prophet. This philosophy, however, coincides with the credo of the Salaf.}

(…) However, is a blind and unlimited submission to power possible? This is where the second trend comes in. This is based on the hadith of the Prophet who says that "there is no obedience to the created in the disobedience of the creator". This recommendation prohibits the individual from blindly following the orders of one who disobeys God. We find here the legitimization of the overthrow of despotic power which does not obey the rules laid down by Islamic morality.

The Mutazilites are closer to this thesis. It aims, ultimately, to provide the Muslim citizen with legal and moral means allowing him to control the State to avoid possible abuses. Among the duties of the individual is rebellion against injustice.

(…) We can deduce from this that the Mutazilites defended the theory of responsibility. Each individual will be rewarded according to his own works. »

Perhaps the crowds of Arab Spring protesters were unconsciously inspired by this reading of the Koran, this unconscious Mu3tazilite vision of a philosophy of action and change, wanting to break with the emotional blackmail of not looking back against the established order or the raïs, even if he was a tyrant, so as not to trigger Fitna¹⁵² or chaos or anarchy. Anarchy of course understood in its most caricatural and reductive sense. Because after all, like Saint Augustine, isn't God master of time and of Kadr (destiny or History). What is more pretentious than an authoritarian vision of taking oneself for God even while invoking the maintenance of a fictitious unity? We can see very well, what do a Saudi rich and integrated into globalization have in common with the disinherited or damned of the earth in the Middle East or in Africa or the Muslim minorities in China or Burma who suffer the repercussions of a of globalized competition from the exploitation of natural resources in which they have no say in the matter, except to have this role of migratory scourge¹⁵³ or of victims or collateral damage¹⁵⁴ or terrorists.

Perhaps we should and will have to see in this Arab spring, under the worried eye of the princes of the petromonarchies, the Islamists who had not been the initiators of these spontaneous demonstrations, or even raïs supported by our equally surprised leaders, the beginnings of the next revolutions in the Middle East and in Sahelian Africa, where current history is being played out. As Robin Beaumont and Xavier Guignard¹⁵⁵ explain the Arab Spring as a moment of historicity of a political space, “The sequence opened by the socio-economic upheavals of 2011 indeed confirms the existence of a regional political space, defined less by a cultural or linguistic unit (which loses its relevance as it requires nuance) than by the interdependence of its political societies. Whether in countries that have experienced a revolutionary moment, a change of regime, a popular protest, or in those that have only received echoes of it, the Arab Spring was, and in many respects remains, what Thomas Hill defines (…) as “over the long term, crucially, the experience of the possibility of a change of world – and not this new world itself. In this sense, what remains of it, including politically, is the imaginary potential capital, and therefore political, invested in the collective memory of this experience: something that did not need a new factual reality to exist, and which, as such, could survive the quick recovery of pre-Spring realities […] in a regional counter-revolution. »

We will see to what extent neoliberalism and its injunctions to maintain the status quo or the support of strong regimes in the Arab and African world, can allow this mythology, not to say mystification, of a world in motion, of course in the North towards the South and the West and the East, in conformity with the Schengen agreements and other Frontex system, which could not exist without the perpetuation of a form of imperialism, even of neocolonialism. From which today, even the classes of the rich countries at the bottom of the social hierarchy suffer the setbacks, even the contempt by the nicknames of "losers", "lazy", "refractory" and "people of nothing", which would never have been imaginable only a few decades ago. And which shows to what extent the Islamists or useful idiots of the globalized system are off the mark and serve as an alibi for the powerful to carry out state policies of emergency, control, and impose draconian laws in the name of fight against terror. No longer favoring a climate of peace and security, but of terror. COVID has further accentuated the phenomenon, and some even speak of the Great Reset¹⁵⁶.

Neoliberal dogmatism between Saint-Simonism and evolutionism?

Now that there is an awareness of this contingency and this finitude of raw materials which are the main source of our civilization, which has so far set itself up as an unsurpassable model and of the myth of unlimited progress . Not to mention the reality of global warming and the threat to ecosystems and biodiversity through overconsumption and the exploitation of resources to run our energy-intensive societies. Some say that the new industrial revolution will come from the digital agri-food and pharmaceutical industries?

Frederic Rouvillois¹⁵⁷ explains to us, "But if this question of roots matters, it is not only with regard to the intellectual biography of the President of the French Republic: it is also, and more broadly, because the latter, with the more or less enthusiastic agreement of his peers, has posed since his election as the herald of the "new world" - which he conceives in accordance with his fundamental convictions, based on the categories and Saint-Simonian theses. A new world remodeled by the digital – in the same way that the one in which Saint-Simon and his disciples lived seemed to them about to be revolutionized by the steam engine and the railway; the development of industry, trade and communications should, according to them, lead to a golden age of prosperity, freedom and universal peace. Two centuries later, if the technique has changed, the words are the same: "Digital", prophesied in 2016 the future president, "is not an economic sector: it is an in-depth transformation of our economies, our societies, our political systems. It decompartmentalizes by opening up possibilities to individuals”, it prepares “a deeply decentralized organization where everyone can play a role and regain power. The multitude takes shape because everyone can have their place […]”. The resulting civilization “thus weakens all the classic forms of intermediate organization of society and in particular the State. It overflows it on all sides”. A new world dominated by industry, economy and finance, where borders will be virtually abolished, differences and identities erased in favor of a global and consensual approach – States reduced to the role of administering things, democracies made universal, but subject to the benevolent direction of the most able experts. A world which, following Saint-Simon, “separates the sign and the thing”, and recognizes, “behind the political, the truth of the economy”. A world where tends to appear, according to the analyzes of Marcel Gauchet, a “completely autonomous subject […], disaffiliated, floating because cut off from all tradition and rid of any community framework as well as any fidelity to a national past; but also, freed from the weight of social hierarchies, except those which are manifestly required by the requirements of an extremely rationalized production”. A World "on the move", a liquid world, in accordance with the analyzes of Zygmunt Bauman, where everything is nothing more than networks and flows, of images, information, goods, populations, and where the essential, underlines Macron, even "for the most fragile", is to obtain "access". A possibility to enter and leave, to move. Not to stand still. Especially not. A world of “generalized communication”, this idea which, according to Philippe Raynaud, “is at the heart of modern utopias” and which is reborn today “in the new figure of globalized capitalism”.

