Kamel Daoud’s fascination for the far right

What can a writer from the global South, an Arab to boot, have to say in the “free world”, especially in France? He is free to criticize the Arab dictatorships, Islamic fundamentalism and its lethal violence, the authoritarianism and the crimes of China and Russia - which is both legitimate and salutary, indispensable in fact. On the other hand, criticism of the chaos caused by the interventionism of the United States and its allies in the Middle East, of Julian Assange’s unjustified imprisonment for over a decade, of the fascist ideologies of the far right in France and Europe, is not desirable, certainly not acceptable and is, in most cases, quite impossible.

For a writer from the global South to be able really to speak out in the mainstream media, he or she has to do like Kamel Doud : bend their pen to contribute actively to the enhancement of a new dictionary of conventional wisdom called “l’arc républicain” (the republican covenant), valiantly preaching to their readers that the Rassemblement National (RN) has become more respectable, more “republican” and “patriotic” than la France Insoumise (LFI), le Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP ) and a “self-Hamassised” Mélenchon¹.

Moreover Kamel Daoud promotes these ideas in two of his op-eds for Le Point under these evocative titles “’Sheik’ Mélenchon’s mistake” and “Are French Muslims the useful idiots of La France insoumise?” His idea is that there is a Muslim vote based on “anti-Semitism, determination to destroy the State of Israel” and an alleged “hatred of [French and Western] civilization”.

The RN preferred to LFI

Among the many articles illustrating this reactionary turn of his, the one entitled “Malika Sorel, Rima Hassan and the hidden subject”, published in Le Point on 8 April 2024, is undoubtedly the one which most clearly reveals the novelist’s fascination for the far right². In an attempt to explain what a “lucid” approach to immigration and secularism based neither on “victimhood or vindictiveness” would consist of, Kamel Daoud delivers a certificate of “republican lucidity” to RN Euro MP Malika Sorel-Sutter to the detriment of Rima Hassan, seventh-ranked candidate on the list led by Manon Aubry for LFI and now also a Euro MP. Indeed, he explains, this far right polemicist, “herself an immigrant, has the courage to say that immigration, as it is practised today, under ideological and religious ’submission’, constitutes a major threat to us all” ; an immigrant who has the courage to combat the political project of a religion - namely Islam – “which aims to devour the Republic followed by the rest of the world”.

Malika Sorel-Sutter provides, according to Kamel Daoud’s “Republican yardstick”, the perfect remedy to the ideas conveyed by Rima Hassan, Franco-Palestinian lawyer alleged to embody the “image of the decolonized immigrant, frozen in a posture of victimhood and grievance”, the Trojan Horse which “Les Insoumis are trying to monopolise” in order to capture pro-Palestinian emotions and the ’Muslim’ , if not Islamist vote so as to guilt-trip others without feeling guilt themselves“; the infallible sign of”the delusional left wing’s lurch towards radicalism".

Yet the woman who wrote Décomposition Française³ laces her tracts with imprecations about “the curse of birthright citizenship” and calls for an end to “foreign preference”⁴ and for the intensification of “extra-European immigration”⁵. But none of this prevents Kamel Daoud from delivering this woman his certificate of “deeply clear-headed Republican lucidity”, since France runs the risk of “being ’devoured’ by an Islam” which we don’t know what to do with“, he assures his readers, quoting an anonymous source,”a subtle observer of Franco-Maghreb affairs“. Faced with this risk,”the typically French radicalism“of La France Insoumise can offer only to obstruct the debate,”witness the sterile polemics over Islamophobia, rejection, immigration, delinquency or political extremism".

Far from offering any well-founded, rational critique of the policies defended by LFI, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Rima Hassan, and without so much as mentioning racism, or the biologising culturalism defended by Malika Sorel-Sutter and the RN, our columnist prefers to lecture his readers on the imminence of an apocalypse which is ineluctably bound to be the death of France; an apocalypse which can only be Melenchonian, Muslim, immigrant and “woke”. At the same time he reassures them: if they join the RN, it will have the merit of “breaking the rule of silence and compromise imposed in the name of communitarianism”, of categorically voicing “a refusal to delude oneself [about] immigration and Islamism”. With these words he is echoing Malika Sorel-Sutter who never ceases to proclaim the coming “suicide” of France which is “falsifying the savagery of the children of immigrants, a savagery which will end by destroying it altogether”⁶.

Appearing on the France 5 TV program La Grande Librairie (15 May 2024) in honour of Salman Rushdie, Daoud stressed the importance of the fight to preserve artistic freedom and the right to dream against “the rampant guilt-tripping of the West”. A terminology borrowed from a newspeak aimed at de-demonizing the RN, including it in the Republican covenant and branding LFI and the NFP with the stigma of “terrorism”, anti-Semitism and “immigrationism”.

The naturalised super-citizen

We might dwell on those miserable articles entitled ’Colognisation’ of the world and Cologne, home of fantasies⁷ in which Kamel Daoud echoed without any attempt at verification the fake news spread by the German far right on the “migrant rapists doomed by cultural and religious failure”.

Or in the way he slid, in the Algerian press, from a critique of the regime to a critique of the people, described as intrinsically pre-destined to being dysfunctional and indisciplined. Or to his epistemological inability to name Israeli colonialism and its apartheid regime in Palestine in the various articles devoted to that issue, such as “Why I have no “solidarity” for Palestine“,⁸, “A defeat for the ’Palestinian cause’ “(Le Point, 13 October 2023) or even more recently in “The Islamists, major beneficiaries of the Gaza tragedy” (17 May 2024), where he describes the on-going genocide and the massacre of non-combatants as “targeting errors [...] with collateral victims” because “Gaza remains a quagmire ’if you go there’, yet not to go there is a disastrous solution for the future of Israel”.

