In La Psychanalyse ? l'lpreuve de l'Islam (2002), the Tunisian psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama undermines the universality of the Oedipus complex theory by pointing out that the centrality of the father-son dyad while central to the Judeo-Christian tradition cannot be applied to the Islamic context where the Oedipal situation is marked by the absence not the castrating presence of the father. In the Muslim psyche, the human pater is actually absent: Ishmael is abandoned by Abraham and Muhammad was symbolically abandoned by 3 father figures through death. Instead of the father son-conflict, he holds the abandonment of the father as the primary trauma in the Muslim psyche, from the story of Abraham's abandonment of Agar and Ishmael in the desert, to Muhammad's status as an orphan and symbolic abandonment (through death) by his biological and two adoptive fathers. In contrast with the nationalist Arab/Muslim leaders of the 1950s and 1960s--Bourguiba, Nasser, or FLN--who adopted state policies which opposed secularism to Islam, Benslama, to face the increasing threat of Islamism, finds it "urgent" that that the disciples of secularism organize and place themselves within an "Islamic reference" to signal their "break-up with the logic of mythical religious identity" claimed by Islamists. One way of combating Islamic extremism is to question and challenge through historicization and free speech, the four constituent parts of "le soi Islamique" claimed by Islamists: one religion (Islam); one language (Arabic), one text (the Quran), and one nation (the Umma). In contrast with the Tunisian expatriate scholar in France, Olfa Youssef, an Arabist feminist scholar residing in Tunisia, does not shy away from using Lacan's concept of the qadhab (phallus) to reinterpret on the symbolic level the Quranic verses often used to ban homosexuality or deny women equal rights in inheritance and political leadership. Reinterpreting the word din (religion in Arabic) as political power, she argues that it is on the symbolic level (i.e., political power not faith) that women are feeble; a position which made her alienated from both the secular and religious movements in the Arab and Francophone world. This paper focuses not only on the conditions of production and reception of this emergent school of Islamic psychoanalysis in its local and diasporic variations, but also on the spiral of silence which conceals its existence in the Anglophone world.