[by Jean-Baptiste Chikhi-Budjeia [1].]
If the start of the sports season offers its share of controversies and highlights, in the media, the major international events to come – the football World Cup in Qatar, the Olympic Games in Paris – it must also allow us to remember that the majority of sporting practice is amateur and recreational.[2]. However, it is not spared. Indeed, the associative sector in general, that of popular education in particular, has been hit hard and for a long time by the offensives of fundamentalist Muslim networks. Sport seems more specifically targeted, in particular collective disciplines, combat and "martial arts" - which would only be practiced, according to a report from the National Institute of Youth and Popular Education - INJEP - in 2020, by, respectively, 11 and 4% of the population licensed in an APS[3]. For a long time now, we can and must ask ourselves: is sport a preferred space for fundamentalist movements, and if so, why? What types of proselytizing demonstrations do we see? But ultimately, the essential question remains the following: is sport a vector of emancipation or alienation?
Sport, a preferred environment for fundamentalist Islamic movements?
Let us agree that the practice of physical and sporting activities (APS) is popular – in the quantitative sense. The popular dimension in the sociological sense of the term is more significant in certain disciplines than in others. The Ministry of Sports is perfectly aware of this dual reality – a broad practice and a social dimension – to such an extent that it is renewing the “Pass’Sport” scheme this year.[4].
There is a lot of money in sports[5], including amateur – which does not mean that all clubs are rich. Membership fees often represent the primary source of income for sports associations[6]. Public policies, certainly less and less generous, support the French sports movement, in particular through subsidies. It is therefore easy to understand that, all things considered, the sports movement, even amateur and recreational, can represent a financial windfall, but above all, these numerous events, at the level of the neighborhood, the city, within the federal framework – at the level of departmental committees, leagues, or even interclub tournaments – offer significant visibility. Furthermore, sport is a means of mass education that mainly attracts a young audience.[7], which can be impressionable and the victim of sectarian excesses, in the cases – too numerous – where we would allow entry onto the football field or into the dojo the demands made by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist networks.
Proselytizing demonstrations
If we have been able to note that it seems easy, in certain media, to accuse free thinkers and more broadly universalist republicans of "pie-in-the-sky" qualifiers such as "racists", "Islamophobes", by taking up stricto sensu the term of fundamentalist Islamic movements, we observe at the same time – an expression which has now become established – that it seems very difficult for them to describe with the appropriate words the so-called fundamentalist practices: extremist, retrograde, or even fanatic. Let us move on…
The pressures exerted by the hijab women will have revealed to the general public the extreme tensions which could rest on the federations[8] as much as they recalled that for fundamentalist Muslims – supported in their demands by a certain press and a good number of elected officials of the Republic – that a supposedly Muslim woman, or who would claim to be such, had every right to play sports, provided that she did so with her ball and chain on her foot, sorry, "her covering outfit". We will not return here to the usual sophisms which pretend to ignore both a militancy, a condemnable proselytism, even if it was supposedly chosen, and the springs of voluntary servitude so brilliantly highlighted by Etienne de La Boétie. It seems more useful to us today to underline the ease with which, in an almost general indifference, we have moved from sophism to the exhortation made to women to cover themselves: thus, Adidas launched a campaign at the start of the 2022 school year for its hijab bath sign that read "Cover yourself"[9] ! In the name of a misguided tolerance and a puritanism imported from the United States, we should not highlight the repugnance and the fiercely retrograde and phallocratic dimension – without this apparently bothering the neo-feminist movements that are nevertheless so quick to denounce the “heteronormative white patriarchy” – of such a campaign. Are women therefore walking sexual organs that should be covered up even in sports practice? Here as elsewhere, capitalism provides the merchandise, religion the clientele. It would be wrong to consider that the demands of the movements that we will describe here, albeit somewhat hastily, as “brotherhood-Salafists”, are only played out with great fanfare, without ever reaching the basis of the practice, the amateur sports field. Thus, the head of a departmental basketball committee recently informed me that during a competition, some teenage girls on a team had worn, along with their jerseys, a hijab. It was not a question of "only" covering the head, but also the arms... The committee stood firm, it did not back down. My "source" told me that the regulations were going to be reworked to clearly state that religious clothing had no place on the field.
I have been able to see for myself, as a professional sports educator, a teacher of Karate-Do, refusals of co-education, rejection of girls by boys, invoking the religion of Allah, and sometimes even before… 8 years old! Furthermore, the proselytizing and fundamentalist pressures are not limited to a form of “sexual apartheid”. Thus, at the end of one of my interventions at a multi-sport training camp, a Salafist mother told me that the Japanese ritual greeting is “a very great sin [for us]” because it would call into question “the oneness of Allah”. Using the presence of photos of dogs in the room as an excuse – the intervention was taking place in a school group – she added “there is no way my children are going to prostrate themselves before dogs” – which should have allowed her to kill two birds with one stone, but of course it is the RN voter that the mainstream media will present to us as fundamentally racist. Faced with my intransigence and my refusal to negotiate, she threatened to withdraw her children from the activity, I answered her: "no problem". This fundamentalist who held a fanatical speech was taken aback, tried again a "negotiation" and my refusal was concluded by "it is you who exclude your children from the activity".