But as Barbara Stiegler explains and reminds us, in the criticism of these metaphors used by the Macron government "To stay the course" or that of "pedagogy", for the sake of imperative or injunction to change or evolution:

“Always aiming in the same direction, keeping the rudder straight despite the eddies, headwinds and storms – the famous cape – and achieving it thanks to what the dictionary defines as the “science of education”. children" - the famous pedagogy -, this would therefore be the new art of governing. These two metaphors, tirelessly taken up by the team in place, as by successive governments, for decades, are not only what communicators call “elements of language”. This vocabulary is much more interesting. It reveals in a very rigorous way the meaning of the new liberalism which emerged in the 1930s and which then continued to spread throughout the world, baptizing itself with the name of “neoliberalism”.

She goes back to the reflection from the Lippmann-Dewey debate which happens to be the Gordian knot of this dialectic between the sovereignty of the people and the legitimacy of their elected officials who claim to be their representatives (by vote) or experts who claim to be as the only ones to understand the issues that would go beyond the skills of the masses (Lippmann), faced with or against a radical, horizontal democracy closer to regional or even local realities (Dewey). Like what happened in the episode of the yellow vests, or even in the risky management of the COVID, demonstrating on the contrary the organized impotence of the State in France¹⁵⁸. Or, and more ironically, a form of clergy that imposes the dogmatism of the monotheism of neoliberalism, as an uncriticable and unsurpassable doxa, even if it means sacrificing real public debate, even democracy? We are inclined to ask ourselves, is this not a way of maintaining a form of domination via these metaphors of “pedagogy” or “course”? Isn't there something downright paternalistic, even childish, about this, as the people of the South have always experienced when faced with those who imposed structural adjustment programs on them via the IMF, indebtedness¹⁵⁹, following the example closer to us and more recently our Greek and Spanish neighbours. And having no more political leeway than the question of identity to the detriment of the common good¹⁶⁰? Premises of a new era, which would affect even the citizens of the most advanced democracies, who would have believed or imagined it twenty years earlier!

Barbara Stiegler recalls and explains “Le cape, d’abord. Not to "let it go", as in classical liberalism, but to impose on society the direction it must take. This direction is that of its progressive adaptation to the globalized division of labor. And its final destination is that of a large world market in which the arbitration rules of a fair-play competition will now have to prevail where, as in sport, everyone must have an equal chance of revealing their talents. Because what the new liberals understand, in the wake of the 1929 crisis and following the dark decade that followed it, is that the market does not regulate itself. It is because there is no "invisible hand" that spontaneously harmonizes the struggle of interests, and that it is therefore imperative to appeal to the hands of the States, architects and arbiters of this new market to be built.

(…)

This would be the end of the story and the ultimate meaning of the evolution of life and the living. Such is in any case the course, this transcendent goal which can neither be criticized nor discussed.

In doing so, neoliberalism reactivates the old evolutionism of the end of the 19th century, stuck in the belief that it would be possible to know in advance the end of the evolution of history. Which leads him to accomplish a double betrayal. To betray the essential lesson of Darwin first, who showed that the evolution of life went, on the contrary, in a dizzying multiplicity of directions, of which no one could ever foresee either the meaning or the goal. Then to betray democracy, because the meaning of history is already fixed, the peoples do not have to decide on it or even to debate it, it is up to the new liberal State to impose on the human species, willingly or by force, what one of the main characters in my book, Walter Lippmann, calls "the great revolution". In the light of this reminder, we can only be surprised by the refrain that the liberals have been feeding us repeatedly since the end of the 1970s, and according to which, with the crisis of Marxism, we would have finished with the "great stories” and their naive belief in a “great evening”. We were certainly right to want to disqualify Marxist eschatology, this fantasy of an end of history which, as in the Christian resurrection, was supposed to end up saving us. But why not say that this is also the temporal structure of the neoliberal grand narrative? How not to have seen that it was moreover what gave it all its power of seduction and its capacity to take over from the old revolutionary hopes? »

Enlightened elites to justify the charismatic legitimacy of such and such a president, invoking the state of emergency¹⁶¹ and a certain propaganda taken up by a whole battalion of journalists, economists or experts as formerly the priests in the pay of the Pope. To wonder if the religious aspect in our societies, even secularized, even secularized, has not remained inscribed in the depths of political practices, often shrouded in a form of messianism: in short, having replaced religion or theology by a God-progress, who is ultimately only a substitute God. In short, materialism minus transcendence and immanence, disenchantment, what some call the “silence of God”. But this generalized decline in the face of the reality of a suffering planet, and the mad dreams of the grandeur of our leaders is reminiscent of the pharaonic dream of wanting to reach or surpass the God of Moses or Muhammad.

And Barbara Stiegler points out, “Except, and Lippmann may have glimpsed it himself when worrying about the ecological consequences of globalization, the cape is cracking from the inside. Since the 2000s, since the global awareness of an “environmental crisis”, this deadly contradiction inside the Cape has become the Achilles heel of the ruling elites. This sheds light on the striking sequence that our country has just experienced at the end of the summer of 2018: the spectacular resignation of the Minister of Ecology, the sudden and concomitant weakening of the power in place, moreover suspected at almost at the same time of authoritarian drifts, and above all, the gradual disqualification of the famous course that he had in turn, after so many others, set for the country. Because how can Cape Town both advocate the globalization of trade, which is causing mobility to explode, and fight against global warming, the destruction of ecosystems, and the proliferation of health crises? How can we continue to stay the course with authority, when everyone realizes that the glorious end of evolution may conceal the collapse of our social systems and the imminence of the end of the world? One of the improvised responses was to punish the movements of motorists by taxing them ever more. A year later, when the virus arrived, she was to denounce the “indiscipline” of the confined French people, while calling on them to continue to go outside to keep in shape and to keep the economy running. Get started while staying at home! This contradictory injunction, a mark of neoliberalism in times of crisis, will have been the trigger for the crisis of the yellow vests. »

Perhaps some see it, like our president, the new industrial revolution in the digital age as proof of this "new world" that it is necessary to impose and to which we must fit¹⁶². Moreover, during this COVID pandemic between essential and non-essential businesses, those who will have done well¹⁶³ are those who have been able to adapt to digital.

