This text was first published in 2017. Eight years later, it has lost none of its incandescence. The recent massacre in Sydney, targeting Jews celebrating Hanukkah, reminds us that political Islam, the Islam that calls on Muslims “to kill and be killed in the way of Allah”¹is the legitimate son of orthodox Islam and its sublimated version.

Before reading this text, it may be useful to recall a few facts.

First, the circumstances: Father Boulad launched this cry following two bomb attacks: the first against St. George’s Church in the city of Tanta, the second against St. Mark’s Cathedral in Alexandria. On this Palm Sunday, April 9, 2017, forty-five Copts died and one hundred and nineteen others were injured.

Next, an essential clarification: the author does not write as an enemy of Muslims. It is Islam as a totalizing system, its university, al-Azhar, the complacency of Western politicians, academics, media and the Catholic Church itself, that he takes to task and whose works and fruits he denounces.

Last but not least, the chorus of anathemas this text has provoked against its author: these are typical of those for whom any reasoned criticism of Islam can only be in bad faith and a call to hatred. They prefer to wave red rags instead of acknowledging that facts and history prove their author right. As a prophet for his time, Henri Boulad denounces a system that holds millions of human beings captive and makes violence a divinely required modus operandi against all those who refuse to submit to it.

I blame Islam!³

I accuse Islam of being the cause of this barbarism and of all the acts of violence committed in the name of the Muslim faith.

I’m not accusing Muslims, most of whom are peaceful, benevolent and friendly, but Islam as a political ideology. Among Muslims – who are our brothers in humanity – I have many remarkable, faithful and irreproachable friends, who themselves wish to see a humanist and peaceful Islam. Many Muslims – and ex-Muslims – are not responsible for this barbarism in the name of God. So it’s not them I’m accusing here… but Islam as such.

I’m not accusing terrorists or terrorism. Nor only the Muslim Brotherhood, or the nebulous groups that gravitate around this violent jihadist brotherhood. Nor do I blame Islamism, or radical political Islam.

I simply blame Islam, which by its very nature is both political and radical.

As I wrote more than twenty-five years ago, Islamism is Islam laid bare, in all its logic and rigor. It is present in Islam like the chick in the egg, like the fruit in the flower, like the tree in the seed. It is the bearer of a social project aimed at establishing a global caliphate based on Sharia law, the only legitimate law, because it is divine. It’s a global, globalizing, total, totalizing, totalitarian project.

Islam is at once religion, state and society, dîn wa dawla. This is how it has been since its earliest origins.

With the passage from Mecca to Medina (the Hegira), Islam changed from a religion to a theocratic state. It was also the moment when Mohammed ceased to be a mere religious leader and became a warlord, head of state and political leader. Religion and politics would henceforth be inextricably linked: ” Islam is politics or it is nothing ” (Imam Rouhollah Khomeiny).

I accuse those who claim that atrocities committed by Muslims “have nothing to do with Islam” of deliberately lying. In fact, it is in the name of the Koran and its clear injunctions that these crimes are perpetrated. The very fact that the call to prayer and the incitement to murder infidels are preceded by the same cry, Allah-ou akbar (God is the greatest), is highly significant.

I accuse the Muslim scholars of the tenth century of having promulgated decrees – which have now become irreversible – leading Islam to the impasse it has reached today.

The first of these decrees – that of the abrogating and the abrogated – consisted in giving primacy to the Medinan verses, bearers of violence and intolerance, to the detriment of the Meccan verses inviting peace and concord.

To make this verdict irreversible, two further decrees were issued: that of declaring the Koran “the uncreated word of Allah”, and therefore immutable; and that of forbidding all further efforts at interpretation, declaring “the door of ijtihad [effort of reflection] definitively closed”. The sacralization of these rulings has fossilized Muslim thought and contributed to keeping Islamic countries in a state of chronic backwardness and stagnation.

I accuse Islam of having locked itself into a dogmatism from which it cannot escape. Caught in its own trap of resentment, it blames all humanity for its own failures, in an enterprise of victimization and self-justification.

