Zineb El Rhazoui

Zineb El Rhazoui is a Moroccan-born French journalist. She is a columnist for Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. She was in Morocco during the Charlie Hebdo massacre on 7 January 2015.

She is the magazine's religion expert and a passionate critic of Islam. Since the killings, she has become a prominent secularist and human rights campaigner, speaking publicly around the world about Islam and free speech.

Rhazoui has criticized the term "Islamophobia" and says it first appeared in Iran "a few years ago, as a way of silencing critics of that country's government", although the word is attested in French as early as 1910 in Alain Quellien's book, La Politique musulmane dans l’Afrique occidentale française. According to sociologists Abdellali Hajjat and Marwan Mohammed, the term does not even exist in Farsi.

Rhazoui was born on 19 January 1982 in Casablanca, Morocco. She describes herself as a "blédarde, born in Morocco to an indigenous father and French mother," and thus a dual French and Moroccan citizen.

Growing up in Morocco, she routinely asked critical questions about the subordinate status of women under Islam. In secondary school, she made a point of wearing black nailpolish and low-cut blouses to school, where her teacher was a conservative man with a long beard. "As a woman in a male-dominated country, you sooner or later face a choice. You can comply, let yourself be cowed, and shut up, or you have to fight."

After graduating, Rhazoui worked for a semester as a teaching assistant at Cairo University. At the library she read early Islamic writings, which she found to be more thoughtful and open to critical analysis than contemporary Islam. She wrote a master's degree on Muslims in Morocco who convert to Christianity. She later said that she "wanted to understand how they first could put out the enormous intellectual effort that it takes to escape from one form of brainwashing, only to voluntarily join another religion."

Rhazoui began her career as a journalist in Morocco working for a weekly paper that was shut down by the regime in 2010. She published a number of articles about religious minorities in the journal Le Journal Hebdomadaire, which was banned by the Moroccan government in 2010. She is the founder of several organizations, including the pro-democracy, pro-secularism movement MALI, which he co-founded. She was arrested three times by the Moroccan government for criticizing it. One of the crimes for which she was arrested was a protest picnic in 2009, which involved her eating lunch in a public park during Ramadan. She was eventually forced into exile in Slovenia.

...
Wikipedia