But as Guillaume Carnino¹⁶⁴ is so concerned, isn't this new progressive teleology heralding an oh-so-Orwellian world of loneliness in the new smart cities ( “smart cities”) “aiming to improve the quality of urban services by mobilizing the resources of big data and artificial intelligence would mark the dawn of an industrial revolution. We're hitting it again! ". Denouncing a reinforced industrialization via the segmentation of tasks, which reminds us of Fordism or the modern times of Charlie Chaplin in a version 2.0, with algorithms, via click workers. “(…) abandon statistical imprecision to implement an increasingly individualized standard consumer profile. In other words, where in the past production tasks were divided up and then integrated into a mechanical process of industrial production, it is now possible to extend this logic to consumption itself: the proletarian consumer is dispossessed of his know-how. , manners and life skills. »

As Guillaume Carnino explains, "Another paradox of the Internet: a "decentralization that concentrates", the economic logic of the "winner takes all" specific to the Web leading to the constitution of oligopolistic groups of unprecedented size (the famous GAFAM). Finally, the digital engenders a "freedom that constrains": it is no longer by force, by the standard or even by the law that we guide the behavior of consumers, but rather by a logic of individual choice allowing to make coincide the irrationality of everyone's impulses with tight control of industrial production at the top.

What about the uberization of several sectors of work, and the flexibility, the optimization of overproduction, or the tyranny of customer ratings (stars) that can make these new modern slaves lay off, at the like hotels dependent on Internet platforms (eg, Airbnb, Tripadvisor, etc.), or booksellers dependent on Amazon, or delivery people who made a delivery error or damaged a package.

Jean-Claude Michéa¹⁶⁵ understood upstream what allowed this false revolution to impose itself on a global scale, contrary to what some would have us believe. Because it must not be forgotten that the Islamists or the radicals are often the frustrated or the losers of this globalization, and that, not having achieved this messianic promise here below, hope to precipitate it in their death which they would like to be exemplary, heroic, when it is useless and contributes to the maintenance of the system and this tired and partly false antiphon¹⁶⁶ "they want to destroy our way of life". Yet they are and are themselves the product of the culture of selfishness¹⁶⁷, even in their act of killing others and killing themselves. Often they lie to themselves.

He explains, "We know that in American the word 'liberal' is ambiguous since it applies both to partisans of the market economy (who are generally classified as 'on the right') and to defenders of “new ideas” and “moral liberation” (who are supposed to embody “the left”). Of course, this ambiguity strikes above all those who, refusing to admit "the obsolescence of the right-left divide", obstinately believing that the spirit of contemporary capitalism would still put up with Protestant ethics or the defense of the "moral order". However, when the imaginary of a society has become that of the “cyberworld” and of generalized overconsumption, it is really difficult not to notice that the form of sensibility demanded by the established order is now this liberal- libertarianism that must perpetually be celebrated by the most mendacious sectors of modern entertainment: advertising, showbiz and so-called "information".

(…) In reality, “the state of mind that corresponds to the world of consumption is much more a state of dissatisfaction and chronic anxiety […]. The individual finds himself there permanently observed, not by foremen and supervisors, but by marketing experts and sounding technicians, who tell him what others prefer and what he must, consequently , or by doctors and psychiatrists who examine him with the aim of discovering in him some symptoms of illnesses which could have escaped a trained eye. Such is indeed, ultimately, the specific alienation in which the liberal-libertarian individual struggles today, a human prototype now mass-produced, of which the left does not have a monopoly, although it constitutes highlights his favorite refuge.

This individual, in fact, must constantly imagine that he is on the margins in order to be able to continue to keep to the norm; he must believe at all times that he lives in transgression, licentiousness and epicurean voluptuousness - lifestyles obviously beyond his poor means - to remain the pathetic puppet who moves desperately in the boring universe, tyrannical and puritanical of compulsory consumption and its incessant changes. »

Perhaps, faced with these clerks of media and political experts, and this figure of the hyper-president of the charismatic type, based not on tradition but on "qualities", even on particular gifts or the revelation of an individual, seeing in it the limits of the legitimization and durability of this power which after all was given, in the sense of De La Boétie, only by the people themselves. Or as the Quran says, “God does not change the condition of a people until they reform themselves. In other words, we have the leaders we deserve. However, when the false prophet no longer works miracles, or when he is contradicted by events, just as when the victorious general leads his troops to failure, trust is broken and the charismatic leader can lose face and lose power. As for the traditional chief, he can still be supported by tradition even though he is a poor chief.

However, only rational authority seems compatible with modern contemporary modern society. Because in the framework of traditional legitimacy, loyalty takes precedence over competence, while in charismatic legitimacy, the possibilities of continuity are limited. We see it for the regional ones in the PACA, where La République en Marche is struggling to find local support and alliances (the Renaud Muselier affair of the LR).

Furthermore, within the framework of rational legitimacy via bottom-up democracy, conforming modification resulting from democratic debate allows both the flexibility and the continuity necessary for the social order. Even if here, we had seen that it is strongly threatened. Max Weber was interested in the foundations of a certain legitimacy of power rather than the process of legitimation. Even if it is linked to a historicity, and not everyone is supposed to know, and what some associate with Kadr (divine purpose) and free will. Man facing his responsibilities. Hence this primordial Koranic injunction, opening the fields of possibilities, Iqra Bismi Rabika Ladi Khalaq_ Khalaqa al-Insana Mine 3alaq_ Iqra Wa Rabouka al-Akram_ Aladi 3alama bi al-Qalam_ 3alama Al Insana Ma lam Ya3lam¹⁶⁸.

