I was born and grew up in a Roma Muslim family in Skopje, the capital of North of Macedonia[1], formerly a part of Yugoslavia. The North of Macedonia is considered to be a multi-ethnic country, due to its ethnic population.

In my country, the most common religion is Eastern Orthodox Christianity, practised by most of the Macedonians. Muslims are the second-largest religious group with one-third of the population adhering to Islam, mainly from the country’s Albanian, Roma and Turkish minorities. There are also other religious groups. The first arrival of Roma Muslims in the Balkans is connected to the Ottoman invasion and the establishment of the Ottoman Empire in the region during the 14th– 15th centuries (Marushiakova and Popov).

It is argued that because the Ottoman Empire dominated the Balkans for over five centuries, Roma people have adopted and continued to practice the Muslim religion in most of the Balkan countries. Today, it is estimated that there are between 12 to 14 million Roma people living in Europe. In many European countries, the common referred term for Roma people is Gypsy. Gypsy is a white formation, an identity historically fabricated by academics, “experts” media, governmental institutions, etc. Such historical construction of “The Gypsy”/The Other body has placed the Roma body to be an object of political violence (for an example, historically forced sterilisation of Romani women, urban and school segregation, police violence, anti-Roma media narratives, etc.).

In this sense, Antigypsyism (a form of structural racism against Roma) in Europe is an ideology based on power relations and domination against Roma. Hence, the lack of historical and political attention given to the persecution of the Roma as racially motivated, has resulted in legitimising anti-Roma measures that do not allow to question the problem of power relations, domination, and exclusion, or the problem of whiteness as Europe’s identity.

A strong relationship that for centuries has not only been neglected, rather it has been actively silenced through the focus on “The Roma problem” or “the Roma as a problem”, a notion of shifting the blame towards the Roma themselves for the situation they face in Europe. This silencing does not exclusively affect Roma people, but all racialised communities.

What does it mean to be a Romani Muslim woman? How do we exist with these intersections in an Anti-Roma Europe? What is the political connotation of these identities in an attempt to secure safe space for existing? Is it our Romanipen (our race) or our religion that repeats itself as a political problem for whiteness? These are only a few questions that go through my mind while attempting to write this article.

When I began to think about myself, as a Romani Muslim woman, I asked myself, what is it that  I share with my non-Muslim Roma brothers and sisters? And when I reflect on the above mentioned questions, I cannot help but  recall the words written and spoken by our sister, Houria Bouteldja[2], calling racialised brothers and sisters to think, thus, to also exist Toward a Politics of a Revolutionary Love. Her call toward such revolutionary love, for me as a Romani Muslim woman is also a call on how we think about ourselves, as  non-white existing in an anti-Roma/anti-Muslim/anti-Black Europe. We rely on that call because as Houria asks “How can we envision love between us if the privilege of one relies on the oppression of the other?”

In this note, I also recall the recent interview El Salto [3] did with my Roma non-Muslim husband and political militant, Cayetano Fernandez. They asked him what elements do Roma people from different parts of the world share? He answered: “With the intention to divide us, white academics have put a lot of emphasis on trying to fragment those elements that are common to us, such as our culture, historical origin and language. A lot has been written about that.

However, this view has ignored an element shared by all Roma people, and which for me is the most important one: political positionality, that is to say, the social embodiment of that position that the gadjes[4] view has created about what it means to be Roma in order to be able to ideally construct themselves as the opposite, as the white, civilised, saviour, rational man, etc., within the dominant logic of modernity. In fact, the way in which the gadje’s narratives are constructed about the Roma coincide in essence in the different countries of Europe, and this is precisely because what accompanies this process is the ‘invention’ of the European white man, this fiction through which the gadje society thinks of itself” (Cayetano Fernandez, 2020).

It is within this context that I am also writing this article  that aims to put into importance the political alliances between us, those branded us non-humans enough (Weheliye, 2014), us, the non-whites, us, those branded as “others”, we, the racialised bodies created and seen as a political threat for the modern white world. In other words, this article is a call for a revolutionary love among us. It is a call to think and reflect on what does it really mean to be a Romani Muslim woman in Europe. It is a call for all non-white brothers and sisters to understand that nor our culture, nor our identities, nor our religions are the problems, as whites have argued, rather, the imaginary construction of our bodies as a threat for the modern world created by Europe’s paranoia and obsession for its own integrity (Goldberg, 2009) have actually brought Antigypsyism, Islamopobia and anti-black racism in Europe. And this is where our alliances/fight against oppressive systems should put forces into.

Hence, within this framework we also understood that our individual identity is actually the political identity of a shared condition of being/existing, thus, this is also what unites us with other racialised bodies (Roma, Muslim, Black, Indigenous, etc.), within and outside Europe. In other words, we, being constructed as an inferior alterity of the white man/woman, share the condition of being affected by the logics of the coloniality of power and its impact, exercised through renewed modern mechanisms. Hence, as argued by Araújo and Maeso, “the effectiveness of Eurocentrism lies not so much in prejudiced representations of the ‘other’, but in the depoliticisation of power relations that make plausible such (mis)representations” (2012, p. 2). When we discuss white world/whites, we do not discuss it from a skin colour perspective, rather in our analysis the white world is linked to the notion of whiteness as an ideology of domination and power relations over non-white bodies.

Therefore, this paper calls for a revolutionary love among us! Such love that would allow us to understand that the injustices against one are injustices against all of us. It is a call all together to demand justice for the lost lives of our brothers and sisters. All together to stand up against police brutality! All together to question the impossibilities of existing in an Anti-Roma/Anti-Muslim/Anti-Black society.

This is a revolutionary love call for a racialised organised fight!

Alhamdulillah!

“Behind all of these major changes, we see mass movements. We see people coming together with courage and determination to say, ‘we will not stop until we achieve what we are fighting for. During the coming period, our primary job will be to build community, to create community … in ways that allow us to understand that the work that we do now does matter, even if we cannot see in an immediate sense the consequences of the work we are doing. It will matter eventually.”(Davis, 2017)

References:

• Araújo, M., & Maeso, S. R. (2012). History textbooks, racism and the critique of Eurocentrism: beyond rectification or compensation. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35(7), 1266–1286. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2011.600767
• Bouteldja, H. (2017). Los blancos, los judíos y nosotros. Hacia una política del amor revolucionario. Retrieved from https://www.akal.com/libro/los-blancos-los-judios-ynosotros_35290/
• Davis, Angela. (2017). From Angela Davis, a call for both hope and collective action | News from Brown. Brown University. Retrieved from https://news.brown.edu/articles/2017/02/davis
• Goldberg, D. T. (2009). The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. John Wiley & Sons.
• Fernandez, Cayetano (2020) Anti-Roma racism is a historical product of European modernity – Kale Amenge
• Weheliye, A. G. (2014). Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press.

[1] Until February 2019, officially called Republic of Macedonia

[2] Houria Bouteldja is a French-Algerian political activist and writer focusing on anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and Islamophobia. She served as spokesperson for the Parti des Indigènes de la République (Party of the Indigenous of the Republic). She is also the author of the book Whites, Jews, and Us Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love (2017).

[3] For full access to the interview visit the following link: https://www.kaleamenge.org/en/anti-gypsyism-is-a-historical-product-of-european-modernity/

[4] Gadje in Romani language (Romanes) means white people.

(The views expressed in this article are the author’s own. Content can be used with due credit to the author and to ‘Zariya: Women’s Alliance for Dignity and Equality’)