Pierre-d’Aragon Lyceum, Muret, Toulouse region. The history and geography teacher talks about the “rights and duties of French citizens in respect of secularism”. We end up with the right to wear the veil and a group of girls disputes the professor arguing that “Islamic sharia comes before the laws of the Republic”. In the break, a 16-year-old girl who was not present, warned by the others, violently attacks and insults the teacher along with two boys. The teacher is shocked and has to seek psychological support. The group is reported to the prosecutor.
This episode took place on October 9th; a week later, on the 16th, many kilometers away, just outside the high school of Conflans-Saint-Honorine in the Paris region, Professor Samuel Paty, 45 anni, is beheaded by an eighteen-year-old Islamist of Chechen origin, due to his secular lessons, in which he had shown two cartoons on Muhammad published in Charlie Hebdo. On October 19, the rioters of the Muret high school are accused of insulting the teacher and arrested. They are all minors and the public prosecutor of the Toulouse Republic explained to Le Monde – who published the news yesterday – that they face six months in prison.
The succession of events is important and one wonders if the sanction and the arrests in Toulouse would have occurred without the beheading of the professor in Paris. We do not know. What is certain is that France is entering a regime of exceptionality, with the dramatic overlap of the tragic end of Professor Paty to the unstoppable spiral of the Covid pandemic.
It seems that it is only now that we discover that the profession of teacher has become an act bordering on heroism, if not physically at least civic. In reality, people knew and were silent, paralyzed by the taboos of political correctness and the myth of republican integration, but two years ago an in-depth opinion survey among teachers denounced that 40 per cent admitted that they had been challenged by students and families and have begun to censor themselves in teaching. At the bottom of it all, the religious question, Islam, its values, its story of the world. And it is a seemingly unstoppable crescendo.
The most contested are the teachers of history and geography. The most difficult lessons are those in which the symbolic moments of history, colonization and decolonization are faced. But also subjects with a social background, such as civic and sexual education.
This is the testimony reported by Le Point of Sophie, who for ten years has taught in a “sensitive” “college” (middle school) in Saint-Denis, a Parisian suburb, and confesses that she always has a weight on her stomach when she enters the classroom. “Since the beginning of the year I have been talking about the Carolingians and Justinian and the boys have expressed the impression that I was doing confessional proselytizing, while when I quote Mohammed many of them, those of Muslim confession, feel visibly relieved, they experience it as a release. Even those who until then had remained passive revive themselves, start talking, which would be pretty good if it weren’t for the fact that they are starting to contest what I teach. Some say they know a lot more than I do, just because they are Muslim. It is the parents who push them and tell them that what I teach is false. So I pay attention to what I say, I have to calibrate dreams and words, it’s stressful ”.
But it’s not just a question of content. The principal of another collège in the Paris region tells us: “Organizing a badminton tournament with mixed teams is also a challenge. Science teachers need to insist that kids participate in the sex education classes and family planning meetings we organize with various organizations. During these lessons there are little girls who ostentatiously block their ears so as not to hear. The requests to exempt girls from swimming lessons are more and more numerous, with the most diverse excuses, allergies, painful menstruation … It is a whole series of signs that seem weak but which together begin to weigh heavily on the school. There are some girls who from sixième (sixth grade) come to school veiled and with skirts that reach their feet ”.
The philosopher Elisabeth Badinter dates back to 1989 the first manifestation of political Islam on everyday issues, when three girls showed up veiled in their school in Creil, in the Oise, north of Paris, pretending to wear the scarf in class: ” It was the first failure of the Republic, in the name of tolerance, the left then legitimized their diktat ”.
Following the thread of these stories you get far, between tears and controstrappi. For example in Saint-Ouen, the first Parisian suburb, where in 2012 the high school president Edmond Rostand sent home a Muslim girl who arrived at school with a too long skirt considered “non-secular” and a black scarf that left only the oval uncovered of the face. He had considered it a “provocation” and on the Internet there are still photos with the girl who smiles. In front of the school there was a great protest against the Muslim headmaster, among them one of the most agitated was a certain Abdelhakim Sefrioui, a Moroccan from Fes registered by the police, a fanatic supporter of Hamas, who a few days ago also inspired the protest of Brahim Chnina, the father of Samuel Paty’s pupil, the beheaded teacher. Together they had made the video then posted on YouTube in which they denounced the professor for having shown two cartoons by Charlie Hebdo in a lesson on “freedom of thought and secularism”. This Brahim, who is separated, is 48 years old, has six daughters, lives on precarious jobs and with public subsidies, he was known as a fundamentalist but peaceful Muslim and was very active in Muslim charitable organizations, especially in helping the disabled. The policemen went to pick him up in the middle of the night, the eldest daughter said they didn’t ring the door, but broke it directly.
As far as we know, Brahim swears that he never met or met Aboullakh Anzorov, the Chechen who beheaded his daughter’s professor with a 35-centimeter kitchen knife, argues that it was certainly not his intention to cause the death of the child. teacher. But he insists that that teacher was wrong, offended Islam and Muslims.
And then the evocation of Chechnya in this story is not without consequences because it also opens a geopolitical vein: yesterday the president of the Caucasian republic Ramzan Kadyrov attacked France for having imprisoned the hangman’s family entourage, starting with his father, who has a history as a fighter against Russia and arrived in France in 2007 with an application for political asylum, initially rejected and accepted in 2011. He too denies having suspected that his son had become radicalized, indeed he hoped that Abdullakh followed him in the work on security, bodyguards and the like in which many of the Chechens sheltered in France are specialized, who generally operate with an eye to the police and the authorities. The relationships between them are an inextricable tangle. In any case, Kadyrov, the man who established Sharia law in Chechnya and governs the small republic in the name and on behalf of Vladimir Putin, intervened in his favor, accusing France of being “a country where democracy is confused with permissiveness and where Islamic values are despised ”. Kadyrov, who is considered to have instigated various murders, including that of Anna Politkovskaya, in 2015 organized demonstrations in Grozny against Charlie Hebdo.
A week after the beheading of Professor Samuel Paty it triggered chain reactions and rightly Alberto Melloni, in the editorial in the newspaper “Domani” published today, defines it as a “European crime”. A social and cultural scenario that is difficult to understand, as shown by an apparently trivial question – in its tragic nature – and that is how to celebrate the professor killed in schools on November 2, when – Covid permitting – the children will return to class after the holidays of the Saints. A minute of silence? And then? Everyone remembers how difficult it was after the Charlie massacre to even summon the cartoonists who joked about the prophet’s image. It was then that the “secular cells” were established to help teachers. You are thinking of reading a short text, but which one? How to choose it so that it can be understood at any age? In recent days there have been those who have dusted off the letter that Albert Camus sent to Monsieur Germanin, his literature teacher, who had just won the Nobel Prize. “After my mum, my first thought was for you … and to assure you that your efforts, your work and your generous heart still live in your students.” Professor Paty would certainly be happy, but who will have the courage to read today a letter from the French writer who grew up in Algeria and author of a problematic text like Lo Straniero?
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