On his lips were words of forgiveness: ‘May we, blessed thieves, find each other in Paradise, if it pleases God, our Father, of us both’. A kind of declaration of love!

First, however, he explains and implores, he warns: ‘If it happened to me one day - and it could be today - to be a victim of the terrorism that now seems to want to involve all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would want my community, my Church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God and to this country. That they would accept that the one Lord of all life could not be a stranger to this brutal departure. That they would pray for me: how could I be found worthy of such an offering? That they would associate this death with so many others equally violent, left in the indifference of anonymity'.

Then he adds a consideration that has always impressed me: ‘I know what contempt the Algerians, taken as a whole, could be surrounded with, and I also know what caricatures of Islam a certain Islamism encourages. It is all too easy to salve one's conscience by identifying this religious path with the integrisms of its extremisms'.

There, he speaks of a ‘caricature of Islam’ made by fundamentalists that seems to me much more ferocious and offensive than those of Charlie Hebdo. It is that of those who, in the name of God, in Iran persecute to death women who remove their veils or dance to the rhythm of a song. It is those who in Afghanistan kick girls out of schools and deny them every right. If it were not for the fact that not even the ‘mujahidin’ and the ‘Taliban’, the ‘Guardians of the Revolution’ and the ‘moral police’ would exist if there were no women, they would also take away their right to live.

But in whose name do they cause so much suffering? Surely in the name of that caricature that makes them interpret the Holy Book of the Koran in a violent and degrading manner of God, of the victims and even of their own self-styled observant believers.

Yet in the course of the day they spell out the 99 names of Allah. Is it in the name of the Merciful or the Compassionate, which are the first two names of God, that they allow themselves the intolerant cruelty of violence? Or do they invoke the name No. 5 which is Peace or No. 14 which invokes He who forgives as the 34 (The Forgiving One)? Among the last invocations there is even He who erases (the consequences of sin) which seems to contradict The Avenger (81) and He who harms (91). But again, where is it written that it is they who should claim the right to avenge in the name of God?

In short, only a ‘caricature’ of Islam could allow violence by shouting Allah Akbar. For Allah is only great in mercy and love. Many Muslim friends and friends are witnessing this to us in these days of the ‘passion and death of Gaza and its inhabitants, of the Kibbutz and Kibbutzim’.

See, Le caricature di Allah See also Brother Christian's Testament