That is the moment she fell in the street on January 26, 1997, an instant after a member of the Armed Islamic Group cut her throat on the outskirts of Sidi Moussa.

In November 2012, when I am finally able to locate them in a quartier populaire east of Algiers, I spend several hours talking with Amel’s mother, Houria, and her surviving daughters. Sitting on the couch in front of her TV, Khalti Houria (Auntie Houria) as everyone calls her, wears a long blue dress and glasses that hang around her neck. Both stalwart and shattered, she shows me Amel’s watch, which was returned by the gendarmes. Its white face features small green flower buds just under the spot where the glass is broken. The second hand still aims optimistically upward, frozen fifty-seven seconds after 5:17, approaching a 5:18 that will not come.

Twenty-two years old and a third-year law student at the University of Algiers, Amel lived in the dorm. She wanted to visit her family on that seventeenth day of Ramadan, a day known as Ghazwat Badr in commemoration of a historic Muslim victory. So she boarded the bus for Sidi Moussa, and would never finish law school.

Amel’s mother tells me everything she had heard about what happened on the bus. Just outside the town, the vehicle was stopped at a faux barrage. Amel occupied a seat behind the driver, who was a neighbor, and held her schoolbag. Though she did not cover her head in Algiers, and wore makeup, she had a friend’s shawl wrapped around her hair when the men from the Armed Islamic Group climbed aboard. One came to Amel, hit her on the shoulder, and said, “Ahl al houkouma” (partisans of the government). “Get up. Kill her.” They grabbed the law student by the arm. Still, she dared to say, “Don’t touch me.” According to Khalti Houria, Amel then “turned and looked at everyone.” Even now the mother appeals to her daughter’s fellow passengers as she weeps: “Amel did not speak but begged you with her eyes and asked you to save her.” No one could. “When they got out of the bus, one armed man had a knife and was rubbing it on the pavement, preparing to kill her.”

There are two versions of what happened next. Some said Amel was kicked as she was getting out of the bus and fell to the ground; others remembered that she had her throat cut while still standing. Her death was an atrocity. It was also meant as a warning. In the moment after
Amel’s watch stopped, the GIA men told all the other passengers: “If you go to school, if you go to the university, the day will come when we will kill all of you like this.”

The terrorists had posted placards all over Sidi Moussa saying that young people must stop studying and stay home. As a law professor, I want to understand why a young woman with her whole life ahead of her would continue her legal education when she could be murdered as a result. Apparently, Amel had said to her father, “I will study law and you will always have your head high. I am a girl, and you will always be proud of me. I will do the work of a man.” Mrs. Zenoune, herself a housewife, had long dreamed of her children studying. All six did.

Amel’s sister Amena explains: “Our mother inculcated in us the idea that studying means you are a free woman. Mom said, ‘I am ready to lose all four of them. I will sacrifice them for knowledge.’ When people remember ‘Amel Zenoune who was assassinated by the terrorists,’ they say, ‘The girl who was killed for studying law.’ People say, ‘She was the example for us.’ ”

While still cherishing the values Amel died for, her death was an agony for her family. And so was the way they found out about it. Sidi Moussa, as the sewing teachers had recalled, was then a wasteland of terror. Its people had no running water, no electricity after the terrorists attacked the power station, and no telephone service. So the family was never sure when to expect Amel or their other daughters home.

Finally, twenty policemen showed up at the door, but, faced with the mother and her younger children, the policemen found themselves unable to deliver the news they had come to give. One asked Houria how many of her daughters studied in Algiers, then told her enigmatically that she and her husband had been ordered to meet the prosecutor in Blida the next day. Their work undone, the cops drove off and left the family wondering in the dark. Khalti Houria had a bad feeling. Any of her college-student daughters, or all three, could have been headed home that night.

When the police left, a group of neighbors came to the apartment, including the bus driver’s wife. Everyone assumed that the family now knew the news. Khalti Houria begged the driver’s wife, “Fatiha, tell me.” So the driver’s wife shared as much as she could: “They cut your daughter’s throat.” This answer only left terrible questions for Khalti Houria. “I said, ‘Which one?’ One neighbor said, ‘The one who wore glasses.’ ” No one seemed to know the precise facts.

