François Bourga is a French orientalist and political scientist, born in 1948 in eastern France. He specialized in studying Islamic trends in the Arab and Islamic world. He managed research centers such as the French Institute for the Near East and the National Institute for Scientific Research.
He headed multiple research programs, most notably the “When Tyranny Fails in the Arab World” program at the European Research Council, and he is one of the few Western academic voices who had the audacity to criticize the West and its colonial and arrogant view of the Islamic world.
Borga holds the Western world responsible for producing extremism and extremism through its policies and support for political tyranny. Analysts consider him an extension of great French researchers such as Maxime Rodinson and Jacques Berke.
Birth and upbringing
François Burga was born on April 2, 1948 in the city of Chambery in the Savoie department in eastern France.
Study and training
He studied bachelor’s and master’s degrees in law at the University of Grenoble, the third largest university in France. In 1981, he obtained a doctorate in law and political science with a thesis entitled “The Socialist Villages of the Algerian Agrarian Revolution: The Place of Law in Social Change.”
Jobs and responsibilities
- At the beginning of his career, he worked as an assistant professor and taught law at Constantine University in Algeria between 1973 and 1980.
- After obtaining his doctorate, he was appointed as a researcher at the National Authority for Scientific Research in 1983 in the city of Aix-en-Provence in southeastern France.
- In 1989, he moved to Egypt to work at the French Center for Economic and Legal Studies and Documentation in Cairo until 1993.
- In 1997, he landed in Yemen as director of the French Institute of Social Sciences and Archeology in Sanaa, and remained there until 2003.
- Between 2008 and 2013, he directed the French Institute for the Near East, and continued the work of its branches in Jordan andSyria Lebanon, Iraq andPalestine.
- Since 2018, he has voluntarily chaired the Scientific and Administrative Council of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies/France Branch.
- He chairs the collective research program “When Authoritarianism Fails in the Arab World” funded by the European Research Council, and is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
- Honorary Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research.
- A retired researcher at the Institute for Research and Studies in the Arab and Islamic World.
Experience and path
His experience teaching law at Constantine University in Algeria in 1973 was not the beginning of his openness to the Arab and Islamic world, as he had previously gotten to know it when he was 16 years old when he accompanied his aunt on a French Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
Then, by chance, he met a Palestinian child in the city of Jericho. He told him, “The Jews took my land from me,” which shook everything he had learned about Palestine, as he did not know that the Palestinians had their land stolen from them.
This new fact remained present in his mind, and later formed an element in his interpretation and analysis of the emergence of Islamic movements, which some researchers call “political Islam” movements, and his travels and stay in a number of Arab countries would further consolidate his professional and research path.
He started in Egypt as a researcher since 1989 at the French Center for Economic and Legal Studies and Documents in Cairo, and in Yemen as director of the French Institute of Social Sciences and Archeology in Sana’a, and director of the branches of the French Institute for the Near East in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine, in addition to his travels to a number of Arab countries such as Tunisia and Sudan. And others, during which he discovered what he considered “the West’s stereotypical view” of the East and Muslims in general.
Learning the Arabic language in both Tunisia and Egypt helped him expand his knowledge of Arab and Islamic culture, field research, and meetings and dialogue with a number of leaders of the Islamic movement, including Hassan Al-Turabi Who he described as the founder of “political Islam” in Sudan.
Borga says that Al-Turabi told him, “People in the village ask us: Can we pray with pants? The Sufis refuse that, but we used to say that it is just a formality.” The French researcher cites this example to confirm that the effectiveness and popularity of Islamic movements since the eighties and nineties of the 20th century is due to their responsiveness and openness. On modernity, unlike traditional religious movements, according to him.
His residence in the Arab world for 23 years, and his management of research programs funded by the European Research Council, such as the program “From the Gulf to the Ocean: Between Violence and Counter-Violence” (2007-2010) and the program “When Authoritarianism Fails in the Arab World” (2013-2017) enabled him to Finding out many facts in the Arab and Islamic region, and facts about Islamic movements and their internal dynamics, that contradict what the West has been promoting for decades through its media and a number of its researchers.
Contrary to the French thinker Olivier Roy and the French researcher Gilles Keppel, Jean-Pierre and Alain Gabon, who explained “religious extremism” and the emergence of Islamic movements in general, and “extremist” and “violent” movements in particular, by referring to Qur’anic and Hadith religious texts and referring to the history of Islamic sects, they saw that the problem is The texts and not the person who deals with them, his intellectual and scientific level, his economic and social circumstances, etc., which was the reason behind the phenomenon of “Islamophobia“, in Borga’s eyes.
In contrast to all of this, Burga absolutely rejected the demonization of Islamic movements, distinguished between Muslims and “terrorists,” and did not place all Islamic movements in one basket. He considered that colonialism, hegemony, and political tyranny all play a major role in the emergence of extremism and religious extremism, and that the dualistic view of the West, Especially with regard to freedom of expression, matters have become worse, whether it is an attack on Islamic symbols, such as burning the Holy Qur’an, or an attack on land, such as the occupation of Palestine.