A fellow teacher of another martial art discipline explained to me that he had experienced this situation. One of his students told him: "My Imam "forbade me to greet you" from now on. Fortunately, the colleague did not submit to the exhortation of theImam, the student concerned, an adult, left the club… with his children. Cases that are far from being marginal, so much so that a French expert on karate, Lionel Froidure, far removed from political activism, published an article in 2017 entitled “Salvation and religion”[10]. Let us note immediately that these problems, these intimidations and threats, these Islamic fundamentalist exhortations, are not limited to France. Thus, the late Hirokazu Kanazawa, master of Karate-Do The internationally renowned author emeritus and founding President of the Shotokan Karate-do International Federation (SKIF), wrote in 2006 in one of his reference works: "One thing I would like my readers to put into practice is the first of the Twenty Guiding Precepts of Karate, from Master Gichin Funakoshi: “Remember that karate begins with a bow and ends with a bow.”
The traditional Japanese bow, sitting with your legs folded under you, is a way to express gratitude and respect, unfortunately some people, due to their religious beliefs, consider it unacceptable to bow your head in this way. I would like to point out to them that karate comes from Japanese culture and it is important to accept it as such. Having a dojo allows us to practice with partners. We must be grateful for this and to show it, we must kneel and bow our heads in the Japanese way, at the beginning and end of training.[11]. – I must point out here that a friend who is a professor of self defense was confronted with this claim coming from a pastor, who refused "idolatry"; the professor showed him the exit door of the dojo. Let's stay on the international dimension with the pathetic import on the tatami of issues that have no place there; a professor of krav maga confided to me that a family who practiced the Muslim religion, members of his club, had discovered – surprisingly – that the discipline he taught was of Israeli origin and that in fact, there was no question of the child enrolled in the course, who was fully developing there, continuing it. Let us remember the judoka Egyptian Islam El-Shehaby who refused in 2016 to shake the hand of his Israeli opponent, Or Sasson[12].
Festive events are sometimes also subject to pressure from fundamentalist movements. Thus, in a suburban club where I taught, a Salafist mother, as the association's end-of-year party approached, used the pretext of alleged drunkenness and so-called incidents the previous year, to try to impose... a ban on alcohol! Obviously, the club did not give in - I must admit that I, who do not drink alcohol, for reasons that concern me, had taken care to bring a pack of beer for the occasion... During the party, while the son of this lady, who could not have been 8 years old, or just, approached the meat grilling on the barbecue - a practice that a member of parliament from the world of research recently explained to us was "virile"[13], while a historian sees it as a perpetuation of slave practices[14] –, she pulled him by the shoulder, her face distorted by fanaticism, telling him: “Don’t go there, it’s not halal, it's not halal " We can imagine the opposite situation, where a Catholic mother would say to her child, willingly described as an apprentice Islamophobic fascist: "Don't go there, it's halal is halal ! "
The martial arts of the Far East are not only physical practices, they are also a phenomenon of acculturation. This acculturation is threatened, but beyond it, beyond the combat disciplines from faraway Asia, we have noticed for several years the refusal of practitioners, increasingly numerous, who in the name of Islam and a rigorous practice of religion, refuse in the domain of all that is common. The fundamentalist demands, antechamber of fanaticism, intend to sweep away the principles and values of sport and the like, while substituting themselves for them. The individual should kill who he is in order to submit to what he would be. Fortunately, sports educators and federal executives, sometimes - often? - alone, lead a fight which is historically that of free thought, applied to the field of physical and sporting activities, against the obscurantism and proselytism of the Salafist movements and the Muslim Brotherhood. The pseudo right to difference is the one that mechanically leads to the difference of rights and prepares for the war of all against all, here by imposing a tribal model, where the rules that would be imposed on all and in the common framework would be established on ethno-religious bases. Basically, what is openly threatened here, in the name of a misguided tolerance, what is sacrificed here on the altar of Anglo-Saxon multicultural conceptions – moreover fundamentally religious – is of course universalism, but also and therefore the possibility left to the individual to free himself from dogmas and beliefs, from social determinisms; it is his emancipation that is being assassinated, sometimes even before it happens! It is essential that this fight for the Enlightenment, which embraces all fields of education and instruction, be carried out in physical and sporting activities. Sports educators must realize what the Minister of National Education and Fine Arts of the Popular Front, Jean Zay, demanded for the School of the French Republic: "Public education is secular. No form of proselytism can be admitted in the establishments." But it is true that at the time, the left was secular...
