French President Emmanuel Macron recently made a statement concerning Islam. Considering the content and consistency of the statement, his words could be passed off as delirious. However, the time and place the statement was made and the track record of the person who made it does not allow it to be passed off as such. In psychology, both the subconscious and deliriums have a response.
The crisis Macron attributed to Islam is, before anything, a reflection of his psychological state. His fear and hatred of Islam are evident. In the world he desires to establish and which he controls, Islam, in its current state, does not seem right and displays incompatibility. In Macron’s world, Islam, with its dress code, lifestyle, and philosophy, is like an excess that disturbs his comfort, spoils his visual pleasure, and harms his spiritual state. He is unable to say that it must be completely eliminated, so he instead says it must be changed. In the same ignorant arrogance demonstrated throughout history by those who would not accept Islam as is, he is talking about changing it so that it might conform to his beliefs. Is this not how the subject of Islamic reform came up on the agenda all throughout history?
The fact that Macron made this statement in a speech on “anti-separatism,” a matter that is on the government agenda, attaches even more significance to the event. As a matter of fact, during this speech, Macron said that his aim is to prevent separatism in France against Muslims, and that in order to achieve this they “must fight Islamist separatism.” He additionally said that the Islamist ideology, which advocates “separatist” views, is problematic, and claimed that these people consider their own laws above French laws.
Incriminating all Muslims, which make up at least 10 percent of France’s citizens, while opposing separatist practices and values, is a typical example of enlightened ignorance. Shall we start reading Macron and French imperialism’s records to him by asking what this 10-percent Muslim-French population is doing in his own country?
The majority of these Muslim nationals came from the French colonies in North and Central Africa.
France never discriminated between them as it exploited them ruthlessly in their own countries. It displayed equality by not considering any of them as humans. As it savagely exploited all the resources in their countries, it violated every one of their identities, languages, as well as privacy and dignity without ever making any sort of discrimination between them.
The Muslims in France are witnesses of France’s colonialist, separatist, inhuman record. Of course they are going to continue to cause a ruckus. Regardless of whatever they do, their reason for being is that they prove that they will never be able to steal souls and the future. This is the consequence of the comfort they established with what they stole from their forefathers, and what they are striving to sustain with what they continue to steal. In fact, it is not these people’s presence in Macron’s country that is the source of the problem. The problem is the displeasure the likes of Macron feel as they see them in their country on a daily basis. The source of this displeasure are the fears triggered by this past.
Islamophobia is a serious mental illness, especially in countries that have a colonialist past and whose colonialism still thrives, and countries that are arrogant about enlightenment. This disease is a sign of guilt. It thrives on the fear that an innocent they thought they killed may rise from the dead and exact revenge.
Jacques Lacan, who is also French and the founder of structuralist psychoanalysis, says those who fear specters the most in films and stories are the killers. The increasing visibility of Islam everywhere today has a nightmare effect on the West, because it thought it killed it on many accounts. They are the ones associating the right of exacting revenge with Islam. Though Islam itself is not pursuing revenge, and continues to spread messages of peace and compassion for humanity despite everything, its existence alone turns this likelihood of revenge into a fear – because they too know very well the suffering they inflicted on Muslim peoples for centuries.
In fact, it was figures of the new French ideology that explained to them in a language Europeans would understand that all claims put forth by the Enlightenment were lies. These thinkers, who are also classified as post-modernist or post-structuralist, are the ones who saw the falsehood in modernism and pro-Enlightenment sentiment through experience. The works and statements by Camus, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Guattari, and Deleuze reveal the ignorance, racism, and idolatry, which is the core essence of France, and the ignorance, which is the foundation of the entirety of Western modernism.
The factor that drove Macron to speak in this manner today is correlated to this psychology. Upon the events he is experiencing daily, this psychology is turning into a never-ending nightmare for him. Thus, the shock experienced by Macron, who wanted to turn the rescue or release last week of human aid activist Sophie Petronin – who was introduced by an organization affiliated with al-Qaida in Mali as “the last French hostage” – into an anti-Islam show, upon Petronin’s declaration at the airport that she became Muslim, was like a symbolic representation that fate will not let him be.
When Petronin stated that her name is no longer Sophie but Maryam, Macron canceled the press conference he had planned to hold, and quickly departed from the airport.