Finally, as Barbara Stiegler reminds us, “To the new liberalism and its authoritarian conception of pedagogy theorized by Lippmann, the great American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey did not cease, (…) to oppose, from the 1920s and 1930s, a new conception of democracy as experimentation and co-education, in which it would be the publics themselves who, starting from their own problems, from what they undergo and what makes them suffer , would redefine the ends they decide to pursue together. To neoliberalism, which fantasizes an ultimate course for evolution and an unambiguous sense of adaptation, Dewey opposes the true lesson of Darwinism, for which, in the experimental laboratory of life, the values ​​and ends of evolution are always multiple, local and temporary. Resulting from a singular interaction each time between organisms and their environments, the multiple ends of evolution are also and above all unpredictable. If we have to adapt, it is to a multiplicity of all different local environments, which the organisms themselves continually transform by imposing their own conditions on them. Except that, in the human animal, this active transformation of environments no longer involves the blind game of genetic variation and selection. It goes through slow experimental processes of co-education, which explain the collective emergence and the invention of democracy. »

What about the Arab Spring and protests around the world. The Leviathan (Hobbes) versus the Social Contract (Rousseau).

Conclusion

More than ever, and against the tide of reformist thinkers in admiration of Western technological prowess and who had spread throughout the Muslim world since the Tanzimat (reforms) of the Ottoman Empire, the Nahda movement and the Islah, and in the current context of what some have already called "Titanic Syndrome", perhaps it's time to realize that the model of merchant civilization is not The only and true paradise ¹⁶⁹. As Anne-Cécile Robert puts it on the back cover of one of her books published in 2004, in the midst of the rise of left-wing alter-globalization movements, "And if it were the West, and not Africa, who needed help? What if it was up to the African continent to come to the aid of the West? ". Questions certainly oh so provocative but topical, and which radically reverse the view of our "globalized world". While globalized capitalism is sacking the planet, Africa and the rest of the world could, by drawing on their cultural heritage, bring a more harmonious and balanced vision of the relationship between humans and nature. And return to this "alleged backwardness" which had been taken up by Muslim reformists or others, as a leitmotif or slogan giving pride of place to the myth of progress. This apologetic is understandable given the imperial and colonial expansion of European powers in particular, from the 18th century to the height of the 19th and 20th centuries. But had they foreseen the decline or even the disaster towards which this model of civilization will have ended after the world wars, precipitating the planet and all of humanity into what materialism will have offered most morbidly: the entanglement of the economy, within the meaning of Polyani¹⁷⁰, in all ecological and social spheres. In short, a generalized commodification exacerbated by all-out “liberalization” movements of mores, lifestyles, representations, until taking a one hundred and eighty degree turn, and whose so-called libertarian but rather consumerist drifts pushing for conformism and exacerbated individualism will not have escaped anyone, until the recent identity tensions and liberticidal laws maintained by a virtual auto-psychosis and generalized totalitarian drift¹⁷¹. What some once called the modernization or westernization or Americanization or acculturation of lifestyles hitherto open on the model of the American Way of Life, to take the excesses of illiberal and populist regimes and an obsession with control that would in no way have refused the Stasi or the old KGB. Irony or cyclical movement of History. Faced with this reality, formidable "cultural resistance" to this economic and devastating model, what some have called anarcho-indigenousism, is the most manifest reality of what the diversity of indigenous thoughts and traditions has left to the heritage of humanity.

Yes it is time, and this hope of the Arab springs, of the uprisings of the peoples, to accept the other in their diversity, in their plurality, and to fight this political, cultural, economic or religious hegemony which would like to standardize each citizen in a willing to think politically or religiously correct. Because after all, is it not Allah who wanted there to be believers and non-believers? And does he not himself say in the hadith Qudsi, "Even if they all came to believe in Me or conversely to disbelieve in me, it would not increase or diminish my power in any way". Get out of these mirrored dogmatic shackles, of commodification and religious radicalization, which feed each other, like oil and fire. More than ever the synergy of popular struggles is necessary. Particularly in the face of the threat of what some call biopolitics or the theory of evolutionism, which highlights this fundamental question, is it up to the Environment to adapt to Man or to Man of s adapt to its environment? The whole challenge of the 21st century lies there.

Perhaps we should no longer see capitalism as an unsurpassable evolution. And on the contrary, as we have seen above, pointing out the authoritarian, not to say totalitarian, excesses of a hierarchy of experts, or denouncing the work inherited from slavery which would continue its mutation into a new form of exploitation 2.0 (eg, Uber Eats), and the notion of consumption as an ideal of destruction. And as David Graeber¹⁷² asks, “What if fetishism were stronger and more rigid in capitalism than in so-called primitive societies? »

Indeed, as Sophie Bessis¹⁷³ so aptly reminds us, rediscovering meaning: "The technical civilization that is flourishing today has the capacity to produce everything, except meaning and principles. It has only material foundations and is therefore unable to offer humans anything other than an infinite accumulation of goods. The company being impossible, due to population growth and the limited nature of the earth's resources, it can only continue through lies and coercion. The deception consists in making believe that everyone, as long as they comply with the laws of a market expanded to the dimensions of the planet, can one day reach the nirvana of consumption. Repression is exerted when some no longer believe in it and demand more prudent management and a fairer sharing of available wealth, or when those excluded from a leonine distribution of world production rise up to contest it. Having no horizon but an indefinitely reiterated present and defended by increasingly sophisticated devices and devices of constraint, the civilization of material complexity is at the same time that of the breakdown of thought. In the worst case, thought itself would give way to the work of increasingly powerful and autonomous machines, whose infinite connections would usefully replace our brains, which are too human to be predictable. The worst, however, is not necessarily certain and the post-human is not inevitable.

