Bernard-Henri Lévy

Sometimes, one has to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. I’ve often been very critical about representatives of the French intellectual world—and particularly, about thinkers of the Left—regarding their incapacity to see the dangers of political Islam, of Islamism, as it is called. Nevertheless, if I were to recognize the commitment of just one man, one journalist, one writer, a sole philosopher, in short, one intellectual against this plague of obscurantism, if I had to spontaneously cite one name, that of Bernard-Henri Lévy would immediately come to mind.

He is unquestionably the one who, before all others, was aware of the ignominy that characterized this phenomenon. But, even more, he is one of the few to have flushed out this evil by describing it, all the while offering unfailing support to democratic and secular Muslims, with a subtlety of analysis that never led him, contrary to many others, to lump together the executioner of Al Qaeda and his Iraqi victim, the throat-slitter of the GIA and his Algerian victim, or the kamikaze of Hamas and the secular Palestinian who opposes violence.

It is all the more important to recall his analysis, one that was already evident in the middle of the 1990s, during the Algerian civil war, today, in an international context where the great enemies of Islamism are in reality the best allies of those they supposedly hold in contempt and the worst detractors of all Muslims, because, in their eyes, no distinction is to be made between the one and the other. But his approach also deserves to be explained at present, in an environment where intellectuals of the Left, those who are theoretically called upon to offer a satisfying ideological response to the fundamentalists with arguments based upon the most precious elements of universal values they are supposed to defend, sin through an excess of blissful naïveté when they do not simply revel in the justification of barbarism.

BHL was able to find the right words. In a few phrases, a few articles, and through a few stands on principle, he was able to produce an idea that democrats, republicans, and secular citizens could not fail to identify with. Not believing in the absurd concept of a «war of civilizations», he reminded us—in front of Christophe Barbier, Director of the weekly newsmagazine L’Express—that Huntington’s famous thesis, if it must, imperatively, exist, only makes sense “within Islam”. And it is through this kind of observation that the philosopher can only force the respect of the committed journalist I am, one who, moreover, is attacked every day by indecent prosecutors and that particularly French, or rather western, brand of selective compassion directed only towards victims who are white, European, American—in short, all victims, yes, except when they are Muslim and dragged down by fundamentalist barbarism because they have demonstrated their attachment to democratic principles or their refusal of this revolting feminine garment that is called a veil or a burqua or an “integral veil”.

Yes! There exists as well in the western world this mania that pushes intellectuals to hold forth more often concerning the women who «fight» to be able to wear this loathsome scarf than to linger over the cases of these other women who, from Morocco to Egypt, by way of Algeria or Pakistan, refuse to wear this symbol of obscurantism, sometimes at the cost of their own lives. He, Lévy, has never forgotten them. He is not among those who, in other terms, are either ignorant of or have simply forgotten the fact that, historically and statistically, the primary victims of Islamism are Muslims themselves.

I have long been familiar with the political commitment of Bernard-Henri Lévy, the intellectual, since the days when I was still a young journalist in Algeria. I probably first heard his name in connexion with the Salman Rushdie affair, in 1989. I remember he was one of the very first to publicly offer his unreserved support to the author of The Satanic Verses, persecuted by hordes consumed by the fatwa issued by Khomeiny. There again, he was the precursor and one of those who immediately understood that Islamism is a totalitarian ideology, enemy par excellence of novelists and of the creative. After that, late in the 1990s, I became acquainted with the man. I watched him from afar, rushing between Paris and Algiers, trying to explain the reality of the Algerian «civil war» to the French public, when all the while, on this side of the Mediterranean, people were still wondering if it might not have been better, after all, to allow the Islamists to take power in Algiers. I’ll come back to this subject, which interests me in particular, in another article, but it should be specified that, there too, already, the intellectual played his part as precursor, providing an analysis that some editorialists—no less talented when it came to other questions—were incapable of offering. We know today what happened.

In the Maghreb and in the Sahel, there is no more GIA, this regional organization that, it was thought, threatened to establish a power with which one could neither associate nor compose. There is no more GIA, I say, but there is Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the descendants of the first Algerian terrorists who nonetheless deserve to be called the children of Ben Laden, born an hour away from Marseille—due, among other reasons, to the blindness in several European capitals that refused to perceive the terrorist danger before it expressed itself on September 11th.

It was later, I remember, shortly after the Daniel Pearl affair, that Bernard-Henri Lévy became, no longer just an acquaintance, but a friend. I had interviewed him upon my return from Pakistan and Afghanistan, and he had just finished his investigation, in the region, of Pearl’s assassins. Yes, the man may be a regular presence at Saint-Germain-des Prés (as some of his detractors like to remind us, their words full of the ironic inflection one uses when referring to the Latin Quarter). But regardless of what anyone says, he is also an investigator, an intellectual who goes into the field.

At the time, I wanted to have this interview with him (for a Luxembourg daily), because I had been struck, during this sixth stay in the Pakistano-Afghan area from which I had just returned, by the hatred the very evocation of his name could spark in certain local fanatics who had become aware of his declarations. He had already talked about the cloudy ties between the regime of President Musharraf and Islamists who were close to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. His name was mentioned in practically every Koranic school I visited. His investigation had, I remember, provoked an immense anger among the “bearded ones” from Peshawar to Karachi, not to mention Islamabad.
And yes, I know, not everyone approves of BHL. And I would add, so much the better! Those who manage to create a consensus among consensuses around them are even more suspect in my eyes. Sometimes they dabble in populism, sometimes in honey-tongued demagoguery. This man inspires all kinds of passion. Some “thinkers» who can reason only in a small-minded manner probably resent him because they simply are not intellectually equipped to see anything beyond his white shirt when he shows them the dangers a totalitarian ideology represents. They’re a bit like the monkey: they’d rather see the finger.

BHL yours!

Mohamed Sifaoui

Mohamed Sifaoui, b. 4 july 1967, journalist, writer and director Algerian living in France. He is principally engaged in the investigation of ideology and Islamist terrorism. He is engaged with SOS Racisme and a regular contributor to the magazine Marianne, Le Meilleur des Mondes. He is the author of Combattre le terrorisme islamiste, (éd. Grasset, 2007), Pourquoi l’islamisme séduit-il ?, (Armand Colin, coll. « Éléments de réponse », 2010).

Translation by Janet Lizop

Photo : Abdel Malek Droukdal – Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company – Maquis de l’AQMI – Algérie.  (c) AFP.