Interview with Majid Oukacha

by Grégoire Canlorbe • October 8, 2016 at 5:00 am

What I care about more than anything else is freedom of thought. It is criminalized by the Koran.
My goal is to warn the French people. The day when France will be a Muslim country, it will be almost impossible to back out.... Wherever there is Islam, there are only conflicts of cultures, women who feel guilty for being attractive and who are infantilized and abused; and above all, a continual extinction of creativity and imagination.
A majority of French Muslims may well declare themselves peaceful, but Islam is the cultural common denominator of all the Frenchmen who have told me that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists murdered during the massacre of January 7, 2015, "had it coming to them."
I prefer the individualism of intellectual ideals and moral values of modern Western civilization to the Islamic "big-brotherian" system that criminalizes liberties.
No matter what the Muslims of France—torn between the Western cultural codes and the Koran—say, the majority of Muslims feel closer to an Islamist Muslim who wants to stick to the letter of the laws of the Koran than they do to a non-Muslim who ignores the Koran.
France, and other countries in the West, are increasingly the victim of a cruel twist of irony in which their own founding values and principles are turned against them.
The French politicians who currently govern us have no interest in recognizing or solving these rifts.
I have no desire to make political compromises with Islamist politicians who worship a pro-slavery and misogynist book that criminalizes freedom of belief.

Majid Oukacha (Image source: Video screenshot from "The Fred Connection")

Majid Oukacha is a young French essayist who was born and grew up in a France which he recognizes less every year. "A former Muslim but an eternal patriot," as he sometimes likes to describe himself, he is the author of Il était une foi, l'islam... (literally "Once upon a time Islam...", the French title of a book soon to be released in English under a different title), a systematic critique, without value judgments, of the most inconsistent and imprecise Koranic laws.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Could you start by reminding us of the circumstances and motives of your abandoning Islam — and of your decision to take up your pen to unravel your former religion for the public at large?