« Our village has changed a lot. It was fated to shift. The whole world is bound to shift. »

***

« These thousands of women give us an image of loyalty, sincerity, strength, bravery and patience. The testimonies of only a few dozen of them have survived to this day, but all of them, famous and unknown, have our eternal respect and admiration. »

Like their illustrious predecessors, they were mothers, wives, sisters… They had black, gray, blond hair… They were teachers, merchants, housewives… They were present when the men were no longer able.

Only women who were already mothers were chosen. Because only a mother had in her the sense of ultimate self-sacrifice.

Such were the guardians of the city.

***

Equality never existed. There had always been only the strong and the weak. Some by their intelligence, their work, their will, destined to dominate. The others, by their pusillanimity, dedicated to serve. There was no third way out. The weak dominated only by their number, far superior to that of the strong. At best some of the weak were called to become strong and while waiting for this evolution they had to remain humble.

The will had to be seen in the body. The exterior was only a reflection of the interior. The appearance was the mirror of the soul. The sculpted, carved, forged body was only the result of the will to power. A soft, shapeless, puffy body could only contain a weak and pusillanimous soul. Just as a frail body was the sign of a cowardly and timorous soul.

Power gave the strong superiority over the weak.

Inferiority imposed on the weak duties towards the strong.

Such had been from all eternity the iron law of the world.

***

« We have played the electoral game, the game of your rotting democracy. You reproach us for not wanting to assimilate to your world ! But what should we assimilate to ? To your decadent Western civilization ? Do you want us to endorse homosexual propaganda aimed at children ? Do you want us to listen to your music that dazes our youth ? Do you want to impose on us your fashions that strip women’s bodies and expose them to everyone’s view like pieces of meat in a butcher’s stall ? And your cinema and its films saturated with violence and pornography ? Is this what you are defending ?

– We defend progress, tolerance, benevolence…

– But at least we fight against Islamophobia. We have always defended you against the far-right.

– We don’t need you ! And especially not as defenders. What Muslims aspire to is to get jobs, to be safe, to raise their children with dignity and to be able to practice their religion serenely. And all of this is largely in line with the aspirations of non-Muslims. You like us only as submitters, not to God, but to you. You prefer that we stay downstairs in order to have a cause to defend to give you a clear conscience. You are the worthy heiress of the colonists of past centuries… You mention the rights of the LGBT community but that is only the concern of a satisfied bourgeois. »

***

« Westerners have forgotten God.

– Precisely. As technical progress has brought about an unprecedented rise in our standard of living, in our comfort, we have been caught in the intoxication of our hubris, to use this Greek term, we have gradually felt almighty. Like gods. And then God has become an outdated hypothesis, to quote that moron Jean-Paul Sartre, a hypothesis that will die quietly of itself. And Nietzsche, whatever one thinks of him, was able to say from the end of the 19th century : God is dead. He meant faith in God was dead in the West. On this point he was not wrong.

– You know on this point I share your observation.

– We Catholics have nothing to reproach you Muslims. We Westerners have nothing to reproach you who come from the South and the East. Our civilization has fallen into moral relativism while yours still resists. Our civilization is slowly dying while yours still lives, wants to live and expand.

– That’s right, Mr. Andrew.

– Look at yourself and look at me, Madam Farouk. You are young, you are strong, while I am old and tired. Both of us are a metaphor for this world. The future belongs to you, while I belong to the past. »

***

« In the Qur’an, the absence of chronological order gives this book a timeless character. The Bible is chronological because it is subject to the passage of time, it was doomed from its conception to give way to a later revelation which would correct the aspects falsified over time and ultimately make it obsolete. It is like an old abandoned castle falling into ruins, the remains of the walls of which gradually become covered with vegetation until they disappear completely under the influence of time.

– It’s very poetic.

– The Qur’an is the revelation intended to accompany humanity until the end of time. It is a closed world, self-sufficient, just as our universe is a closed world too. This tangle of narratives mirrors the tangle we see in nature. Trees grow, but everyone’s foliage leaves room for their neighbors for everyone to flourish. The profusion that you can see while walking in the forest is proof that plant forms sometimes in symbiosis, sometimes in competition, can nevertheless live together. This is how the accounts are given in the Qur’an. »