For the time being, this civilization which settles everywhere as at home has found precious help in contemporary versions of the hegemony of God among men. Contrary to what is often said, recourse to religion, which has thrived on the rubble of earthly utopias, is not a reaction to the scandal of a world ruled by the sole logic of having it, even if it thrives about his frustrations. Neither the gurus of the multiple variations of evangelism, nor the proponents of a new Islamist order which would have the vocation of governing all Muslims, nor – a fortiori – the jihadist cohorts pressed to impose by war the nightmare that they present as the divine law do not offer to those who follow them the perspective of an egalitarian society or, at least, attentive to the human. The prophets of the poor no longer have their place in a world where money no longer opposes salvation but contributes to it. As we have said, it is not the modern that the religious entrepreneurs of today are fighting – on the contrary, they use all its resources – but what remains of modernity. »

Amine Ajar

1 Attack against Samuel Paty, against the official of the Rambouillet police station, the point-blank murder of a police officer by a criminal trafficker from the city of Avignon, and more recently, at the international level, state violence in against the Palestinians.

2 Pierre Corcuff, La grande confusion, How the far right won the battle of ideas, ed. Textual.

3 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Vrin, Paris, 1959.

4 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, ed. Gallimard.

5 Ilvo Diamanti & Marc Lazar, Peuplecratie, The metamorphosis of our democracies, ed. Gallimard.

6 Cynthia Fleury, Here lies the bitter, healing from resentment, ed. nrf Gallimard.

7 Cherristopher Lasch, The revolt of the elites and the betrayal of democracy, ed. Flammarion, Champs, essays.

8 Bertrand Badie, Inter-socialities, The world is no longer geopolitical, ed. CNRS.

9 Bertrand Badie & Dominique Vidal, Return of populisms, ed. The Discovery.

10 Georges Corm, The New Eastern Question, ed. Discovery.

11 Under the dir. by Alexandra Monot, Africa: from the Sahel and the Sahara to the Mediterranean, ed. Bréal, Capes, aggregation.

12 Read my article, Amine Ajar, From “Utopia” to “Praxis”: The Koran as a sounding board for the “chaos” of human nature?, in Oumma.com, September 16, 2018.

13 Adrien Candiard, Understanding Islam or rather: why we don't understand anything about it, ed. Flammarion fields.

14 Anne Cécile Robert, The Strategy of Emotion, ed. Lux. Even if it is funny to read the preface by Dupont-Moretti, currently Minister of Justice in the Macron government.

15 Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, “Deadly enemies”, Representations of Islam and Muslim politics during the colonial era in France, ed. Discovery.

16 Amine Ajar, Getting out of the culture of excuse and denial… to reclaim reality, In Oumma.com, March 17, 2017.

17 Under the dir. by Omar Slaouti & Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Racisms of France, ed. Discovery.

18 Amine Ajar, I am not your negro or the hidden face of our democracies, in Oumma.com, June 19, 2017.

19 Amine Ajar, Allahu Akbar! The criminogenic Arabic language?, in Oumma.com, February 04, 2017.

20 Amine Ajar, Open letter to so-called ''Jihadists'', In Oumma.com, November 07, 2020.

21 Ishmael Saidi, Jihad, ed. Librio.

22 Pascal Bruckner, An almost perfect culprit, the construction of the white scapegoat, ed. Grasset. Read also his interview, comments collected by Jean-Philippe de Garate and Sylvie Dutot, La France de 2021? It's Byzantium in 1453!, How in Byzantium, the sophists took power, while the City was threatened with submersion, in Histoire magazine, N°8, Avril-June 2021.

23 Sylvie Laurent, Poor little white, ed. From the House of Human Sciences, coll. Speeches.

24 Ibid, Pierre Corcuff, Pierre Corcuff, La grande confusion, How the far right won the battle of ideas, ed. Textual. Read also Amine Ajar, Zemmour, yet another book for nothing or for the worse, in Oumma.com, January 14, 2017.

25 The military interventionism of W. G. Bush in the name of a certain evangelical messianism, and other far-right movements with the same vision of the world as Anders Breivik or Brendon Tarrant.

26 Dominique Vidal, And if they had shouted “Death to the Jews”? indignant journalist Dominique Vidal, in Oumma.com, April 29, 2021.

27 Amine Ajar, Community and identity assignment or the making of the internal enemy?, in Oumma.com, October 24, 2017.

28 Read my article, Community assignment or the factory of the internal enemy, in Oumma.com, October 24, 2017. Read also Elisabeth Roudinesco, Oneself as a king, Essay on identity drifts, ed . Threshold.

29 Sylvain Cypel, The State of Israel against the Jews, ed. Discovery. Also read, Piotr Smolar, Bad Jew, ed. Ecuadors.

30 Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity, History of a Conservative Turn, ed. The Discovery, Paperback.

31 Bernard Stiegler, In disruption, How not to go crazy?, ed. Babel.

32 Under the dir. by Mohamed Arkoun, History of Islam and Muslims in France from the Middle Ages to the present day, ed. Albin Michael.

33 Todd Shepard, Male decolonization, The “Arab man” and France, from Algerian independence to the Iranian revolution, ed. Payot & Shores. Pierre Conesa, Hollywood, Hollywood weapon of mass destruction, ed. Robert Laffont. Read also by the same author, The making of the enemy, or how to kill with a conscience for oneself, ed. Robert Laffont.

34 Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, The Imperial Republic, Politics and State Racism, ed. Fayard. Or, The Empire of hygienists, living in the colonies, ed. Fayard.

35 Edward Said, Orientalism, The East as seen by the West, ed. Threshold.

36 Georges Corm, The New Eastern Question, ed. Discovery.

37 Read my article, Amine Ajar, The East and the West: the story of a (non) loving dialogue?, in Oumma.com, December 15, 2020.

38 Hamadi Redissi, The Tragedy of Modern Islam, ed. Threshold.

39 Michel Onfray, Decadence, From Jesus to Bin Laden, Life and Death of the West, ed. Flammarion.

40 Haoues Seniguer, Islamism Decrypted, ed. The Harmattan.

41 Georges Corm, Thought and politics in the Arab world, Historical and problematic contexts, 19th-20th century, ed. Discovery.

42 Hamadi Redissi, A History of Wahhabism, How sectarian Islam became Islam, ed. Points, Trials.

43 Haoues Seniguer, The (neo) Muslim brothers and the new capitalist spirit, Between moral rigorism, cryptocapitalism and anticapitalism, ed. The water's edge.