With no one able to give her a definite answer, and no working phone, Khalti Houria ignored the evening curfew and took off with her young son, running through the perilous streets of Sidi Moussa until she got to the gendarmerie. When she finally found herself face-to-face with a gendarme, Khalti Houria remembers saying, “ ‘My son, tell me how many of my daughters.’ He said, ‘Madame, one only. The one who was at the law school. She was wearing jeans and a coat.’” The bereaved mother insisted: “Swear to me.” He swore. So, in the most awful moment of her life, she actually felt gratitude. “I prayed and I sat and kissed the earth and I said, ‘God give me strength.’ They were all three at the university. It was a little less painful that it was one rather than two, or three.” Even as she found out she had not lost three daughters, the reality that one was gone, and how, sank in.

But Khalti Houria’s agony gave way to rage. “I sat on the ground and said everything that came into my mind. That hour my struggle began.” Her daughter Amena describes the mother’s long walk home through the desolation of Sidi Moussa. “The commissariat was far from where we lived. All along the road, Mama insulted the terrorists. She didn’t stop. The police said, ‘If we had ten mothers who had lost their child who did what Mme. Zenoune did, the terrorists would never have won in Sidi Moussa. Never.’  There are many who died before Amel, God have mercy on her soul. No one had done what Mom did. It was enormous to make that journey. Not to have fear. For her, it might have been in her head, ‘Who cares anymore?’ ” In the dark streets of the martyred town, Mrs. Zenoune taunted those who had taken her child. “You killed Amel. Come and kill me.”

Eye-to-eye with the terror she had felt over the previous terrible years, that night she defied it. When she got home, she threw open her door that was always bolted shut. “Let them enter.”  Khalti Houria continued denouncing the murderers on the balcony of the family home well into the early morning hours when the neighbors got up for Zuhour, or Ramadan breakfast. “Ya haggar.” (You who are unjust.)

“You killed her because she was studying. She was beautiful. She was better than you. Amel, Amel, Amel.” After her jeremiad, the gendarmes came and told her husband that the rest of the family should leave Sidi Moussa immediately.
They buried Amel and left their lives behind them.

One of Amel’s younger sisters, Lamia, later overcame her own despair and went to law school in Amel’s memory, practicing today in Algiers, as her older sister hoped to. “Fundamentalism will not win, even if they say, ‘Allahu Akbar’ all day long,” Khalti Houria swears.

Lamia the lawyer takes me into the small, neat living room to see Amel’s framed portrait, which hangs on the wall. The law student had pitch-black hair that fell just below her shoulders, and luminous dark eyes that are now the centerpiece of this room. She was not smiling when the picture was taken, but her determined expression displays what her classmate Adnane Bouchaïb had told me about her: that she had both the eloquence and the lively personality needed to be a successful lawyer. “She had a big future in front of her,” Adnane recollected.

Somehow, in the portrait on the living-room wall, Amel looks both serene and entirely aware of what her future might actually hold. Her face captures perfectly something she said to her mother not long before her murder. “Mom, please put this in your head. Nothing will happen to us, Inshallah. But if something happens to us, you and Dad, you must know that we are dead for knowledge. You and Father must keep your heads high.”

Amel’s watch stopped at 5:17, but she lives on in Algeria and everywhere else women and men continue to fight fundamentalism, by striving for knowledge, and by keeping their heads held high.

(This book excerpt is from Karima Bennoune, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism (www.karimabennoune.com) and that is was published by W.W. Norton and Company.)

The post Dying for Knowledge appeared first on SabrangIndia.

This article was first published on www.opendemocracy.net

A man reads the latest edition of French weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo with the title “One year on, the assassin still on the run” in a cafe in Nice, France, on Jan. 6. Photo by Eric Gaillard/Reuters

The Charlie Hebdo attack one year ago was part of a long tradition of fundamentalist assaults on artists.  Understanding this tragic event is critical to defeating Islamist terror today.

