Michel Houellebecq (Credit: Fronteiras do Pensamento/Commons)
Harun Nasrullah
The rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris has filed a complaint against French author Michel Houellebecq for making “staggeringly harsh” comments in a recent interview, in which he implied that French Muslims were not French.
In a statement released on December 29, the Grand Mosque of Paris announced it had filed a complaint against Houellebecq for claiming a war between “native French people” and “the Muslims,” who were responsible for “robbing and assaulting them.”
The complaint cited excerpts from an interview between Front Populaire founder Michel Onfray and Houellebecq that appeared in the anti-system magazine in November.
In the interview, the award-winning author said, “When entire territories are under Islamic control, I think that acts of resistance will take place. There will be attacks and shootings in mosques, in cafés frequented by Muslims, or “Bataclan in reverse,” referring to the 2015 terrorist attack on the Paris concert hall.
Adding, “The wish of the native French population, as they say, is not that Muslims assimilating, but that they stop robbing and assaulting them or else, another solution, that they leave.” The mosque’s rector, Chems-Eddine Hafiz, described the remarks as “unacceptable” and implied that Muslims were “not real French people.”
It wrote that the comments constitute “an incitement to hatred against Muslims” and “a call to reject and exclude the Muslim component as a whole.” The statement cites a recent European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decision upholding the conviction of former far-right French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour for “inciting discrimination and religious hatred” in comments directed at French Muslims.
“The court held that the interference with the applicant’s right to freedom of expression had been necessary for a democratic society to protect the rights of others that were at stake,” the ECHR wrote in a statement on December 20.
Houellebecq won the Goncourt Prize, France’s highest literary honour, in 2010. His 2015 fictional novel Submission, about the rise to power of a French “Islamist president,” received critical acclaim but also raised concerns about inciting anti-Muslim sentiment.
In response to the accusations, Houellebecq published an opinion piece on the website of the centre-right French news outlet Le Point on January 5, according to Morocco World News.
In his article, the writer dismissed the Grand Mosque’s complaint, recalling that he faced similar accusations 20 years ago on the grounds that his speech amounted to “inciting racial hatred.”
He then went on to poke fun at the very idea of accusing a person of racism because of their views on Islam.
The accusation he faced two decades ago “was silly,” he wrote, adding: “Everyone knows that Islam is not a race, but a religion with universal claims.” For Houellebecq, being accused of Islamophobia, as he has been of late, “is more relevant.” Islam, he argued, “is not a religion that I consider that much. So to a certain extent, I plead guilty, provided that I am [recognized as] a part-time Islamophobe.”
