The journal Mizane published an interview with Haoues Seniguer entitled "Le frérisme et ses réseaux, "un essai saturated de jugements de valeur" in which she intends to "evaluate" the scientific value of my work. The political scientist, who had already attracted attention in February at the tribune of Musulmans de France[1], took part in this massacre in a magazine known for spreading pro-Brotherhood theses[2].
Here is the response from anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, CNRS research officer (HDR):
Since this is the only criticism I have to date, that it comes from a lecturer at Sciences Po Lyon, and that it is circulating in academic circles, I am responding to it. This will allow me to illustrate what I wrote in my book: even if one claims to be critical of the brotherhood and its ideology - as is the case with Haoues Seniguer - when one denies the plan (the "P" dimension of the Vision Identity Plan triptych that I present in my book), one places Brotherhoodism in the blind spot of knowledge, worse, one runs the risk of serving it.
My opponent's 37-character text is dense and sometimes repetitive. I therefore propose to carry out a pruning that will allow it to be lightened of elements that have no place in a text whose pretension is to give a science lesson (see the title).
I will distinguish thus:
– sophistry containing elements of discredit (argument from authority, denigration, damage to reputation, accusation of stupidity, manipulation)
– of the “simulated” refutation which does not respect the theoretical and conceptual framework of the author
– of refutation.
I will first deal with the elements of sophistry. This will show how the author of this text attempts to disqualify and discredit both the book and its author. Each time that the weakness of his arguments against the work transpires, he attacks the author of the book, denounces hostile, conspiratorial and even racist intentions and postures towards Muslims,
I will end with a response to the two valid refutation arguments.
1-Sophistication, discredit, accusations and arguments from authority…
Throughout his text, the political scientist, who claims to be keen to give a lesson in "science", uses the registers of emotion, diversion, blackmail with racism, doubt, victimization, in order to discredit the book - described as wording, i.e. satirical, insulting and defamatory writing, and to disqualify its author.
The charge of the contemner is so constant and so well distributed from the beginning to the end of the text that it seems to have been inspired by a feeling of fury.
- The work “ is more of a test, opinion and wording, than science and analysis properly speaking ";
- "Our colleague says he is receiving death threats. ; she makes these threats " a media resource ";
- It prevents " the scientific and public controversy (….) by its outbursts and its reproaches towards many academics cited in the book"
- « Is it because of my Islam or my surname that I am suspected of being a Muslim in this case?
- « Can we work seriously on an object that we do not frequent or no longer frequent? This seems highly improbable to me.. ".
- « FBB would undoubtedly have benefited from verifying a certain number of allegations which, taken together, end up highlighting flaws and salient inconsistencies in terms of reasoning. »
- « I will not return to the gaping methodological flaws. ».
- « In my opinion, this book absolutely does not meet the required criteria of empirical inquiry, and the requirements of the social sciences more generally. ».
- "Here we are clearly at least in a characterized moral panic, at most in pure phantasmagoria which borders on specious blindness."
- « The investigation is entirely incriminating ».
- « She doesn't take care to verify her information. ».
- The accusation of conspiracy is clearly present thanks to a crude syllogism: "The book is not conspiratorial in itself but contains conspiratorial impulses. The ideas developed therein do not in any way immunize against conspiracy theories. Quite the contrary. »
- Taking the arm of an enemy to hit another is a divisive tactic. Here it is a question of devaluing the author by the preface writer by inventing a scenario from scratch: "It was FBB who probably tried to give credibility to his book by asking Gilles Kepel to write the preface. He accepted, it was his freedom. On the other hand, I am not at all certain that the latter is truly delighted that his name and reputation are mixed up in these controversies and passions that the work arouses in the media, and that the researcher maintains and fuels, sometimes in a clumsy manner. ».
- « FBB can think the greatest evil of Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood, campaign as it does"
- « This book is above all an essay, a "biased compilation" of what already exists on the subject of Islamism.
- "This essay (…) is saturated (….) with one-sided value judgments, in other words openly derogatory "".
- « The definition of Freerism proposed in this book is, in fact, so extensive that it becomes inoperative, or, at the very least, stigmatizing."
