That a cover of the very serious “Time” questions American Islamophobia cannot hide a phenomenon that also affects the European continent: Islam is cause for concern. And not just radical Islamism as it should be. The embarrassing success of a book written by one of the Bundesbank’s leaders is evidence of this: German TV channels could not hide the enthusiasm of many Germans, including those from the SPD, for Thilo Sarrazin’s book denouncing the creeping Islamization of the country. It is proof of the pedagogical ineffectiveness of political statements that strive to separate the wheat from the chaff in contemporary Islam. Extremism is condemned, Al-Qaida is fought, but the moral prejudice reflects back on Islam as a whole. Without Muslim leaders being moved by it or seeking to remedy it, as regretted by the Muslim chaplain of the National Gendarmerie interviewed by France 24. “Islamophobia” is heard here and there to stigmatize an irrational behavior, a baseless fear. But how can Islam be the subject of a phobia? The phobic syndrome, let us recall, does not only concern the object-based foundation it is set upon – the most known being: the crowd, insects, airplanes, elevators – but also the subject who experiences this psychological manifestation daily. It involves the recurring perception of a form of uncertainty, a source of arbitrariness from the external environment. This prevents the salvific negation of phobic anguish by resorting to reality and blocks the way to reassurance that could be drawn from it. One can denounce it or regret it: today, a plurality of causes fuels Islamophobia.
Starting with the attacks of September 11, 2001, for much of the planet. In Italy, the Libyan leader’s declarations about “the conversion of Europe to Islam” spark controversy. When Bernard Squarcini, the Director of Central Interior Intelligence, stated in an interview with JDD that “France faces the same level of threat as in 1995,” he introduced into the collective psyche, the idea of this arbitrariness: that of a major risk likely to hit any of us at random. A diffuse threat, even more insidious psychologically. The head of counter-espionage may take all rhetorical precautions, but his clarifications on potential violent actions in the Hexagon nevertheless highlight the deviant forms of the third religion of the Book.
These phobic fears can be reinforced by religious identity claims that seek to invest the public, individual space this time: dress codes, food prohibitions, behavioral rites. One of the most shocking but also most commented phrases in Germany from Sarrazin’s book precisely targets this element: “I don’t want my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to live in a country with a Muslim majority where Turkish and Arabic are widely spoken, where women wear headscarves, where days are paced by the call of the muezzin.” In an article of An-Nahar, Lebanese journalist Hiyam Kossayfi protests at being refused a glass of wine in a Christian restaurant in Beirut due to Ramadan. The phobic sentiment, mentioned by those who suffer from it, always hinders a spatial-temporal freedom of movement, both physical and psychological.
Finally, phobia signifies – reversal on its contrary – the failure of the meeting, the impossibility of the original separation, recalls psychoanalyst Irène Diamantis (Phobias or the impossible separation, Champs Flammarion, 2005). As incomprehensible as it is destabilizing for the Western psyche, the extreme reactivity to religious offense among Muslims puts into action this lack of distance between the dogmatic rigor of the text and the ways of its application.
A colleague psychiatrist from Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, thus put away the cross she wore as a pendant since her communion when she receives her patients, mostly Sunnis, in her office. In her therapeutic activity, she often heard this remark: “you cannot understand our problems, you are different.”
