Beyond The Violence And Heated Rhetoric: Macron's Reconciliation Of French Secularism With Multiculturalism
By Amel Brahmi
November 8
2020
Last month,
French President Emmanuel Macron introduced measures aiming to fold Islamic
institutions into the patronage of the state, thus curtailing foreign
influence, ending what he called “Islamist separatism” and producing an
“enlightened Islam” in La Republic.
“The problem is an ideology which claims its
own laws should be superior to those of the Republic,” said Macron, during a
visit to the impoverished, predominantly North African Paris suburb of Les
Mureaux. This separatism “often promotes a counter-society where children are
home-schooled, where they have their own sport and cultural associations,” he
added.
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In the Wake of Killings in France, Some Questions to Fellow Muslims
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In the
proposed bill, to be introduced in December, the government will for the first
time closely oversee Muslim religious associations, imposing strict guidelines
that differentiate between the practice of religion — a concept referred to in
French as culte, not to be confused with the English word cult — and the
promotion of religion or religious culture, a distinction much clearer in
French law than it is in Anglo-Saxon codes.
All mosques
will have to register under a landmark 1905 law, which enshrined the separation
of church and state and the concept of state secularism, proudly touted in
France as laïcité. Being subject to this law will give local officials the
authority to dissolve any organization through which Islam is preached in
conjunction with cultural activities, which include things like travel,
cookouts, and soccer. Additionally, the state has already designated one
authority, the Conseil Français du Culte Musulman (CFCM), to exclusively train
and certify imams in France, including those coming from abroad.
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The
proposal has sparked controversy among France’s Muslim minority and throughout
the Muslim world, sparking boycotts of French products and an uproar on social
media. That this proposal comes during renewed controversy over cartoons that
lampoon Islam’s Prophet Muhammad and after two subsequent attacks — one
involving the beheading of a schoolteacher and the other an attack on a church
— claimed as “retaliation” only makes it that much more contentious.
But beyond
the violence and heated rhetoric, and much less represented in the ongoing
debate, is a cogent conversation about France’s history with secularism and
what Macron’s proposal means for the Republic and its Muslim minority.
“The other
religions have adapted because of what they are, but also, when the law of 1905
was voted, Islam wasn’t an important religion in France,” Macron said. “We must
help this religion to organize so it can become a joint-player of the
Republic.”
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Islamic
institutions, relative newcomers to France, have been operating under a less
stringent, more opaque law that was passed in 1901.
The 1901
law protects the freedom of association, a key tenet of democratic ideals that
the 19th century French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville introduced into French
thought after his return from America. But while this law aimed to protect the
formation of secular associations, like unions and political organizations, it
can also be loosely interpreted to include religious organizations, which is
how France’s Islamic institutions have come to operate under it.
Mounted Police patrol outside
the Grand Mosque in Paris during Friday Prayers on October 30, 2020 in Paris, France/
Photo by Kiran Ridley/Getty Images
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The law,
which allows state subsidies and a small amount of private donations, applies
to faith-based groups as long as they do not engage in the “promotion” of
religion, a term that is not vague in French law, but is arguably flouted
anytime an Islamic organization does something like organize youth activities
or discuss the tenets of Islam during what is billed as an Arabic language
class. It is this divergence that creates conflict between France’s laïcité and
the culturally organic approach to Islam by France’s diverse minority,
especially when it comes to the issue of homogenizing the schooling of imams.
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Also Read:
Blasphemy, Islam and Free Speech
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Mohamed
Henniche, president of the Union of Muslim Associations in Saint-Denis, which
manages 20 mosques in the suburbs of Paris, captures this sentiment. Part of
Henniche’s work is to hire imams, who end up being mostly foreigners due to
what Henniche says is a shortage of French-born imams. “Islam is a diverse
religion. The practice in Pakistan differs from the one in Algeria. What if an
imam’s traditions differ from what the CFCM wants?” he says.
About 300
foreign imams work in France currently, and they have had their religious
training in various countries, including Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and
Saudi Arabia.
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Also Read:
Islam and Free Speech: A Reply to A. Faizur Rahman
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Then there
is the issue of compliance with the new law. Henniche’s mosques are registered
under the 1901 statute because “it’s more flexible.” Forcing the existing
institutions to re-register under the 1905 law would be arduous and disruptive
to the community, he argues.
“To create
a 1905 association, you have to go through a background check. Not everyone
wants to go to the police station just to open a mosque!” he says.
Re-certifying will also create “a lot of headaches” because it will require 25
people to sit on the board instead of the two required by the 1901 law.
For French
people, laïcité became a real concept under the Third Republic starting in
1870. School attendance became mandatory for all children, and a secular
curriculum was introduced, taught by secular teachers. This is known as the
“Republican moment.”
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Also Read:
The False Binary of the Secular versus Islamic Needs to Be
Broken
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But pushing
secularism onto a religious populace did not come without blowback. It resulted
in the infamous anti-Semitic campaign led by the Christian newspaper La Croix
against a young Jewish army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, who was wrongfully
convicted of treason.
There were
also earlier crises that shook France into reinventing its relationship with
religion. Perhaps laïcité first came to light in its earliest forms in the
aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew massacre, carried out on the night of Aug.
24, 1572, against the country’s Protestants, in which thousands were killed.
The terrible event inspired Protestant philosopher Pierre Bayle to develop his
ideas about the principle of tolerance, but it would take more than 20 years
for the state — represented at the time by King Henri IV — to issue the Edict
of Nantes (1598), which finally accepted France’s Protestants into the kingdom.
Two
centuries later, Voltaire would play an integral role in the development of
this idea when, at the age of 72, he published an indignant letter berating
France as “a country where barbarian crimes committed in cold blood would even
scare drunk savages.” The harsh words came in response to King Louis XV’s
beheading of a Catholic knight for blasphemy. The 20-year-old knight, named De
la Barre, was accused of vandalizing a cross with a knife and refusing to lift
his hat to a procession of priests. After the execution, the king ordered the
body burned along with a copy of Voltaire’s Encyclopaedia, for good measure.
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Fast
forward to La Revolution, when France and its clergy became polarized into two
camps: those who supported separation of church and state and those who did
not. It was during this tumultuous time that the state decided to ensure the
protection of its priests, under the then-nascent idea of the freedom to
practice religion, or culte. This is what led to the landmark 1905 law, which
has been governing the operating status of Jewish and Christian institutions in
France. The law has since been put to the test, amended no fewer than 30 times,
often after incidents of contention or violence. One such incident unfolded in
1907, in the small village of Saint-Hilaire-la-Croix, after the mayor replaced
one priest with another deemed more compliant with the Republic’s separation of
church and state. But the people became upset, and priests and their
parishioners ended up fighting over delivery of the sermon. The mayor shuttered
the church, and the incident went all the way up to France’s Supreme Court,
which ruled that the local municipality had no business in choosing its own
priest, even if it deemed him more legally appropriate.
Macron’s
current proposal will also need to strike the right balance between laïcité and
the people it will affect. It is unfortunate that the merits of the debate have
been hijacked by acts of violence and conflated with frantic rhetoric about
cartoons and the right to blasphemy, instead of focusing the conversation on a
concept that is the very essence of Frenchness — laïcité —with a sizable and
growing minority in France.
Original Headline: Where Laïcité Collides with
Islam
Source: The Lines Mag
URl: https://newageislam.com/islam-west/beyond-violence-heated-rhetoric-macron/d/123467
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