Two French Islamist gunmen of Algerian descent entered a newspaper office in Paris a year ago today and gunned down a generation of Europe’s greatest political cartoonists- – many from an anarchist, anti-racist tradition – along with their co-workers and those protecting them, who also included people of Algerian descent.  In case anyone is confused about the politics of this – it was a far right attack on the left. 

At first the world reacted with justified horror and a solidarity which is not always forthcoming for the frequently anonymous victims of Islamist slaughter, and which was not often experienced by the Charlie Hebdo staff in previous years when they endured threats and firebombs. However, the backlash began quickly.  The truth about Charlie was that many were shockingly equivocal in their reaction to these events. 

There was the “I am not Charlie” campaign, promoted by Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.  The meaning of that was clear enough.  Those whose ideology helped pave the way for such killings were publicly admitting their lack of solidarity with the victims. There were outright vilification campaigns suggesting that the cartoonists (or perhaps French people generally) were racists, “Islamophobic” or otherwise had it coming.  In California – which by year’s end became the site of another Islamist bloodbath – a number of people expressed such views to me, thinking that because I have a Muslim name I would agree.  Not long after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, I spoke at a U.S. university event on freedom of expression along with a self-appointed young American spokesperson for “the Muslim community” from the Council on American Islamic Relations – whom I must say I never elected to speak for me.  She reviled the January 7 victims to the point where I felt compelled to ask if she understood that they were actually dead.  She did not know as I did that just before their murders, the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were in a heated discussion about terrible socio-economic conditions in the Paris suburbs where much of the Muslim population lives – an injustice which mattered a great deal to them.

Another response was the more sophisticated “I am Ahmed” campaign named for the stalwart French policeman Ahmed Merabet also of Algerian descent who was killed by the Kouachi brothers as they fled the newspaper’s offices. Sadly, this was sometimes meant as a rebuttal rather than an amplification of “Je suis Charlie,” when in fact people like the murderous Kouachis have been killing Ahmeds around the world for years.  Very few have been paying attention to that body count.  When they depicted their version of the Prophet Mohamed crying over terrorism, the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists had the courage to take on those carrying out that slaughter while others looked away or were silent. 

That is committed anti-racism and solidarity, even if it comes in the shape of a merciless, sometimes disturbing French satirical tradition not always well understood elsewhere – like Mad Magazine with politics.

On this anniversary, we must remember that those who killed Charlie also killed Ahmed and that saying “I am Charlie” is also a way of saying “I am Ahmed,” and vice versa. Indeed, opposing the Kouachis of the world is essential to saving those countless people of Muslim heritage and their fellow citizens in the Global South who have been dying in the tens of thousands at the hands of Muslim fundamentalist killers in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Nigeria, Libya and beyond. Ahmed is a synonym for Charlie, not an antonym. That was why so many people of North African descent stood with the January 7 victims.

" The idiots killed me", cartoon by Dilem. Credit: @DilemAli.

For example, Ali Dilem, one of Algeria’s best political cartoonists joined the Charlie Hebdo team in February out of solidarity.  His bold cartoons have lampooned political figures and fundamentalist terrorists for years, earning him jail sentences and countless fatwas. On January 7, 2015, Dilem’s cartoon bore the heading: “God is Humour” (in French: “Dieu est humour,”a play on words derived from “Dieu est amour” – “God is Love”).  Another of Dilem’s cartoons after the January 7 attacks shows a dying figure writing in his own blood on a wall: “the idiots killed me”

l trying to escape the “Islamic State” offensive, and in front of the small club where 89 mainly young people lost their lives at the hands of another group of young Islamist assassins of North African descent.  I found my visit doubly poignant because I went with Samia Benkherroubi a former Algerian TV presenter whose own producer, the legendary Aziz Smati, had been shot in 1994 by the Armed Islamic Group, the forerunners of “Islamic State,” and is today a paraplegic, but continues his work from his wheelchair. Smati’s crime, like Charlie’s, was creativity.  He produced Algeria’s groundbreaking youth music TV show, Bled Music, showing the first Rai music videos on TV, which were also controversial at the time. 

