BISMILLAH c’est les ténèbres..

During the current wave of lycée blockades/student protests in France. Screenshots circulated of Snapchat accounts allegedly trying to infiltrate student groups and obtain names, information about blockades, organizers, etc. The supposed “teenagers” used spectacularly forced youth/banlieue/Maghrebi slang — including an account opening with something like “Salut, Bismillah c’est les ténèbres”. The screenshots were presented as police officers trying to pass themselves off as lycée students. That claim has circulated extremely widely, but I would not treat every screenshot as authenticated; some of the versions circulating now are definitely parodies, and even French commenters are debating which originals were genuine.

The reason that particular sentence became the meme is that it sounds hilariously unnatural. Bismillah (بسم الله) means roughly “in the name of God.” C’est les ténèbres literally means “it’s the darkness”, but in contemporary slang it can mean something closer to “it’s grim / it’s chaos / this is fucked / it’s hell out here.” There are people from Marseille saying “c’est les ténèbres” itself is legitimate slang — roughly like “c’est la rue” when something is very rough or chaotic. Reddit

But putting them together as “Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres” feels like someone grabbed two expressions associated with young Maghrebi/French street speech and glued them together. That awkwardness is the joke. It basically became the French equivalent of an undercover cop walking into a room and saying:

“Greetings, fellow youths. Wallah, it’s lit.”