Since he acquired French nationality in 2020, Kamel Daoud has adopted the style of what we shall call the “Republican polemicist”, i.e. that of the naturalised-super-citizen, regarded as “especially deserving” par excellence, vigilant and attentive to every “offence against the Republic” committed by “undeserving French nationals” who, in the racist rhetoric of certain politicians and sycophantic “intellectuals” are ordinarily described as “Muslim immigrants, bottle-fed on welfare benefits”, or “paper Frenchmen” and “their objective allies” the Melenchonian and “wokish” far left, “accomplice of Islamic terrorism” and the “new anti-Semitism”.

The most striking aspects of Kamel Daoud’s op-eds are first of all the lack of any interest in literature or the arts (whereas his fans and followers speak of him as the epitomy of the Arab Writer), and secondly his total indifference to historical fact and reality, in favour of a boot-licking approval of the various polemics fabricated by the editorial chieftancies with the aim of drowning social and intellectual life in a flood of crimes and accidents and fake news. Far from reflecting the “lucidity of a man who has experienced Islamist terrorism in his home country”, as his admirers never tire of repeating - disarmed as they often are by the very mention of the word “Islamism” - the articles by this “Muslim world progressive” deal solely with the subjects that obsess both the hard-right and the far right in France today, the immovable culturalist quadriptych: Islam-ghettos-immigration-insecurity. In other words, blind adoption of the tropes of resentment felt by the dominant towards the dominated, this “new political fundamentalism” of “the extreme centre”, rigorously analysed by philosopher Jean-Fabien Spitz in his La République, quelles valeurs? (Gallimard, 2022) and historian Pierre Derna in L’extrême centre ou le poison français, 1789-2017 (Champ Valon, 2019).

Welcomed into the highly respectable “Republican covenant” by French political and editorial circles thanks to his reactionary conversion, Kamel Daoud has now become one of what Alain Policar has rightly termed, in La Haine de l’antiracisme (Textuel, 2023) the “activists fighting other activists”.

The Goncourt

His latest novel, Houris, newly published by Gallimard and which has been praised to the skies by all the mainstream media, is no exception. In an earlier work, entitled Ô Pharaon (Dar El Gharb, 2005), which is no longer listed in his French bibliography, Karel Daoud defended the thesis that “only the army killed” during the Algerian civil war (1990-2002). In Houris, written in a grandiloquent style, obscure and overblown, he develops quite the opposite idea: “only the Islamists killed”, and go on killing. As proof: they slaughter sheep each year during the Eid el-Adha festivities... Ignoring decades of military and oil despotism in Algeria, of antisocial laws and massive investment in the instrumentalization of religion in order to do away with the left-wing socialist tendencies that marked the beginnings of independence, the “novelistic truths” of Kamel Daoud’s new “counter-enquiry”⁹ descend to the depths of the most cartoon essentialism: the Koran and Islamic tradition in general are perceived as bottomless, venomous pits of terrorism and mindless killing.

Dealing with the Arab and Islamic culture from which he is proud to come, our editorialist develops a doubly inverted orientalism, just like that infallible, humourless radio “humorist”, Sophia Aram. In her 6 March 2023 on France Inter set entitled “The Mullahs’ toxic masculinity” she imagined she was giving her listeners a good laugh by identifying the foreskin with Islam, by finding it absolutely legitimate and acceptable, in the name of the Arabic and Islamic culture which she calls her own, to attack “Ayatollah Khomenei with his killjoy scowl, his foreskin worn as a turban, his tiny dickhole eyes and ballhair beard”. This year she has had no qualms at all about setting herself up, through her outbursts in the press, media and social platforms, as an authority on indignation, directed against her fellow humorist Guillaume Maurice and his repeated joke, somewhat similar to hers, about the genocidal Israeli Prime Minister: “Netanyahu? You see who I mean? A kind of Nazi but without the foreskin.” Of course Kamel Daoud, to keep up with the Rabelaisian mood of today’s media, backed her up with his article: “If we want to defend humour, it’s Sophia Aram we must defend”¹⁰.

The author of Houris sets himself up as the valiant champion of the ideas promoted and disseminated in France by the “extreme centre” and the far right groups. When, a few months ago, we read or heard that he was in line for the 2024 Goncourt prize, we couldn’t help wondering why a writer who saw Michel Houellebecq’s racist and white supremacist rhetoric as the thinking of ”the most clear-headed“ French writer of the day, one”who does well to take advantage of his right to excess, transgression and provocation“, at a time when”clear-headedness is a pretext for the stupidity“[ Kamel Daoud,”La mosquée contre l’écrivain, le plus mauvais des castings“, Le Point, 5 January 2023.]] of those who would see Islamophobia everywhere - why such a figure should still be presented as”a progressive writer who has known Islamist terrorism in Algeria". As a reminder, here is the passage from Houellebecq, object of this praise:

I believe that what the native French population wants most is not that Muslims become assimilated but that they stop stealing from them and assaulting them, in short that they become less violent, that they show respect for the law and other people. Or else, another good solution would be that they leave the country¹¹.

As stated at the outset, it would be a shame not to distance ourselves from the conservative and fundamentalist Algerian circles where Kamel Daoud is accused of being a “harki” and a “collabo”. But if we want to rid ourselves of the mythical narratives produced by the phoney “democrats” and “progressives” of the Arab and Muslim worlds, we need to see him in the political context where he is now developing, which claims to be defending democracy and social and civil emancipation with the ideological tools of the hard and extreme right.

Translated by Noël Burch.