Outside the bullet-riddled Bataclan, Samia and I laid flowers and mourned together, lamenting that the fundamentalists we have been battling for years are still so much stronger than their civil society opponents.  She had written to me after the November 13 attacks to say how deeply saddened she was to see the fundamentalist violence she fled in 1990s Algeria reproducing itself elsewhere.  What was especially mystifying to her, was the way in which some on the left tried to use the history of French colonialism as the excuse (or so-called “explanation”) for these attacks. The same thing happened after January 7. Samia wrote that “looking for explanations in colonial history is an injury to all victims of blind terrorism.” It also entirely overlooks that Algeria itself lost as many as 200,000 – including many veterans of the liberation struggle – to extremist terrorism in the 1990s, a fact often conveniently forgotten.

The same night that Samia and I paid our respects at the Bataclan, we visited the plaque by the Seine to the victims of the massacre of October 17, 1961 when several hundred Algerian nationalists were slain and thrown into the river by police during a peaceful protest.

We vowed by that memorial not to let their brave memory be misused to justify fundamentalist atrocities, even while keeping their memory alive like those of other victims.  For me, this is very personal. My Algerian grandfather Lakhdar Bennoune died defeating French colonialism.  His death is part of an historic injustice which still demands real accounting – but is no justification whatsoever for the lamentable Kouachis who would have said he was not a true martyr because he died fighting for a republic rather than an “Islamic State”.

All of this complexity seems to have been lost on the authors and signatories of the petition against the granting of the PEN Freedom of Expression Courage award to the Charlie Hebdo staff signed by a group of mainly Western intellectuals in the name of anti-racism.  They wanted to make clear that they were not Charlie.  They claimed solidarity with Ahmed.  They presumed to know what the Ahmeds of the world think (and that they think alike) while overlooking the contemporary politics of the Muslim majority regions of the world.  They regretted the killing, but clearly didn’t understand it. 

The petition’s authors presumed a) that French Muslims were mostly devout, and b) that this meant they could not stomach satirical drawings – two huge and highly inaccurate presumptions. This was a recurring theme after January 7 – that all Muslims and all people of Muslim heritage were offended by the publication of cartoons (whether they liked the cartoons or not). It is not at all clear how assuming that 1.5 billion people have no sense of humor (and no politics) is anything other than patronizing.

Meanwhile, the campaign to support the presentation of the PEN award to Charlie Hebdo was led by Salman Rushdie, who is of Muslim heritage, and whose name is derived from a great 12th century Andalusian Muslim philosopher  Ibn Rushd who likely would not have been terribly troubled by provocative cartoons, and whose own books on philosophy and theology were burned by Muslim fundamentalists while his Christian followers were slain by the Inquisition. 

There was the “I am not Charlie” campaign, promoted by Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.  The meaning of that was clear enough.  Those whose ideology helped pave the way for such killings were publicly admitting their lack of solidarity with the victims.

So, we must remember that January 7, 2015 was one in a long line of far right attacks on creativity, and part of a history of fundamentalist assaults against artists and intellectuals who have defied them.  And, sadly, it was only one of the first armed Islamist salvos of 2015 which will be remembered as the year of endless, expanding jihad. Charlies and Ahmeds, Ceciles and Samiras died in many regions of the world at the hands of those seeking a free ticket to paradise.

In 2015, Muslim fundamentalists would go on to target Pakistani arts promoters, Iraqi women lawyers and teachers and most of the country’s minorities, Syrian archaeologists, a Kosher grocery store in France, an event about freedom of expression in Denmark, Afghan airports, Tunisia’s national museum, countless Shiite mosques everywhere, minarets, a Beirut shopping district, a Sousse beach, Nigerian markets, a Kenyan University, and a Russian airplane carrying families home from vacation.  Grave crimes, crimes against humanity, war crimes, even genocide, in some cases.  Afterwards we were all assaulted verbally both by some on the left who tried to excuse the perpetrators or minimize their crimes in defiance of the facts, and some on the right who sought to lump all Muslims in with those perpetrators notwithstanding how many Muslims have died at their hands and how many have opposed them.

