Turning point

International human rights groups have repeatedly failed to acknowledge the dangers of fundamentalism. Salil Tripathi talks to Karima Bennoune, whose book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here holds a mirror up to Muslim liberals they cannot ignore

Karima Bennoune is an Algerian-American lawyer who teaches international law at the University of California, Davis. She is a brave woman. She writes using her real name, travels to dangerous parts of the world and champions men and women who resist fundamentalists.

Bennoune grew up in Algeria amid a struggle of secularists against Islamic fundamentalism. Her father, Mahfoud Bennoune, was an outspoken secularist, a professor at the University of Algiers who faced death threats in the 1990s. She studied at the University of Michigan’s law school, and was a delegate at the NGO forum at the world conference on women in Beijing in 1995. She has been a legal adviser at Amnesty International in London and has published widely in legal journals, newspapers and magazines. She was also an election observer in North Africa following the Arab spring.

Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here begins with a dramatic account of an Islamist mob harassing Bennoune and her father outside their house in June 1993. In the book, Bennoune talks to more than 300 people in 30 countries, who, she says, are “doing today what my father did back then” to build international support for those confronted with fundamentalism. Salil Tripathi spoke with her during a recent trip to London to launch her book.

Salil Tripathi The debate about Islam and the West is an old one. Most people argue that the key moment was Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. But you show in your book that it is more complex than that.

Karima Bennoune The fatwa on Salman Rushdie was exceptional because it was so transnational and visible. But there are many Rushdies in many contexts. People have taken the most incredible risks to express themselves, without any support. One story that touches me deeply is of an Algerian journalist in the 1990s. Fundamentalists had declared fatwas against the press. Some editors and journalists faced them down, but they were facing prosecution from the government at the same time. Algeria had become the most dangerous place to be a journalist. The story that stays with me is of Omar Belhouchet, the publisher of el Watan. One day he was coming back to his office after attending an assassinated journalist’s funeral. He knew people were looking for him, and yet he went to the funeral. As he was returning, he could see smoke from the Press House, a building where many newspapers were located, which had been hit by a truck bomb.

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Above: Karima Bennoune

Credit: Florence Low

He found that 18 people had been killed – journalists, workers, neighbours. Nearly 60 were injured. Some of the offices were devastated. Journalists were pulling their colleagues from the rubble. Omar gathered the journalists who were unscathed. It was 3pm. He asked: “Who wants to get the paper out?” And they stayed. They worked in the smoky ruins of the Press House, where their colleagues had been killed in a gruesome way. What they did was ferociously brave journalism. They did a compendium issue of all the newspapers in one. A copy of that compendium is one of my most precious possessions. I remember one of the articles, by Ghania Oukazi, who asked: “Pen against Kalashnikov – is there a more unequal struggle?” And she wrote: “What is certain is that the pen will not stop.”

In the countries where the niqab is worn it is actually a political shackle that is imposed from above

During my research I encountered this time and again. People just kept writing, refusing to be intimidated. Unfortunately, the Rushdie affair is not an anomaly. It represents a much broader attack on freedom of expression, freedom of thought and freedom of movement.

ST And yet, here in the West, and in India where I was born, some people blamed Rushdie for bringing this upon himself. Many of the left, which should have championed writers against fundamentalists, ended up on the side of the fundamentalists. They characterised the Muslims who disagree with them as stooges of the West, or worse.

KB A left-wing Algerian psychologist told me: “No one from among our old friends tells me: ‘We are with you.’” It is disappointing; people feel alone. People are left to take risks all by themselves. Cherifa Kheddar, who came to speak in Europe, remembers being heckled by someone from the left who showed up at her talk and denounced her as a stooge of the state. [Kheddar’s brother and sister were tortured and murdered by Algerian fundamentalists in her presence in 1996; her husband was also killed. She now runs a victims’ support organisation, Djazairouna.]

What’s difficult is to find a space to be heard. While I respect those who have left Islam, like Ayan Hirsi Ali – and she should be able to write as she wants to – there are different Islams and different practices. The liberal Islam of my grandfather is what I am fond of. My book can’t be accepted by the right, because it is opposed to them, but it is also critical of the left and the human rights movement. I am trying to find another way of talking about this, drawing from the language of the people on the ground. We have seen that the West knows only two sets of responses. On the right, in some quarters, you see anti-Muslim rhetoric – all Muslims are fundamentalists. This is not only offensive, but also wrong. And then on the left, you have a set of responses that are too politically correct to be considered responses at all. Those are flawed and unhelpful positions. I’m looking for another kind of response.

ST What prompted the book?

KB It began in the 1990s, with my father opposing the armed groups in Algeria, when he was threatened with violence. I was frustrated that outside of Algeria people knew so little about it. Years later, we saw the same misunderstandings – a failure to recognise the dangers of fundamentalism. People on the ground in Pakistan, in Chechnya, were doing courageous work, and what was painful for him was that there was so little understanding of this situation outside. So I tried to retrace my father’s steps, met these brave people, gave them the microphone.

Local human rights organisations understood exactly what was going on. But in the 1990s, international groups did not understand the threat the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism poses: it is very dangerous for human rights, for women, for free thinkers, for minorities. And the international human rights movement has failed to understand this for a long time. It has also defined the fundamentalist project as “cultural”, so that the things that the fundamentalists impose – such as the niqab – are defended as cultural practices. But in the countries where the niqab is worn it is actually a political shackle that is imposed from above.

ST So that was a turning point?

A: Yes, I was personally deeply upset that human rights groups were failing the victims. Jihadi armed groups were committing mass rapes in Algeria, but major international human rights groups were not producing reports on this. And this went on: the way Amnesty International treated Gita Sahgal, despite her dedicated work; the way Amnesty International USA invited Moazzam Begg [the former British prisoner in Guantanamo Bay] to give a keynote address. Begg was rightly defended when he was tortured, but he ran a radical bookshop. [In 2010, Saghal was suspended from Amnesty International after she complained about the group’s links to Begg and the email was leaked.] And then there was the case of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), on whose board I sat, which took on a pro bono case to defend Anwar al Awlaki, who had issued death threats to prominent people around the world. He was not a detainee being defended. He was advocating that people should be killed. Why did human rights groups not speak out against that? On Awlaki versus Barack Obama we – the CCR – were on Awlaki’s side. At that time, seeing Gita’s courage in taking on Amnesty, I realised I too had to speak out.