Writer Kamel Daoud decides to quit Journalism

Algerian journalist and writer Kamel Daoud announced in a letter published Saturday, February 20th by Le Monde newspaper, that he renounces the public debate and journalism after being accused by a group of western academics “of feeding Islamophobic fantasies.”

“It’s like an Algerian group of academics asking an Italian intellectual to stop writing about this country,” Kamel Daoud told AFP. In an article published in Le Monde on 12th February, this group of historians, sociologists, philosophers and anthropologists firmly reacted to two texts written by Kamel Daoud regarding sexual assaults during the night of New Year’s Eve in Cologne (Germany), and whose perpetrators were migrants.

Kamel Daoud notably asserted that “sex is the greatest tragedy in the Muslim world where the woman is denied, repudiated, killed, veiled or owned” as he put it.

“Today, with the last flow of immigrants hailing from the Middle East and Africa, the pathology relationship that some Arab countries have with the women burst out in Europe”, he bluntly added.

The laureate of the 2015 Prix Goncourt (Middle-East Option) for first novel also considers “illegitimate that some persons pronounced him guilty of Islamophobia from Western capitals and cozy terraces of cafés which are endowed with comfort and security.”

“I’ll deal now with literature (…) and I’ll quit journalism shortly,” concludes the author of the famous book “Meursault, Counter-inquiry” (2014), who was also the author of a regular column some years ago in the “Quotidien d’Oran” in Algeria before joining “Le Monde” newspaper in France.