Instead Of Addressing the Alienation of French Muslims - Macron Wants To Build an Islam in France That Can Be an Islam of the Enlightenment
By James McAuley
Oct. 23,
2020
When a
terrorist in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine beheaded Samuel Paty,
a middle school teacher who’d shown his students caricatures of the prophet
Muhammad, he was transformed from an educator into a national symbol. Paty is
the latest of more than 260 French killed in similar attacks since 2012. As
with Jacques Hamel, an 85-year-old priest whose throat was slashed by Muslim
fundamentalists in 2016 in a small stone church in the village of
Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Paty’s killing was portrayed as an attack on the soul
of France. He “has become the face of the republic,” President Emmanuel Macron
said at a memorial service Wednesday.
French
President Emmanuel Macron walks past the coffin of slain teacher Samuel Paty
during a memorial service Wednesday. (Francois Mori/Reuters)
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After years
of brutal attacks by Muslims who’d been radicalized at the margins of French
society, the government has finally had enough. Early this month, Macron
unveiled his long-awaited plan: reforming the practice of Islam in France. The
proposals would restrict the funds that Muslim communities receive from abroad,
supposedly limiting foreign influence, and create a certificate program for
French-trained imams, among other things. Paty’s killing made this matter much
more urgent. The French Interior Ministry added this past week that officials
will target for potential dissolution more than 50 French Muslim associations
if they’re found to be promoting hatred, including a mainstream group devoted
to combating Islamophobia. Macron wants to build “an Islam in France that can
be an Islam of the Enlightenment,” as he put it, and to halt “repeated
deviations from the values of the republic and which often result in the
creation of a counter-society.”
The
objective, backed by popular sentiment, appears sensible: to protect the French
from further attacks. “What we need to fight is Islamist separatism,” Macron
said. But the method seems designed to solve a different problem than terrorist
violence. Instead of addressing the alienation of French Muslims, especially in
France’s exurban ghettos, or banlieues — which experts broadly agree is the
root cause that leaves some susceptible to radicalization and violence — the
government aims to influence the practice of a 1,400-year-old faith, one with
almost 2 billion peaceful followers around the world, including tens of
millions in the West. It’s an odd answer to the problem (although one that
echoes the way Napoleon regulated the practice of Judaism). But it’s perhaps
the only one France can contemplate in a universe where it will not commit to
measuring the systemic discrimination that fuels so much of the “separatism” it
seeks to combat.
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The French
republic is avowedly laïque, or secular. Enshrined by a 1905 law, this notion
forces the state to remain neutral — to neither support nor stigmatize any
religion. In the United States, a religiously pluralistic society, the
separation of church and state is seen as the freedom to choose one’s religious
belief. In France, historically dominated by Catholicism, it is largely
understood as the freedom from oppressive religious authority. But this clear
and seemingly uncontroversial vision of secularism is a product of a vastly
different time, when the country was far more culturally and ethnically
homogenous than it is today. At the turn of the century, it was predominantly
Catholic, with a small Protestant minority and an even smaller Jewish
population. The collapse of the French empire after World War II meant that
metropolitan France soon became home to many former colonial subjects and their
descendants from North Africa, West Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. Islam
had officially arrived.
With these
changes gradually came a new interpretation of laïcité, one that often
positions the country against public displays of Islam and that has no basis in
the law. After France’s humiliating defeat in Algeria in 1962 — a trauma that
remains largely unprocessed — French citizens began to see public traces of
Islam as aggressions against the country’s secular essence, even if the state
still closes for business on every major Catholic holiday.
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The veil,
and where it can be worn, has become one of the most fraught questions in
public life. The French often see criticizing its use as a means of liberating
their fellow citizens from religious oppression. A law enacted in 2004
prohibits the veil from being worn in high schools, and a 2010 law banned the
face-covering burqa on national security grounds. When Muslim women wear the
headscarf in public, they often come under fire, even when they do so legally,
and even when they attempt to be part of French society. Last year, for
instance, then-health minister Agnès Buzyn decried a runner’s hijab marketed by
the French sportswear brand Decathlon, because of the “communitarian” threat it
apparently posed to France’s secular universalism. “I would have preferred a
French brand not to promote the veil,” she said. Likewise, Jean-Michel
Blanquer, France’s education minister, conceded that although it was
technically legal for mothers to wear headscarves, he wanted to avoid having
them chaperone school trips “as much as possible.” These were examples of
Muslim women attempting to participate in public life rather than withdraw from
it; still, they were censured.