Describing the West’s duplicity, Burga said, “They attack the Holy Qur’an, but they will never go out in a demonstration to condemn homosexuals or Israelis, which shows their double standards.” He added, “If you speak with 1% of freedom of expression toward the Torah or toward a Jew, you are immediately criminalized.” She is immediately prohibited from making statements to the official media.”
Confrontation with French secularism
François Bourga was known for his frankness and clarity when talking about his country and the West in general. He said before the French Parliament that “a good Muslim in the eyes of the West is one who has abandoned Islam.” He considered that French official policy was the reason for the rise of religious extremism and the far right in France after its failure to integrate Muslim immigrants.
He added that the state is the one that sponsors “Islamophobia that does not distinguish between moderate Muslims and extremist Muslims and puts everyone in one basket, exploiting ignorance and fear.” On banning (the rally against Islamophobia in France), and defending secularism selectively against Muslims and not against Catholics or Jews.”
Borga believes that the conflict in France, after the escalation of extremist secularism’s hostility against Muslims, is a conflict between the descendants of the colonizers and the descendants of the colonizers who refuse to demand that the children of the colonizers demand their rights. He explains this by saying, “The cleaning lady in France can wear the hijab without any problem, but if the woman wants to wear the hijab, She becomes a university professor or a lawyer, and this is where the voices of defense of secularism become louder.”
Borga does not differentiate between the right and left of France in his double standards, accusing the latter of being against religion and not having programs to address Islamophobia. He believes that the major French media, including television news channels, add fuel to the fire and contribute to spreading hate speech and Islamophobia.
Borga summarizes France’s problem in dealing with Muslims, whether in their countries or within it, in that it adopts the understanding of the Arab regimes and its vision of the Islamic movement and the political and social movement in the Arab and Islamic world, and does not respect the slogans and “French values” that it preaches, and does as the entire West does, in not Taking responsibility and blaming the culture and religion of the other, as it permissible the Qur’an and Islam as the religion of the “foreign other,” and refused to burn the Bible or the Torah.
The French media attacks him from time to time, because it contradicts the prevailing narrative about the Islamic movement and the causes of religious extremism, and because it holds the West responsible for not supporting democracy in the Arab and Islamic world, and for defending tyranny because fair democratic elections – in his view – will produce Islamists emerging from the moderate school described by Borga. Secular, democratic, and open to the values of modernity.
Charge of anti-Semitism
The French media, in turn, considers Borga a friend and defender of… Muslim BrotherhoodIn 2014, he accused him of anti-Semitism because he demanded the separation of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France from the state, and the independence of French television channels from the influence of Israel. The accusation was repeated in 2018 and early 2019 based on what Borga described as lies and his tweets were unbearable.
The media attack on him was renewed in 2020 after his support for the Swiss thinker Tariq Ramadan during his trial on rape charges in France and Switzerland. Borga was also attacked for signing a petition asking a number of questions about those charges.
The French weekly newspaper, Marianne, considered this a questioning of French justice and an accusation of judges being biased against Ramadan. The media attacks on him did not stop, describing him as a defender of the Islamists and the Brotherhood, because of his research methodology, through which he tweets outside the flock and opposes the narrative of the secular elite controlling France.
He did not bow to pressure and criticized the Israeli occupation’s aggression against Gaza after Operation “Al-Aqsa flood“October 2023, and criticized the West’s full and unconditional support for the aggression.
The media targeted him again at the beginning of January 2024, and he was accused of “glorifying terrorism” after he announced in a tweet on the X website (formerly Twitter) his great respect for the Islamic Resistance Movement (agitationHe said that it represents the will of the Palestinian people, stressing that he does not respect Israel’s leaders, in response to an article in the New York Times about allegations of rape and violence committed by resistance fighters against prisoners.
François Bourga faced many pressures in Arab and Western countries to influence his proposals, and in an effort to discourage him from meeting with opposition political figures, whether Islamists, leftists, or others. He was also subjected to pressure from the pro-Israel lobby in France, whose media arms did not succeed in attacking him with their numerous accusations, including that he is an “Islamic leftist.”
François Burga remains one of the greatest scholars of Arab and Islamic culture from the reality of coexistence and field contact, and he presented to the West a different vision of Islamic currents with their various stripes than what he was accustomed to from researchers who worked on the theoretical side, texts, religious and Islamic sectarian dialectics, and their interpretations by going back to history, and did not mix with the Arab and Islamic world and did not listen to its pulse. They were guided by their ideological backgrounds and what the decision-maker in the West wanted in what they wrote, not the objective facts on the ground.
Compositions
Throughout his long research path, he produced and supervised the completion of dozens of research and studies, and wrote important books based on field research. He focused on Islamic movements in all their orientations, those who engaged in political life and those who boycotted it, in which he shed light on their various internal dynamics, their opinions and perceptions, as well as how The West’s view and understanding of it. Among his writings:
- “Political Islam…the voice of the south.”
- “Political Islam in the time of Al-Qaeda.”
- “Understanding Political Islam: A Path of Research on the Islamic Other, 1973-2016.”