With all of this bloodletting and intolerance, why is it important to remember the Charlie Hebdo attack and its victims?  Algerians I have interviewed about the country’s “dark decade” of 1990s fundamentalist violence have often told me about the debates regarding the motives behind fundamentalist killings. In the beginning, people tried to explain away the targeting – “oh, he was a policeman, he we was an atheist, she was a communist,” until the terrorists began killing Every(wo)man and it seemed inexplicable.  Grassroots solidarity with less popular or controversial victims was crucial but sometimes harder to come by, something which their assassins knew only too well.  A muted response to what happened to the cops and the communists only emboldened the so-called Warriors of God to attack others. 

So, a year later, remembering the Charlie Hebdo attack, and paying tribute to its victims, are critical aspects of the ongoing struggle against Muslim fundamentalist terrorism.  Likewise, remembering that many Muslims and people of Muslim heritage have spoken up in defence of Charlie Hebdo and against fundamentalist violence (and have died in that violence) is a key way of fighting the racism and discrimination against Muslims which also burgeoned in 2015.  The truth about Charlie is that in the year since the attacks we have often forgotten all of these things.

So today, in memory of Charb, Cabu, Wolinksi, Tignous, Bernard Maris, Honoré, Elsa Cayat, Mustapha Ourad, Frédéric Boisseau, Michel Renaud, and the police officers Franck Brinsolaro and Ahmed Merabet who were killed exactly a year ago, and all those who died at the hands of Islamist terrorists in 2015, I say simply, “I am still Charlie.”  It is a battle cry in the ongoing campaign against fundamentalist violence and the ideas that motivate it, which is one of the defining human rights struggles of 2016.  That is perhaps the most important truth about Charlie.

(The writer, an academic of repute also won the 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her book, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism)
 

The post The truth about Charlie: one year after the January 7 attacks appeared first on SabrangIndia.

A young couple armed for battle attacked a Christmas party full of the husband's colleagues. In the face of this nightmare — both the 355th mass shooting in 336 days in the United States, and one that came less than three weeks after the Paris attacks — right and left alike are sticking to their scripts rather than grappling with the complex reality. If we are to successfully prevent future massacres that have to change.

First and foremost, we have to think of the victims and their families.

And then we have to declare all-out war on the political ideology of Islamism that motivated Syed Farook and Tafsheen Malik, while simultaneously standing firm against all attempts to discriminate against Muslims generally. We have to disarm all potential terrorists by toughening up gun control laws and by discrediting the foul ideas that motivate them. (And we have to name those ideas without fear of being labeled politically incorrect.) The right and the left, more worried about their fight with each other than the fight against terrorism, have made this an either/or choice when it is both/and. We cannot succeed by only doing one of these things or the other.

The right rushed in almost immediately. Twitter was full of smears of all Muslims, President Obama, immigrants, etc. Ann Coulter tweeted: "it's been a 50 year invasion." "Where," shrieked Pamela Geller, "are the programs in mosques and madrassas teaching against jihad? NONE." Are there enough such programs and are they succeeding? No. But, as someone who has spent years traveling the world talking to Muslims, including clergy, who are challenging extremism, I know that this is simply a lie. As the icing on the cake, Marco Rubio now denies that there is any discrimination against Muslims in America.

The left meanwhile, as exemplified by the tepid statements of Democratic candidates — has only been willing to talk about gun control and has mostly refused to name a key part of the problem in this case — Muslim fundamentalism or Islamism, a virulent political ideology (which represents the far right of the Muslim political spectrum). That ideology today poses a global threat and is one that many (but not enough) people of Muslim heritage themselves have been fighting against all around the world for years. Hilary Clinton deems it insulting to say "radical Islam." Not saying it, when it represents a reality, is much worse.

