Our challenge of living together: How to live together in a raw society? All these questions, Mohammed Chirani asked himself them like everyone else but will have lived them with an exceptional singularity.

He spent a happy childhood with his family in a mobile SNCF wagon and surrounded by the varied landscapes of the French countryside: his father was in charge of maintaining the railways! The adolescence of Mohammed Chirani, she shattered on the return to Algeria, a country he soon saw with fear in his stomach when the civil war broke out and tore society apart. Back in France in the Ariane district of Nice, he gradually finds his hope in studies and has since expressed a hatred for fundamentalist excesses.

He was admitted to Sciences-Po Paris where a completely different universe opened up to him. He rubs shoulders with student unionism, inter-religious dialogue and politics. Above all, a few months before the 2007 presidential campaign, he caught the attention of the media: on his own initiative, he criss-crossed the suburbs and rural areas of France, walking stick in hand, trying to convince young people to register on the electoral lists and vote rather than resign.

The suburbs: for worse, but also for better

"The pilgrim of the Republic" as Le Monde nicknamed him, has experienced the vagaries of any child from immigration, but has made an original journey. After a stint at the Quai d'Orsay, he became the Prefect's delegate, volunteering to take care of these suburbs which are bubbling for the worst but also for the best.

Since then, Mohammed Chirani has embarked on an exciting and unprecedented political adventure in France: community organizing, or how to encourage and teach citizens to organize themselves into associations and participate in the life of the city.

Reading the biography of Mohammed Chirani is also discovering some unsuspected pages of the French novel in the making.

THE AUTHOR. Mohammed Chirani (1977) is a community organizer in Seine Saint-Denis and a candidate for the March 2013 municipal elections in Sevran.
Size: 13X20
306 pages
ISBN: 979-10-252-0023-0
Retail price: €20.00