Project violence on the other’s body is authorizing to exercise violence against him

For Aboubakar Cissé

We come out of several decades of denial of racism in French society. Islamophobia is also this racism which is only rarely considered as racism, condemned only with lips. It is a racism by denial. The murder of Cissé reminds us of the irresponsibility of this denial, because yes Islamophobia – like sexism and racism that it helps to intensify in our societies – kills.

Intellectuals have to stop this denial if they want to avoid the worst. If the investigation concerning the murder of Aboubakar Cissé is still underway, a fact is nevertheless remarkable: although a significant part of the French political class has mobilized the term Islamophobia to describe the crime, its use still remains disputed, eminently polemical or even simply proscribed. This essay proposes to define the type of racism and violence which allows itself from a discourse on Islam and the Muslim. It is a question of better identifying the contours and fighting against what I propose to describe above all as a device of racialisation Islam.

Whatever the term used, the racism which proceeds is singularity of not only racializing the color of the skin. One can be Arab or black, atheist or religious and undergo this racialization of Islam because it is not faith but it is first the signs of real or supposed religious affiliation that are in question. Hence this proposal for definition: Islamophobia or anti -Muslim racism is this racism which racializes a religion Islam – by stigmatizing its supposed or real signs and symbols. She can therefore fall on all of them as soon as he is Muslim presumed·e.

Let us recall that Cissé is Malian and that antinoir racism is nourished by the rise of Islamophobia which is wrongly reduced to an anti-Arab racism, despite the obvious centrality of the latter in the factory of Raciali