The reader can thus see in what frame of mind the political scientist intends to make an "evaluative critique" of my book. If he seems to have read it, or at least to have consulted some passages (his critique focuses essentially on the introduction and the conclusion), to have spotted two typos actually present in the book[3], he does not seem to have understood the general framework, the conceptual framework, the elements of definition around the central axis: Vision, Identity, Plan of what I call the Islam system. So he hits here and there, where he can.
2-Propositions having the appearance of a refutation
I call propositions "having the appearance of a refutation" the arguments mobilized outside the framework proposed by the author to defend his thesis.
In principle, a refutation aims to counter an argument, that is to say the set of arguments used to convince of the validity of a thesis. This thesis emanates from a point of view. A point of view is never scientific as such, what is scientific is the demonstration which must follow a certain number of rules, in particular that of refutability. My thesis is refutable and even falsifiable in the Popperian sense.[4], but here it is neither refuted nor falsified.
To refute according to the rules of the art, the refuter must first show that he has understood the author's thesis and what the latter intends to show. The professor-researcher of Sciences Po makes fun of this step and proceeds to a dismemberment without method.
We therefore find a series of criticisms administered outside of any framework, supported by quotes taken out of context. It is less an operation of falsification, than a fraudulent operation intended to impose one's views by crushing those of one's opponent (mine).
- Passages from the book are truncated, for example here :What, on the other hand, is more serious from a moral and social point of view, is to say, without restraint, that "the Brotherhood accompanies the warrior jihad" (p. 32); But what I wrote is quite different: "Brotherhood accompanies the warrior jihad, which harasses and terrorizes, with an intellectual project..."
This truncated sentence allows me to say what I never wrote and to attribute to me confusing remarks: "any real or supposed Muslim Brotherhood supporter endorses and de facto justifies jihadism... ».
- « When reading it, one actually hesitates between perplexity and consternation, even more so when one knows the limited power of influence, which is in no way a power of injunction, of the European Muslim Brotherhood in general and the French in particular.
Why ?
She first writes that Muslim Brotherhood is a kind of European version of Islamism, and then argues, in short, that what Islamists in a predominantly Muslim context, particularly Arab, have been unable to achieve, namely the caliphate, the Muslim Brotherhood, in Europe, would be willing and able to accomplish it, in the form of a global Islamic society. And there is little, if any, factual, concrete evidence of this project. ».
H. Seniguer claims that the Brotherhood's power of influence is limited. He thinks that the European Brotherhood cannot achieve what the Islamists in Muslim countries have failed to establish: the caliphate. He takes no account of the accumulated evidence - attested by numerous works indicated in footnotes and in the bibliography - highlighting the Brotherhood's desire to eventually establish an Islamic society in Europe. He has not seen, or does not want to see here - any more than in my previous book Le Marché halal ou l'invention d'une tradition (Seuil, 2017) - the desire to create a halal normative framework to make society sharia-compatible before it eventually becomes Islamic.
- Yûsuf al-Qaradhâwî (1926-2022), who is presented as a kind of Deus ex machina, omniscient and omnipotent; in the sense that the latter, as a certified mentor of Muslim Brotherhood, would have planned absolutely everything, and even foreseen the announced Islamist conquest… no excerpt from an interview with notorious “Muslim Brotherhood” from France and Navarre supports this prejudice in the slightest. Why, in fact, not have verified his views, by questioning those primarily concerned about their relationship to the legacy of Hassan al-Banna and Yûsuf al-Qaradhâwî?
Or,
"Why not call upon excerpts from speeches from the present time, even if only those published on social networks and on its website, by the federation? called "brotherhood", Muslims of France (formerly Union of Islamic Organizations of France)?
I report and analyze the plan and priorities of the "Islamic movement", the fields of action, the jurisprudence of balance and its art of cunning, the political organization by population segments, the strategy of the golden mean of Qaradhâwî through his own writings. But the author claims that I would have described only a deus ex machina omniscient and omnipotent, which I have neither written nor thought. He is free to reduce to a few words what I have developed in an entire chapter.
To verify Qaradhâwî's plan, Haoues Seniguer suggests organizing interviews with "notorious Brotherhood members" (sic) (while the Brotherhood is secret and every certified Brother denies being one) while doubting the "Brotherhood" character of the Brotherhood's showcase: Muslims of France (formerly the Union of Islamic Organizations of France).
Let us point out in passing that if the teacher-researcher proceeds in this way with a secret brotherhood, he has less chance of being informed by it than of being used as a pen-holder.