44 Exhibition at MUCEM, The Sound Orient, Forgotten Music, Living Music, July 22, 2020- January 04, 2021.

45 Ibid, Georges Corm, Thought and politics in the Arab world, Historical and problematic contexts, 19th-20th century, ed. Discovery.

46 Georges Corm, For a secular reading of conflicts, On the "return of religion" in contemporary conflicts in the Middle East, ed. Discovery.

47 Ibid, Read also Georges Corm, The Religious Question in the 21st Century, or The New Eastern Question, ed. The Discovery, among others.

48 Daniel Colson, Three Essays in Anarchist Philosophy, Islam – History – Monadology, ed. Leo Scheer, Manifesto.

49 Olivier Roy, Holy ignorance, The time of religion without culture, ed. Points.

50 Ibid, Hamadi Redissi, The tragedy of modern Islam, ed. Threshold.

51 Jack Goody, The Theft of History, ed. Fayard.

52 Ibid.

53 Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar, How the East and Islam Influenced the West, ed. The Bonds that Liberate. Read also, Sigrid Hunke, The sun of Allah shines on the West, ed. Albin Michael. Read also, Juan Vernet, What culture owes to the Arabs of Spain, ed. Sindbad, South Acts. Read also, Allem Surre-Garcia, Beyond the shores, Les Orients d'Occitanie, ed. Dervy.

54 Gabriel Martinez-Gros, The Islamic Empire, 7th-11th century, ed. Dots, History.

55 Under the direction of Gabriel Martinez Gros, Pays d’Islam et monde latin, 950-1250, éd. Atland. Read also, Jean-François Solnon, The Ottoman Empire and Europe, ed. Perrin, coll. Time.

56 Georges Corm, Orient-Occident, The imaginary fracture, ed. Discovery.

57 Georges Corm, Europe and the myth of the West, The construction of a history, ed. Discovery. Read also Dino Costantini, civilizing mission, the role of colonial history in the construction of French political identity, ed. Discovery.

58 Ibid, Jean-François Solnon, The Ottoman Empire and Europe, ed. Perrin, coll. Time.

59 Christopher Lasch, Mass culture or popular culture?, ed. Climates. Also read, Christopher Lasch & Castoriadis, The Culture of Selfishness, ed. Climates.

60 Didier Musiedlak, The Western Workshop of Terrorism, The Roots of Evil, ed. Arkhe.

61 Gilles Feragu, History of terrorism, ed. Perrin, coll. Time.

62 Term that was used by orientalists in the 18th and 19th centuries, found in the writings of Ernest Renan, like the isms used for Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism. Nowadays it implies a political dimension.

63 Ibid, Hamadi Redissi, A History of Wahhabism, How sectarian Islam became Islam, ed. Points, Trials. Read also, Carlo Degli Abbati, Radical movements in the name of Islam, a shared responsibility?, ed. Persee.

64 Myriam Benraad, The Islamic State Taken at Words, ed. Armand Collin.

65 Mathieu Guidère, Atlas of terrorism, from Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State, ed. Otherwise.

66 Nicolas Hulot, The Titanic Syndrome, ed. Pocket, volume 1 & 2.

67 Claude Lorius & Laurent Carpentier, Journey into the Anthropocene, this new era of which we are the heroes, ed. Babel.

68 David Cayla, The economy of reality faced with misleading models, ed. deboeck, superior.

69 René Passet, The neo-liberal illusion, ed. Flammarion, Champs.

70 Carl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, ed. Gallimard. Also read in the introduction, Jérôme Courant, Have you read Polanyi, ed. Champs Flammarion, Essays.

71 Sophie Bessis, The double impasse, The universal put to the test by religious and market fundamentalisms, ed. Discovery.

72 Given the current events (pogroms) against the Palestinians of Jerusalem, at the end of Ramadan 2021, we are inclined to wonder. Our media speak of clashes between the Muslim faithful at the end of the Tarawih prayer and the Police, obscuring (like France Culture) the fact that it was the extremist settlers who started the hostilities when they were in Jama3a (common prayer).

73 Haoues Seniguer, The (neo) Muslim brothers and the new capitalist spirit, Between moral rigorism, cryptocapitalism and anticapitalism, ed. Waterside.

74 James Q. Whitman, Hitler's American Model, How American Race Laws Inspired the Nazis, ed. Armand Collin.

75 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, ed. Complex. Also read, Enzo Traverso, Nazi violence, a European genealogy, ed. The fabric.

76 Khaled Ridha, Capitalism, Islam and Socialism, ed. Publibook, Essay.

77 Ibid, Daniel Colson, Anarchism and Religious Facts, in Mondaymatin#55, published April 4, 2016.

78 Alaa El Aswany, Religious extremism and dictatorship, The two sides of a historical misfortune, ed. South Acts.

79 Alaa El Aswany, The Dictatorship Syndrome, ed. South Acts. Read also, Moustapha Safouan, why the Arab world is not free, Politics of writing and religious terrorism, ed. Of Christmas.

80 Sabrina Mervin, History of Islam, Foundations and Doctrines, ed. Flammarion, Fields, History.

81 Malek Chebel, Changing Islam, Dictionary of Muslim Reformers from the Origins to the Present, ed. Albin Michael.

82 Mohamed-Ali Adraoui, From the Gulf to the suburbs, ed. PUF, coll. Middle East. Read Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam, ed. Points, test.

83 Jacques Huntziger, Arab Springs and Religion, The Secularization of Islam, ed. College of Bernardins, Humanities.

84 Myriam Benraad, The Islamic State Taken at Words, ed. Armand Collin.

85 Boualem Sensal, Governing in the name of Allah: Islamization and the thirst for power in the Arab world, ed. Folio. Read also by the same author, 2084, ed. Gallimard.

86 François Furet, Ernst Nolte, Fascism and Communism, ed. Hachette Literature, coll. Plural.

87 Translation of Dominique Penot, The Signs of the End Times in the Islamic tradition, ed. Alif.

88 For an introduction to his thought, read Erik Sablé, René Guénon, The face of eternity, ed. Points, Wisdoms. Read also, René Guénon, The crisis of the modern world, ed. Folio, essays.

