Zineb El Rhazoui

Zineb El Rhazoui (; born 19 January 1982), known mononymously as Zineb, is a French-Moroccan journalist. She was a columnist for the Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo from 2011 to 2017, but was in Morocco during the Charlie Hebdo shooting on 7 January 2015.

She was the magazine's religion expert and an outspoken critic of Islam. Since the killings, she has become a prominent secularist and campaigner for universal human rights,

Early life Rhazoui was born on 19 January 1982 in Casablanca, Morocco.

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 nail polish 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." 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 she co-founded with Ibtissam Lachgar in August 2009. She was arrested three times by the Moroccan government for criticizing it. One of the crimes for which she was arrested was at a protest picnic in 2009, which then involved her eating lunch in a public park in defiance of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. She was eventually forced into exile in Slovenia.

She later went to Paris to study, and became a spokeswoman for the feminist organization Ni Putes Ni Soumises ("Neither Whores Nor Submitted [Women]"), for which she worked helping Muslim women in oppressive family relationships. At the Sorbonne she studied Arabic, English, and French.

She wrote the text for the 2013 special issue of Charlie Hebdo, a comic-strip retelling of the life of Muhammed, which intensified the harassments and death threats directed at the magazine.

She contributed to Charlie Hebdo issue No. 1178, which was published the week after the killings.

In February 2015, she received death threats via Twitter that she described as "a fatwa 2.0." Several people online have written that it is their "obligation" to find her and kill her in order to avenge the prophet. Her husband has also been targeted with backlash as a result. Her visit to Chicago, sponsored by the university's French Club, marked the first time a Charlie Hebdo journalist had spoken in the United States since the attack.

She was profiled on April 2, 2015, in a long article in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten. She formalized her departure on January 3, and criticized the magazine three days later, on the eve of the massacre's second anniversary, for following the "editorial line demanded by Islamists" and for no longer being motivated to draw Muhammad.

She became the subject of a documentary titled Rien n'est pardonné ("Nothing is Forgiven"), directed by Vincent Coen and Guillaume Vandenberghe and co-produced by Belgium's Francophone RTBF network. It chronicles her life from 2011, during the Arab Spring in Morocco, to 2016. The film appeared at the 2017 Festival International de Programmes Audiovisuels in Biarritz,

In November 2019, on a televised broadcast on CNews, she triggered a polemic, by saying during a debate on urban violence: "The police must shoot real bullets in these cases." After the debate she explained on Twitter that the law allows police officers to shoot people when threatened with death or serious injury, and that she hasn't called for shooting at protesters who don't pose a threat.

One of the texts in which she has most thoroughly set forth her views on Islam, the concept of anti-Muslim racism, Western attitudes toward Islam, and related issues was a response to a harsh December 2013 critique by Olivier Cyran of her work for Charlie Hebdo.

To her, in Cyran's view "people of my race, and myself, are congenitally sealed off from the ubiquitous ideas of atheism and anticlericalism," or, perhaps, that "unlike other peoples, our identity is solely structured by religion." Noting that Moroccan laws "do not grant me a quarter of the rights you acquired at birth," and that if she were raped "the websites that posted your article will definitely say I was asking for it because I don’t respect Islam," she observed that Cyran himself had implicitly endorsed all of this by embracing the "whole moralizing discourse about how one must 'respect Islam,' as demanded by the Islamists, who do not ask whether Islam respects other religions, or other people. Why the hell should I respect Islam? Does it respect me? The day Islam shows the slightest bit of consideration to women, first of all, and secondly toward free-thinkers, I promise you I will rethink my positions."