Majority Of Muslims In France Are Well Integrated Culturally And Socially
By Vincent Geisser
Oct. 31,
2020
Once again,
terrorism strikes France — and once again, terrorism is exposing the country’s
dangerous contradictions.
New York Times
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First there
was the murder of Samuel Paty, a history teacher who was decapitated near Paris
on Oct. 16 by a young Chechen man after Mr. Paty showed students caricatures of
the Prophet Muhammad in a class about freedom of expression. Then, on Thursday,
three churchgoers were knifed and killed in the southern city of Nice. The
prime suspect in that attack is a Tunisian man who later yelled “Allahu Akbar” at police officers.
Within days
of Mr. Paty’s murder, the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, announced a
crackdown against people “who spread hate online.” BarakaCity, a humanitarian
NGO that the government says “took pleasure in justifying terrorist acts,” has
been dissolved. The government has threatened to ban Le Collectif contre
l’islamophobie en France, a nonprofit organization that says it combats
anti-Muslim racism: According to Mr. Darmanin, the C.C.I.F. is at work “against
the Republic.”
In addition
to security and counterterrorism measures, the French government responded to
Mr. Paty’s killing by vigorously reaffirming the right of free speech —
including the right to satirize and blaspheme — as well as the central role of
France’s version of secularism, known as laïcité, in all state institutions,
especially public schools.
In his
homage to the teacher, President Emmanuel Macron said Mr. Paty had been killed
for “embodying the French republic” and in his name vowed to “hold laïcité up
high.”
But the
French government’s conception of radical Islamism also rests on a problematic
assumption: namely that the principal cause of terrorism in France is the
failure of French Muslims to fully endorse the country’s secular culture.
In early
October, before the recent killings, Mr. Macron had announced a new government
plan, including an upcoming comprehensive bill, “to strengthen laïcité and
consolidate republican principles” in order to combat what he calls
“separatism.”
The
president’s notion of “separatism” seems to assume that a significant minority
of Muslims are tempted to set themselves apart somehow from the rest of French
society, perhaps by creating enclaves in disaffected suburbs or building Muslim
ecosystems of sorts around Islamic schools, halal stores or mosques.
But this
diagnostic is questionable, and it risks being self-defeating: It, itself, may
endanger social cohesion.
One problem
with this idea is that it implicitly treats Muslims as though they were a
separate category of French people, and immature citizens who lag in their
comprehension of secular republicanism.
In fact,
numerous studies and much statistical research, including by the Institut
national des études démographiques (the National Institute of Demographic
Studies), have long revealed that a majority of Muslims in France are well
integrated culturally and socially (less so economically, partly because of job
discrimination). The political scientist Bruno Etienne once called French
Muslims “abnormally normal.”
It may be
that in the 1980s and 1990s some, perhaps even many, Muslims in France looked
upon laïcité as a synonym for anti-religiosity or institutionalized atheism.
But that thinking has long since changed.
Back in
2004, l’Union des organisations islamiques de France (the Union of Islamic
Organizations in France), a major conservative Muslim group, stated, about a
controversial new law banning “ostentatious” expressions of religion at school,
“We would have liked for this law not to exist, but the law on laïcité is here
and we will apply it.”
Two-thirds
of the Muslim respondents in a 2016 study by the right-leaning think tank
Institut Montaigne said they believed that a secular state allowed for freedom
of religious expression.
In a study
released last year, 70 percent of Muslim respondents said they felt that they
could freely practice Islam in France. Some 41 percent also said they thought
Islam should adapt in some respects to conform to laïcité — but 37 percent said
they wished that laïcité were more flexible.
When
Muslims in France criticize laïcité today it isn’t the republican version of
laïcité set out in a seminal 1905 law about the separation of church and state.
That law aims to protect freedom of belief by requiring the French state and
its institutions to remain absolutely neutral when it comes to religion: “The
Republic neither recognizes nor employs nor subsidizes cults.”
Muslims who
take issue with laïcité typically do so against a more recent and more
ideological interpretation of it that is sometimes brandished to blame Muslims
for their failure to integrate, as well as other social ills. They feel and
fear that this inherently liberal principle is increasingly becoming a cover
for anti-Muslim racism, a concept distorted and deployed to make racism
respectable.
Jean
Baubérot, a historian and expert in the sociology of religions, once warned:
“Let us not use laïcité against Islam.”
It is
telling, for instance, that the far-right party of Marine Le Pen, le
Rassemblement national, now casts itself as the last bastion of France’s
republican values, including laïcité — even though some of the conservative
Catholics among the party’s core members don’t much care for the notion. A
universalist principle that once stood for progress has become a defensive
partisan slogan.
Mainstream
political discourse in France also tends to chide French Muslims for failing to
denounce Islamist radicalism vocally enough. But that accusation, too, only
reflects a blind spot on the part of the political elite.
In the
course of my own research, I have found numerous examples of Muslim groups
condemning terrorism. After attacks in early 2015, a leading federation of
Muslim groups called on mosques to say a weekly prayer asking God “to preserve
France.” Muslims routinely hold services to grieve for non-Muslim victims of
Islamist terrorism — and, of course, Muslims, too, sometimes are among the
victims. The imam of the city of Bordeaux has become a leading figure in
efforts to prevent radicalization in France.
The
government’s concern about Muslim “separatism” also is problematic for
conflating two distinct phenomena: Islamist terrorism, on the one hand, which
does attack the symbols of the French nation and, on the other hand, Muslim
communalism, which essentially is an expression of some Muslims’ identity as
both French citizens and believers in Islam.
Warning
against the purported risk of separatism will not help mobilize French Muslims
against radicalism or encourage their sense of belonging to the nation — just
the opposite.
If
anything, it is the French government’s rhetoric that could end up convincing
some Muslims that they are indeed different from other French people. The
country’s leaders may well be accelerating the creation of precisely that which
they fear: a distinct Muslim identity and community within France.
----
Vincent Geisser is a political scientist with
the French National Center for Scientific Research at Aix-Marseille University.
This essay was translated from the French by The New York Times.
Original Headline: Is France Fueling Muslim Terrorism by Trying
to Prevent It?
Source: The New York Times
URl: https://newageislam.com/islam-west/majority-muslims-france-well-integrated/d/123375
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