I relate in my book that when I began my investigations with the Brotherhood in the early 1990s (the critic, then about twelve years old, did not know that era), it took me several months to understand the use that the Brotherhood made of students and researchers to increase their relational, social and cultural capital. Those who did not play the game were excluded on the pretext of "racism" (cf. pp. 28-30).
Generally speaking, the teacher-researcher should know that interviewees are not asked to validate scientific hypotheses, we tests his hypotheses with them which is different. The relativist tendency which consists in having knowledge validated by the interviewees has largely participated in obscuring the plan of the Brotherhood. This is a recent failing of the social sciences to which I devote two chapters of my book (in particular, Brotherhood and its allies in the social sciences, the theses of the denial of Islamism, Brotherhood and anthropology, the classical anthropologists Geertz and Gellner, the Asadian turn: why anthropologists prefer Salafism).
- « However, the caliphal utopia, even among legalist Islamists operating in a predominantly conservative Muslim context like Abdelillah Benkirane in Morocco, has been largely abandoned. »
The author uses the terminology of "legalist Islamists" specific to the political scientist François Burgat and his followers, which designates Islamists ready to move to the side of democracy, by abandoning the caliphal utopia. I demonstrate in this book that even if certain Islamists wished it - which is rarely demonstrated - their desire to abandon the primacy of sharia would make them leave Islamism, ipso facto. I devote a chapter to showing how this belief in an Islamism without sharia has also participated very actively in the concealment of the Brotherhood project.
- Also, would the "brothers" supposedly be capable of doing, in the European context where they have no power or even significant institutional relay, what their counterparts, with mass parties, have been incapable of achieving in the country of the Commander of the Faithful or even within regimes where Islam is the state religion? Here, we are clearly at least in a characterized moral panic, at most in pure phantasmagoria that borders on specious blindness.
The weakness of the argument always leads its author, helpless, towards anathema. It is fashionable to accuse the contradictor to whom nothing can be opposed of being under the influence of a "moral panic". What the political scientist does not grasp is that the Brotherhood, by using soft power et soft law in multicultural and inclusive European secular societies (I develop these points in two chapters), bypass politics, go through culture and economics (halal market) avoiding as much as possible confrontation with States. Entryism is much better adapted to the European environment where Islam is a religion still poorly known and understood in its variations and specificities[5] than in Muslim countries where the techniques of Islamization from below Ikwhan have been known for almost a century.
- Furthermore, rather than analyzing Islamism and Muslim Brotherhood in situ, based on contemporary field data accumulated, renewed and updated, FBB studies it through the main prism of very old texts, generally undated, by theorists foreign to the European Islamic field.
Qaradhâwî, who chaired the European Council for Fatwa and Research for a long time before his death in 2022, is neither old nor foreign to the European Islamic field, quite the contrary. What I analyze comes from data collected directly over several years, from hundreds of cited sources referenced in 437 footnotes, and listed in a comprehensive bibliography.
- FBB makes wasatiyya the trademark of the Muslim Brotherhood; this contradicts the work done in Arabic by the Egyptian intellectual, Nasr Hamid Abou Zayd (1943-2010), who is far from being suspected of collusion with Islamism. The latter explains with forceful arguments that "the ideology of the happy medium" most likely draws its origin from the work of the jurist-imam-theologian, al-Shâfi'î (767-820).
This objection is fallacious. I have never written anywhere that wasatiyya was the "trademark" of Muslim Islam alone.
- H. Seniguer advises referring to the objectives specified on the "Muslims of France" website, as if these latter reflected not the communication of the federation, but what it really thinks.
He cautiously adds this anthology sentence:
We are certainly not obliged to take the word of the members of the organisation in question, but in this case we would have to be able to provide proof to the contrary, which is precisely what FBB does not do.
So we would either have to take the actors' justifications as given, or prove that they are lying. Suddenly 150 years of sociology are wiped out.
3-Answer to what remains
The author's criticism focuses mainly on the two parts of introduction and conclusion in which 1/ I announce what I am going to demonstrate from a societal problem (Freedomism) and 2/ what I suggest to try to resolve it once the demonstration has been carried out throughout the chapters.
The teacher-researcher criticizes me for not producing a “cold” analysis.
In this book, I actually take a position, only in the introduction and conclusion, the 10 chapters being devoted to the demonstration.
