Being a Muslim in a country with a long colonial history, which has also had to deal with terrorist attacks carried out in the name of Islam, is an everyday challenge.
In January 2015, for example, I was as profoundly shocked as everyone else in France by the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo journalists in Paris. As the country mourned, I was invited by a major radio station to comment, but was first asked, live on air, to “dissociate” myself from the attackers.
I had been critical of Charlie Hebdo’s publications in the past, but my comments always fell within the scope of legitimate political debate. Nevertheless, as a Muslim, I was now treated as if I was under suspicion. In order to be tolerated on the airwaves, I had to profess my innocence: state publicly that I had nothing to do with the violence.
I couldn’t hold back my tears – because, even with a media profile, I was reduced to the most racist perception of my identity. I was strongly defended that night by others who took part in the show, and received much support online, but I couldn’t help thinking of the millions of French Muslims who, unlike me, would have no microphone to defend themselves against vile accusations.
Some years later I was invited to take part in a TV debate on the thesis: is the white man always guilty. I was expecting a conversation about gender and race. But my opponent, the philosopher Pascal Bruckner, immediately took me to taskclaiming that I had used my status “as a Black, Muslim woman” to incite hatred against Charlie Hebdo. He claimed that I had, in effect, blood on my hands, that my words had “led to the murder of 12 people at Charlie Hebdo”. I immediately protested, stating as firmly as I could, that I had “absolutely no responsibility for any terrorist attack”.
But Bruckner wouldn’t let go. He attacked me for having signed a joint statement in 2011, following a night-time petrol-bomb attack at the Charlie Hebdo premises that caused, fortunately, only material damage. Nothing in the statement – which I did not draft and was co-signed by 20 other academics and activists– had called for hatred or violence. It had been critical of the disproportionate media treatment of the fire at Charlie Hebdo when vandalism of Muslim places of worship featured rarely in the news. Signatories had expressed dismay at the selective nature of French national outrage, highlighting the indifference shown after an arson attack on a Paris building inhabited by Roma people, in which a man died.
But Bruckner repeated his accusations in an interview the next day, claiming without any evidence that he had simply “reminded Rokhaya Diallo of her involvement in political Islam” adding – as if it were a crime – that I had “criticised Charlie Hebdo by calling them Islamophobic and racist”.
I felt I had no option but to file a defamation lawsuit against Bruckner, believing the accusation to be not just outrageous and insulting, but influenced by my origins and my faith. But defending myself was viewed as another provocation.
Le Figaro, the leading conservative daily, published a highly offensive article on the eve of the trial, which, without even bothering to interview me, stated: “Inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, ‘anti-racist’ activists like Rokhaya Diallo are multiplying lawsuits to silence critics of Islamism.” Taking legal action as a Muslim woman was framed as a “jihadist” political plot.
This kind of smear tactic is used again and again to discredit any Muslim who calls out Islamophobia. When the footballer Karim Benzema spoke in support of the people of Gaza in October 2023, the then interior minister Gerard Darmanin declared – without a shred of evidence – that the player had “well-known ties to the Muslim Brotherhood”.
In May, a report commissioned by the interior ministry into the Muslim Brotherhood fuelled suspicion of all French Muslims by recycling conspiracy theories around supposed “infiltration”. The report was as the the socio-anthropologist Hamza Esmili put it, “intellectually impoverished”.
Yet Bruno Retailleau, the current interior minister, used alarmist conspiracy tropes to describe its conclusions, claiming it had identified “a very clear threat to the republic and to national cohesion” and “a quiet form of Islamist infiltration whose ultimate goal is to bring all of French society under sharia law”.
But even the report stated unequivocally: “No recent document demonstrates any intent by Muslims of France to establish an Islamic state in France or to enforce sharia law there.” It added that the Brotherhood’s members in France today are estimated to number “between 400 and 1,000 people”.
As Esmili argues, French Muslims present a paradox: we are part of every social sphere, yet many of us have not given up our cultural specificities. And that is precisely what we are blamed for – integration without assimilation. This is why the same government can claim it uses the law to fight against Muslim “separatism” while denouncing the threat of Muslim “infiltration”. Muslims can’t win: we are blamed for being part of the national community and for being outside of it.
Thus, no matter what level we reach in the social pecking order, being Muslim always carries the suspicion of association with a radical and dangerous ideology: of being the enemy within.
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So when Léna Situations, a major fashion influencer in France, appeared on the Cannes film festival red carpet wearing a long dress with a headscarf, a senior official in Emmanuel Macron’s party suggested on social media that she was practising a form of religious “infiltration”. As if an outfit was in itself proof of extremism. The influencer never mentioned her religion but it made no difference – her Algerian heritage alone was enough to disqualify her.
Even non-Muslims who take a stand against this hostile climate are subjected to similar accusations. Emile Ackermann – a rabbi vocal on Islamophobia – was accused by a self-proclaimed academic “expert” of being inspired by a “Brotherist” discourse. Such absurd accusations would be laughable if the situation weren’t so volatile, with Islamophobic crime on the increase. Take the case of the hairdresser Hichem Miraoui, killed in June in the south of France, in what investigators are treating as a racially motivated act of domestic terrorism. Miraoui had been the target of racist rhetoric posted on social media by a neighbour who also denounced the French state as “incapable of protecting us from Muslims”.
Yet, the very same state constantly fuels a narrative portraying Muslims as a problem.
During the defamation lawsuit I launched against Bruckner, and its appeal, my accuser and his lawyer leaned into these cliches. While the philosopher repeated his accusations and suggested that I was funded by “foreign powers”, his lawyer told the court that, given that Charlie Hebdo’s case files amounted to several tonnes of documents, no one could say for sure whether my name was not mentioned in them.
Elyamine Settoul, a political scientist and expert on jihadism, testified, however, that terrorists are radicalised through direct contacts and in no way rely on intellectual debates or interventions.
And the expert and former Islamic State hostage Nicolas Hénin testified that my name appeared “neither in the legal proceedings concerning the January 2015 attack, nor in the research conducted on the subject”. He told the court that “the jihadist sphere holds nothing but contempt” for people like me because of my “multicultural progressivism, which aligns with none of their religious doctrines”.
Bruckner was acquitted in the first instance on the grounds that he had attributed to me only “purely moral responsibility” and invited me to “take ownership of the weight of my words and commitments”. The appeal court overturned the initial judgment, recognising the defamatory nature of Bruckner’s remarks, yet still acquitted him on the grounds that he had made his statement “in good faith”.
Just like the “yellow peril” once attributed to east Asians, or the supposed “cosmopolitanist” trope used about Jews, the image of an allegedly foreign group secretly infiltrating France’s circles of influence is once again thriving, in a sadly familiar strain of dangerous racist rhetoric.