I accuse the Azhar, which is supposed to embody moderate Islam, of nurturing a spirit of fanaticism, intolerance and hatred in the millions of students and imams who come from all over the world to train at its institutions. It is thus becoming one of the main sources of terrorism worldwide.

I blame the Azhar for its systematic refusal to reform its school and university curricula and textbooks. Despite repeated requests from Egyptian President al-Sissi to remove all texts inciting hatred, violence and discrimination, nothing has yet been done.

I blame the Azhar for its refusal to condemn the Islamic State/Daesh and Salafist/Wahhabi Islamism, proof of a genuine proximity to terrorism.

I accuse the Grand Imam of el-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, despite several years of study in Paris and a doctoral thesis defended at the Sorbonne, of persisting in sticking to the obscurantist and medieval current. While he was expected to promote innovative thinking in this venerable institution, he has instead reinstated texts inciting to violence and intolerance in the school and university textbooks of el-Azhar’s institutions, which had been rejected by his predecessor Sheikh Mohammed Tantaoui.

I accuse the Azhar of not calling on the “new Muslim thinkers” from East and West to initiate with them an in-depth reform of Islam.

I accuse major Western nations which, while claiming to defend the values of freedom, democracy and human rights, actively collaborate with fundamentalist Islam for the sake of economic and financial interests.

I accuse the West of having invented with the Islamists the false notion of Islamophobia to silence any criticism of Islam.

I accuse certain European leaders of giving in to the liberticidal demands of an increasingly demanding and aggressive Islam, whose clearly proclaimed aim is the outright conquest of the West. In so doing, these leaders are betraying their peoples and selling out their historical heritage. In the name of a multiculturalist ideology, unbridled globalism and unbridled openness, they are contributing to the collapse of a prestigious past of culture and civilization.

I blame the laxity of a certain liberal left in France, incapable of imposing the laws of the Republic on a minority that refuses to integrate. The leaders, sold out by electoral interests to the explosive suburbs, have participated in the social degradation of the “lost districts of the Republic” in the name of a “civil peace” that is nothing but capitulation on the part of the State.

I accuse the Catholic Church of pursuing a “dialogue” with Islam based on complacency, compromise and duplicity. After more than fifty years of one-way initiatives, such a monologue has now come to a standstill. By giving in to “political correctness” and under the pretext of not offending the Muslim interlocutor in the name of “living together”, we carefully avoid thorny and vital questions. True dialogue begins with the truth.

I accuse the mainstream media of manipulation and lies, with their biased reading of realities, tendentious figures, distorted statistics and rigged “polls”. This systematic disinformation tramples on the most elementary deontology and ethics, to the benefit of the major financial groups that subsidize them and dictate their editorial lines.

Rather than being indignant about increasingly frequent acts of terrorism, it’s high time we faced up to real reality and dared to speak the truth.

It’s high time to reconsider the problem of Islam without detours, without fear and without complacency. The use of doublespeak and relativism only leads to the worst. Western states have a legal and moral obligation to preserve their territorial integrity, way of life, culture and values in the face of a conquering Islam that is fundamentally hostile to Western civilization.

Let Muslims who do not recognize themselves in this outburst of hatred and violence be confronted, without denial or prevarication, with themselves, their founding texts and their history, and with their tragic situation in the world today. Rather than seeking to promote dialogue between Islam and Christianity, or between Islam and the West, it is urgent to promote intra-Islamic dialogue and reform. Let us hope that Muslims finally recognize that their problem is endogenous, and that they have the courage to tackle it with lucidity and humility, and stop hiding from it.

It’s high time we moved beyond the divisions of left and right, progressive and conservative, socialist and democrat, republican and liberal, Judeo-Christian and Muslim, to find a common basis of values and principles among all human beings. I know of none other than the Universal Charter of Human Rights proclaimed by the UN in 1948, which all Arab and Muslim countries have refused to sign in its entirety.

It’s high time we placedMan at the heart of the debate, in a common search for truth. For “if truth and friendship are equally dear to us, it is a sacred duty to give preference to truth” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I, 4, 1096 a 13).

Only a true confrontation with reality will allow “love and truth to meet… justice and peace to kiss” (Psalm 85:11).

Notes