The result
of this vitriol, and of prejudice among some White French, particularly on the
right, is that many French Muslims do live in the sort of “counter-society”
Macron fears, withdrawn from the mainstream — a position not all have chosen.
Conservative commentators are not wrong when they call some of the banlieues
that surround Paris, Lyon and Marseille “territories lost to the Republic,” in
the words of the historian Georges Bensoussan. These communities are often rife
with radical interpretations of Islam, anti-Semitism and gang activity that,
together, can incubate terrorist violence.
But the
question is why these territories have been lost. One explanation is
structural. The descendants of immigrants who live in the crowded housing
projects often struggle to achieve the social mobility promised by the
officially colour-blind republic. Applications for jobs and certain housing
options can still require pictures, and people of colour are often overlooked
because of unconscious (or even intentional) bias. When minorities, and
especially Muslims, voice opinions critical of establishment dogma, the French
press often accuses them of terrorist complicity. In a television debate
Wednesday, for instance, the author Pascal Bruckner said the well-known
journalist Rokhaya Diallo — whom he identified as a “Muslim and black woman” —
abetted the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo because she had once signed an open
letter against the paper.
Yet despite
the public scrutiny Muslims face here, it can also be extremely difficult to prove
that discrimination exists. Since 1978, French law has largely prohibited the
collection (even by private or academic social scientists) of statistics on
race, religion or ethnicity, primarily in response to World War II, when the
country’s classification of Jewish citizens made it easier to round them up and
deport them. But banning race has not banned racism, and without an empirical
basis, it can be difficult to prove where disparities exist and to what extent
— let alone to know how to undo them.
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All of this
contributes to the phenomenon of “separatism” in France’s Muslim community,
says the Franco-Tunisian scholar Hakim El Karoui, the author of “L’islam une
religion française,” a popular 2018 book that influenced Macron’s Islam reform
project. Especially among third-generation immigrants, “there is an important
minority who have this problem of identity, who don’t feel French — either
because they’ve been rejected or because they don’t have the desire,” he said.
“Islam fills that void.” The radical and violent version practiced by attackers
over the past eight years represents only a fringe of what is thought to be
just under 10 percent of France’s population. But it is enough to threaten
public safety.
The
problem, then, isn’t Macron’s understandable desire to address an actual
threat. And his proposed law may block the most toxic strains of foreign
preaching from reaching French worshipers, and it may limit the diffusion of
hatred on social media, two factors that were thought to have animated Paty’s
killer. But these issues are only adjacent to the problem of isolation and
anomie that the country has helped to foster — deliberately in some cases,
inadvertently in others. The truth is that the counter-society has as much to
do with France as with Islam.
The raw
anger that Paty’s killing elicited allows little room for reflection. Most
French politicians have doubled down on a hard-line interpretation of France’s
secularism. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin went on national television and
identified ethnic food in supermarkets as “communitarian cuisine” that fosters
the sort of separatist sentiments that led to the attack. Days after Paty’s
killing, two female attackers stabbed two Muslim women in headscarves and
called them “dirty Arabs” as they walked near the Eiffel Tower. “There is a
hysterical climate,” says Rachid Benzine, a French political scientist.
One person
who did not share the exclusive vision of secularism was Samuel Paty, who was
sensitive to the potential concerns of his Muslim students and who offered
anyone in his class who might be offended by the Muhammad cartoons the option
to look away. He was clearly fascinated by Muslim culture, signing up for
training courses at Paris’s Arab World Institute and organizing an Arab music
concert for his students’ benefit. But those aspects of Paty as the “face of
the republic” appear already to have been forgotten. He was the victim of an
unspeakable barbarity, but he may end up a martyr to someone else’s cause.
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James McAuley is Paris correspondent for The
Washington Post. He holds a PhD in French history from the University of
Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar.
Original Headline: Instead of fighting systemic
racism, France wants to ‘reform Islam’
Source: The Washington Post
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-west/instead-addressing-alienation-french-muslims/d/123270