89 Claude Levi-Strauss, Race and History, ed. Folio, Essays.

90 Amine Ajar, Lockdown, Netflix, Messiah & the Apocalypse, in Oumma.com, April 11, 2020.

91 Ahmed Djebbar, The Golden Age of Arab Sciences, ed. The Apple tree. Also read, Under the ed. by Abd-al-Haqq Guiderdoni, Science and religion in Islam, Muslims speak of contemporary science, ed. Albouraq. Read also, Danielle Jacquart, The epic of Arab science, ed. Discovery Gallimard.

92 Haoues Seniguer, The (neo) Muslim Brotherhood and the new capitalist spirit, between moral rigorism, cryptocapitalism and anticapitalism, ed. The edges of the water.

93 Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd, The meeting of civilizations, ed. Threshold.

94 Makram Abbès, Islam and politics in the classical age, ed. PUF, Philosophies.

95 Amine Ajar, “The myth of Al-Andalus” through the prism of current events: multiculturalism versus identitarianism? What globalization?, in Oumma.com, May 04, 2019.

96 Amine Ajar, From Symbolic or Media Islam to Real Citizens, in Oumma.com, February 10, 2012.

97 Allessandro Barbero, The Divan of Istanbul, A Brief History of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Small Biblio Payot, History.

98 As we have already mentioned, this debate on the status of minorities in imperial or classical Islam is anachronistic since it is contemporary with monarchies in Europe. In addition, the tanzimat (reforms) of the Ottoman Empire went in the direction of a citizenship granted to all. But isn't this controversy a way of showing the tree that hides the forest, or drowning the fish as to the current situation of minorities in the suburbs in France or the situation of Palestinians in Israel?

99 Abdelmalek Sayad, Immigration or the paradoxes of otherness, ed. Reasons to act.

100 Dr Mohamed Chtatou, Was Napoleon a great admirer of Islam and its prophet?, in Oumma.com, May 05, 2021.

101 Julia de Funès, Coup de philo, 40 received ideas scrutinized through philosophy, ed. Michel Lafon, Pocket. Read the chapter, Democracy is the opposite of tyranny, p101.

102 Francis Dupuis-Déri, ​​Democracy, Political History of a Word in the United States and France, ed. Lux.

103 Pseudonym in reference to the famous disciple of Al Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, Egyptian reformist disciple of the 19th century. That we will write this way to differentiate it from its contemporary namesake.

104 Amine Ajar, Reflections on I(i)slam and politics: instrumentalization or voluntary servitude?, in Oumma.com, January 2, 2021.

105 Gabriel Martinez-Gros, On the other side of the Crusades, Islam between Crusaders and Mongols, 11th-13th century, ed. Past / Compounds.

106 Yahya Michot, Ibn Taymiyya, Mardin, Hegira, escape from sin and “abode of Islam”, ed. Al Buraq. Or by the same author. Disbelief and forgiveness, ed. Al Buraq.

107 Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman Fabricating Consent, The Media Management of Mass Media, ed. INVESTIG/ACTION. Read also, Edward Bernays, PROPAGANDA, How to manipulate opinion in a democracy?, ed. Areas.

108 Suzanne Citron, The national myth, history of France revisited, ed. of the Workshop.

109 Read the excellent comics by Riad Sattouf, The Arab of the Future, tome 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ed. Allary.

110 Mohammed Arkoun, When Islam Will Awaken, ed. Albin Michael.

111 Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, “Deadly Enemies”. Representations of Islam and Muslim policies in France during the colonial era, ed. Discovery.

112 Taha Jabir al-Alwani, Apostasy in Islam. A critical re-examination of the Muslim corpus, ed. The scribe Harmattan, IESE Brussels, 2014.

113 On this subject, read the excellent contribution of Philippe Moulinet, Islam et contrat social, in Valeurs d’islam, under the dir. by Dominique Reynié, ed. PUF, coll. political innovation.

114 Doctor Moreno Al-Ajami, What does the Koran really say, ed. Zenith.

115 Al-Ghayb: The mystery, the future, the hidden. Forgetting to say, that in the Islamic tradition it is considered that those who distinguish themselves by ostentation and excommunicating other believers, or passing a final and lapidary judgment on non-believers, or that they have an atom of pride, do of them that they are the allies of Iblis or of Satan.

116 Michel Houellebecq, The possibility of an island, ed. Pocket, I read.

117 Ibn Tufayl, The Awakened, ed. Libretto. A child is born on a desert island located at the equator. This child, who has no known father or mother, is raised by a gazelle. He awakens alone – hence the title of the book – to the knowledge of the world and then to that of the Divine. It was then that a man named Absâl was shipwrecked on the island. Through it, the child comes into contact with “codified” civilization and religion. If he realizes that a standardized life offers many advantages in terms of the organization of human society, he deplores the confinement and dogmatism inherent in it. Tired of this so-called civilized life, he decides to leave it to return to live on his native island and thus escape all established order, taking his friend Absâl in his footsteps.

118 Under the dir. by Dominique Reynié, Values ​​of Islam, ed. PUF, Political Innovation. Read the chapter by Philippe Moulinet, Islam and social contract, p. 197.

119 Ibid. Makram Abbès, Islam and politics in the classical age, ed. PUF, philosophies.

120 Under the dir. by Pierre-Jean Luizard, The colonial shock and Islam, The religious policies of the colonial powers in the land of Islam, ed. Discovery.

121 Under the direction of Henry Laurens, John Tolan, Gilles Veinstein, Europe and Islam, fifteen centuries of history, ed. Odile Jacob.

122 Hamadi Redissi, The Tragedy of Modern Islam, ed. Threshold. Read also, Fatima Mernissi, Fear-modernity, Conflict Islam democracy, ed. Albin Michael.

123 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, political power in the age of oil, ed. Discovery.

124 Timothy Mitchell, “Petrocracy”, in The industrial age, 200 years of progress and disasters, Special Edition, History, The Collections.

