PARIS – They call themselves Les Resilientes, the Resisters, and they meet every week in a couple of modest rooms in the immigrant neighborhood of Saint-Denis, on the northern outskirts of Paris. Their main purpose is to provide a refuge for women who have been victims of violence, but they are fighting another battle as well.
Though most of the Resilientes are Muslims of North African heritage, they are resisting other Muslims — the growing influence and strength of a conservative, fundamentalist Islam in their neighborhood.
“What worries me is that it’s developing; it’s not retreating,” the group’s founder and president, Rachida Hamdan, told me during a visit in June to the Resilientes center, located on a charmless avenue lined with public housing estates. “More and more, for example, you see little girls wearing the veil, which I oppose because I see it as a symbol of female submission. But it’s also an act of open defiance against the Republic,” she said, referring to French laws that limit wearing certain religious identifiers in public. “You see it in front of the schools, mothers telling other mothers that their children should be veiled. I’ve been told by 17-year-old boys that I’m not a true Muslim because I’m not veiled. Who is telling them to say things like that?”
“If they force us to close our doors, they will have everything,” she said, “they” being the conservative imams and elected officials who, she says, depend on the Muslim vote in her immigrant neighborhood. “They’ll have the city hall, the cafes, the movie theaters, the schools, the money. If we go, there will be nothing in the way of their radical program.”
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