Roger Garaudy

Roger Garaudy was a French philosopher who passed through Protestant Christianity and the French Communist Party before declaring his Islam in 1982. This record follows the account of him given by Tareq al-Suwaidan in the twenty-seventh episode of his programme "A Story and an Idea". The episode is titled "the search for truth", and he tells Garaudy's life as the model of a mind with "no banks and no rigid moulds". ^{1 2} The dates and judgements below are al-Suwaidan's.

Al-Suwaidan says Garaudy was born in Marseille in 1913. His parents had no religion; in Garaudy's own words they belonged to a traditional generation for whom religion meant nothing, and they were not communists or anything else. A year after his birth the First World War broke out. ³

In 1927, at fourteen, he became a Protestant Christian by his own choice, since his family had no tie to any religion. Al-Suwaidan says he did so to give his life a meaning at a time when people thought the world was ending in war and in Europe's crisis. ^{4 5}

In 1933 he joined the French Communist Party while he was still leading the Protestant Christian youth. Joining was then common among French intellectuals who were looking for a way out of capitalism. ⁶ After France was occupied he joined the communist resistance. He was arrested and sent in 1941 to a Nazi camp in the Algerian desert. ⁷

After Christianity and then communism, al-Suwaidan says, Garaudy had still not found peace. ⁸ His doctorates and posts:

• 1953: his first doctorate, at the Sorbonne, on the materialist theory of knowledge. ⁹
• 1954: a second doctorate, on freedom, at Moscow University. Al-Suwaidan calls it the first doctorate a Frenchman earned there, and calls Garaudy the first French translator of Lenin. ¹⁰
• 1956: elected to the French parliament, then made its vice-president. ¹¹

Khrushchev's report to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, exposing Stalin's crimes, shook him and set him to rethinking Marxism. He refused to publish his first thesis as a book. ^{12 13}

His books and posts over the following decade, as al-Suwaidan lists them:

• a book on the nature of man (1959); ¹⁴
• a critique of socialist realism frozen in fixed moulds; ¹⁵
• the Centre for Marxist Studies and Research, founded in 1960 and directed by him for ten years; ¹⁶
• a critique of Marxist dogma (1966). In it he called Marxism a new official religion with its rites and followers, and rejected Marx's saying that religion is the opium of the people as contrary to history. ^{16 17}
• a book on a national model of socialism, after the Warsaw Pact occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968; ¹⁸
• a call in 1969 for a painful but necessary review of Marxism. ¹⁹

He took part in the Christian–communist dialogue of the 1960s. In 1970 he broke with the Party and was expelled; some say he resigned. ²⁰

He then travelled widely and met Fidel Castro, Houari Boumediene and many other leaders. ²¹ In 1972 and 1974 he published books proposing a civilisational project for humanity and alternatives to the existing order. He called for cutting Western dominance down to its true size and for a real dialogue of civilisations. ^{22 23} In 1976 he founded the International Institute for the Dialogue of Civilisations, holding that Western civilisation had exhausted its purpose. ^{23 24}

In 1982 he declared his Islam at the Islamic Centre in Geneva. Afterwards he performed the Umra. ^{25 26}

Al-Suwaidan says what first drew him was the life of ordinary Muslims: their sincerity to their values and their respect for human beings. ²⁷ He relates the event Garaudy himself described as the start. On 4 March 1941 some five hundred detained resistance fighters were held at Djelfa in southern Algeria, behind barbed wire and under machine guns. They staged a demonstration in honour of comrades of the International Brigades in Spain, against the camp commander's orders. ^{27 28 29} The commander ordered the guards, soldiers from southern Algeria, to fire, and they refused even under threat of the whip. Garaudy said he owed his life to them. An Algerian assistant later explained that a Muslim warrior's honour forbids shooting an unarmed man, and Garaudy called this his first encounter with Islam. It taught him more, he said, than ten years of study at the Sorbonne. ^{30 31 32 33}

Al-Suwaidan quotes him as saying that his Islam was no accident. It was the end of a long search with many turns, and it brought him to certainty. ^{33 34} In an interview with the Qatari magazine al-Umma, Garaudy said he had spent his life looking for the point where feeling meets reason, and art meets political action, and found it only in Islam. ^{35 36 26}

His conversion, al-Suwaidan says, caused a great stir in intellectual circles, and Garaudy gave the rest of his life to defending Islam. ²⁶ The main events, as al-Suwaidan gives them:

• a trial in France over an article in Le Monde criticising Israel during the invasion of Lebanon; ³⁷
• the King Faisal International Prize, in 1985, for service to Islam; ³⁸
• a human-rights prize from Libya in 2002, and a book on Western terrorism in 2004. ³⁹

Al-Suwaidan sums up his later work under three causes:

• presenting Islam to the West, and Islam's part in the West's rise;
• the humanity of Islam's creed, law and ethics;
• his opposition to Zionism. ^{40 41 39}

He says Garaudy died in 2012, south of Paris, aged about ninety-nine. ^{39 42}

From the story al-Suwaidan draws the lesson of the episode: one must always look for truth and not take things as settled without proof. He adds that reason is the ground of religious obligation. ^{42 43}