The double standards have been stunning. On the right, people who denounced anyone who dared make a connection between the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooter and its own extreme anti-choice discourse were instantly linking the San Bernardino bloodbath to "Islamic" terrorism before there was any evidence other than that the first suspect had a foreign sounding name. On the left, the same people who had instantly (and correctly) recognized the politics of the Planned Parenthood shooting were reticent to admit any connection to terrorism here or to discuss the possible political motivation, even as thousands of rounds of ammunition were being found in the "IED factory" Farook and Malik had in their garage.

The soundtrack to all of this has been a diatribe from the Far Right in the West increasingly suggesting that all Muslims are members of one big sleeper cell and that there is something inherently wrong with this religion, and this religion only. Such views contravene basic tenets of humanism and decency. They also give a powerful weapon both to actual fundamentalists and those who apologize for them by suggesting that the extremists are just fighting an oppressive, imperialist West and defending Muslim interests. Making Muslims into victims, or making them feel like they are, plays into the hands of the fundamentalists who know just how to play that card.

While the Western Right sometimes advocates bigotry and international crimes — like killing the families of terrorists as Donald Trump appallingly suggests — in response to Muslim fundamentalist violence, the Western Left often refuses to recognize the reality of that violence and the actual danger posed by its underlying ideology.

We have to declare all-out war on the political ideology of Islamism that motivated Syed Farook and Tafsheen Malik, while simultaneously standing firm against all attempts to discriminate against Muslims generally.

They should listen to progressives of Muslim heritage whose words also belie the claims of the Gellers of the world. For example, Algerian anti-extremist activist Cherifa Kheddar, whose own brother and sister were killed by the Armed Islamic Group in 1996, clearly explains that you cannot end jihadist violence without "prioritizing the fight against fundamentalism which makes the bed of jihadism."

A similar point was made by a petition authored by Muslim journalist Mohamed Sifaoui and published last summer in the leftwing and secular French magazine Marianne that was signed by some 2000 people, mostly people of North African, Muslim heritage. "Islamism imposes a war on us and its principle weapon is terrorism, but Islamism also imposes on us a great ideological battle that we must face up to collectively."

In facing up to this very battle, President Obama got some things right in his Oval Office speech though he mainly pledged — somewhat incongruously — to continue the same strategy against a threat which has evolved, and emphasized what he would not do. However, he rightly reminded us that Muslim Americans are an integral part of the community. Discrimination is an unacceptable response to terror. Allowing terror suspects to arm themselves inside our borders is not a good idea. And at the same time he insisted that Muslims must confront extremism which is a grave threat and one that has, in fact, taken root in certain quarters, including here in the U.S..

What we need to do now — rather than giving a forum to self-appointed spokespeople like CAIR who have not led the fight against extremism — is listen to those who have actually been taking on this very struggle the President referenced. One of those brave people, Ani Zonneveld, the Malaysian American head of Muslims for Progressive Values based in Southern California, wrote to me the day after the San Bernardino slaughter. "You cannot be religious and go out and kill in Islam, and yet again we are witnessing murder in the name of our faith. The fact that guns are easily accessible and there have been more than 355 mass shootings in America to date should be irrelevant to our internal conversation. Our conversation should be why and what is it in our theology that has been so bastardized to give people permission to kill? Until we honestly root this out, we will by default be blamed."

To enable the "rooting out" Ani calls for, the right and the left need to focus on the actual problem and not on each other. They all need to carefully distinguish between Muslims, people of Muslim heritage and immigrants on the one hand, and Islamist extremists on the other. They must be tolerant toward the former who are key allies, and unwaveringly intolerant of the latter. As a necessary first step, they must speak the name of the problem: "Muslim fundamentalism."

The memory of the victims of San Bernardino, and of so many other recent terror attacks around the world, demands nothing less from us today.

(The author is a law professor at UC Davis, author of “Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism”; This article originally appeared on The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karima-bennoune/how-the-right-and-the-lef_1_b_8739586.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in (hyperlinked) on December 8, 2015)

The post How the Right and the Left Are Getting San Bernardino Wrong appeared first on SabrangIndia.