Why do I consider Muslim Brotherhood as a system of action whose influence must be limited? Because Muslim Brotherhood seeks to impose in universities a form of Islamization of knowledge (Islamization of knowledge) that is to say, knowledge that would be developed only within the limits of the Islamic framework.
I am taking a stand against this project because its advent is incompatible with the profession of scientist. It seems logical to me that the researcher should not only be concerned with applying science, but also with ensuring the conditions of its possibility and reproduction.
- The political scientist writes:
"Ultimately, one of two things: participating in social and political life as a Muslim or as a Muslim is running the risk of being accused of infiltration, by resorting to "trickery", etc. Remaining aloof from public life, while nevertheless maintaining a visible attachment to Islam, is to be treated as a "separatist". (...) Behind the Muslim Brotherhood member is ultimately the observant Muslim, attached in one way or another to the Islamic norm, and behind the latter, a dormant Muslim Brotherhood member, or even a potential jihadist."
Or
"In other words, any Muslim actor, real or presumed, who expresses himself critically about public policies towards Islam and Muslims, or against Islamophobia, is likely to be accused of Muslim Brotherhood."
He reproaches me for considering that participating in social and political life "as a Muslim or as a Muslim" (sic) is a problem: in this sense I cannot deny it. Participating in social and political life by claiming a citizenship other than that of the State is like wanting to play a game in which one announces that one will respect the rules of another.
Muslim citizenship does not exist in the French Republic; what does exist is French citizenship, which gives rights and assigns duties to everyone, regardless of their beliefs, values, religious or philosophical practices.
The author criticizes me for thinking that visible attachment to the Islamic norm is a form of separatism: here again I do not contradict him. Common norms and values are the watchmaking of national cohesion.
He also disputes that one can consider that behind a Brotherhood member there can be a jihadist. However, Brotherhood shares with jihadism, if not the means, at least the caliphal goal. But the political scientist has chosen to ignore the chain of responsibility that can exist between a Brotherhood organization and the murderer who decapitates, as happened in the case of Professor Paty.
- "We have the constant feeling that social actors are incapable of change, of evolution, and that on the contrary they are invariably in a calculation, moreover perfidious.
Yet this is often the case. Salafi indoctrination, disseminated by the Muslim Brotherhood through many French-speaking publishing houses, invites each Muslim to practices and invocations as frequently as possible at each age, period or event of life. Applications broadcast daily reminders. Through books and videos distributed by many bookstores, the faithful are invited from a very young age to organize their daily lives around the halal norm, to follow the line that goes from the past of the pious ancients to the future of Islamic society. This indoctrination is so restrictive that it can induce calculated and hypocritical behavior.
The political scientist denies this dimension of psychological and physical conditioning, which he cannot ignore, preferring to accuse the person who reports it of conspiratorial and catastrophic intentions: "One of the characteristics of the conspiracy theorist is his resolutely catastrophic vision. In other words, the danger is there, at our doorstep, but only a handful of awakened people would see it."
- H. Seniguer writes: “ Any protest and critical discourse coming from Muslim or non-Muslim circles, issued with regard to public policies or opinions intended to address or talk about Islam and the Muslim presence, could be interpreted, a priori or a posteriori, as a justification for physical violence. ».
He argues that, if my thesis were adopted, the statements of all those (whether Muslim or non-Muslim) who hold a discourse of protest or criticism of public policies in order to defend Muslims, could justify physical violence against Muslims. This is obviously a very serious and totally unfounded accusation, which attributes criminal intentions to my book.
This technique is that of the organizations fighting Islamophobia (one of the central activities of the Second Generation Brotherhood in Europe) who have made this suspicion a formidable weapon: the accusation of structural Islamophobia prevents a society from defending itself against Islamism. Coming from the university, from a researcher who receives his salary from taxpayers, it is an infamy.
Conclusion
For several decades, the social sciences in France have given a large place to the theory of legalistic political Islam, allowing themselves to imagine a European Islamism compatible with democracy.
In order to impose itself, this theory criminalized any other view. It did so without encountering any real obstacle because no one dared to truly confront and contradict a reassuring thesis. The Brotherhood imposed itself in particular by locking down criticism, and prohibiting the thinking of the programmatic dimension of the doctrine under penalty of being accused of Islamophobia and conspiracy theorism.
By revealing this dimension, my book triggered a furor.
