Tell Your Story. Without makeup or exaggerated narcissism. Without false modesty or excessive triumphalism. Talking about oneself is not necessarily a chore or a therapy. What is perhaps most impressive in Abd Al Malik’s book “May Allah Bless France!” is the dual capacity to describe and to live, to accompany one’s own journey. In hindsight, he becomes both actor and director of his path. His path is anything but linear. The son of Congolese immigrants, Régis, his name before converting to Islam, finds himself in one of those suburban housing estates in Strasbourg, a family of three children abandoned by a father “whose terrible beauty must have sown misfortune around him.” One can easily guess what follows.
The next part: The one where political visions sometimes clash between total condemnation and justification at all costs, the one triggered by a statement from a Minister of the Interior who has since become President of the Republic, the one the press is asked not to publicize too much for fear of creating imitators, the one that causes witnesses, whose bravery in complaint plunges them subsequently into daily hell, to move away discreetly. Régis spares us none of the details of this underground, masked life from the basements of public housing with their rules, their clans, their loot, and their deviations. The size of the theft grows with him: “to flaunt: that was indeed the sole objective,” he explains regarding the easy money that simultaneously wins the “girl” and the respect of those around him. Success of the National Education system? Result of his intellectual foresight? Divine intervention or just a stroke of calendar luck? In any event, he avoids drugs and encounters Islam. The unconscious father figure changes location and nature: gone is the craze for Jacques Mesrine or Tony Montana, the hero of the movie Scarface. As the Intelligence Services discover in the eighties in lawless zones, the installation of a local Imam leads to a significant drop in delinquency and a return of the “blond heads” to schools. Régis becomes Abd Al Malik and “submits” to an Islam as structuring as it is demanding: “my new playmates were called Seneca, Camus, Epictetus…” Wary of radical forms of religion from which he distances himself, the author follows his “inner light,” which he first expresses on a musical medium. The Sufi path allows him to live his faith “offset but real.” Instead of an Islam of the suburbs, he treats himself to “the suburb of Islam.” “Passionate conversion,” the author confides, also salvational from the temptations of a radical Islam that could have led him to distant and war-torn countries. Not without contradiction, at the cost of human effort, a personal “jihad,” Abd Al Malik continues his journey: he reads Ibn Arabi, loves, and becomes a father. At the heart of love, he simply discerns the love for another.
Abd Al Malik, “May Allah Bless France!”, Coll. “Free Spaces”, Editions Albin Michel, 2007, 205 p.
