Islam and Its Adversaries

Abstract

In the group (of those vvho accuse the ulemas of fanaticism), there is notably a woman and a man who both pretend to be Algerians. The woman blackened a paper a bit with some French and called that a book (The Algerian Woman) [La Femme Algérienne, Paris, Maspéro, 19641, which she filled with enormous lies and small talk empty of any sense of Islam and Islamic morality. Her intention is to call on the Algerian woman to reject an Islam that is fanatical and archaic because it allows promiscuity between sexes no more than it allows that a woman go where she wants without her tutor (ouali) keeping her from it, nor all sorts of other diabolical desires. But it becomes clear from the ideas that she propagates that she is a creature of Marxism, in the service of atheistic pretensions (…) and the name that she uses (Fadila Mrabet) is a borrowed name. As for the man, he is a writer, a novelist who has the habit of decorating his writing with his fantasies and his falsifications in order to attract more readers. But in reality, he is far from understanding Islam. He wrote in a weekly, printed and published in Algeria but French in its language and ideas. It rarely writes of religious events and then only to speak of its disdain for them. It has become insupportable to this writer to see minarets raised over mosques from which the voice of the muezzin calls those who believe in their God to prayer (…).

Abdel Latif Sultani. “Fadila Mrabet, Kateb Yassine, and the Rocket of Islam.” In Al-Mazdaqia hia asl al-ichtirakia (Masdaqia is the Source of Social-ism), Morocco, 1975, p. 33, quoted in Francois Burgat and William Dowell, The Islamic Movement in North Africa. Austin, Texas: Center for Middle East-ern Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1997, pp. 252–3.