Book Review: Muslim by Zahia Rahmani

´When guns, war, beards, verbs, deaths, bombs, meat, words, shouts, women, children, tears, theft, hate, lying, stupidity, vulgarity, ignorance, rape, skin, soliders, crying out, snapping of the jaws, disdain, abjection, infamy, destruction, and ignorance invaded, I was scared´. 

´Are you one of us?´

Zahia Rahmani, one of France´s leading art historians and fiction writer, accounts in Muslim, the second book of an autobiographically inspired trilogy about the intricacies of her faith and language. I´ve read it in the English translation as I didn´t want to wait until will get my French language copy from the French Institute. I felt the pressure of reading it - and I did in one short installment, as the book is relatively short - as every time when I am brought back to thinking about French, my language of a country. 

She grew up speaking Tamazight, a language of the Berbers. ´I was born into the world in a minor language. A language that was passed on orally, a language that was never read. We called it Tamazight. A Berber language that throughout the incursions of history was guarded tightly by its people for what it knew. For the people of the Atlas mountains, in the regiony of Kabylie, in the Areos mountains, where the Mozabites and Tuareg lived, it was in their language and in their traditions that islam was introduced´. In France, it was the French language, that took her over, a jealous possessive kind of language that does not accept equals or betrayals, even if she is not the first choice. ´She takes you, guides upon her, seduces you, then, if she thinks you´re unfaithful, she insults you in every way possible. It´s narcissistic, but it´s her capriciousness that gives you power. That´s no chance of irreverence with her. Above all else, don´t doubt her benevolence and her intentions. No other language is allowed. She´s very jealous´.

In Zahia Rahmani´s world, languages are competing for taking over the human soul. The human soul longs for its home built up on words. When the words escape and the languages are hit, there is no home. The human soul longs for a home. Language has a life and desire of its own and it may return when it wants to, as a haunting ghost. ´Why did I stop talking my language several months after I left Algeria, and why then did it come back to me ten years later´? You cannot cut a language out of your life, divorce it, obliterate it completely. Following a language and renouncing another is more than a cultural choice, is a life-and-death choice, both for the soul. ´I was born into a minor language and escaped from a distant nowhere where that didn´t want me´. 

But there is more to the identity than the words, that are taken away anyway. ´I don´t know what the word ´nationality´ means. It filled me with anxiety´. 

There is the assigned religion too. A religion that is at home no. 1 distorted through foreign influences - ´The rigor of Saudi Arabia was the new law of the land´ - and whose belonging is negatively attributed at home no. 2. There is the general assumption of what a religion, any religion should be, and how it´s assigned followers must behave in both private and public circumstances. ´For me, I think of God as a protocol, an agreement among people. But the rowdy crowd barred the road in front of me. So, ´my´ God? They simply brought him down from heaven for me´.

Zahia Rahmani writes so simple tragic truth. It´s an empathic prose, decently desillusioned, but decided to share the truth and the pains. This is the safe space where public intellectuals meet.

Rating: 4 stars