125 Roland Desné & Marcel Dorigny, Enlightenment, slavery, colonization, ed. Discovery.

126 Alaa El Aswany, religious extremism and dictatorship, the two sides of a historical misfortune, ed. South Acts.

127 Bertrand Badie & Dominique Vidal, New wars, ed. Discovery. Read also from the same authors, Who governs the world?, ed. Discovery.

128 Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, “Deadly enemies”, Representations of Islam and Muslim politics in France during the colonial era, ed. Discovery.

129 Saïd Bouamama, “Planter du blanc”, Chronicles of French (neo)colonialism, ed. Syllepsis.

130 Jean-Joël Brégeon, Bonaparte's Egypt, ed. Perrin, coll. Time.

131 Benjamin Stora and Abdelwahab Meddeb, History of relations between Jews and Muslims from the origins to the present day, ed. Albin Michael. Read also Bartolomé & Lucile Benassar, The Christians of Allah, ed. Perrin, coll. Time. Read also Haïm Zafrani, Jews of Andalusia and the Maghreb, ed. Maisonneuve & The Rose.

132 Albert Memmi, Portrait of the colonized, ed. Folio.

133 Abdelmalek Sayad, The double absence, from the illusions of the immigrant to the suffering of the immigrant, ed. Points, Trials.

134 Read also, Abdelmalek Sayad, Immigration or the paradoxes of otherness, ed. Reasons to act.

135 Moulaga, a term for dirty money, drug money.

136 François Burgat, understanding political Islam, a trajectory of research on Islamist otherness, 1973-2016, ed. Discovery.

137 Ibid. Haouès Seniguer, Islamism decrypted, ed. The Harmattan.

138 Richard Labévière, Terrorism, the hidden face of globalization, ed. Pierre-Guillaume de Roux.

139 Ibid, Georges Corm, For a secular reading of conflicts, On the “return of religion” in contemporary conflicts in the Middle East, ed. Discovery.

140 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Denocracy, Political Power in the Age of Oil, ed. Discovery.

141 Carlo Degli Abbati, Radical Movements in the Name of Islam, A Shared Responsibility?, ed. Perseus.

142 Michela Marzano, La mort spectacle, Inquiry into “horror-reality”, ed. Gallimard.

143 Fethi Benslama, The war of subjectivities in Islam, ed. Lines. Read also Tobie Nathan, Wandering Souls, ed. Poached.

144 Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam, ed. Points, Trials.

145 Timothy Mitchell, PETROCRATIA, democracy in the carbon age, era researcher collection.

146 Bertrand Badie and Dominique Vidal, The return of populism, the State of the world 2019, ed. Discovery.

147 Ibid, Christopher Lasch, The revolt of the elites and the betrayal of democracy, ed. Flammarion, Champs, essays.

148 Barbara Stiegler, From heading to strikes, Story of a mobilization November 17, 2018-March 17, 2020, ed. Greenfinch.

149 Abdelwahab Meddeb, The disease of Islam, ed. Point, tests.

150 Ibid, Hamadi Redissi, A History of Wahhabism, How sectarian Islam became Islam, ed. Points, Trials.

151 Ibid. Amadou Hamidou Diallo, Mutazilism, Philosophy and History of Dissension in Islam, ed. L'Harmattan, Senegal.

152 Hichem Djaït, Fitna, ed. Folio.

153 Didier Leschi, This Great Disturbance, Immigration Opposite, ed. Gallimard, Tract No. 22.

154 Roberto Saviano, At sea no taxis, ed. Gallimard.

155 Mediterranean Confluence, Parties and supporters in the post-2011 Arab world, ed. L’Harmattan, iReMMO, N° 96, Autumn 2016.

156 Klaus Schwab & Thierry Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset, ed. Forum Publishing.

157 Frédéric Rouvillois, Liquidation – Emmanuel Macron and Saint-Simonism, ed. of the deer.

158 Frédéric Farah, Fake State, The organized impotence of the State in France, ed. H&O.

159 David Graeber, Debt, 5000 years of History, ed. Babel, essay.

160 Michel Pinton, Identitarianism against the common good, Autopsy of a society without an object, ed. FYP.

161 Vanessa Codaccioni, Repression, The State in the Face of Political Challenges, read also The Society of Vigilance, Self-surveillance, denunciation and security hatred, ed. Textual.

162 Barbara Stiegler, “We must adapt”, On a new political imperative, ed. Gallimard, nrf essays.

163 Cyprien Boganda, The business of bankruptcies, Survey of those who prosper on the ruins of the French economy, ed. Discovery.

164 Guillaume Carnino, Digital: the false revolution?, in Special Edition, History, collections, The industrial age, 200 years of progress and disasters. Read also by the same author, The invention of science, The new religion of the industrial age, ed. Threshold.

165 Ibid. Preface by Jean-Claude Michéa in Christopher Lasch, The revolt of the elites and the betrayal of democracy, ed. Flammarion fields, trials.

166 Anne-Cécile Robert, Latest news on lies, ed. LUX.

167 Christopher Lasch & Cornelius Castoriadis, The Culture of Selfishness, ed. Climates.

168 Read! In the name of Your Lord who created_ Created Man from an adhesion (attachment or relationship)_ Read! Your Lord the Generous _ Taught man the use of the Qalam (Pen, writing) _ Taught man what he did not know.

169 Christopher Lasch, The One True Paradise, A History of the Ideology of Progress and Its Critics, ed. Flammarion, Champs Essais. Read also, Emmanuel Fureix & François Jarrige, Disenchanted modernity, rereading the history of the French 19th century, ed. Discovery.

170 Jérôme Maucourant, Have you read Polanyi?, ed. Flammarion, Champs Essais.

171 Ibid, Vanessa Codaccioni, The vigilance society, Self-surveillance, denunciation and security hatred, ed. Textual.

172 David Graeber, Ends of Capitalism, Possibilities I, ed. Payot manuals.

173 Sophie Bessis, The double impasse, The universal put to the test by religious and market fundamentalisms, ed. Discovery